Any old Tuesday 5

Dear Void,

I’m just going to tell you about my day. Nothing too fancy.

8:40am Tuesday. HDR Studio, Woolley Building, USyd.

In the morning I put together an abstract for the talk I’ll be giving at the end of October. I read on #academictwitter the other week (no, I didn’t bookmark it. Yes, of course I should have!) that a lot of the development of a thesis happens in times that you have to pull together public expression of the research: departmental presentations, 3-minute thesis competitions, abstracts, explaining why you're doing a Doctorate to a cousin at a family lunch, blogging ;). All that elevator-pitch stuff helps to shape the thesis and refine it. I’m not suggesting that it will be honed this way, I accept the rhizome metaphor, that your theme or your subject is just not (ever!) neat and clean, but is bulbous. It busts out in all different ways, constantly taking into itself anything it comes into contact with: categories and specifics and generalisations and matter and abstractions, your moods, your energy, even other people’s projects, song lyrics, beats and rhythms of music in your headphones. Though chiefly it is influenced by prior text. [Discuss].

And those times you have to present to someone else what is going on in the research, what it might be able to say, what your research *is*, what it might be, at this point, here and now, to a particular audience, those times allow you to anchor all that mess to some frame that will allow other people to see it as something with shape. 

I started on my abstract this morning thinking it was going to focus on travel and stasis. A group of us were talking about this in our lounge area about two months ago. It was something that fits my project well since Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (the compiler of the commonplace book that is the object of my research) is most famous for her letters written during her travels when she accompanied her husband who’d been made ambassador to Turkey (1716-1718). The commonplace book was also written when she was living in exile in Lovere, and later more happily in Venice.

And I was thinking about the book itself having travelled here in 1925. Being separated from the rest of Lady Mary’s collection. And now, it sits in a safe in a sort of death in life, unmoving. Unless requested for viewing when it is taken to the reading room on Level 1 in Fisher Library, loved, then returned to the safe. Travel and stasis seemed to fit. But then even as I began to write the abstract (for a presentation that is still to be developed) a theme of Collection and Connection pushed through more forcefully. My research is also about how the object came to be here in Sydney and what circumstances allowed that to happen which brought me back to the Fisher Library’s Librarian in the 1920s, Henry Mackenzie Green, who’d pushed for the collection to sit across disciplines which to some extent reflects what’s happening at the moment within the university 

If I were to consider this more in the presentation, I can then talk about libraries and collections more, and the way the material feeds connectiveness. This manuscript very much embodies that theme because a commonplace book is exactly a compilation of all sorts of texts across a range of themes and subjects. They are an aid to a well-rounded education and life-long development of the self through reading and consuming texts (this sentence was written for an email exchange this morning re the presentation. See, it hones itself in the writing, in those everyday expressions regarding the research).

[I’m hoping to borrow another commonplace book from the State Library of NSW for the presentation. Fingers crossed].

Okay, that’s me done for the day because they’re painting a room on the level below, directly beneath us and the fumes are making me woozy! 

Today’s soundtrack was (no surprises!) Goldberg Variations and later BBC Radio 6 (focusing on Jack White’s music which I was enjoying but had to turn off towards the end because I couldn’t concentrate on writing this). The weather is sunny! Warm in the sun, cold in the shade. And I spent the first half of the day using this Pomodoro page to keep me moving through my tasks. A good day.

À demain, Void. Thanks for listening.

Jx