Where Did Fall Go?

I've certainly had an eventful six weeks or so since my last post. Things went from being a sedate and predictable pace to seeming suddenly like a treadmill spinning out of control. When I last posted, classes had barely started and now, thanks to the quarter system, final papers are looming three-ish weeks away. For the first couple weeks of the term, things were pretty quiet. I didn't have any trouble keeping up with my class reading, and my social life was limited to once-weekly visits from a friend who is taking one of the same classes I am, occasional departmental functions, and a visit every few weeks from the person I was seeing. Then, I started dating someone more or less local, my parents came for a long visit, and suddenly it seemed that I wasn't even keeping up with schoolwork. I don't for one moment regret spending time with people important to me, but things got a bit ugly there for a while because I wasn't vigilant enough about staying on top of things and disciplining myself to prioritize. Even though we are now gearing up for the end of term, I have my work and life much more under control now. Well, to the extent that you can have your life under control at all, having fallen head-over-heels for someone. I don't for one moment regret that either, though.

OK, enough mushy stuff. For now, anyway. I've been spending a very quiet Sunday afternoon at my boyfriend's place while he's at work. It's an ideal time for me to get work done myself because there are so few distractions. Well, aside from noisy neighbors and the Internets. I've spent most of the day starting to pull together ideas for a paper on the Book of Margery Kempe for the English class I'm taking. It appears that about half the class will be writing on Kempe's Book rather than any of the other texts we read, so I'm not alone in being fascinated by it. The main thing that I noticed in reading all the journal articles we were assigned to go with it was just how much disagreement there is about what genre the Book fits into, so that's what I'm going to write about. I'm looking at how Kempe presents her work in its prologue, and then comparing that to (mostly) contemporary works of various genres, like The Cloud of Unknowing, Bridget's Book, Julian of Norwich's Shewings, some hagiographies, etc. I'm hoping some important similarities and differences will emerge that will help clarify the genre issue.

My other classes have also been pretty interesting, especially the one that I am taking at the Newberry Library downtown. Some intriguing questions are arising from the stuff we've been looking at in there, and I think those might be fertile ground for the major paper that I have to spend the next two quarters writing. More on that later. The field seminar in early modern history has been a little harder for me to get into, but for this week we read a couple of particularly interesting and not too heavy books. One of the books, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh, is a scholarly biography of an 18th-century woman of undistinguished origins but fascinating life, and the other, Women on the Margins, is about three different 17th-century women of the artisanal/mercantile class. I enjoyed both books thoroughly despite their chronological distance from my usual realm of endeavor.

Well, back to the salt mines until my beloved returns home from work.