Dumb Riffs

My article about the Dublin and Blessington Steam Tramway is in today’s Irish Times here.

Just back from Berlin, where I wandered around staring goggle-eyed at the truly strange landscape of meticulously reconstructed 18th Century buildings and the postwar apartment blocks that line the streets of both East and West.

Because I spent a day at a conference in the Schloss Charlottenburg, I didn’t get a chance to see as much of the city as I would have liked. Instead, I bought a day pass for bus and rail, and spent every evening jumping from U-Bahn to S-Bahn to bus. Inevitably, I was drawn towards the bruised monumentality of the Brandenburg gate and the Reichstag, but also to the seedy vitality of the Bahnhof Zoo.

At the moment I’m running the IVRLA Research Blog for the Irish Virtual Research Library and Archive here in UCD. It’s quite a learning curve, but we’re starting to get a lot of good content up, starting with some posts about the recent Children’s Literature and Culture Symposium, which was held on campus last weekend.

Watch this (virtual) space for more information about the research activities of the IVRLA.

On Saturday night, Graeme Souness asserted that the French football team ‘had another gear’ to shift into. Cue much noisy disagreement from Johnny Giles and Eamonn Dunphy, followed closely by me switching off the telly.

Lately, I’ve been trying to shift gears, although not a swift, elegant shift up exemplified by the likes of Thierry Henri and Nicolas Anelka. Rather, my shift in speed has been akin to a blindly galloping Paul McShane attempting to stop short before he collides with an advertising hoarding. It’s more an emergency stop than anything. It’s not pretty, but it’s necessary.

About three weeks ago, I finished and submitted my thesis. Since then, I’ve been attempting to balance the inevitable phases of doing absolutely nothing with a routine that helps me adjust to the dramatic change in circumstances occasioned by being almost completely done with something that occupied my time and drained my finances for the last…umm… 215 weeks.

This has included: an attempt to watch the entire 5 seasons of the Wire, trying to catch up with reading piles of magazines that sit at the end of my bed and remain unread, carrying out some research into journalistic articles about the cultural history of Dublin, writing endless lists of stuff I intend to do, and much sitting about.

It’s a slow, strange, jolt-ridden transition. But it’s not bad, not at all.

Tomorrow I co-host (is that the right word?) a seminar in UCD about academic blogging. At the moment I’m thinking about the uses of blogging, and the question that animates me at the moment is this one: if a new PhD student was to go to my blog and scan through the posts over the last three or four years, would he or she learn anything about what it’s like to be a PhD student?

Is there a difference between an academic blog and a blog written by someone who happens to be an academic, whether a research student or a lecturer, or whatever?

One of the points I’ll be stressing tomorrow is that blogging complements and even improves your ability to write and research a PhD; that it establishes informal networks outside of your home university which sustain you and your research in ways that your own university and department often can’t. And that it’s also a place where you can write about whatever you feel, outside the constraints of academic discourse.

I’m not sure how any of this applies to this blog, and that’s why I’ve been combing my old posts, trying to see how much I’ve written about the experience of being a PhD researcher. Quite a bit, as it happens. But the posts on academic-related issues are distributed amongst all sorts of other things. So this is probably a blog written by someone who happens to be a research student, rather than an academic blog.

Things have been, and continue to be, quite hectic as I work on the final stages of my PhD.
In the meantime, post Lisbon Treaty, have a look at how the Irish are being portrayed in a cartoon by Jeff Danziger, with commentary from Laura, here.

The first issue of The Kakofonie is launched tonight in the Pygmalion Bar, South William Street, Dublin (near the Powerscourt Centre). Events begin at 7pm, and at around 7.45pm I’ll be interviewed by the journal’s editor, John Holten, on my thoughts about urban space and memory.

I’ve got my head down working on an introduction to my thesis at the moment, which entails a lot of sitting in a chair for long periods and, inevitably, quite a lot of internet browsing in lieu of quantifiable work. Thinking of buying a new bike? Well, I wasn’t a minute ago, but it now seems to be the most important item on my agenda, as I surf manufacturers’ sites, trying out my close-reading skills on the specifications of each bicycle. And I’ve also discovered that reliable time-wasters such as Twitter and Facebook become over-familiar and quite superfluous with overuse. Maybe that’s the story of the Twentieth/Twenty-First Centuries: new and innovative technology adopted quickly and exhausted before we’ve even got a chance to know whether it’s actually useful. Anyway, back to combing through footnotes - you know, the kind of activity that motivates me out of bed, motivates me down the stairs and out of the door, and motivates me down the street every morning.*

* Motivation, Motivation, Motivation - Peter Cook on Clive Anderson’s chat-show.

I review Adam Braver’s novel about the day of JFK’s assassination, November 22, 1963, on 3:AM here.

My article about the 1984 Lleyn earthquake is in today’s Irish Times here.