Dual Purposes

Ostensibly, I am here to write a dissertation. If you are wondering how that is going, please refer to my dissertation blog, found here: http://keegansbookblog.blogspot.com.

It's not terribly interesting reading, unless you find rambling entries about comics interesting. Wait...this is not good salesmanship.

That blog is the most transcendent piece of augmented reality prose you will ever see in any media imagined, or unimagined. In the history books, the canon of literature will be reduced to this: Beowulf; some poems about elves and flowers; a few plays involving trees, shoes and lost love; T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland; novels that are just enough Daniel Defoe, but still interesting; Keegan's Book Blog.

Read my works, ye mighty, and despair. Percy Bysshe Shelley Keegan

The Hardest of Questions

Most of the time, when I meet a Welsh person and we get to talking, the inevitable question arises: What brings a person from Chicago (or America) to here? True, looking at the map Aberystwyth is located in the middle of nowhere between nothing and nothing else. It seems as if someone was trying to get as far away from Birmingham by only walking directly west. When they got to the coast, this person stopped and formed a village around him.

Truth be told, though, this is a popular vacation spot of visiting tourist. This is obvious by the sheer number of hotels, taxis and buses in the area. My walks along the sea front take me past at least a dozen brightly colored hotels that advertise vacancies.

So there are reasons why someone might want to come to this small town situated on the coast between two hills. But the original question is why and how I found my way over here.

The stock answer I give in academic circles is that the department, with Will, Peter and others, is pretty established, especially in the literary field that I want to study. This is going to be my answer when applying for jobs, too:
"Why should we give you a job? You went to a tiny school in the corner of a tiny country miles away from anywhere?"
"Because Aberystwyth is the best little University that you have never heard of."
"Oh? Well then. Welcome to Harvard."

While this is certainly true, narrative theory is certainly not popular in the states, and both Will and Peter are well read and published in the fringe types of literature I am interested in, this is really not the reason that I packed up my life and left all behind.

Truthfully, between you and me, I was running away from Illinois. I had spent my whole life in that strangely shaped state, framed by rivers and Cheeseheads. Granted, for college, I pushed the boundaries traveling as far West and South and the state provided. The rest of my Illinois Experience was spent living in Chicago, the North-easterly corner. However, until this move, I had never lived outside the land of Lincoln.

Knowing one place well has it's advantages. It was nearly impossible for me to get lost almost anywhere in the State. When driving back and forth between Monmouth and Southern Illinois, I would often take back roads to break-up the trip. I had an extensive knowledge of which roads I could take to get where, and which smaller cities sign-posted my trip home. All in all, I was tired of Illinois.

By extension, I was growing tired of America. This is not to say I had some Hemingway-esque desire to expatriate because I found my homeland deplorable. Quite the opposite: I really like being American.

However, never having left America, it begged the questions of whether or not I knew America. There are lots of cultural theorist who argue that the outsider has a better perspective of an object than one who is close to it, and there is probably some validity to that idea. Some epistemological thinkers would argue that to know something, you have to know the opposite. To know good, you have to know not good. To know happy, you have to know not happy. So, by extension, to know America, I need to know not America.

But this jarring experience is going to shed light on more than what my origin country means. It will, in the long run, shed a lot of light on who I am. I am going to spend a lot of time explaining my customs to people, looking at myself through the eyes of other people. People who might not understand why it is I stay up until four in the morning watching DVDs of the The Venture Bros. This sort of self-examination is not possible when constantly surrounded by like-minded individuals.

And that, my readers, is the long and short of it: this trip to nowhere is the best way to know where, and who, I am.

Getting Down with the Sickness

This is the first time I came down with any sort of sickness since having been here, and I am a little upset it was not something more fun or exotic, like Traveler's Diarrhea, Malaria or Cholera. That would make for a much better story than, "I came down with the sniffles that my housemates had last week."

That said, being sick, and 3000 miles from anyone that knows me, makes for a miserable sick day. Usually, when you are sick and someone who cares about you is there, you can squeeze out a free meal, can use the pity to get you out of chores, and usually get to watch what you want on TV. When you are sick and alone, making food, taking showers, and so on becomes a testament of will.

