MATERIALIST DOT NET

reckon I owe somebody an update.

so at long last I submitted the dissertation, earlier this month. a touch anticlimactic, it had been languishing untouched by human hands for months waiting for feedback, but I still had to sit down on the stairs outside for a bit in order to take it in.

less than a week afterwards I went to norway to have my lower left wisdom tooth taken out, I shan't rain fiery scorn over the NHS dental service in a public space, though I might have. the jutting overgrown beast was coming in perpendicular to the Y axis and had eaten out a substantive chunk of bone from my jaw - mister dentist made a point of showing me a number of large bloodied lumps of sluglike mass he extracted. after bonedrilling - yay! the smell of my own bone burning, check - and cracking it into five pieces for extraction, the procedure left a gaping cavernous space behind my back molar. two weeks on it still bleeds slightly and fills to the rim with anything I eat. but the relief! god, the relief. I still feel its absence like a 20-lbs barbed weight lifted from my jaw.

at the moment I am at my parents' place in norway, typing out a research proposal for a postdoc with the sami research programme - recently reincarnated in a second framework - and slowly trying to take in the new state of affairs. blondie comes over on the third, we head to bergen to meet some of her family on the fourth, back here on the seventh, up to kirkenes for a few days on the twelfth, head to the mid-country to have my measurements taken for a bunad on the nineteenth, then do a festival on the mainland on the twentieth and twentyfirst.

in short, what lay people might call a holiday.

sitting on the terrace of the downstairs house at my parents', watching the light fade to dusk and listening to the gray sea tumble against the shore, when unexpectedly something bright tingled in my chest and it was suddenly all I could do to stop myself from stretching my arms as far back as they could go, laughing like a demented loon.

in fact I failed miserably, and wound up crouched, giggling in breathless excitement and watching the shrubbery, the clouds, the sea, the rocks of the terrace in the blue evening light.

all of a sudden it felt like like someone had flicked on an invisible light behind the surface of the world.

I walked back in to my laptop and the research proposal I'm typing out, still a bit giddy, and before I sat down I just knew someone unexpected would have sent me an email. lo and behold, there it was.

epic dream last night, one of those that occupy a whole morning while you repeatedly wake up, go back to sleep and continue the same story.

the short of it was that from being myself, I passed over time through five completely different forms of life. for whatever reason, in the beginning I was blowtorching some small rubbery crustaceans - somewhere between trilobites and slugs - which I think became my first new form. I can only remember clearly the third form - in which my then-humanoid body was transformed into an exact replica of itself, made of a sentient gel contained by an elastic olive skin. the gel could squeeze out through an opening on top of the head, much like one of those pooping cow toys you find everywhere.

by the end, one ewige widerkehr des gleichen later, I was back at the beginning: blowtorching rubbery slugobites.

the dream made me think of the tale of the stonecutter, and about cycles, passage, repetitions, lessons learned and not learned. it seems appropriate right now, with its imagery of shedding not just skins but existences.

finally submitted the thesis on thursday, then went to norway and had my malignant, festering, jawbone-eating lower left wisdom tooth taken out on wednesday.

I'll write out the gory details some other time. right now I'm back in cambridge, hopefully for my last night in wolfson, and packing up the rest of my stuff to take it up to edinburgh tomorrow. finally, I am moving out.

dreamt last night that I was having a conversation with an old german, in my grandmother's flat in oslo.

I'd never met him in real life, but I knew he was a professor. tall and thin, white hair, olive complexion. somewhat aquiline features. I know the description makes him sound a bit like my late alienated grandfather, but it wasn't him. at least I don't think so.

he was reading my thesis.

him: this is good stuff. solid, well written.

me: yeah. I think I've written every sentence in that book 15 or 20 times over.

him: it shows. good work.

and that was it. like a mini-supervision. I'm not sure who he was, and his approval didn't matter enormously, but there was a certain satisfaction in the exchange. at the very least I can state that my subconscious is on the ball, not hassling me with pointless anxieties.

so, 'tis done.

I've printed out and bound two final copies of the dissertation, soft cover 188pp., plus - as per the submission guidelines - two copies of the title sheet, three copies of the summary, one copy of the deposit declaration and one copy of the signed declaration. all sitting in a plastic bag on my desk.

promised someone I'd let them participate in the submission non-ritual - drop by the BGS, hand in the materials, get a receipt: not even a handshake - so the bag'll be sitting there til thursday.

I ask myself how I feel about this and the truth is I feel very little. I gave my supervisor the complete draft in january, since then I've just been treading water waiting for feedback. I'm completely alienated from the contents - except for a few minor typos, I might as well have submitted a month ago, I haven't done any conceptual work on it since march. more than anything, it feels like a solid thing that someone else did - leaving me to go through the bureaucratic motions of submission.

so no real relief, no real pleasure. just something to be done before I can leave this place. and I've been complaining about this place for so long that I've exhausted all the words for that particular subject; speech becomes rote repetition.

still. be interesting to see if I get a sudden onflux of joy at a later point - when I actually submit, or more likely when I've done the viva.

in the shower this morning I was thinking about the seedphrase 'I iz in ur base / killin all ur d00dz', wondering whether the powerful regular metric rhythm of the expression might have something to do with its viral spread.

'DUM da DUM da DUM DUM da DUM da DUM'.

catchy, sticks in yer mind. considered as a line of pentametre, it would look like this:

'DUM da / DUM da / DUM DUM / da DUM / da DUM'.

half trochaic, half iambic, with a spondee in the third foot [yes, I have looked this up]. doesn't sound right though, does it?

'I iz / IN ur / BASE KILL / in ALL / ur D00DZ'

nope. seems more intuitive to refer it as

'I iz / IN ur BASE / KILL in / ALL ur D00DZ'

that is to say,

'DUM da / DUM da DUM / DUM da / DUM da DUM'.

four-foot line, trochee / amphimacer / trochee / amphimacer. trochaic tetrameter?

not that I know jack shit about scansion, and not that I'm sure where it'd lead if I did. though if there was some kind of citation index for lolcat expressions, it'd be interesting to filter for correlations between popularity and metric form.

[in other news, yes I am still back in wolfson and yes I am experiencing collegiate living as a form of physical pain. yes I have too much time and no ability to make constructive use of it. my jaw hurts and I desperately, desperately want to be somewhere else. anywhere. oh the humanity.]

this stands out as the single most memorable online comic strip dialogue I ever read. I want to quote it in my thesis.

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and someone is going go kick my ass for this.