La Vie En Rose

Sincerely,
me

Returned from a two week jaunt in Turkey with Jenn. Pictures… sometime. I have an excuse! My computer hates the uploader thingie. It was a great time, but a little more expensive than I thought it would be even though we were cutting all kinds of corners. Prices raised approximately 300% from the ones quoted in my 2007 LP, no joke. I’m through with traveling through Europe for now. No really. Stop laughing. Ok so I have a cheap flight to Florence booked in January, but after that, that's it. I'm thinking Mexico.

Back to the grind here in Novi Sad. I have learned a lot about my limits here this summer. When it comes to something like language immersion, that’s important, because unless I’m working at peak capacity I feel like I’m wasting my time. Or not making the most of it. Something. I got burnt out after about four weeks, and the two weeks off weren’t enough to fully recharge. If I had it to do over again, I’d do three weeks, take a week or two off, then another three weeks. And I’d bring some books and do actual work for a week during the break. Then I’d go back to London.

Back to London on the 9th! Wooo!

Also I booked my flight to the US. 13th to 29th October, flying to and from SF which means I’ll need a ride to SLC at some point, keep your ears to the ground.

I have some interesting classmates this time around. The French girl is still here, but she leaves tomorrow so I’m about to go meet her one last time. I’m in class with two other American guys, one 35 and the other 19, so we are quite a diverse group for being all Americans, but these two have the distinction of their courses paid for by the US government. I actually wonder what percentage of Azbukum’s income comes from the US government. Wish they’d pay for my course.

We have class every day at nine, which is way too early for me to be up and thinking in a foreign language, and sometimes activities in the evenings. On Monday we all watched Gde ceveta limun zut and I gave a little (very little) talk about my research. The movie was interesting but long and the portrayal of Flora Sandes was barfalicious. I wish I’d gone to some of those memorials when I was in Corfu, instead of mudbathing on the beach and crashing other hostels, being bitter about how commercial it was after Albania, but what can you do. You live, you learn.

Uhh yeah I better go do my homework. I have been suck a slacker lately with not doing it, I feel like I'm in high school. The time just literally flies by and I have no idea where it goes. This entire summer was gone in the blink of an eye. I remember the days of yore when summers were endless, day after day romping through vineyards and... yeah.

I went to Oxford yesterday to go to a seminar. What a nice town! It's so pretty! I guess I'd forgotten. It turned out to be a really helpful and interesting seminar and I met lots of nice people who are also doing FWW. All in all very refreshing. Other recent adventures include Karaoke with the nanoers and a mysterious illness that struck me on the way home from Athens and rendered me various stages of useless all week. Jenn was flat/dogsitting at a nice place in Chiswick and I went down there this weekend. We spent a good day vegging out watching movies, episodes of Gilmore Girls and Arrested Development, and old Mariah Carey music videos on Virgin Music on Demand, while I wondered whether eating brie and chevre was a good idea in my delicate condition. Probably not, but a good time all around.

“Oh, Rachel, this should interest you,” says one of my coworkers, pouring over a copy of The Bookseller. “In ‘history, politics and war’... ‘What is was like being a woman in the Balkans, First World War.’” He was joking of course, but I read the preview section anyway. No need to worry, there’s still a unique place in the historiography for my work. In fact, there was not one book on non-western fronts, unless you count "a concise and authoritative account of the entire course of the First World War, with analysis of decisive encounters and landmark engagements. It describes every major battle..."

The entire course of the war? Just the very book I would argue is impossible to produce. A definitive account of the First World War? EVEN if it’s just focusing on military events? (They never come out and say this outright, you have to infer it yourself from the description of battles, etc, but I think it’s a deplorable assumption in this day and age of social and culture [not to mention economic and political] history that a book on a war by default means military history. But anyway.) Let’s just consider the scale of the event. But then, these are publishers, not historians.

What other gems does The Bookseller line up for us? How about one on Marie Antoinette’s daughter? "It includes previously unpublished evidence that lays earlier conspiracy theories to rest." Previously unpublished evidence??? Who ever heard of such a thing? How exciting, really. Except that finding and interpreting primary source evidence is, um, yeah, the job of historians.

One book drew my attention, seemingly about the foundation of the Imperial War Museum and the end of the First World War. Since I spend a fair few of my days at the good ole IWM a book about its first days was intriguing to me. But – go to the Amazon link and lo and behold!: “Including archive material published here for the first time…” Why is this such a big deal? Not only that, it looks like I got the wrong impression from the Bookseller. Just another book on remembrance….

Now don’t get me wrong, remembrance is all well and good (and important)… However since Jay Winter it has been done over and over, and in one section of my thesis I remember (haha) arguing that this over-emphasis on remembrance might be just another way of our co-opting First World War experience for ourselves and devaluing the experiences of those who actually lived it.

National Archives perks:
Free internet
Better and cheaper food
picturesque area
quick(er) document delivery time
higher ratio of cute guys to general reader population
no pound coin required to operate lockers (seriously what is the point of that?)
no undergraduates
You can take in a camera! they even have camera stands so you can photograph documents
Less stringent rules about ids required to get a reader's ticket

British Library perks:
Newer and nicer building
Not on the other side of the world
Greater likelihood of running into friends and thus an excuse to escape to the cafe for a break
Or for that matter your supervisor so she will see for herself how hard you are working
Fewer dragons pacing the floor to make sure you are not mauling the documents

BUT BL put "Ms R" on my card and NA put "Miss Rachel." Guess which I prefer. I went to my friend's flat in Wimbledon for dinner (which, coincidentally, means that I transversed London from zone 3 to zone 1 three times today, but you know, it was okay, I had a Julia Quinn novel) and we had a long discussion about the importance of titles in this country.

In the depths of sickie, hoping to be inspired, I picked up a book that was delivered (or not, I had to run to the post office twice to get it. RUN. TWICE.) via parcel force from my loving sister, who may or may not have "opened in to make sure it was what she ordered." Yes! The long-awaited fourth installment of The Pink Carnation series. Once again I am struck by jealousy of not only Lauren Willig, who seems to be able to churn out novels and get them published while completing JDs AND PhDs in History from Harvard and holding down jobs in law firms (explain that one to me) but her heroine Eloise, who manages to succeed in areas where I can hardly hold a candle, including dressing cutely, getting grants, exposing secret agents in dusty archives, convincing good-looking heirs to allow research weekends in their family archives in charming Sussex estates, and landing dates with said good-looking heirs. But I am getting closer, people. I spent ALL DAY in the British Library. (I went to a training day for history postgraduates). I HANDLED Sylvia Pankhurst's toilet paper roll! (On which she wrote letters to be smuggled out of prison.) The manuscripts curator happened upon that little gem in their recent acquisitions. I might not be Eloise Kelly, but I'm a hell of a lot closer to it than I was 3 years ago when I first picked up the advanced reader copy of The Secret History of the Pink Carnation in the break room at Russo's.