Monday blogging is fast becoming a regular feature, so that y’all get the benefit of my sunny, post-weekend optimism. And I’m feeling positively sparkly today, after I spent the morning indulging myself by watching the Gwyneth Paltrow film version of Emma. Really dreamy stuff.

Whilst Netflix is an unorthodox start to a hard day of work (at least in Oxford, I can’t speak for elsewhere), it’s got me all set-up for a week of Jane Austen. When, a couple of months ago, I started my vacation reading by getting down with Sense and Sensibility, it was with this week in mind. Several weeks later, however, I had a momentary memory failure where I couldn’t even recall the name of the novel’s rake (Willoughby, fyi), which, once again, raises suspicions in my mind that vacation reading is just a ploy to force me to have to read everything twice. It’s a weird form of late 18th/early 19th century brainwashing that is making me very consciously aware of the fact that I have yet to find myself a suitable husband.

But, perhaps, just like Emma, I oughtn’t to be worrying myself about matchmaking right now. One year from today, I will be a day away from finishing my course. Whilst this is a profoundly scary thought for me, it can be nothing compared to that of the people who are actually doing their last exam tomorrow- the white carnation long disposed of, the pink carnation wilting, the red carnation sitting in a jar of water by the window… It’s almost too much to think about. I don’t want to be accused of whinging about having to read my £2 edition of Persuasion, whilst sweaty noses blot paper down in Examination Schools, so my concern, this week, is entirely for them. I raise my empty bottle of Coke to you.

But this has all dragged me away from Anne Elliot, Emma Woodhouse and Eleanor Dashwood for too long. I have a responsibility to defend the passivity of Austen’s earnest protagonists, so I’m not going to get bogged down in feeling sorry for finalists. The absence of finalists from the library has been a real blessing- it’s much quieter now, and I feel a smug sense of superiority at being the self-appointed King of the Library, way more life-experienced than all those frantic freshers who make up the rest of the EFL population (well, except for the creepy, obese DPhil student who often sits near me and pants). 

But, in this post-Netflix nightmare of a world, I need to get back to my reading. The remaining 100 pages of Persuasion aren’t going to read themselves, much as SparkNotes might suggest they could.

I’ve actually been away from Oxford for a not inconsiderable amount of time now, so I suspect my lack of overall achievement should be starting to bother me. So far today, I’ve got myself a sandwich and had a bath. Both terrific successes, but even for the most slouchy of slouches, that’s a slow day.

It’s raining, which is as good an excuse as any for not going outside and frolicking with the street urchins. And, in a further fit of evading my real work, I bought myself the new(ish) Peter Carey book and have been slowly reading that (rather than Tom Jones, as I promised I would). None of this is terribly interesting news, but it’s fractionally more interesting than discussing my burgeoning preference for Cherry Coke over regular Coke, or the fact that I started breathing in time to the hammering from the construction site next door, and almost hyperventilated.

I’m told that, given it’s Friday evening, it’s practically the weekend, and my sister has certainly come home all excited for a couple of days off. In my mind, this just illustrates how mushy and amorphous the delineation of weekdays is for me. Even at university, I see very little practical differences between Tuesdays and Sundays- other than the fact the library is closed- so I’m used to just nodding and feigning interest when people tell me how excited they are about the weekend. If you’re excited about the weekend, good for you. You probably also notice Bank Holidays.

Anyhow, this is more of an update built out of the necessity of sustaining a regular format to this blog, rather than having any real news. If you’re interested to know how my reading of The Chemistry of Tears and Tom Jones goes, then I’ll update you in a few days time. And that’ll be pretty much it until we get to my incredibly insightful commentary about the Oxford and Cambridge boat race, that, in a mysteriously irreligious piece of planning, takes place on Easter Sunday. I’ve got a full week to prepare myself for overt partisanship in an event whose outcome I couldn’t give a thruppence of a shit about. Better get into training straight away…

I had almost forgotten the smell of the library. People have this romantic notion that libraries ought to smell like the leather binding on books, or the appealing mustiness of old pages, but the reality is that most libraries just reek of whatever detergent is used to clean the floor. The English Faculty Library smells more like Lynx than it does like the antique bookshops that archive hipsters’ minds.

This week marks the first time this term that I’m studying prose, rather than poetry. It’s a nice break and Robinson Crusoe is, at face value, quite a fun book (although, for us Huck Finn enthusiasts, it drags like a tug boat in treacle). It also means that there’s quite a lot of reading to do, for, however long The Dunciad may be, it can still be measured in number of lines, rather than number of pages. So, I didn’t go to the library yesterday, instead choosing to stay in my room, wrapped up in sheets that I somehow imagined would cure my throaty cough, alternating between reading the novel and listening to an audiobook version of it. It was a nice day, I got a coffee and I managed to read a staggering 88 pages.

