Archive for the 'Writing' Category

Confidential

Published January 21, 2012 Literature , research , Writing 2 Comments
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How much can you put yourself into the mind of another individual? It’s not a trick question: though I ask it a lot, I seem to do it a lot too.

My work on Marvell and Private Lives took up most of 2011, and it’s been a wonderful introspective process because the way I’ve symbiotically linked our biographies together has given me license to think as deeply and darkly as I please.

But now, just as I come to wrap this up, there’s something quite subtle which doesn’t add up.

Marvell almost always strikes the reader as the shy, demure sort. Occasionally women are abruptly visible, but otherwise they are teasingly distant, obscured, or absent. He weaves threads of complicated desire behind fastastical themes and layers of honeycombed language.

Honeycomb_FracFx

But perhaps that’s just his writing. After all, his publishing history is thin, and there’s little sign that Marvell placed a great deal of value on the majority of his own poems. Perhaps he’s even embarrassed by them. Why would that be?

Continue reading ‘Confidential’

Ugly Business

Published December 20, 2011 Uncategorized , Writing 2 Comments
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[Mercifully not what it may sound like, though the temptation is there].

There’s a real internal challenge in play. Over the years, I’ve come to appreciate the art of quality writing. Some lucky souls can churn out thousands of quality words every day, but most of us mere mortals will always struggle with that.

I want my own page to represent a benchmark for thoughtful writing. If it takes a week or a month to make the right statement, then so be it. After all, if you’re hoping to make £150+ per day as a copywriter, the very least you can aim for is to showcase ‘quality’.

In 2011, I’ve finally embraced the rule that less is more. As a doctoral student, it’s natural for verbosity to take over while the 80,000 word target still seems distant. Pages – thousands of words – achieve nothing. Now that this pressure has relaxed, I’ve realised the pleasure in shedding words.

Continue reading ‘Ugly Business’

A Vote of No: Social Media and Sacrifices

Published May 7, 2011 Culture , Politics , Writing 7 Comments
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Regular users of social media networks will no doubt have noticed – if their friends lists are anything like mine – that politics is again becoming a very public sport. I raised some concerns last year about the extent to which social networking sites were turning into moral and ideological crusades when elections came along. Yesterday, a referendum was held on whether to adopt the ‘Alternative Vote’ system, and the same tactics were out in force again.

Continue reading ‘A Vote of No: Social Media and Sacrifices’

The Second Anniversary: A Song For No-One

Published March 6, 2011 Music , Writing 4 Comments
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A happy second anniversary to RoyalArbor, or Writing Privacy as it became. There is plenty that could commemorate this, but there was only one winner. First, it’s time to take stock for a moment.

A Space for No-One?

I think a lot about what goes here. Writing privacy demands it. It’s an oxymoron of sorts: to write privacy is to publicize it. Andrew Marvell not only withheld his works from publication, but he also privately considered the role of the writer in the new public sphere of the seventeenth century. That someone capable of such lyric majesty was so determined not to share it gives a permanent awareness to what should be allowed to escape into public space.

As such, this place never needed to be about me. It has needed to be about pieces of research that tell a good story; about events or developments that have some form of interest extending beyond me; and about privacy as a wider interest. The reason I left my old space behind was because it had become for no-one but myself.

We all live intricate and complicated lives. Continue reading ‘The Second Anniversary: A Song For No-One’

What’s in a Title? Can More Be Made Out of the Same?

Published February 10, 2011 research , Writing Leave a Comment
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Last autumn, in a fit of generosity, I wrote an article on blogging for everywoman that has been well received. It is always easier to preach than to practice. So often easier said than done. Perhaps I can write convincingly on what makes a good blog. But can I practice it?

Any self-respecting professional in any field is interested in bettering themselves and their work. Sometimes it is a necessity for survival in competitive arenas. Recently, I witnessed copywriter and peer Al Allday make some changes to his site, influenced by his competitors but still strongly fashioned to himself. My space is very different – it is in no way fashioned as any sort of business portal – but this silent observation has certainly made me think about what it takes to improve even a quiet cornerstone like this page.

Continue reading ‘What’s in a Title? Can More Be Made Out of the Same?’

“Retirement”

Published February 4, 2011 Writing 2 Comments
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It is often joked about when I return home, “Are you going to get a proper job before you retire, kid?” Strangely enough, this does not come from my parents, but their ‘witty’ friends. “Yep. I’m making sure that I don’t end up doing what you do”. <Chortles all round>. The question is funny, even if it does sting a little. Perhaps the subject has its moments too.

