In other news, I'm working on a long poem that's based on a phenomenally strange dream I had on Saturday night after watching about several dozen paper lanterns glide through the sky over York. At first, I really had to wonder if I was seeing something that would end up billed as a UFO sighting the next day; it was stunningly surreal. But, as you know, codeine does weird things to my creative mind whether I'm awake or asleep, and Saturday night's vision is definitely proving good subject matter.
In Teaching Land, this week is Beowulf Week, that wondrously cracky time of term where I pull out such gems as Marillion's "Grendel" and play all seventeen minutes of it in class. With a lyrics hand-out. I heard that last year a student from another seminar group, not mine, found out I did this, looked up the song, and incorporated it in a paper she wrote. GENIUS. I can corrupt them even via hearsay! The Grapevine still has its uses.
10 November is my deadline for having a draft of the final bit of my Ph.D. thesis finished. I'd say I've got maybe a few thousand more words to write, if that. And it's amazing how the last few thousand words can be the most terrifying. I mean, everything else is done and polished. Everything else. It's just bloody Chapter 3 and its unbelievably high-stakes discussion of the Piers Plowman A/C MSS...
