Hello! That worked well.
If you’ve read the one and only previous post here, you will admire the absolute absence of bloggishness during my year at Cambridge. A glorious silence. Oops.
To recap the year:
I did spend a lot of time thinking about imaginary gardens. I wrote my dissertation on responsive landscapes in Milton’s Paradise Lost. I thought a bit about Satan’s experience of Eden as contrasted with his experience of Hell, and brought in Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space as a theoretical framework.
For a while, I practically lived in the University Library Manuscripts Room, researching a commonplace book of 17th- and 18th-century sermons and religious treatises believed to be owned by a guy called Sir John Archer. This project was in part an opportunity to use the paleographic and bibliographic training I’d received as part of the course, and in part a chance to be a book detective.
And I participated in the community life of Jesus College, Cambridge, which really is the best college. (Really.) I gave a speech at Burns Night, visited Harry Potter Studios, ate more cheese from a cheese board than in all of my previous cheese years, and made some very good friends. (I did this, I should note, without an active Facebook account. Still possible. Amazing.)
And onward
I am now back in the States, enjoying a few moments of jet-lagged peace before starting the next adventure, which I will write about later. I look forward to writing a bit more here, as I continue to try and understand digital culture in conversation with an early modernist perspective.
I’ve updated the About page with some thoughts about what I’ll be writing about, off and on, a few times a week. If you’ve got thoughts, questions, or suggestions, comments section or Twitter (@gclinnell) are wide open.
Until next time.