Since the semester started, Fridays have always been reserved for English department happy hours, but tonight I decided to stay in and do some reading, some homework, some cleaning. I’ve just managed to post some work on a subject blog for my Approaches to Teaching Writing class, and will spend some time this evening reading “Rasselas” by Samuel Johnson. (I admit, I’m becoming a huge fan of his…)

Things are afoot. I’ve started to plan my two major essays for the semester: for Dickens I’m going to look at “Bleak House” and for 18th Century I’ll be focussing on Samuel Johnson’s “A Tour of the Western Isles”. I’ve got a research consultation with a librarian lined up for Wednesday this week, so I’ll have a month or so to really work my way through those pieces. In the mean time, there’s the rest of classes and class reading to think about. So: I’m diving in.

We had a “Town Meeting” for the graduate students in the department last week. It was a chance for graduate students to come together as a group outside of class time with Professor Temple, and ask questions. The main focus last week was on PhD application processes—a large pile of paperwork that I am NOT looking forward to, I have to say. It was quite motivating, however, and made me think through my research interests. Since I’ve never been able to settle into a specific author or period that I want to focus all my energies on (Henry James aside… and in spite of my love affair with him, I don’t want to spend my whole life simply as a Jamesian who occasionally branches out into Edith Wharton) I started thinking about themes and research frames that interest me. I keep coming back to aspects of space, exile and melancholy. Perhaps over the next six months or so this will coalesce into something.

One of the girls here, Olga, has been very proactive in starting a graduate poetry group. A few of us had been talking about the idea of getting one under way, and then it’s suddenly sprouted. We met last night for the first time. I think we were initially under the impression that it was going to be a sorting-it-all-out meeting, but David Gewanter, the faculty member who’s helping us out with it, asked if anyone had poems, and we ended up jumping straight into a poem I wrote a couple of weeks ago, “October.” I think that group will be a source of sanity for me. And I’m keen to get us discussing some contemporary poets and poetics too.

I’m also getting together a reading group for next semester. They don’t really have reading groups here in the same way they do in Melbourne, but when I’ve floated the idea of getting a critical theory reading group together, a lot of people have responded very positively—including members of staff. As well as giving suggestions for a list of books we might want to consider reading in such a group, a couple have expressed an interest in being kept up to date on it—I don’t know if that means we could potentially end up having faculty in the group, but if we do, that would be wonderful. In general I’m impressed with how much staff and students come together here.

A few weeks ago in Dickens, Leona Fisher had told us about a former student of hers who has twice made a spectacle of himself in the library when reading Dickens—the first time dissolving into laughter, the second time into tears. I’m afraid I joined the spectacle-in-the-library society yesterday. Rereading the end of “Great Expectations” I just broke down when Joe left Pip a letter, after nursing him through his illness. “Ever the best of friends.” Some days I think I’m too much of a literature student for my own good.

It’s been raining most gloriously in the past few days. I have to waterproof my boots and think soon about getting a real winter coat. I have no concept of what temperature it is, because I just can’t come to terms with Fahrenheit. I just know that summer is over, and the pre-rain smells like home.