god it's been ages!!!

but I feel the need to write... so much going on I don't think I can keep it all in my head at the same time...

and so ... I am no longer in Exeter working on a masters... I have moved on, or time has moved on and I am now in Cornwall (the place of dreams) and working on a Phd wooo hooo indeed....

it gets better...

I have found a little place to live that is all wooden floors, pale limed pine, lapiz blue paintwork and white walls... and out of the windows is ..... a beach complete with waves, sand, marham grass, and a plethora of surfers... particularly in the summer as the lifeguards station is right outside... I even have a cat and a lover... life is good so good that maybe I just haven't had the need to write.. that contentment has overflowed and I have no words left for blogs, private or otherwise....

my phd is interesting,
in a way,
not something I am absolutely passionate about though

and I think this is the nub, the crux of why I am returning to delilah.. I do have a little nugget of angst.... I can make it interesting, I can view it as a job to do, research for someone else... but it is not my own research!!! that is the key..

I am feeling less and less personal involvement... the reason I am back here is because I have just read a blog from someone who is due to do a seminar here in a couple of weeks...ecology without nature and I want to be spending my time researching something like ecology/nature/phenomenolgy/soundscapes/liminal places and that is so where I want to be yet I find myself reading historical documents about whether the Post Office should take over the running of the telegraph industry.. doh! do I care????

I am taking one of the new collaborative doctoral awards that have been set up and funded by the AHRC and the Porthcurno Museum... and University of Exeter... the research proposal was already confirmed and finalised by the time I came along to make my application and I have had to fit in with too many other people's agendas.... and none of them match my own... I had my doubts about this phd when I applied as historical geography was not a favoured arena... it had seemed quite plodding and quite frankly dull! I decided to play the interview my way and just describe how I saw the thing and how my theoretical background was more cultural and material and so I prattled on mentioning merleau ponty's reflexivity, spinozan ethics, chucked in a reference to deleuzian lines of drift... waved my hands around a lot and thoroughly enjoyed myself... I had the idea that if they offered me the place it would be because of my approach and implicit within this is the approval of my approach...

so what has happened since starting?? I have had all sides banging on about the visual, the corporate identity... all words that were in the original title and that a number of colleagues in exeter assured my was only a working title and that I could wrangle it around to something applicable to me.. that, in fact, all I had to do was get the phd funding and then I would be away.. doing my own thing..... this has not worked out so simply

I travel to the museum, last term I went once a week, I read stuff, look at images, feel flippant and peripheral.... this term I am planning to try out staying for longer and 'fully immersing' myself in the archive.... what I realise now is that I dont care enough... it just doesn't mean that much to me.. that I cant be bothered to explain to museum people just what I want to do , because they wont 'get' it and will begrudge my funding... and what I really want to do is explore soundscapes at modern music festivals, to work out just what is going on when the whole crowd at glasto sing along to leonard cohen's halelujah, or what is happen to people at the front in a moshpit when they experience the full physicality of the music's power from the vibrations of the bass coming up through the feet to the fish-like school of moshers moving as one.... or to explore the search for a non-dualistic approach to life, how dualistic hierarchies seem unsurmountable....

unfortunately it's not really anything to do with telegraph cables or historical geography...

oh yes.... and a Happy New Year!!x