This notion of ‘retirement’ is curious. Of course, it features heavily in my research capacity. Marvell, by his own admission, favoured ‘modest retirement’. There are entire realms of conscience and casuistry to be explored when examining someone’s choice of the passive, private life over the active, public life.

It has somehow grown to mean more than that, though. Continue reading ‘“Retirement”’

A Green Thought: Private Minds

Published January 10, 2011 Literature , research , Writing 4 Comments
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It is a great shame that it is so difficult to make personal experience count in professional or academic writing.

The first time I attempted genuine research was looking at Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray through the lens of dysmorphophobia, or body dysmorphic disorder. Of course, it wasn’t random reading of somatoform disorder textbooks that brought this match to my attention, but personal experience. And, to be honest, personal experience does not always match what textbooks or research papers have to say.

There’s a scene where Dorian’s portrait is revealed, and Dorian is momentarily ecstatic with it, then inexplicably miserable. It’s one of many emotional episodes that seem so tangibly familiar to me, yet so difficult to map credibly and analytically into academic writing. This is probably why, despite being my most unique piece of work, it has never become anything more than a reference in a personal newspaper article on the subject of BDD.

The same scenario surfaces for Andrew Marvell. Continue reading ‘A Green Thought: Private Minds’

Measuring Privacy: An Ode

Published December 19, 2010 Politics , research , Writing Leave a Comment
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New Horizons (Alphaville)

Winter's enigmatic whiteness (Alphaville: New Horizons)

The weather gripping Britain this weekend is perfectly representative of how the PhD has gone since an Apprentice-style interview in the summer: too much white, and nothing moving very far very fast. Leicester-based Joanna Riley described the process in Wednesday’s penultimate pain-fest as ‘mental torture’. Ironic, then, that December has proved a strangely productive month.

A paper was presented at the Leicester Postgraduate Forum earlier in the month. I returned last week for a bibliographical assessment, and met my supervisor in the British Library on Friday to submit 6,250 words. That’s 8% of the thesis this term, and over 30% in this calendar year.

An iron grip has come from nowhere, thanks to a self-imposed deadline which should have been imposed much earlier. The right ‘formula’ continues to elude, but the weeks of slow reading and constant editing do appear to make something click eventually.

I have looked forward to, and feared, this section the most. Continue reading ‘Measuring Privacy: An Ode’

Marvell in Manuscript and Print

Published December 2, 2010 Culture , Geneva , Politics , research , Writing 4 Comments
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Today I am presenting ‘Marvell in Manuscript and Print, 1649-1665’ at the English Postgraduate Forum in Leicester. Having braved the weather for the second time this week, I am inconveniently left with just enough time for procrastination before the event begins at 5pm. This will be a curious one.

Today marks my fourth ‘trial’ presentation (following two seminars in Geneva and the summer’s PhD upgrade procedure), and the eighth overall, following conference presentations in Fribourg (2008), Cambridge (2009), Geneva (2010) and Hull (2010). A nice balance is reached.

My experience to date is that presentation material can rarely be the same twice. Occasionally, at the highest level, there will be merit in repeating or recycling a paper across expert audiences with different personnel. Otherwise, there is a process to develop and tailor work for the specific requirements of the event.

Continue reading ‘Marvell in Manuscript and Print’

Private Pursuits: The Difficulty of Writing

Published November 15, 2010 Knightmare , Music , research , Writing 4 Comments
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Autograph from Dr. Adam Fox

Writing is hard. It is harder still when fighting battles with yourself.

Yet this is trampled on completely when November’s fad of eleven years, NaNoWriMo: National Novel Writing Month, comes around. The idea is to write a 50,000 word novel by November 30th.

Like many other things around me at the moment, it is an alien existence. It has taken me three years to come close to 50,000 words for my thesis. Writers will be soon be surpassing that toil in less than 3% of the time.

NaNoWriMo has received a lot of strong opinion, largely because it encourages quantity over quality. The official page freely concedes, ‘Make no mistake: you will be writing a lot of crap’.

Sometimes I have sympathy for the freedom, precisely because adding 500 words of quality to my doctoral thesis seems like a colossal achievement. It is also something that, for better or worse, the world of academia has contemplated itself. But I also loathe it for the way it can disregard the graft that goes into a small amount.

Writing often delves into dark, private pursuits. Continue reading ‘Private Pursuits: The Difficulty of Writing’

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