I woke up with a completely congested head. The sort of congestion that makes you suddenly aware of how much more your head weighs when filled with a viscous green fluid. Had I been at home, I would have moaned and groaned until someone got me a bagel and some juice. Here, I had to stumble down stairs, trying to balance this new head on my sickened shoulders to get my cereal and milk. Then, I stumbled back upstairs and ate the uninspiring cereal in silence, drank my milk, and tried to figure out who was going to take care of all the refuse. I was sick, after all. I shouldn't be taking care of my plates and spoons; I should be laying down, watching ESPN while my family tip-toes around the house.

Being apart from people when you are sick sucks, but so does being a grown-up. I had to work today, despite being congested. When I was seven, this sort of request would have seemed strange to me. Excuse me, I would think, but I have to blow my nose regularly. Clearly I can't do math. Luckily, there was a drop-hours call out, so I truncated my shift and was spared from having to grade essays in a stuffed-up stupor.

But my adult responsibilities don't end there. I have a paper due on Wednesday, and a significant amount of reading to get done between then and now. So, I stumbled over to my bed with the ever entertaining Longman Critical Reader: Narratology and tried to plow through some dense, quasi-mathematical descriptions of the narrative process when I should have curled up under the covers and watched cartoons.

I am still in my pajamas, at 6:30 at night, trying to get the will up to cook myself something for dinner. Or at the very least, make a sandwich. The kitchen is downstairs, though, and the dishes need to be washed. I'm sick, I whine to myself, this is just unfair.

Collegiate Differences

While entertaining blog entries are a nice side effect, the real reason I am here is to finish what I started many moons ago: getting an education. I started in August of 1985, and hopefully in May of 2013, I will be finished. Granted, I was out of school for a few years as I had forgotten to really think about what I wanted to do with my life once out of college. As much as Monmouth did bestow on me a wonderfully flexible liberal arts education, they did not really prepare me for the brutal fact that no one was looking to hand me a job. My senior year I was corned by Mark Willhardt and Rob Hale, and they told me that grad school might be the best choice for me.

Originally, I was going to be a fiction writer, but, well, my fiction is terrible. Also, I am unmotivated, so writing without a deadline was never something I could do. It seems my creative gene needs a kick in the pants, and life after college provided fewer kicks than I had hoped. I tried to get some of my college writing published and was unanimously rejected. After two years of unsuccessfully trying to get published and unsuccessful applications to MFA programs, I tried to get into some MA programs. My second round, I applied to Southern Illinois University, was accepted and did rather well.

Determined not to make the same mistakes twice, I applied to grad schools early, 10 total, and was accepted by two: here at Aberystwyth and at University of Washington. Neither one offered much in the way of compensation, but the price tag on Washington was more prohibitive than Aberystwyth, so here I came.

Not that I mind, actually. I have attended three different institutes of higher education, and is like nothing that I have ever attended. I went to the small school in rural Illinois (Monmouth College, in scenic Monmouth, Illinois), and was attended to as one would imagine at a small school: the professors all knew me by name, they all took great strides to help me academically, there were tons of engaging conversations to be had at any time. That said, Monmouth does not open doors. No one has heard of the college, and while the faculty is amazing, few have regional recognition, to say nothing of national recognition.

Southern Illinois was a different experience entirely. First, it was HUGE, the second biggest university in the state behind the venerable University of Illinois - Champaign-Urbana. The faculty was massive, and several of which were publishing regularly (many had books out, or were in the midst of publishing books). My adviser had two book length studies of Stephen Crane published while he operated trains in Iowa. He was mentioned in the acknowledgment pages of several reputable books, and taught one of the first graduate level classes on comic books. That said, I had to fight tooth and nail to get noticed at that school. The professors had their own concerns, and a department of roughly 5,000 undergraduates and nearly 100 postgraduates to worry about. I was a small fish in the ocean. I felt, often, that my needs were not high on the list of priorities (I could understand why), so in many regards I felt that I was unprepared for my PhD at that school.