Today I have confined myself to the library, which is packed full of equally stranded souls. Whilst Robinson Crusoe had the whole island to himself, I am forced to share this wasteland with other, equally poorly groomed, castaways. Like Crusoe I find myself clock-watching, trying to keep track of the passing minutes, hours, days… Like Crusoe I try and find order in the universe- where he uses God, I use the Dewey Decimal system. But I don’t even have a Man Friday to help me with my work (Disclaimer: I fundamentally oppose slavery). Instead, I slog on, in the same quietly vigilant fashion as Daniel Defoe’s protagonist.

On the plus side, ‘Defoe Week’ has given me a chance to revisit my favourite topic, colonial literature, and I’ve even got the copy of JM Coetzee’s Foe out beside me. It’s a book that tells the Robinson Crusoe story in a way that I find interesting and engaging, but, of course, I’m not allowed to study it. I’m just keeping it there to stimulate my general interest in this topic and provide a welcome relief from describing Robinson Crusoe as the ‘social and religious forerunner to the second wave of British Imperialism at the end of the 18th Century’.

Time will tell whether this argument is more convincing than my ‘Andrew Marvell is a transgender pedophile’ one, but I suspect it is. And, at the very least, I can tackle this novel knowing that I am simultaneously acting out a concise version of the marooned hero’s life. Albeit, mostly, without cannibalism, or sunlight.

I’ve managed to get almost nothing done today, because I’ve been in bed feeling pretty sorry for myself. The cause of my sorrow (or self-pity, more accurately) is a runny nose and a cough. First world problems, yes, but it really spoiled my chocolate pancakes this morning…

I have to do a Middle English commentary for tomorrow, which I attempted to do in a coffee shop packed out with Christian Union members who’d just come out of a ‘Born Loved’ talk. Even though I didn’t attend the talk, church or believe in any form of deity, it’s reassuring to know that there are still people for whom a ‘night out’ constitutes coffee and an ice cream. We might not agree on the big questions of existence, but the CU knows how to throw a ‘Nick party’. Still, I didn’t approach them, partly because I wanted to finish off my essay and partly because I was slightly afraid that my secularity might tarnish their innocence. When Dr Dre came on shuffle, I felt a little bit like E.T. in the ghost costume.

But, despite the fact that 80% of my body mass is currently mucus, I’m relatively content at the moment. I’ve been told that it’s making my blog posts boring (‘Stop writing about your boring fucking work…like anyone gives a shit about Anthony Mardell!’) but there’s not much complaining that I feel like doing. Sure, I’d like to be a few inches taller and maybe be able to grow a proper beard, but, perfecting my Hugh Jackman-like physique aside, I’m satisfied with my lot. Admittedly, my misanthropic tendencies set the bar pretty low, and I’m not sure what percentage of people would tolerate my general inability to exist beyond the confines of the faculty library and Pret, but that’s just me. 

Maybe the Christians are right and I was ‘Born Loved’ after all. Or, perhaps, this is all just a mirage, like the vision of a new Jerusalem in the commentary passage of Pearl that I’m studying this week. I guess that only time will tell…

In the meantime, here’s one last complain: there’s an undammable river of snot coming out of my nose and I don’t like it and I want it to stop and it’s not fair…etc.

Christ am I finding it easy to get distracted at the moment. I’ve had the poem ‘Upon his leaving his mistress’ by John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, out in front of me for the last hour and a half but, strangely, I’ve yet to make it past the first couplet: ‘Tis not that I am weary grown/Of being yours, and yours alone’, which is a remarkably prescient piece of poetry, because it isn’t that I’m ‘weary’, it’s just that I have Twitter.

Rochester is my man this week. The 17th Century libertine, famous for his heavy drinking and frequent philandering, is a poet of some renown, although I’m going to have to overcome my preoccupation with talking about ‘poetry and sex’. Last week’s essay, in which I concluded that Andrew Marvell was a gender confused pedophile, went down like a Gregg’s in Jerusalem, so I’m going to have to start rethinking my strategy. I’ve always considered ‘gender’ to be a safe topic- like ‘social unrest’ or ‘narrative voice’- but I was sufficiently wide of the mark with Marvell to make me as scared of ‘sex’ as a wedding night John Ruskin (yep, I’m like a Victorian TMZ).

But Rochester is still a lot of fun. I can’t help but admire a poet who concludes a poem with the lines, ‘With wine I wash away my cares,/And then to cunt again.’ Still, I’m going to try and write an essay this week on ‘Rochester’s sense of failure’ without making reference to the fact that ‘drinking a bowl’ might be a metaphor. Shouldn’t be hard.

