Category: Uncategorized
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Starry, starry night
You may by now have noticed that I like my garden birds. I have just been standing out in the garden, which backs on to a playing field and beyond that, the countryside, admiring all the stars and appreciating the song of the male tawny owl that lives nearby. I’ve never seen it, but I’ve…
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Writing the Fox
I have been reading ‘the Hunting and Finding out of the Romish Fox’ by William Turner. If I’m honest, it’s something I’ve been putting off because of the density of the text, but it’s actually turned out to be nothing like I expected. Obviously it’s heavily based on metaphor, but it’s rhetorical style is pretty…
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Welcome to 2013
And so a new year begins. I have spent a lot of it so far cataloguing ballads, to the extent that my analysis spreadsheet is now so enormous that I am probably going to have to take it to the university print services department to get it printed out – I guess it will be…
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It’s Christmas!
I’m taking a break from the madness to say merry Christmas. I have a house full of family, five children playing games together on my living room floor; lots of food on the table and a kitchen full of cooking smells. Christmas, it seems, starts here.
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Apocalypse now?
I’m sorry, I’ve got to say this: It’s twaddle. I wrote my undergraduate thesis on pre-conquest Latin American culture and the impact of the Spaniards, particularly on the Aztecs, but they believed that the world had ‘ages’ and no Mayan said the world as a whole would end tonight. Apart from which, whose ‘midnight’ are…
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Christmas Break
I decided at lunchtime today that I’m stopping now for Christmas. I’ve still got all the presents to wrap and a lot of sorting out to do before my Christmas visitors arrive, so having got my last self-imposed deadline out of the way yesterday, I am going to give myself some time off. I may…
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This week
Most of this week I have spent analysing the extant sixteenth century ballads. I have a big spreadsheet with the names of the ballads in one column and all sorts of topics and features listed across the top. I have comments in some of the boxes, and others are just ticked off. It’s a slow…
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This is an interesting blog post, and confirms something I had long suspected. There is another angle that the author hasn’t considered – the need for academics in some fields to travel for long periods to conduct primary research is hardly conducive to a ‘normal’ family life. I already have my children. In fact, if…
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A little gem
This morning’s nugget of advice from the sixteenth century: “If I in thee Suche faultes ones see, As no man ells doth knowe; To thee alone, And other none, These faults I ought to showe.” Haywood – A Ballad against Slander and Detraction
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