The courses thus far...

Tuesday, the 11th of April, 2006 - 4 to Midnight.

Current Song ~ "Meathook" by Hannah Fury.

Aha! A gap emerges in my OU schedule!
...If one cares to overlook, you know, that whole backlog-of-chapters-to-get-through-this-week thing...

I'm actually coming to this (more or less) straight from reading a coursebook chapter on 'writing the self', which included a whole section on diary-writing - including the online variety, a la this entry.
I need hardly say that this brought great joy to my heart. It also made for a stunningly easy web search activity, as at the time that I got to that bit of the unit, I actually had a journal up on the screen a few feet away from where I was working.
I knew that my habit of obsessively checking to see whether anyone had updated in the last few minutes would eventually pay off!

The Linguistics is proving to be rather fabulous, in spite of having got off to a rather shaky start: the problem with doing a degree that ranges over multiple different fields, I've found, lies mainly in the great yawning chasm between different approaches.
After two years of History (or rather more than that, if you take into account my misspent youth of wearing out multiple sturdy bags with thick historical tomes borrowed from the library), Linguistics came as a bit of a shock to the system.

All of a sudden, I found myself in a whole new world of terms that hadn't really featured in my life up til then ('lexical' springs to mind), and scarier still, of having to collect my own source material.
Not only this, but using subheadings in essays suddenly became permissable, as opposed to being a good way to get run out of the university with pitchforks and flaming torches! Madness, I tell you.
(And, incidentally, not a right that I've taken advantage of. Most essays are two thousand words long. How much subdivision could something that short possibly need?)

After a couple of weeks of the odd 'argh, why did I not pick a subject that I've done before?!' wibble, however, I got the hang of this whole linguistics lark, and - usual assignment grousing aside - the course has been a thing of wonder and delight ever since.

The Music course, meanwhile, goes... well, it goes. These last couple of weeks I've been trapped in Modernist/Postmodernist Hell and consequently forced to listen to works that are essentially the aural equivalent of Chinese water torture.
I swear that I've heard similar things in sci-fi/thriller scenes where the bad guy has the hero trapped in an all-white room and is trying to drive him insane by way of a distorted audio track stuck on a perpetual loop.
The only thing that stood between me and bucking hysteria was the fact that this guff was accompanied by Pink Floyd, Eno and Kraftwerk - though really, the fact that they were the least pretentious artists on the CD says quite a lot about the others...

Thankfully, I am now free - FREE, I tell you! - from the dread clutches of Schoenberg and similar elitist gits, and am now looking forward to reading through a block that includes a substantial amount of Elgar. Now that, I can live with!

...Which is just as well, as that is precisely what I should be getting back to in the very near future.

Until next time (whenever that may be), toodle-pip!

Lily

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