Words on a Page

Discussion of Woody Guthrie's 'New Year Rulin's for 1942' have been all over the internet this week with some inferring that Woody's inclusion of hygiene matters (3, 4, 5, 9, 11) as an indication that the Huntington's disease which killed him twenty-five years later, at the age of 55, was already at work.  Maybe that's so.  Maybe not.  Maybe he was just so busy spilling words onto paper (the Woody Guthrie Archives contain the lyrics to nearly 3000 songs) that some of life's more mundane tasks occasionally got forgotten.   You can tell he's concerned about the way he's treated his family.  You can tell that, at the age of 30, he's thinking about his health - eat good , drink very scant if any - and about his spirit - don't get lonesome , stay glad , dream good , love , love , love - and about the need to take action and not waste time.  I see Woody's rulin's as a  to do  list, a way of taking small but meaningful steps to s...

This is the third annual review I’ve written since setting off on this journey.  One more should see me through to the end, at least as far as submitting my dissertation and preparing for the final viva.  The viva, the ultimate test of whether or not my work stands up to scrutiny, will come in just over a year’s time.  Not too much over, I hope, for I fear that my husband’s patience has its limits.  And so does mine.  After three years, we are both anxious to get our lives back.  Anxious to load up our bikes and find a nice quiet road to pedal down for a few months.  Route 66 sounds good, passing through abandoned Oklahoma towns on the way to the west coast.  So does the northern tier trans-America route as plotted out by the good people at the Adventure Cycling Association – from Bar Harbor , Maine all the way to Anacortes in Washington state.  Or better yet, their Lewis and Clark route which passes right through my hometown.  No d...

Ethel Louise Mabry The end of another year is upon us and I am reminded of my grandmother’s claims that time speeds up as one gets older. As a kid, in Idaho, I was dumbfounded by this idea. Science was never my strongpoint, but I knew, somehow, as the interminable years of my childhood wore on that such a statement must go against some law of physics. ‘Don’t go wishing your life away,’ she’d tell me as I itched to break free of high school classrooms, anxious to join the world outside my small town. Even in grade school, at the age of nine or ten, I kept track of the school days, crossing them off one by one, willing each of them into the past so that I could be released into the freedom of summer. I was in a hurry to be somewhere else, do something new, start living my life. Anxious for time to pass. Grandma was right, of course. She always was. Time does speed up as a person gets older. It’s a fact. Physics be damned! And though I always find myself feeling sombre at the c...

It's been a full year since I started down the PhD road and at times it doesn't feel like I've gotten very far at all. To be honest, I've only been officially on the MPhil/PhD programme since mid-October. The preceding ten months were spent on University of Chichester's Probationer's Scheme, a sort of feeder road leading to the PhD highway, filling out applications, applying for funding, applying for more funding, building my 'writing profile', attending conferences and doing preliminary research into my subject. Lordy, I've filled out a lot of forms this year... Here's a list of what I've actually done this past year: completed a 7,000-word Literature Review of fiction, historical texts and theoretical works pertaining to my research; finalised my research proposal; applied for funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (a three-month long process which was highly stressful yet ultimately unsuccessful); attended three confe...