My first blog post is a daunting prospect, and one that has been haunting me since I started my PhD back in September. To blog or not to blog has been the great question, and it is only in the last couple of weeks that 'to blog' has become the obvious answer.
I'll be honest, I've never really had much time for social networking generally; too often, it seems to become a space for bemoaning the trivial tragedies of life which, face to face, probably would never be mentioned. This immediacy of social networking can, then, be a problem: you don't need to think before you share your views with the whole world any more. But, it is this immediacy which gives bloggers, Tweeters and Facebookers the world over an unprecedented advantage: we can share our ideas as soon as we have them, get feedback as soon as we have readers, engage with a whole interactive planet without ever walking out the door. On the whole, it seems that the relationship between researchers and social networking is one which is set only to grow stronger and become more integral to academic life (Amber Regis and Charlotte Mathieson have each written excellent posts on the unforeseen advantages of becoming an active social networker). Besides these professional advantages, for the lonely PhD student, or in fact any lone worker, this sense of a community being literally at your fingertips, perpetually just one click away, can keep you in contact with an outside world that it's quite frighteningly easy to forget.
So, basically, this blog is a way of keeping connected with both the academic and wider worlds, and of doing so as a part of a dialogue (as opposed to, say, only reading online journals and checking the Guardian once an hour). Having been convinced that entering into this community of social networkers is a good thing, I had then to agonise over what to call the blog. Unlike my Twitter name (I opted for as close to my real name as it's possible to get for someone with one of the most common names on the planet), I wanted a blog name that reflected all of my reasons for embarking into the wide, wide sea of the blogosphere: disseminating my research, communicating with people inside and outside academia, and, inevitably, deploring the hard lot of the PhD student. Where it should come from was easy: my focus is on the Coleridge family, and who better to go to than the most famous member of it: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a writer who experimented with pretty much every thinkable mode of discourse. Were he alive today, I have no doubt he would be among the Stephen Frys of the online world: his notebooks and letters acted then in much the same way as the tweets and blogs of today. His notebooks recorded fragments of his thoughts, and, although they were written for his personal perusal, he was always aware of their potential to be published. His letters, meanwhile, discussed all aspects of contemporary life, from his own deeply private issues, to long theses on, amongst other things, politics, religion, travelling, finances, publishing and biography. Again, Coleridge was constantly aware of the ways that his correspondence was disseminated beyond the person to whom it was addressed. To Coleridge's letters, then, I turned to find a name, and found one in a letter of advice to his second son, Derwent. Coleridge is 'anxious' about Derwent's 'dissipated' student lifestyle, and worried about the distractions of 'society' upon Derwent's academic life. Coleridge advises him to sequester himself from 'extra-academic Society,' using himself as an unlikely example for studious habits:
'In my first term... Six nights out of seven, as soon as Chapel was over, I went to Pembroke, to Middleton's (the present Bp. of Calcutta) Rooms - opened the door without speaking, made and poured out the Tea and placed his cup beside his Book - and went on with my Aeschylus, or Thudydides, as he with his Mathematics, in silence till 1/2 past 9'. [Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Derwent Coleridge, January 11th 1822]
Coleridge may not, in reality, have been quite the academic paragon he implies here, but the idea of this kind of student lifestyle may sound familiar to the PhD student, even as it has undergraduates snorting in derision. Gone are the days of constant 'dissipation;' 'extra-academic Society' now means research seminars; it often feels like you are, or should be, at your desk 'Six nights out of seven' - and even if you're not stationed there, chances are you're thinking about something that you should have got done at least two days before. Reading in silence with many cups of tea sums up my early PhD career rather neatly - even if my subject ('old Books') is something that Coleridge thought could only 'dissipate your time and thought'. (I can't help feeling that, if it does, at least some part of me is becoming 'dissipated' on a regular basis.)
The last hurdle - of course - had to be what to write about. I turned to another Coleridge for inspiration: Mary. Mary complained that she felt 'condemned to wander restlessly around the Gates of Fairyland, although I have never yet passed them.' Mary's 'Fairyland,' like her great-great-uncle's, was that mystical place reserved for canonical literature; mine is that mystical place where academics go. The 'academic' or 'critic' is still another beast, and I am still looking at them from the wrong side of the Gates. I suppose my main feeling since starting the PhD has been one of exclusion: neither student nor professional, the PhD seems to float around a liminal space, anchored down only by the hope that it will, one day, be the key to the Gates. This blog, then, will I hope be one of the ways by which I search for that key - and if anyone knows where it might be, please feel free to let me know!
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