Aberystwyth lands somewhere in the middle: its bigger than Monnouth and much smaller than SIU. The faculty is large, but the department is smaller. There are not many PhD students (I have met two, and they mentioned about four or five others), so my supervisor is well acquainted with my project, with my writing style, with my expectations for the program and what I want to do afterward. Will is focused on not only making me a better scholar and writer, but ensuring I know how to publish my work, get accepted to conferences, and get a job at the end. Though, without classes, teaching assignments or an office, I feel really isolated from the rest of the learning community, and have riddled my friends (read: Erika) with tons of academic problems they neither understand fully or care about.

Probably the biggest problem with this program is that it requires a certain amount of motivation that I lack. I am trying to keep on my studies, but lying around not doing anything sounds really enjoyable whenever I pick up a dense book about narrative theory or comic studies. That said, I am actually interested in my project, so I can usually rustle up some get-up-and-go if I sit around long enough. Hopefully, though, as Aberystwyth becomes routine, I can manage to get more work done. I begin drafting my introduction soon, and should have the first portion of my dissertation done by March, maybe late March.

If anyone has ever considered European academia, particularly British academia, I highly suggest it, especially late in academic career. There is a pragmatism here that is lacking in the States, but I don't feel the focus on getting a job later in life detracts from the education I am receiving.

Then again, I have been here a month, so I could be totally misconstruing the situation.

Pub Quiz

Having gone to Buffalo Wild Wings, the idea of a Pub Quiz was not surprising to me. At the aforementioned wings bar (and no, not the bar in Wings), there were TVs asking questions, and you could punch in your answers. All good, unobtrusive fun.

Pub Quizzes here are much different affairs.

I was invited to go to the quiz by Megan, one of the other PhD students, here in her fourth year. Her housemate Rebecca, also an older PhD student, was there as well. We later met up with two of Rebecca's friends from the film studies department and Alisha, an MA in the English department.

Alisha, it should be mentioned, was blind. I didn't know this right away because she wasn't there with everyone else. She was coming over later. After a little while, we all began wonder where she was. It was then, after she was late, that I found out she was blind. She was just going to wander over on her own. Of course, we were upstairs, which made it impossible to find us.
"So, let me get this straight," I asked. "You left your blind housemate to come over here. Alone. And then sat upstairs? Now that she's late, no one has thought to maybe find out where she is."
"That's a good point. I'll send her a text."
I thought that was the meanest thing you could do. Her phone would buzz, and she would try to answer it, getting nothing but silence on the other end. She knows something happened, but can't retrieve the information. Turns out her phone reads the text-messages to her, making the simple act seem less mean. Eventually, it was determined that Alisha was downstairs, and Megan went to retrieve her.

Then the quiz started. Our team name was "My Life is Average," which turned out to be prophetic as we scored the average score. The quiz was done on paper, and each team was given an answer sheet and a set of pictures. We were to identify the pictures, some of which we easy (Gerard Butler, Buddy Holly), some were difficult due to their positioning (Kylie Minogue had her hand in front of her face and looked a lot like Sheryl Crow), and others were distorted to make it impossible (Bruce Willis had his chin made to look like Jay Leno).

Once we finished, we swapped papers with the team next to us, and the bar lady read the correct answers. We did not fare well on that round, scoring a 50%. I was surprised, though, at how it was graded. Being a devious person, and out of sight of the Pub Quiz master, I wondered why we didn't just pretend that we didn't have an answer sheet, or pretend that we had swapped, fill in most of the right answers, and jog down to report our scores. As it turned out, the pride came in knowing the right answers, not just having the highest score. Which is why England never wins at basketball, and loves soccer so much.

Being American turned out to be quite an advantage. One question featured American cities, and we had to identify which states they came from. Another one had phrases ending in sports terminology, and we had to guess the right sport (blitz, quarter, down, etc. = American Football), and one question was about the youngest assassinated US President (JFK).

In the end, though, I felt like calling shenanigans on the whole thing. The team that won had nearly 20 people on it. The sheer number of people on a team is going to increase the chance that someone will know the answer. Why not fill a whole side of the bar, and have them answer the questions collectively. Also, I am fairly certain that one team had a Blackberry and a fast typist.

