Esmeralda Rocha

Engel was wrong - so was Atwood

Esmeralda Rocha — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 03:54:00 GMT

You know the famous Engel quote:

An ounce of action is worth a tonne of theory.

Well that's bollocks, at least for the average Ph.D. student... I propose instead that an ounce of theory is worth a tonne of action.

You spend weeks of source/data analysis, thinking, reading etc (in other words 'action'), just to come up with one idea, one key, one way into the issue at hand. Each idea is worth so much more than the individual facts. That's why writting a Ph.D. is so difficult - it not about collating facts and drawing nice parallels - it's challenging theories, and/or inventing new ones to explain the facts, to explain ideas. If it was about action I would have finished my Ph.D. months ago - instead it's about theory and thought - and these, sadly for the doctoral candidate, are so much more elusive.

I'm feeling low today, not being able to express the wordless, shapeless, embryonic inklings that are stirring in my head. I'm beginning to think that Margaret Atwood was wrong too when she intimated, in works like The Handmaid's Tale, that all thought is connected to language - that without language, the concepts cannot exist. What nonsense.

Thought is much more nebulous that language - I believe that all thought lives in the spaces between words, and language is our very inadequate way of trying to share ideas. If concepts were impossible without language then no-one would have ever struggled to write anything. Most people have tonnes of ideas, but no way to express themselves. Of course language is important, and common discourse crucial in understanding each other. But I've come to regard thought as preceding all this.

Well - these are my rambling two cents today.

Best, fellow travellers.

TIME MANAGEMENT

Esmeralda Rocha — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 04:01:00 GMT

FREAKING OUT and HERE'S WHY:

List of things to do:

Finish current chapter
Start next chapter
Amend lit review
Finish abstract for 2010 Conference
Continue primary source analysis of Melbourne and Indian materials
Begin research for my T&L research project
Plan my next lectures
Plan my next tutorials
Hand in all essay marks
Read countless books
Order Nandi Bhatia's book on Indian Theatre.
and...and...and...

ARGH! It's enough to make me want to tear my hair out, hop in my car and drive continuously north until I hit some isolated paradise just shy of Broome. But instead of escaping, or facing my list of infinite things-to-do head-on, I'm here procrastinating and whinging about how much I have to do.

Or am I? Simply typing the list out made me feel better - simply seeing the things I was most concerned about accomplishing, there in black and white, made them seem more accomplishable. They came into my head in no particular order, though obviously the most pressing appeared at the top. Those are the big issues...I may as well have simply written 'Finish thesis and be perfect tutor'. So I started with the little one... I ordered the Bhatia book through GetIt. DONE.

Then I finished all my marking and handed all the essays and marks back to the School of Music. DONE!

Then I looked for the next small task.... write my abstract. Spent some time and...DONE!

Then I looked at the lecture and tute plans and decided I'd be better off doing those in July, to keep the prep fresh in my mind. So not done, but at least rationalised and planned.

Then, feeling far more relaxed, I returned to the BIG stuff. Okay - finish chapter. I made an appointment with my supervisor, saying that I'd be handing in a draft by the 22nd June. So not done, but well on the way, and now have impetus to focus on this.

A Ph.D is like a marathon, only instead of 40 miles, it's 40 months. Well - that's pithy, but it's not accurate. We all talk about having a plan for our thesis, and we separate the tasks into months or semesters...but that's not how it gets done. It gets done day to day, hour to hour. Virginia Woolf said we live in the hours. And it's true. It's all very well to have a GRS approved thesis plan, but you've got to make little lists and plans and goals along the way. Sometimes my goal is write 500 words on 'x'. Not much, but at the end of the day you get a tick, and you got you 500 words. Only then do you get the satisfaction of achievement everyday that you need. And only then can you put the next foot out to take the next step.

So feeling more relaxed and focused again, I'm going back to a discussion of opera in India -and I can't wait!

3 months in!

Esmeralda Rocha — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 04:36:00 GMT

Well,

I'm 3 months into my PhD, and already I feel stressed and WAY behind the 8-ball, and yet I'm working very hard at it and getting through a ton of reading, so I don't why I feel so inadequate!

ARGH!

Anyway - mostly the stress has been created by logistic and administrative nightmares, and most of these have been caused by my need to spend a considerable amount of time in the UK for research.

My topic (at present - haha) is 'Operatic performance practices in colonial Victorian societies with particular reference to the social, economic and cultural context of opera in London, Calcutta and Melbourne'. Basically I'm looking at the way opera was performed in those 3 cities during the course of the Victorian era (1837-1901), comparing and contrasting both the musical (scoring, instrumentation, adaptation, repertoire choice) and extra-musical performance practices (staging, sets, costumes etc) of the centres and then relating them back to the socio-economic and cultural conditions of each society in order to find trends - i.e.: middle-class professionals preferred Mozart to Verdi, or the Anglo-Indians used opera as a colonisation tool, whereas the Melbournians used it a symbol of social status etc.

It is a fabulous topic, but being essentially a topic which is both sociological and historical, it is very dependednt upon primary source material, such as diaries, memoirs, journals, newspapers, letters and handbooks. and almost NONE of this material is available through UWA. Books and articles I can get on ILL, but all the others are generally held in British archive collections, with some in Melbourne.

Hence the need to go to England. Also the guru of all things Music in the British Empire is Professpr Stephen Banfield at the University of Bristol, who is also the director of CHOMBEC (Centre for the History Of Music in Britain, the Empire and the Commonwealth). Stephen and I have been e-mailinf since November last year, trying to organise me coming over to be supervised by him for a couple of months, while I do this research over there.

As usual, teh academics are all for it, and the bureaucracy keeps putting up obstacles, and generally wasting everyone's time. I stress that it's the bureaucracy and not the bureaucrats, who are just doing their job. Sato Juniper is absolutely one of the most useful and helpful people on the planet...I'm officially a groupie of hers!

But finally after months of 'should we do it as a co-tutelle', or 'should we jsut send her over un-enrolled' 'or maybe she could go as a guest?' it was finally discovered that a simple student exchange was all i needed - with some jiggling at the edges, such as enrolling me at Bristol as a part time student in 2 non-coursework units, and I believe the lovely Carrie Haloun at Study Abraod did some special pleading as it was now July, and I needed to go in September.

But it's all done....so if you ever need to go away for an extended period of time, just talk to Sato at GRS. She'll work it out!

And of-course, that isn't the end of the paperwork, it's only the beginning...now the adventure is getting flights as cheap as possible, as close to the $1750 that GRS offers as possible! I've spent so long working on logistics, I'm forgetting what my actual PhD work feels like!

I'll keep you posted!