ThesisWroteMe

Thesising is about getting one's hands dirty, digging up research, weeding, pruning, growing, seeding, transplanting, potting up, overwatering, overwintering and a lot of prancing about in one's own sandbox. I moved between my thesis work and gardening in the open air which seemed to have a lot in common.  I dallied with the idea of applying for a real-life job as a consultant writer at a railway 'Firm' as my dear departed mother would have called it. He has a 'post' at a 'Firm' all allusions to fixed stable structures. Well, I think perhaps I will dabble in the spading my own earth bit, first. The point is, that it is an awfully difficult decision to make, while being at the same time a frightfully easy one. Well, first you have to have a friend called Neil. Some years ago when I treated Neil of the glen - who had a fresh air observation on most things - to a treatise on the postcolonial misery of Lankan history that nevertheless produced quirky charact...

  Copyright: Timber Press The day after submitting, I awoke with a strange light-headed sense of non-burden from the two-year long 'Goddamit you need to get on with it and shame on you for not finishing your thesis thing' sensation. I had no thesis-guilt. Sat myself down on sofa with Radio 2 blasting out 'Gotta get right back to where we started from'; none of that YouTube jazz cafe or Liszt for studying sounds no more.  Unwrapping a year's worth of New Yorkers, I meticulously sorted em chronologically to catch up on long-reads which easily require three more years to complete.  Undaunted in the manner of a post-doc brain, strung to think any immersion in researched work 'encompassible' as I term it, I delved in.  It only served to stimulate the grey matter further. I was by now running on parallel tracks bubbling away to no avail.  When I picked up the three books I had bought on Abe on trees and gardens in my neighbourhood by a brilliant author I found my...

 Devastating delay from 200 days to go but what was I thinking? First, I had no actual need to submit the thesis until 2022 September which was a year and 200 days more like.  I guess I was aiming for five years rather than the full six of the part-time student.  At 12 noon on the 29 Feb I submitted my thesis. Three years' after I wrote that first post. Font is important whatever they say. I cannot do Helvetica or Arial on that thesis, and chose Yu Gothic UL which I had used all along for, well, five years. It turned out to be a Japanese font and developed to make lengthy texts readable. Amazing how Jap fonts like this one, Zen Old Mincho leap out at me as being far more legible than others. Yu Gothic spaces the words out more than Calibri for instance, and come in five weights so I tried out Yu Gothic Medium for the title and Header 1. If you have an issue with the TOC chapter on same page as the subtitle in a different line, just place it on the same line with no para ...

Well, I only discovered my theoretical framework of analysis into Chapter Three.  It was tucked away in an insignificant reference by Akhil Gupta in his key article Blurred Boundaries on everyday practices of postcolonial bureaucrats : Research on the state, with its focus on large-scale structures, epochal events, major policies, and "important" people (Evans et al. 1985; Skocpol 1979), has failed to illuminate the quotidian practices (Bourdieu 1977) of bureaucrats that tell us about the effects of the state on the everyday lives of rural people. (Gupta,1995 p. 376) I am convinced that there is a God of Sixth Sense or a metaphysical power that guides me unconsciously to things that I am hardly aware of, that I need, and that are invisible.  What possessed me to look up Pierre Bourdieu remains a mystery. I ordered an Outline of a Theory of Practice and never looked back since. It wasn't easy to get a grip on the stuff as Pierre tends to be write long convoluted sentences ...