a regular Brute of a Bee

Not so enamoured of academia this morning, me. I'm still wrestling with Angela Carter, which was a bitch-chapter first off and has not drifted, in the interim, any closer towards sweetness and light. Am somewhat depressed at the discovery, after a couple of hours' database browsing, that the chapter's sketchy and reluctant feminist theoretical underpinning is, in fact, based even in its sketchiness on a whole school of theoretical thought which has subsequently been superseded by a new, more exciting one whose texts I was unable to access when I was writing owing to living in a benighted intellectual backwater. Also in the interim, fortunately, the whole academic world has miraculously become accessible online in the full-text academic databases, which means my desk is submerged beneath 8 different PDF printouts, my brain is muddled by performance theory and feminist metafiction, and there are straws in my hair.

Matters have not been assisted by the Army of Reconstruction, who this morning have (a) dumped a load of sand and another of gravel on the stretch of outside lawn which actually survived the garage construction, (b) removed tiles from my bathroom with sufficient gusto to knock the plaster off my study wall, and (c) put a chisel through the wiring for my study, plunging my computer into darkness in the middle of a particularly good phrase. The door to my study is now festooned with extension cords in addition to telephone cords and the line for the Iburst. I hourly expect to be tripped and strangled as I pace the floor in intellectual angst.

The worst, however, was the news this morning that one of the Masters students whose mini-dissertation I supervised has been failed by the Masters degree board. While she was always a problematical student and I worked very hard on her thesis, I feel horribly culpable and more than a little inclined to doubt my actual fitness for this whole academic endeavour.

Edited to add: I almost forgot. Today is extemporanea's second birthday. My little blog... *sniff* ... all toddling around and breaking things. I note with an ironically raised eyebrow that my first post was, appropriately enough, also marked by expressions of fear and loathing of feminist criticism in the context of chapter-wrestling. Plus ça change... Oh, also happy second birthday starmadeshadow, since we accidentally erupted onto an unsuspecting world in practically the same fateful hour.