All entries for Saturday 04 February 2006

Saturday, 04 February

Egads! Another week escapes me without blogging. Slippery as an eel, it is.

Chapter has progressed, though more slowly than planned. I seem to recall that my failure to post on Tuesday was a result of my being utterly despondent at my abysmal progress in the course of the afternoon. I sat for four hours and wrote about a hundred words; was literally tearing my hair at one point — then it hurt, so I stopped.

Wednesday and Thursday were lost altogether, to a visit from my family and work at the Learning Grid respectively. Overcompensated for missing Greek midweek by covering half of yesterday afternoon's lesson at home beforehand — three hours travelling to campus and back almost entirely wasted. Once I was back, though, I added 400 words in a couple of hours [a fairly respectable rate] — my work screeches to a halt every night at six-thirty, though, for Masterchef Goes Large. I am hopelessly hooked.

Tacked another 200 words on the back end of the thing this morning. I have nearly tiptoed through the minefield of discussing the antiquarian references in Servius, where the lacunae in my knowledge are most perilous. Once I can launch into the stuff about [biographical] allegory — tomorrow, hopefully — I may be able to start galloping off again, as I kind of did at Christmas. Current word count is about 1500.

Trekking off to the Learning Grid again in about a half an hour; should be back for five. My plan is to take the chapter on USB drive and maybe sneak a hundred words or so if it goes quiet; that was, however, the idea last Saturday as well and I didn't get more than five minutes' peace in all the three hours I was there. So who knows?

Ditched Garcia Marquez's Collected Stories after the first three chapters, because I found the first of them oblique and rather tedious, lacking utterly the charm of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love In The Time Of Cholera, which I so enjoyed last month. I am now spending my bus journeys reading furtively The Vesuvius Club, debut novel of Mark Gatiss [of the League of Gentlemen and also writer of Doctor Who's "The Unquiet Dead"]. Pretending I am enjoying it less than I am.

Got Kate to order me the Vintage edition of Don Quixote from the bookshop. What on earth possessed me?

: 04 Feb 2006 11:35 |  Tags: Classics Ma Research |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem