Readers who are on the ball will be familiar with the fact that my supervisor at King’s is the rather excellent Mark Turner, who currently has me skimming through a wealth of background material (actually, skimming through every book I’m ever likely to read in connection with this project) in an activity he calls ‘blitzing’. The idea is to produce a fairly extensive document (c.8,000wds) which surveys everything I’m going to write about in my thesis.
There’s only one problem – I’m not very good at blitzing. How do I know this? This morning I spent some time with one of Mark’s books, only to realise – and, by the by, this is after a fairly significant amount of time – that it wasn’t one of Mark’s books. There’s another man called Mark Turner!
But here’s the thing. The other Mark Turner writes interdisciplinary stuff on literature, metaphor and cognitive science. It’s fabulously interesting, and very applicable to my work – in a more abstract way than ‘real’ Mark Turner’s stuff, but nevertheless there’s absolutely no way I can’t use him. My bibliography is going to be so confusing.
The only thought more disturbing than “I’m just not cut out for research” at this point is “maybe this is how all research is done”. It’s certainly the best way I’ve ever found new material, and as a personal failure it’s up there with Living For Three Days With The Guy Who Wrote One Of The Books Which Gave You The Idea For Your Project In The First Place And Not Noticing, which I have also done (Hi Martin).
So, Hawarden folk, here’s another book recommendation for you – Mark Turner’s The Literary Mind (Oxford: OUP, 1996). I also recommend Mark Turner’s ‘Periodical Time in the Nineteenth Century’ (Media History, 8:2, 2002).
I have a friend here in Oxford called Mark Taylor. I spend my evenings sitting in darkened rooms, shivering.
Will Tattersdill