Writing Privacy

[Amended from Original]

It is nights like this where I am glad for another space to turn to. The academic climbs of the past few months, even the past two weeks, have been outstanding. I have spoken with people, who, before this period, I would only have dreamt of meeting; Professors contacting me through various channels discovered on the internet and offering all sorts of help – unimaginable.

Yet this seems permanently overshadowed by neverending problems in Switzerland, not least as time here nears its end. As much as the people in the English Department are wonderful, this place is a recurrent and desperate nightmare. There are four separate forms to be filled in to leave the country, all of which need delivering to different places. A charge is levied for a leaving certificate: freedom from prison.

I had to go to the admin building, Uni Dufour, last week to try and sort out the extremely messy business of matriculation, 12 months after I was reprimanded about my French there. There had been a misunderstanding, and the stern headmistress was even less impressed this morning. Why had I not appeared at her summons last year? Because my registration file should have been complete. But no, she is not satisfied that she has seen original documents, even though I went through the painstaking process of getting them here, taking them last year, and she herself offering to copy them. At that, everything stalled, indefinitely. As a member of staff at the university, I should not have let myself be intimidated to the bone like that, but could do no more than utter ‘Je les ai apporté’ without assertiveness. I was left to shiver through coat and scarf through the various shakings of the head from the other side of the desk. The positive upshot of this – and there is one – is that I should be guaranteed student status at Geneva in absentia with Lukas’ supervision.

Uni Dufour / Prison / Mental Asylum

Continue reading ‘Way Out’

At the beginning of the summer, I was tasked with creating a poster for the Swiss Association of Medieval and Early Modern English Studies (SAMEMES). It was this newly formed association whose inaugural opening Origins conference/seminar I presented at a few months ago. Having prepared this for the upcoming first main conference, Pretexts, Intertextualities, and the Construction of Textual Identity, a generic version needed to be done again. When patience eventually rediscovered itself, the final version was eventually made.

The aforementioned conference will feature several presentations from Geneva: Petya Ivanova, Ioana Balgradean, Louise Wilson and Sarah Van der Laan; and plenary lectures from Prof. Stephen Orgel and Bristol’s Prof. Ad Putter. Despite the obvious pleasures, I am once again the solitary student male from Geneva, staying in a different building with different arrangements from everyone else. I am not attending the conference dinner, and I’m glad it is only a one-night stay. Finally, on the artistic front, it has been time for a refresh. The course website has been updated, with a new (though simple) homepage. ‘Improvement’, it would seem, is a simple enough, and apt enough, target.