In the mean time, I’ll sit here in the EFL whilst itching for a coffee, but knowing I don’t have any change. So, when I do take my break, in however many minutes, it’ll probably involve me taking a scenic tour around the St Cross monolith, before resigning myself to another few hours of sitting in the library, gazing longingly at the ever present tab on my browser which says ‘Twitter’.

If only I were allowed to write my essay in 140 characters, then my tutors couldn’t blame me for having half baked ideas that cut out mid-th

Rain has replaced the snow and, frankly, I preferred being cold to being cold and wet. So, for that reason, I have yet to properly leave my room today. Instead, I’m just sitting here, vaguely reading Andrew Marvell’s poetry, whilst also watching the rain falling against the window. Even nature is distracting me.

Today marks the start of Third Week in Oxford, which, in an eight week term, is a pretty big deal because it means we’re finally making progress. Having successfully navigated my way through a quarter of my fifth term at the university, it’ll only be another two weeks before I am, officially, half way through my stay in the City of Dreaming Yadda Yadda. English finals actually take place very early in the summer, so, in all probability, I’m already over the 50% mark, but I’ll wait until Fourth Week before baking a cake and putting a party hat on. And what better way to celebrate your slow progress through life than essays on metaphysical poetry and medieval fables? YOLO.

Still, this isn’t North Korea, so I shouldn’t scoff at progress. In addition to reading every poem ever written by Andrew Marvell, my major task for this week is trying to return the stack of books that I took out of the EFL in December and have yet to return. I’m relatively sure that I’ve already incurred a fine for them, but the exponential day-by-day increase of that figure is something I’d like to avoid. That would definitely eat into my ‘crystal meth money’. So I’m going to pack a rucksack to the library tomorrow and try and take them all back- even the unread Nadine Gordimer and Peter Carey. It’s a sad acceptance of defeat, taking back books you want to read so that you don’t lose the privilege of checking out books that you need to read, but I guess that’s my fault and not the fault of the library staff or the international system of book lending that all libraries work by.

But I can’t do that today for a number of reasons, not least because the library isn’t open on a Sunday, but also because I don’t want to leave my room until the rain stops falling. Perhaps I should spend less time writing about how the Old Testament is bullshit and more time building an Arc…

I’m cold, in a way that makes me think that I might be horribly ill with snow flu. It has been snowing after all. In fact, an awful lot has happened since my last post, because, in addition to England being rendered completely unworkable by 3 inches of snow, I’ve had a birthday. I’m now a whole year older. Perhaps that’s why I feel ill.

My birthday also brought about the realisation that I’ve been doing this blog for over a year now. In that time, I’ve ceased to study Anglo-Saxon (I considered changing the name of this blog to ‘Renaissance Man’ in October) but have continued my relatively dreary way of life and general misanthropic tendencies. But, at the same time, I’ve also noticed a marked improvement in almost every aspect of my existence- an improvement that tempts me to write about candy floss, water flumes and all the other totally awesome things in life. But, somehow, I think that sort of change of tone would fit in even less well amidst the steady stream of kitten pictures and blowjob GIFs on Tumblr.

I’m currently trying to write a commentary about the Middle English poem Pearl, but am finding myself distracted by the growing sensation of being in a pressurised aircraft cabin. I think that this is the point where a stronger man would make the 20 minute walk back to his room and try to sleep it off, but I’m too scared of the ice and the ravenous Law students escaping from their next-door faculty. So I’ll wait it out in the English Library for a bit longer and, hopefully, this will pass and I can fulfil all my Middle English dreams this afternoon. 

Anyhow, it’ll be dark in an hour, so I ought to be cracking on with my commentary. It feels like the ages of 8 and 20 are the only times I’ve ever had to write about ‘alliteration’, but it’s not the worst way to waste your week. If I can locate a single instance of antanaclasis (Google it, tumblr’s trying to tell me it’s not even a word…) then I’ll leave the library a happy man.

Albeit, a happy, old Renaissance man with snow flu.

Oh fuck, sorry, I forgot to blog for a few days. I’ve been back in Oxford since Thursday and, since then, I’ve sat five hours of exams and then had a wonderfully leisurely and carefree weekend. I think it’s fair to say that I’ve yet to readjust properly.

My exams, on Friday morning and afternoon, were every bit as stressful as I had anticipated. Sadistically forcing your students to put pen to paper about last term’s work, the day after they’ve returned for a brand new term full of brand new work, is listed in the 1899 Hague Convention as a war crime. Still, I sat down and dragged my pink fountain pen across the paper until, after what felt like a fortnight, I had finished my work. After a full week of anxiety, I felt an enormous, unburdening release, like loosening your tie in church, and celebrated with pizza before my afternoon exam. Middle English at 2pm, however, brought me back down to earth, as my every hagridden thought was manifested in a perversely concise question paper. 

