The Future of an Illusion Or, What now for Hwæt The Swyve?

Anyone who regularly read Hwæt The Swyve in its heyday, ie earlier this year, will have noticed that we’ve written very little of late. The truth is, we’ve both been extraordinarily busy writing our dissertations and generally being involved in the entire self-absorbed mess that this entails. Of course, things haven’t been helped by the fact that the Postmedieval Reading Group has had its last meeting, and that Ben (the modernist traitor that he is) is busy thinking about the imminent excitement of his vastly important Ph.D project, which I hope he’ll post something about in the near future.

Anyway, I thought I’d take a little time out of my busy writing/sobbing/wailing schedule to post about the future of ‘Hwæt The Swyve?’, if indeed it has one. Well, as I mentioned, Ben is off to Queen Mary College in London to pursue an incredibly interesting project, supervised by Jacqueline Rose, on the Psychoanalyst Masud Khan, and so his involvement with the blog, I guess, will unfortunately be minimal. I’ve asked him to consider setting up a sister blog, maybe just called ‘What the F*ck?’, but whether he does is entirely up to him. My plans for the next twelve months, meanwhile, are somewhat less exciting. Having failed to gain funding to start my Ph.D at King’s College London this year, I’m taking a ‘year off’ to work, earn some money, and re-enter the application cycle for both English and American schools for Ph.D places. Of course, I’m going to try to stay ‘on the scene’, so to speak – I’ll be off to the BABEL conference in Austin, TX in November; and have submitted a paper to a panel at Kalamazoo for 2011. So I might try to continue this blog, as a record of my continuing involvement in everything medieval, as well as just keeping a general opinion-based, pseudo-academic foot in the door of online medievalisms.

One of my big plans for the next year is to save up enough money to embark upon a grand American road trip with my friend, Welsh Tom, who is similarly taking a year out of serious education before becoming, of all things, a schoolteacher. The plan is, we’ll fly over to one coast in early July, rent or buy a cheap campervan, and then spend three months pootling about the grand old US of A! This, of course, is contingent on us both getting good enough jobs to fund the endeavour, but you’ll be able to keep track of our progress and plans through my writing here, too, I guess.

Eventually, probably when Ben and I have finished our Dissertations (so sometime in late September) we’ll put our heads together and write something about the Postmedieval Reading group, its successes and failures and our trials and tribulations with it. Until then, though, I hope that I have tempted anyone who currently follows and reads to keep following and reading, as I promise some more productive and entertaining posts will follow!

Much Love, and ta-ta for now,

Mikey