All in all, though, it was a good time, and my first experience in a bar outside the US. I don't know when I'll go again, but I have started brushing up on my soccer terminology and the names of famous rugby players.

Defamiliar Voices

I had some time between a meeting and when I had finished eating, so I wandered to somewhere quiet in the Arts Center, overlooking the art gallery, and hunkered down for some light reading: Postmodern Narrative Theory by Mark Currie.

I usually have trouble focusing in large groups of people, finding myself distracted by the conversations that surround me. I like to know what is going on around me, and I am fascinated by the conversations that I can hear snippets of:
"No, I'm telling you. Three days tops. You should see the doctor."
"Fugly, dude. I'm telling you, Fugly."
"I'm not racist, I just don't trust Mexicans."

Here, though, two things tend to prevent me from getting lost in conversations:
1) The British talk exceedingly quiet. I became very aware of how loud I talk within the first few social outings I have been to. Maybe my hearing is shot from all the loud concerts I have been to, the bands I have played in, and so on. But I don't think so. People err on the side of courteous and speak very quietly.
2) Because the accents make it hard for me to figure out what people are saying, the quiet din of conversation just melds into white noise. Like waves crashing on the beach, or static fuzz of a radio station barely coming in.

This particular day, as I tried to make it through a particularly dense chapter about linguistic terminology deconstructing structuralist narrative theory, I heard the first American voice I have heard for some time.

Now, through the wonder of Skype, I have kept up with my American voices, so it wasn't jarring for that reason. But I have yet to hear any American voices in context. Here, two tables away, this woman was talking to another young man.

It could have been the person, or the conversation, but her voice cut through the white noise like a Ginsu knife through a leather belt, a tin can and a tomato (STILL CUTS EVEN SOMETHING SOFT LIKE A TOMATO AFTER ALL THAT!). One might assume that an American voice might help relieve homesickness, or instantly bond me and this stranger. Quite the opposite happened. Instead, I was suddenly embarrassed to be an American.

Again, had a well-spoken American sat talking politely with some British folk, the situation would have been different, but this woman peppered her speak with "like" and other vocal mannerisms pulled straight from Clueless. She was loud: laughing loudly in the quiet Arts Center, talking loudly, interjecting into the conversation loudly ("Oh. My. GOD, I KNOOOOOOWW!"), stepping all over the other people in the discussion. Here I am, tucked into a quiet corner of Wales, miles away from anything listed on the British Travel Council's website, and the one American I run into was a caricature, and not of something awesomely American like Barry Bonds or Great America.

Granted, my salty language and appreciation of the finer points of Transformer movies probably does not make me the best representative for American culture, but I am careful not to seem pushy, loud and obnoxious. Of course, if one is pushy, loud and obnoxious, keeping aware of your cultural surroundings is probably not high on the list of said person's personal attributes. When she began talking about how much she could drink (tacitly implying that she was awesome because of this), I packed my stuff and left the Arts Center, secure in my pretentious belief that I was a better expatriate than her. Now, I thought, where can I get me some Mickey Ds?

The Lady at the Post Office

It has been some time between writing entries, and this stems mostly from my lack of free time. I still live and try to assimilate myself into my British surroundings, but I have less time now that I have started work on my dissertation and have begun working for SMARTHINKING again.

I have, though, begun to feel more at home. I feel less and less like people can see the "Americanism" on me, or smell it, like funk. My housemates even integrated me into a social event, playing this game "Lyrics" (one round, my partner and I kicked ASS), and a knock-off version of Jenga in which the pieces were wider than three times their length (making for an oddly shaped, and inherently wobbly structure). All in all, I don't feel like too much of an outsider.

Accept at the post-office. There is a post at the top of the hill attached to this small grocery store that is really convenient for me. I can walk there, do my shopping and mail some post cards as the mood suits me. The first time I went there, a really pleasant woman helped me mail out a half dozen post cards, and even attached the stickers and licked the stamps for me.

Every other time, this tiny crone of a woman has helped me. And she does not make it easy on me.