But that’s all over now, and, having bunked off this weekend, it’s time to turn my attention, once again, to Milton’s Paradise Lost. This text fills me with the same dread that The Faerie Queene did, except for the fact that it’s fractionally shorter (but, on the downside, it doesn’t rhyme). I think that Oxford needs to accept that there’s a reason that people are no longer writing colossal, 500-page, poems. I’d much rather write about the Nadine Gordimer book on my bedside table than a single Spenserian stanza, or Milton’s blank verse which, frankly, I think is lazy and can only have taken him a couple of hours. That said, this year is pretty heavy on poetry, so it’s probably better to get with the programme than spend another six months railing against the injustice of being force fed a diet quite so high in vitamin ababbcbcc.

But my readjustment to the Oxford bubble might well be facilitated by the onset of tonight’s rumoured snowstorm. Getting snowbound in the library might just be the only way Paradise Lost gets the critical analysis from me that it has been so desperately lacking all these years. If I’m locked in the English Faculty Library with nothing but books, wifi and the weird tiny coffee shop, then I’m relatively sure that I’ll be a fully fledged Milton scholar within a week.

Or I might just be cold and bored.

The mild dread that I referred to in my last post has now almost reached the point of hysteria. I realised that I’m going to have to do a commentary on Troilus and Criseyde in less than a week. I’ve done plenty of T&C commentaries in the past, but this one carries a word that is a harbinger of doom for university students across the world: unseen.

I’m sure you shivered as you read that.

Yes, I’m going to have to pick up a passage of Chaucer’s epic poem about the Trojan war and, in addition to saying something about the text, have to locate where exactly, in this 300 page poem of Middle English language that reads like Stephen Fry’s pillow talk, it’s from. I feel daunted by this mountainous task, not in an Edmund Hillary sort of way, but in a miserable ‘rather just stay at home’ sort of way. If I am to reach the summit of my metaphorical mountain, it will require the metaphorical crampons of revision, the metaphorical ice-axe of serious note taking, and the metaphorical North Face jacket of me suddenly becoming a completely different human being. 

I have less than a week left of this Winter Vac (I am refusing to keep calling it ‘the Christmas Vac’) and that’s weighing heavily upon me. London seems to know I’m leaving- my local Pret closed today at 5pm for some reason- and that only serves to make me feel less inclined to return to Oxford. I actually went back, for the day, this weekend and wandered through the pre-0th week town that bears to little resemblance to what it will become in a few days time. Where were the anxious faces? Where were the library prisoners with their vitamin D deficiencies? Where were the people riding bikes in their fluttering gowns? Where were the crew-daters in their embroidered blazers? WHERE WAS ALL THE FUCKING KNITWEAR?

But all those things will migrate back to Oxford with all the certainty of a retreating tide, and all the fun of a January weekend at the Blackpool Pleasure Beach. I better make the most of my last few moments at home…

…time for Netflix.

I hope you all had a great Christmas. Now it’s time to knuckle down for another year of unrelenting misery, catastrophe and turgid lines of Chaucerian verse. I’m really not expecting a lot from 2013…

It’s been a few days since Christmas and you’d have thought that this would’ve given me time to put the consumerist gluttony of Christmas behind me and crack(er) on with wrapping up Paradise Lost and starting on the heaps of other work I have to commence before the start of term. And then, on top of all that shite, I remembered that I have collections at the start of term. For the uninitiated, collections are Oxford’s way of ruining your holiday. It’s like having a man in a black suit and hat standing in every room you enter, twitching a flick-knife and staring into your soul. You try to hide from him, but he’s there. You try to run, but he catches you up. You think you can escape him in your sleep, but when you roll over, he’s spooning you…

So I’ve got to revisit all the stuff that I did last term, which, as regular readers of this blog will know, was about as much fun as having root canal surgery administered by Lindsay Lohan. I’m even going to be forced to reopen The Faerie Queene! This is the point where, in a film, I’d scream ‘NOOOO!’ and wake up in a cold sweat, realising it was all a horrible, horrible nightmare. But this isn’t a nightmare, because nightmare’s are, by their very nature, not real. And this is real. 

Still, wild over-exaggerations aside, I’ve got less than two weeks of vacation left and that is starting to fill me with an anxious dread. I have to balance my desire to enjoy my remaining time with the requirement to finish the work that I have only tentatively started. It’s like Sophie’s Choice, except that one of my children is awesome and the other is a complete shit. I wonder which one I’d give to Dr Mengele…

Still, I had Christmas and it wasn’t as unpleasant as it could’ve been, so I should take that as a small victory. And who knows, maybe 2013 will be the year that I finally realise the profound importance of dead languages, poetry that you need a dictionary to read and 1000 page allegories whose message is ‘don’t drink, don’t have sex, don’t have fun, love Jesus.’

Yep, 2013’s gonna be a fucking great year.