#scholarly stuffs

[ashes-and-inks]

I am officially published.

An academic chapter on JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Phantom Blood.

It's been over a YEAR since it was accepted on concept.

I am SO excited about it

[voluptuarian]

I love trying to do historical research, you want an answer to a simple question like "could Jews serve in the British army in the 1880s" and you get back

Jews in the American Revolution

Jews in the American Civil War

Jews in World War I

Jews who fought for Nazi Germany

Thanks, that absolutely covers the time period and country I specifically asked for, couldn't have done it without you

[anachronic-cobra]

Tell me something about your niche special interest. I'll go first

Plague doctors had existed since the initial major spread of bubonic plague in the 1300s, but the iconic beaked mask did not exist until the mid 1600s when it was invented by royal physician Charles de Lorme of France. Most plague doctors weren't even doctors - typically they were volunteers, whether they had a medical background or not, who were willing to interact with infected patients and were paid well to take census of the living, dead, and infected. In some cases, they would also peddle "treatments" to patients for extra coin. Some of these may have been genuine attempts at treatment, such as bloodletting to balance the humors, but some may have simply been scams to get extra money from wealthy patients, such as injesting crushed gemstones or bathing in mercury.

Actual medical professionals of the time were physicians, who were mainly scholars interested in expanding medical knowledge, and barber surgeons, who were more common as general practitioners. One notable known plague doctor had no medical background whatsoever, he just took on the role after his fruit stand went bankrupt.

[bunniesandbeheadings]

It’s hard to be a hater against someone who’s been dead for so long. I can’t bully Marie Louise off of twitter. Because of woke. And also because she’s been dead for like, a whole bunch of slutty slutty years.

[worstloki]

Thor: Loki wastes two days reading some tome and I get the lite version in a 5 minute rant when the information actually becomes immediately relevant. I’m the winner here

[impossible-rat-babies]

i care a lot about them going to mt rokkon together

[hamartia-grander]

Just found out I could completely skip doing my final project in my film crit class and still pass with an A,,,, I'm not gonna do that because I actually like my professor but it's crazy how giving myself permission to purposefully write the shittiest paper I've ever written in my life with absolutely no consequences actually makes the assignment FUN

[theladysherlock]

One bit of housekeeping for this year's liveblog: normally I refer to Deryn exclusively with she/her pronouns because that's what the book uses, but this year I'm going to switch it up because I really like all the different gender interpretations that come with the territory of this character. So for any chapters that are Alek's Third Person Limited POV, I'm going to use Dylan and he/him; for any chapters that are Deryn's Third Person Limited POV, I'm going to use Deryn and she/her; and for my own thoughts unconnected to any lines in the text (mostly found in the tags of my posts, tbh), I'm going to use Deryn and they/them.

(When we get to Goliath that might change a bit with Alek's POV but we'll see how I feel when we get there.)

[queenlua]

it's funny how, when i was in college, one of the reasons i decided not to go into academia

was because i did a semester of research with this computational linguistics research prof who i really liked

and the [redacted research project] went totally fine, but i couldn't shake the feeling of "ok tho, this seems to mostly consist of doing some funky transformations on the corpus of The Entire Internet, which is cool and all, but it doesn't feel like i'm... adding... much... to our understanding of the universe? doesn't this feel like Garbage In, Garbage Out to anyone else? sure, it's kinda neat that i can do some funky transformations on stuff i pulled from [basically-Reddit], but that's all it is?"

and then, years later, LLMs blow up and it's like. joke's on me buddy, do you know how much hype you can milk out of doing a couple funky transformations on stuff you pulled from Reddit

[bmpmp3]

when people complain about getting like, a 98% grade on something because it was "so close to perfect" its like. i understand what you're saying on a technical level. but that is a line of thought so far away from my experiences and ways of thinking that i do feel like im from another planet. 100% isnt even a real number to me

[isfjmel-phleg]

Here's the tentative outline of the TSG paper, as okayed by the professor whom I've been discussing the project with:

intro to the trend of recent adaptations/retellings reframing TSG as a story about grief

an assertion that the book is really about healing from childhood e m o t i o n a l n e g l e c t (CEN) (my thesis?)

defining CEN and distinguishing it from traditional grief

an analysis of CEN in the text

how this interacts with what these adaptations/retellings are doing

conclusion about the importance of the text’s depiction of CEN and why it’s worth acknowledging/exploring

It's a relief to pin this down and be able to go into this with some kind of focus. I've already got a start on the first paragraph. I'm trying a method of drafting by just constructing the basic argument and then working in all the evidence and research later. My college papers tended to take forever to write because I drafted them with Finished Perfection in mind for each sentence, which is stressful and easy to get bogged down with. We'll see how it works. The paper needs to be completed by October, probably the end of the month at the very latest, but I'd like to get it finished in enough time to fully polish and not have to stress about a tight deadline.

