Quasi-Intellectual Ramblings

It’s late.  I’m writing essays again.  The joy.  The veritable joy.  I can hardly contain myself.  I may well run naked down the street waving streamers and singing songs about the post modern novels of youth.  Except that it’s cold and I can’t think of much that rhymes with post modern novels of youth.

I am trying to capture the euphoria that happened on Saturday when I got my essay on comparing Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights, Philippa Pearce’s Tom’s Midnight Garden and Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons back, to find that I had scored 92%.  This was a big deal because a) I had hoped for a mere pass and b) I had a new tutor and I wasn’t sure if the last tutor had marked me highly because we got on well, or because I was actually doing good work.  Now I can actually believe that I am producing good stuff, which is great, and has kind of set the final seal on any doubts I may have had about launching myself back into academia in September.

It was a stinker of an essay and took me ages to structure in a way that made any sort of sense at all.  They are three fairly disparate books and getting it to gel and not seem more like some kind of autistic scrapbook of random and half baked ideas gave me sleepless nights.  Since then I have finished off an essay about Peter Rabbit, which was easier, because I just had to write about one book, and now we’re back to the whole compare and contrast idea again, albeit in a highly disguised form.

I hate compare and contrast essays. I really do. 

This one is turning out to be brutal for several reasons.  The first of which is that I had four books to choose from on this module and I have to incorporate two or three of them in this essay.  I have chosen two rather than three because of time pressures and work load.  I have earmarked one of the books for use in my next, and final essay (Beverley Naidoo’s The Other Side of Truth) and so don’t want to use it here, because I don’t want to have to worry about repeating myself in the next essay, for which I would get marked down.  I just don’t need the aggravation.  One book I have discounted altogether (Jamila Gavin’s Coram Boy), because it was about killing babies and things, and I’ve read it once, and that was enough for me thanks.  This leaves Mortal Engines and Junk.  Both of them are great books, but which do not sit so neatly together thematically as say, Coram Boy and Mortal Engines or Junk and The Other Side of Truth, or even Coram Boy and The Other Side of Truth.  This means I am hunting about looking for strands which link the books together, and it is proving somewhat hard.  Not impossible, but more challenging than my weary brain can deal with at the moment.

The other complicating factor is that as well as having the compare and contrast element, this also demands deeper thought about other, external issues, like historical perceptions of childhood and the nature of children’s fiction and how it has been published and disseminated to children over the years.  I have to think about the books in relation to these issues as presented in a long and rambling essay by someone intellectual and stimulating.  This would be fine if I felt intellectual or stimulated. 

I didn’t do any work yesterday.  I decided to give my brain a holiday.  I don’t know whether this was such a good idea.  I started this evening surfing on the fumes of past victory, and have steadily gone downhill ever since.  I am now at the embittered, entrenched stage in proceedings where I have rewritten the same paragraph nine different ways and it still seems clunky, overlong and footling.  It does not help that despite drawing interesting diagrams on bits of scrap paper and writing myself cryptic notes at the kitchen table earlier, I still only have a vague inkling of where all this is actually going.  The answer seems to be ‘to hell in a hand cart’.  Which is unfortunate.

It will come.  Everything I do academically seems to have to go through a long, dark, tea tray of the soul moment before I can just get on with it and stop moaning.  I am trying to moan quietly though, as Jason does not seem to understand that moaning is an intrinsic part of the enjoyment of the process, and without the woe and pouting nothing would actually get done.  I have tried to tell him that it is my being so cheerful that keeps me going, but he doesn’t really get it.  So I am doing secret, underground moaning in the quiet reaches of the night.  He will never know, and he will be stunned at the end of the week when the essay is finally born, all bloody and bawling, but his wife has been silent but deadly about it all.  He will probably think I have been snatched up by aliens for experimentation and that they have sent down a pod Katyboo in my place.  If it got the essay done any quicker I’d offer myself up for some alien probing, but I don’t think it will help.

Biscuits on the other hand, are an excellent study aid.  I have just realised, after sitting at the keyboard for several hours, that the last time I had a biscuit it was still daylight.  No wonder my creative powers are on the wane.  I must go and refuel.

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