I've thought it for the last few days, but today I actually said it out loud: my PhD thesis idea is dead. Sigh. Which is not to say that I definitely won't be doing a PhD, I just no longer have a case for getting my department to allow me to do an interdisciplinary PhD rather than a strictly Classics one. Meaning my next option is to do a UK PhD, which is about 4X the tuition per year, and thus many years of real employment away. Ah well, researching for that was getting in the way of the more present-day concern of finishing my Masters thesis on time. The books I checked out for the PhD topic also smelled a lot more than the Masters ones. Anyway, the contents of my brain and my thesis-idea notebook now look like the prints of London-based designer Frances O'Leary's S/S 14 collection (found via NJAL), i.e. metaphorical lines drawn to link ideas/cultural phenomenon in a coherent manner, but being more or less just jumbled up lines that have nothing to do with the original elements. Pretty and interesting, but not dissertation worthy. I actually have half a mind to just use the pages of that thing to wallpaper my study or something. Or write a fantasy novel with those ideas. Hmm...
