Blog: First Supervision

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I've got a right stinky old cold at the moment, all sneezing and sniffling and generally BLEH. The last time I had one of these was EXACTLY a year ago, so maybe I am somehow ALLERGIC to new jobs?

I thus spent most of yesterday sat at work annoying everyone around me with my Nasal Palaver, until approx 4:20pm when I set off for UAL where I was due to have my first Phd Supervision Meeting. Before I did THAT though I went to the LIBRARY to get some Inter Library Loans what I had requested. "Inter Library Loans!" Even typing that phrase takes me zooming back to Leicester Poly Scraptoft Library, where Librarians were FOREVER going on about Inter Library Loans, but nobody ever seemed to want them. That library, like all of Scraptoft campus (and pretty much all the pubs I used to drink in in Leicester) isn't there anymore, but the YEARNING for people to do Inter Library Loans clearly still is, as the UAL lot kept talking about them at Induction, so I thought I'd FINALLY give it a go.

It worked! My two books were on a SHELF with a very politely caligraphied LABEL saying there were for me. That was quite old fashioned, and thus contrasted sharply with the actual act of BORROWING - I swiped my card in a machine, put the book ON the machine... and that was that, LOANED! Amazing!

That done I went round the corner to meet Roger and Ian, my supervisors. I had learnt a NEW WORD on the way in to work that morning - HYPERDIEGESIS - so was keen to use it, and ended up saying it A LOT. We had a LENGTHY chat about what on earth it is I'm going to do, the three of us coming to the eventual conclusion that, actually, we weren't quite sure. It could be a fairly straightforward cultural analysis of Marvel Comics in the Bronze Age, it could be nothing to do with Marvel at all but an EXPLORATION of the nature of performance and collaboration, it could be an EXPERIMENT with SERIALISATION. It was all a bit head-spinning really, so we agreed that my HOMEWORK would be to prepare a presentation detailing all the different options so that we could then work out which bits we wanted and find a way to fit them together. It's a PLAN!

I have since given this presentation a LOT of thought. Not ALL of that thinking has been "What Bronze Age characters can I used to represent these different themes and which one would Howard The Duck be?" but it has been quite a large proportion.

Afterwards we went to the STUDENT BAR for a STUDENT PINT, which was very nice indeed, and discovered that one of Roger's chums is a stand-up comedian who I have SEEN and briefly SPOKEN to, when Steve did his BEER talk at Bright Club in Edinburgh, back in 2013. It may not actually be a small world, but the bit containing COMEDY PERFORMANCE and People Interested In Comics definitely is!

posted 20/10/2016 by MJ Hibbett

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