I can do this. Probably. It's been a few years but I might still have it in me.

[whentherewerebicycles]

therapy was “helpful” and I “liked it” and sigh I’ll “keep going”

[youremyonlyhope]

Every day I am more and more upset I didn’t write that research paper on parasocial relationships in social media a whole decade ago.

[cyanbugremix]

ah yes. My act of lowkey personifying any plant when i'm writing about them is not strange at all

[dragonji]

I've been just absolutely soaking my brain in wuxia for the past 4 days in preparation for my audiodrama project and honestly its making me want to be an academic about danmei again but I know in my heart that is the devil speaking

[swordatsunset]

hello! i love your blog and your 'for the thesis' tag is especially intriguing to me (i'm very curious about medieval literature and history); would you be willing to talk a little about what your thesis is about, if you're comfortable with it? no problem if not! have a nice day :)

[wearing my neon pink "ask me about my thesis" t-shirt] haha yeah of course

SO the short answer is that I’m tackling various adaptations of Arthurian works through an ecocritical and racial lens.

The long answer is all of that, but with more detail, lol. I have a couple through-lines in my adaptations insofar as the histories they’re building upon— I’m tackling Le Morte d’Arthur by Malory, so I’m also tackling Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and TH White’s The Once and Future King. I’m looking at Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, so I’d also like to tackle The Green Knight (2021) (I might scrap that though, sadly) and, though this doesn’t as much fit into these two camps, I think Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant slots in quite well with the concerns of SGGK. There are other works that I’m interested in too, though I don’t know to what extent or how much time I’ll be afforded: there’s a really interesting amount of adaptations of Chaucer’s the Wife of Bath’s Tale, with all that it holds, and I’d like to see if I can include Patience Agbabi’s Telling Tales and Zadie Smith’s The Wife of Willesden, which both adapt the story into a modern context, with a stronger focus on race— which is super interesting to me on the racial lens more than the environmental!

In an overarching sense, my thoughts are centered around the construction of capital-N Nature, nation and empire (you see this very heavily in Idylls of the King, unsurprisingly) through Arthurian legend as well as how those ideas are both corrupted (see The Buried Giant, The Green Knight) and boldened by adaptations, as well as the specific connections between empire and environment and how those lay the groundwork for thoughts around race.

The theoretical texts I’m working with are primarily Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman, Iman Jackson’s Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World, Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World, Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, and Kathryn Yusoff’s A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. I’m delighted to talk more about how these texts fit into my critical work, but this answer is already long enough lol!!!

I’m particularly curious about how/why adaptations of Arthurian legend are so concerned with nature and the environment (see The Once and Future King), and what about Arthurian legend makes it such a heady and rich place for analysis and environmentally concerned fiction. How does the constructed and real history of the UK/Britain/England as reflected through Arthuriana reveal anxieties and insights on environmental changes of the time? Can the fall of King Arthur’s court be used today as a metaphor for species extinction? Is the Anthropocene- and all the dicey territory that comes with such a term- in Camelot? Is the Holy Grail a Hyperobject? Where do Hyperobjects appear in Arthurian adaptations? How does environmentalism interact with race in these adaptations, and in their historical situations?

My thesis tag is a little misleading insofar as there are quite a couple posts in there that don’t really have anything to do with my thesis in particular, but rather just remind me of it and the stuff I’m working on!!!

Thank you for asking and loving my blog hehe :3 I hope this answered your question and if you have any more questions or anything like that feel free to ask or also dm me if you prefer :D

(edit: OH there's also another work I'm super interested in though I need to bring this one up to my thesis advisor called King Artus: A Hebrew Arthurian Romance of 1279 which is super fascinating on both a racial and 'adaptational' (to which that can be discussed as an appropriate term) level)