Oh, how I miss it! But just over the past few days I’ve written over 3000 words during study and will write more tomorrow, let alone what I’ll write getting my assignment together and writing my essays.
I miss one particular aspect of writing especially. The epistolary aspect. That is as much as I’ll say on that.
Anyway, I just wanted to briefly touch base. Studying hard.
Jane Eyre has been all-consuming. I have to work on Twelfth Night too. There is sssooo much more to the novel than the play though. The two hardly compare, yet we’ve been given the same limited number of words for an essay on them. Go figure!
Yesterday I completed reading Jane Eyre and started on the course material. There is a lot to work through and it will pretty much have me reading the book all over again. It also has me fearing that I am going to struggle with the essays now.
My two previous results had lulled me into some moderate level of confidence which plummeted over the course of yesterday afternoon as I began to work through the course book and see how much I have to write in discussing the context and plot, etc, of Jane Eyre itself. Let alone what is to come with writing out a 600 word essay on both it AND Twelfth Night.
I slept well despite my misgivings, but a new dawn has brought renewed waves of misgivings. The doubt and concern continues into thinking about Creative Writing. I feel as though I need to be moderately good at English Literature and understand how I need to be able to deconstruct novels to potentially make my own writing good…and that scares me because I don’t feel as though I am not that good with close-reading and the skill of studying and analysing text.
I don’t want to spend the next three weeks feeling uneasy but I am not sure how to abate it and how to quell this attack of the modicum of self-confidence I had gained from my enjoyment of the past few weeks of study and from my assignment results so far in module A112.
I guess I need to just …. Breathe and take it a day at a time…
All week I was right back to studying big time. I had done so well! I got right back into it from New Year’s Day and even before that I started to read the set book of Twelfth Night. By Thursday I had worked through two weeks of study. I gave myself the day off on Friday and I was hoping to get out of the house but we’ve been having problems with our boiler and a guy was going to be coming to repair it so I decided to just stay home. As the day progressed, I progressed more into cold symptoms. Twelfth Night, eh! Lol
Yesterday I was feeling absolutely crap! I just stayed in bed all day. Today I am still heavy with cold but I feel better and although I am isolating myself in my room (I don’t want my OH to get a cold as the last time I had one – in November – she got it too and it took her about 8 weeks to get over the thing! I don’t want to subject her to that again), I have been up and about and out of bed and I even had my bedroom windows open for a couple of hours to get air in and rid the room of germs.
I’m not behind by any means, but I didn’t want the study I had so diligently done to then be swallowed up by me getting ill!
I really enjoyed the study. I actually liked Twelfth Night and it is the first time I have studied Shakespeare like that and I FINALLY got to appreciate what a clever sod he is with his use of language. Reading along to the play while listening to a BBC Radio 3 adaptation of it really helped me to get to grips with the dialogue. We were also given short clips of a theatre production to watch and that helped with interpreting the characters.
Yesterday, despite being full of lurgy and in bed, I watched a production performed at the Globe Theatre in 2012. This production starred Johnny Flynn (of the universally panned David Bowie biopic, Stardust) and Samuel Barnett as Voila/Cesario and Sebastian, respectively, Stephen Fry as Malvolio and Mark Rylance as Olivia. I actually found myself not that taken with Stephen Fry’s Malvolio – I didn’t think he played it with enough emotion to draw in the empathy that the character is deserving of from the audience. Mark Rylance’s Olivia was great and he gave her comedic overtones which was great. I could watch Samuel Barnett all day and wish he had been playing Voila/Cesario instead of Sebastian as he didn’t have as much stage time as the role of the brother offers. Johnny Flynn seemed wooden to me. I kept thinking that if his performance here was anything to go by, no wonder the Bowie biopic got panned! (It was as much for its ludicrous script and the refusal of the Bowie estate to allow any of his music to be used in the film as anything else that sealed its fate.) I sadly came away from having watched it more wishing that I hadn’t. Rylance, Barnett’s and the actor playing Feste were the people that saved it. The actor playing Maria was quite good too. He played her with a particularly conniving nature.
Samuel Barnett as Sebastian, Mark Rylance as Olivia and Johnny Flynn as Viola in William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night directed by Tim Carroll at the Apollo Theatre in London. (Photo by robbie jack/Corbis via Getty Images)
I’m still on target to get through reading Jane Eyre in good time. I had set myself a reasonably doable target of two weeks to read it, in tandem with studying the course material as I go. Actually, I am allowing for some days in which I won’t be able to read any of the book at all (too many tutorials in one day, and a gig in Edinbugh in about 10 days time) – so I have over 2 weeks from tomorrow ro get it read and there being two weeks left until the next assignment is due.
I’ve been drinking a lot of water today and trying to get myself feeling better to shake this cold off nice and early. I’m sure I’ll feel even better tomorrow and should at least start reading Jane Eyre even if I actually don’t start back up with study until Tuesday.
You know that period I mean? The time between Christmas Day and New Year’s Day when you’re not sure what day it is and time seems to both crawl and travel at the speed of light at the same time. There’s so much food in the house that you feel obliged to eat it and feel like a permanent beached whale. That.
Well…today is Kerrsday (aka Thursday for the non-Jim Kerr obsessives – you lucky bunch!) – 29 Dec. It’s the penultimate day of my Christmas break from uni study. And although I’ve not been looking at any of the course work since I handed in my assignment, it doesn’t mean I haven’t been studying! Oh, no.
For the past few days I have been tackling Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, as both it and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre are literary pieces we need to read for the English Literature block of study we have coming up.
I’d read the 80 page introduction to the play and are now starting to read the play itself. I’ve just read Act I and about to start Act II. I’m reading through without the notation and will then read it again with the notation. I was apprehensive to start it but it feels okay at the moment. I feel as though I actually have a handle on what’s going on even if the ‘olde English’ phraseology is a tad intimidating to get to grips with.
I received my mark for my assignment this afternoon. I honestly was not expecting it until the New Year. I always feel ssoooo nervous when the email notification comes in letting me know that my mark is ready for collection.
I can see the mark before I actually collect my tutor’s assessment and feedback. Again, as I arrived to the page to collect, I see a score of 80 and I’m just bloody stunned!
I can’t really go into any more detail than that. I have to be careful with what I discuss. Once again I am incredibly happy with my mark and fully understand and realise why I was deducted marks – or not scored as highly – for certain things I didn’t do right or shouldn’t have done.
Overall my result is really good and I got very positive feedback.
The tough stuff is to come next year. Tough in that these are the subjects I am doing my diploma for – English Literature and Creative Writing. I have William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre to tackle next with 600 word essays to write on each one of them.
In the meantime, there is some stuff happening with the house that’s going pretty crappy. When one part of your life seems to be going okay, other areas will be crap. It’s always the way!
I must apologise for the disruption to the blog today. I was sorting out my domain linking and changing over the blog’s theme to something I liked more. I hope you like it too.
Lastly, here’s another bit of Kerr Christmas fun. Yes…Jim will feature here now and again…he’s unavoidable. I’m more comfortable with him featuring here than my personal stuff and uni stuff featuring on the Simple Minds/Music blog.
