Yet Another Update That Claims Not To Be An Update

But, honestly, I haven’t been doing anything in the last three days to warrant an update, not even the “slice of life”-style updates that I sometimes worry are overtaking the blog at the expense of the reading material.

Nick and I have discovered The Middleman television adaptation—I really must track down the comic books, which I’ve never read, but they don’t seem to be highly available, due no doubt to the forthcoming omnibus edition. The Middleman is lovely; people seem to be suggesting that the SFX are no good, but that doesn’t bother me when the dialogue is so snappy and fast paced. It reminds me a little of the live-action Tick, but slightly—only slightly—less insane.

We’ve starting watching Chuck, too, which I’d only vaguely heard of and hadn’t even considered watching until we saw the pilot episode the other day.

True, the best friend gets on my nerves a little, and there’s perhaps a few too many spy-porn moments for my liking (although that may be influenced by the fact that all the spy-porn moments involve the CIA chick rather than Adam Baldwin. But even the reverse would get old after a while), but it’s fun and breezy. The science makes no sense, of course, but I did watch a fair few seasons of Alias, so that obviously doesn’t bother me. (Also, I don’t understand science at all. Any branch. It’s like magic, as far as I’m concerned.)

(Actually, it occurs to me that I can no longer remember how many seasons of Alias I’ve watched. Surely I should be able to remember that? I only hope whatever bumped that piece of information out of my head was important. Perhaps it was instructions on how to change a spare tire. Or a reminder of when to clean the lint filter on the dryer. Something like that.)

I’m not just watching television, though. This is also the time when I need to break some sections of my thesis off into journal articles, before second semester begins in a month. The research is all fairly fresh, so it shouldn’t be as difficult a task as it could be. But I’m tossing up between two pieces: one on the methodological difficulties of preparing a bibliographical listing for an author who wrote exclusively for penny weeklies, and one on verisimilitude and textual manipulation in adaptations of penny-weekly serials for suburban theatres.

Naturally, I intend to write both of them—it’s a question of which will require the least manipulation of extant material, so that I can get back into the swing of writing as quickly as possible, and hopefully push two articles out there before teaching becomes too intense next semester.

My inclination is towards the piece on adaptations, myself.

I also want to see if I can place the bibliography of my key author (the gem of the thesis, I think) and perhaps at least one of the indexes to fiction in Victorian penny weeklies. I’d hate to see that much work go to waste but, more than that, I’d hate to think of other researchers spending a year sitting in front of a microfilm reader when I’ve already done all that work.

I know it’s called re-searching, but let’s not go nuts, here.

I don’t know if writing journal articles is a topic out of which I can make fascinating blogging, myself. I’m also not sure that my research is something I’m comfortable putting on the Internet in any detail—that’s a hurdle I haven’t crossed yet.

So if the next month is made up largely of short pieces on television advertising, that’ll be the reason why.

On the other hand, Nick and I are currently debating the value of my live-blogging the upcoming season of Doctor Who when it starts airing on the ABC, this week.

So it could be a matter of more updates than you can handle.

We’ll see.