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A first: My history research has become obscure enough that right here, in the highly-trafficked Reid Library at the University of Western Australia, I pulled a couple of books in a row off a shelf and had to blow dust off them. (The scatter of dust that leaps into the air as you tug them off the shelf sparkles in the light, and warns you that seriously, blow those puppies off or you will be choosing between reading and breathing.)
Today's books I want to go through:
Basil Williams, The Whig Supremacy 1714-1760
Coupland, The American Revolution and the British Empire
Denis Gwynn, The Struggle for Catholic Emancipation 1750-1829
C. Robertson, England Under the Hanoverians
The problem is, there just isn't time enough in all the world to do as much reading as I want to for this essay, so a lot of the reading I'm doing now is kind of a skim-for-key-chapters thing. But I need to start keeping a bibliography, because if I've used them for my essay, they have to go in...
Speaking of reading, I keep seeing people mentioning ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif) 50books_poc. It seems like an interesting and edifying concept, something I'd like to try (after all, I do like being exposed to cultural perspectives not native to me), but I'm totally not going to.
(Because I'm clearly a racist. Because I don't read fiction, really, right now. At all. I have mountainous piles of reading to do for history, Linguistics to keep up with, and when I'm resting my mind from history I tend to do things which engage my brain on only the most superficial levels, like watch Japanese kids' shows or play Civ4 or World of Warcraft. And those times are also generally after my ADHD meds have worn off, which means reading any work of fiction longer than about ten pages is beyond me. With sufficient will/incentive, I'm capable of reading novels, but the focus-spoons that requires are currently being devoted to history.)
Just, take it as read that I'm aware of it, so you don't need to tell me and encourage me to take part.
Meanwhile, I am still reading RaceFail09 stuff occasionally. One of the things I've taken from it? I clearly need to return to working on [Kentish and Jude], the story I started writing after doing History in Fantasy/Fantasy in History. Inspired by that course, it's a novel that's deliberately aware of the way ideology underwrites speculative fiction; I've put together a socio-historical background in my head, and each chapter opens with an excerpt from a fictional history book, about the history of that universe. I kind of love it, I just got distracted. (RaceFail brought it to mind, along with verb_noire, because of people talking about the dearth of non-white heroes; the two central characters of the story are Kentish, who is black, and Jude, who is a lesbian, although neither of these points is explicit until a couple of chapters in. Which one is the main protagonist, and which one is, in real terms, the Hero? Highly arguable, if I do my job right, because the nature of heroism is also something which I am intentionally letting be a little questionable in this story. Argh, need more time for working on this stuff.)Current Location: Reid Library Current Music: Cold Fairyland - Mula-shabel War
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I am downloading many, many articles originally printed in the Scottish Historical Review early last century. I have to say, scholars of the present have it easy; so much is available online, both in terms of archives of periodicals and even of primary sources.
So far I've gone through twenty years many many years of the Scottish Historical Review. I've downloaded a number of articles - not all will be useful, but if I can save the PDFs to my laptop (and I can) I can go through them at leisure. Handy. I'm up to 1965 and slogging on.
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I am sitting alone in the back corner of a McDonald's. It is loud, the music is ass, there are constant beepings from the kitchen, and I have a splitting headache and a deep sense of sadness and hurt I've been fighting all day, because there are some things it's just really damn hard not to take personally.
At least McDonald's has free WiFi, at least while my battery lasts.
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