The first time, I handed her a stack of post cards, like I did the other time with the other woman. She looked at me, and the post cards, like I had handed her a stack of Mormon pamphlets I wanted her to read and give her friends. She flipped through the stack, and said, "Are all of these going to America?"
Despite clearly having written U.S.A. on the bottom of each, I played along, "Yes ma'am."
She slid them back under the glass, which seemed odd to me, and huffed off her stool. She came back and tossed a handful of "Air-class" mail stickers under the glass.
"You'll be needing these," she sighed. And then added, as if I couldn't manage, "They go on the card."

She did some quick math and told me the total (which, I have to say, is really expensive). I paid her, and slid the card back under. She put a stack of stamps on top of those, and slid them back with no further instructions.
"Thank you," I said, and went to find somewhere to affix the stamps.

Today, I went to mail a package and there she was again, smiling with stiff lips, thinking of all the ways that she could make my life difficult. I walked to the window, noting the large sign that said PARCELS, and said, "Should I put this in there?"
"What? No. You put it on the scale," she replied, bitterly. Aw, hell, I thought, here we go.

She weighed the package, and started a series of half-sentences that I was supposed to understand, and then reply to:
"You...what is...where...do you...where is...what..." She stopped, looking at me, waiting for my reply. I froze. What should I say? I thought. I don't want to offend her more than my existence already seems to.

After a moment, she collected herself. "Where is it going? Do you need a customs label?"
"Umm..."
"A customs label? One of these? Here, put it on there."
She slid a customs label under the glass to me. I looked at it totally confused, first because I wasn't sure I needed it, and secondly because I couldn't read it. I mean, I could see that there were letters on it, but none that I could combine in any semblance of a sentence. I looked up at her, and she was speaking in Welsh to the other woman, casting sideways looks at me. I returned to the label trying desperately to figure out what each box was for. Finally, deciding the package was too important to have a half-assed label, I said, "Excuse me, but do you have one in English?"

You see, the one I had was in Welsh, which looks like no other language I have ever seen, and had French subtitles, another language I am not familiar with. I can speak English, read German, and have a cursory understanding of Spanish, none of which was useful here. It seemed to me that asking for an English label was not beyond the realm of understandable requests.

But that I held a Welsh sticker in my hand begged a different question: how did I end up with this sticker? That woman had a choice: a sticker in English or a sticker in Welsh. Having dealt with me to this point, American accent and all, she decided the Welsh sticker was appropriate. I started to hate this woman.

Evidently, they didn't keep a stock of these stickers around, and she sighed, loudly and in English, before hopping off her chair and staggering around looking for one. After slamming a few drawers, she found one and threw, literally forced it under the glass at me. "Can you fill this one out?" she asked. How long would I spend in jail for murdering this old woman, I thought. I could argue that, having ended her life in the most exciting way possible for her at this stage of the game, I had done her the service of avoiding a painful end that was, I assumed, just around the corner.

As I tried to make sense of what to put on this sticker, she barked out commands. I hurriedly scribbled down some vague descriptions of the contents, and estimated a value. "Here, just give it to me," she said, clearly annoyed, and letting everyone know that I was inconveniencing her, the line, and possibly the entire country. I crammed it in the little box, and handed her my credit card.

Okay: a word to the wise, if you go somewhere distant, check out the means of credit they use. Here, the cards all have chips in them instead of magnetic strips. This makes my card extremely outdated and often the focus of curiosity. Knowing that all the card readers only read the cards with chips, I have taken to handing my card to cashiers, who more often than not look at me like I just arrived off the boat. "No honey," the woman at the grocery store says slowly, enunciating clearly, "you put it in here. HERE."

The woman at the post-office did the same until I noted that it was a "slide-card," a term some people use. "Well, then, give it to me, and I'll see if I can manage."

She ran my card, eying me over the register the whole time, probably trying to figure out who I killed to get this foreign card, and how long I have been living in her city, fouling it's purity. From this point forward, she refused to look at me, and instead just eyed the non-existent line behind me. She took the plethora of receipts, had me sign one, and flipped my card and the remaining receipts under the glass. Without so much as a "thank you" she made it abundantly clear that our business was finished.

I made a decision right there to avoid the post office at all cost, using the one twenty minutes down the hill, with much longer lines instead of this convenient but off putting post. The walk is worth it to feel like I am not a strange interloper.