Submission!

You may have noticed that my posts have been less frequent in recent months. The reason is that my various projects and side-projects have all been escalating in intensity as of late.

The biggest such project has been completing the PhD thesis, and I'm happy to report that I submitted my final draft for examination on May 21st, after which I headed immediately off to a cottage in the Scottish countryside to record with the band. Then it was back to Glasgow for additional recording in a proper studio before hopping on an airplane to Barcelona for a vacation from both band and thesis! I hope to post some photos of these latter two diversions in the near future.

Eggheads invade the blogosphere

There has been quite a rustle of web-based activity among my fellow doctoral colleagues at the University of Stirling. No less than three of my friends, all of whom have pursed a similar popular music studies type PhD to mine, have recently set up weblogs of their own. All of them are worth reading. You can check them out here:

Adam Behr now serves up his inimitable blend of razor-sharp wit and social commentary on a blog called Cartoon Life.

Szu-Wei Chen divulges his recipe for blackberry jam and other secrets on something he calls Principal Wei's Weblog.

Pedro Nunes, Portugese indie-rocker extraordinaire and the only one of the four of us (at present) to have actually earned a doctoral degree, points the way forward on his delightful blog called Artychoking.

The Story of Selling Out

I've recently written a little two-page summary of my PhD project. If any of you are curious about my current research interests, you can download it here.

Conferenced out

It's been a heckuva week. I just attended my first ever academic conference. The topic was poetry and sexuality, and I gave a paper about the use of music in erotic poetry and popular song lyrics, if you can believe it. You can read my abstract here.

Highlights included spending time with a lot of interesting people, having guests from Canada, catching readings and speeches by the likes of Sharon Olds and Germaine Greer, chowing down on a huge haggis dinner and dancing myself silly at a ceilidh in Stirling Castle (pictured above).