between the rock and the cold, cold sea

Ah. The back-to-termtime wibbles, right on schedule.

*curls up with fire and cat*

It's okay to doubt myself. That's natural. It's not okay to let myself be crippled by it. Or by perfectionism. Or by body-image issues. Or by abandonment issues. Or any other type of damned issue at all.

I can deal. Thanks to the year from hell (and the better year that followed it), I even have tools for dealing.

Right. Now we have that out of the way, I should probably write, and then think about what I should put on my CV. Because really, with the price of bread and milk, I should really try for a weekend job.

Provided I can find one that doesn't try to suck out my energy along with my soul, of course.

That's 300 words of essay, and time out for catwaxing and dinner while I think about the next three hundred.

I've been doing a bit of thinking lately about autodidacticism, and why the habit of self-directed learning is a good thing.

I had a good basic education. Good teachers (for the most part), interesting courses - I have a grounding that I could build on in biology, physics, maths, chemistry, languages, and a grouding that I did build on in history and critical thinking*.

But post-primary education is incredibly narrow and incomplete. I was always a history geek, so when I realised how very basic my secondary history education really was** (although on the causes of WWI and WWII? Quite detailed, thank you.), I started doing some extra reading.

What I know about the SOE in WWII is self-taught, for example. Verdun and Gallipoli in WWI? Self-taught. The Russian gulag sytem and its lasting effects on modern Russia? The medieval world and medieval self-understanding? The empresses of medieval Byzantium? The first crusade?

All self-taught. And what I know about self-teaching is also (mostly) self-taught.***

(Although what I know about self-teaching falls apart when it comes to teaching myself a process. Bodhrán-playing, for example. It's a series of repetitive actions that take time and persistence to put together in a meaningful way. The tin whistle, likewise. Cooking, on the other hand, seems to be about experimenting madly until I find something that works. And we will not speak of writing, which as matociquala has so often said, is like everything.)

Now that I'm in college, I'm finding self-teaching very useful to fill up gaps in what the lectures offer, as well as gaps in my own knowledge.

(I am slowly, for example, introducing myself to the English literary canon, starting with Marlowe. In the summer, I will be introducing myself to the Roman literature, and teaching myself Latin. I have no plans to further my understanding of Irish history, though. It's hard to appreciate thoughtful analyses of past blunders, bigotry and/or cruelty when you're living with the dust of their legacies. But I suspect that may yet change.)

Autodidacticism. Everyone who reads nonfiction does it, to one degree or another. But doing it - knowing that you're directing your own learning - is really one of the things 'official' education doesn't encourage. (Not until you get to third level, anyway, and that's a whole 'nother jar of worms.)

And yet, the people who learn early that they can direct their own learning (anecdotally) seem to be the ones who keep learning their whole lives long.

...Well, that's a thoroughly waxed cat. Since I've run out of waffly thinky thoughts, I should go back to my essay.

*Though those two come bound up together, in my view.

**Europe 1870-1960 and Ireland 1869-1960. With large chunks - such as Spain, and post-WWII Russia, left out for time constraints.

***For history: pick something and read widely about it. Assess the sources for biases, and the theories for whackjobbery. As you go, keep fitting the bits together until things make some sort of sense. For the sciences: the latest research is almost always out of date by the time it's published, so it's futile to try to keep up with the cutting edge. Get a good grip on the basics first (or instead).

Books 188-190, Nonfiction 11-12, Fiction 178:

Nonfiction 11-12.

11. Rachel Manija Brown, All The Fishes Come Home To Roost.

I can't remember who recommended this to me. I don't usually read autobiography, memoir, that kind of thing. But this one was definitely... interesting.

12. Rosalind Thomas, Literacy and Orality in Ancient Greece.

Published in 1990 as part of the Cambridge Key Themes in Ancient History series, it remains, so I'm informed, the most thorough examination of literacy, orality, and their intersection, in ancient Greece in print.

It's lucidly written and clearly organised, with chapters dealing with oral poetry, the arrival and use of writing in Greece, performance and memorial, and the use of writing by the state. It suffers from an understandable concentration on Athens and the use of writing there - the majority of our sources come from Athens, after all - but it's a very interesting and useful examination of a topic that has been subject to perhaps a surfeit of academic ideology.

The material making use of the evidence from Graeco-Roman Egypt, and the epilogue on the use of writing in Roman times, is also extremely interesting.

Thomas' work is at it's best when examining the intersection of literacy and 'orality'. If you are in any way interested in this topic, this is the book. Seriously. It's thorough, it's interesting, and it suffers somewhat less from the over-comma'd, contortionist style of academia than other writers I could name.

Fiction 178

178. Emily Gee, Thief With No Shadow.

Like Patricia Briggs' early work, only not quite as good.

WARNING: severe spoilers may follow.

This is an interesting book in a number of ways. Interesting for me, at least, because I can see the ways in which this is definitely a journeyman book, and thus I can use it as a learning tool.

It's romantic fantasy, and there's not a lot of (external) movement: it stays mostly in one place. The prose is workmanlike at best, choppy at worst, and the story suffers a lot from forced escalation*, and a little from obvious melodrama. Nevertheless, it manages to be entertaining.

The opening is in medias res, and it wouldn't have suffered for starting perhaps fifty pages earlier, with the main characters' (Melke and Bastian's) motivations more clearly fleshed out from the start.

In order to rescue her brother Hantje from salamanders, Melke has to steal a necklace from Bastian. Bastian, however, needs that necklace to break a curse on his family. The reader doesn't really learn this until the end of chapter four, and so I, at least, did some very annoyed muttering.

(Incidentally, we never do learn satisfactorily why Hantje decided to steal from the salamanders. The reason given near the end of the book is too little, too late.)

Bastian despises Melke, but needs her to steal the necklace back from the salamanders. Melke despises herself, and agrees to help - partially out of guilt, partially in order to get a healer (Bastian's sister) to help her brother. And so days pass.

The characterisation is somewhat uneven, and not very much happens while Hantje is ill. Bastian is unlikeable. Melke is a bit wet. The sister is Good. The brother is unconscious. And when we get to the exploits of derring-do, I was astounded by the reversal of character shown by the two major protagonists.

And, ah. The resolution? Is not so believeable. The reader is expected to believe that the two men - individually - can survive what amounts to rape, and go on back to normal with a bit of self-affirmation and a good talking-to. (And teh Love of a Good Woman, of course. Bleh.)

All the ends tied up neatly with bows. No lasting suffering, or scars.

So I have learned something about tension, characterisation, pacing, and emotionally satisfying resolutions. So I can't consider that a waste of time.


*When I say forced escalation - some writers make the tension within the story seem natural. Here, at least intially, that escalation is very obviously an authorial device.