The book is finished!! 'Smudging the Air'. 70,000 words about the collection of work that is Leonard Cohen's lyrics. All I need now is a publisher. I really want his fans to have the opportunity to read this.

Still studying

I haven't blogged for a while because I've been pressing on with the book. I'm over 40,000 words now, so its going reasonably well. I've just decided to totally restructure the way I've written it. Instead of dealing with each theme separately (politics, relationships etc.), I'm going to go back to the traditional way and organise it by lyric. BUT I'll still pick out the themes so that I can produce some graphs of how they compare by subject matter and over time. Its a cut and paste job, so while its complex, I don't think I've wasted too much effort.

In the meantime, I'm feeling a bit stale, so I've decided to take up MOOCS (Google knows what I mean) in my spare time. My first one is: http://iai.tv/iai-academy/courses/info?course=physics-what-we-still-dont-know.  I'm part way through and its brilliant!!

The new hairstyle is great -I've wanted this style all my life. Whether I could have coped with it when I was working is another thing, as its high maintenance.

We saw ENO's Carmen at our local cinema and really enjoyed it. The best special effects movie I have ever seen is Jurassic World in IMAX 3D.

Dinosaur is coming for two days without his parents so sleep might be limited and energy depleted.

Achieved

We have finalised the design for the kitchen. Its all high gloss black and white with a sparkly white work top, which will extend up the wall over the main worktop. The local company have worked for us before and will undertake all the work including taking the ceiling down to put up LED spotlights. 13 of them in the main kitchen. And we will seal off the kitchen and utility room so that its like a different property with its own entrance so no dirt gets into our house. We've hired a portaloo for the workers. We will be able to live as though nothing is happening. Well, no kitchen, sink or washing machine for up to four weeks!!

A little bit of analysis and writing has been done. This week its been all about the power balance between Cohen's characters. The narrator holds the power in only 3 songs. In the rest of them, he's dumped or abused by a woman or rendered powerless by the system.

The degree certificate arrived - its real and I got a Merit.

Less than three weeks to the cruise. Most Christmas shopping done but no cards written yet. And I've baked and frozen a flourless chocolate cake. We had visitors and ate half the Christmas ginger cake.

Contact

I have been afraid to contact S, because I don't need criticism which results in more work right now. But I didn't know whether some of my Tables counted towards the wordcount or not, so I had to consult. As a result, I have moved them to an Appendix, so I'll need to describe them in the body of the text. He was very encouraging in his note.

The discussion chapter, which I'm finding quite hard, is well under way. But does anyone else find the flaws in the argument when you try to summarise it?

But my leg is improving and my filling has been replaced. And we had an afternoon tea party to introduce the new grandson to TSH's family. He is a very smiley boy but teething is starting, which seems painful.

I'm getting quite excited about it

When I first did the keyword analysis, I was disappointed that all the words that came up were things like 'the' and 'and'. But now I see how important that is. Its not what he's saying but how he's saying it that's so important. And as far as I know no-one has ever analysed Cohen like this before. This really feels like research now.

But I'm still not happy about my writing up. I know S will be (politely) scathing again. I always thought I wrote well - at work in the old days everybody said I did. So is this so different? Or am I 'lostitat62'?

I've ordered two sleeveless tops for the summer. One blue, one pink. Lets hope we get good weather. But I can wear them under jackets and cardigans.

Rewrite

My latest task is to carry out some computer analysis of the songs. I have already done quite a lot of work on this but I printed it out and read it and it was so disorganised I was ashamed. So I've gone right back to the spreadsheet and reworked it. I have 38 key words. These are words which Cohen uses more than the popular songs I am comparing him with. Its a statistical measure. Then I've checked whether these words are significant across the whole corpus or just in a small period. For instance, 'lover' is key but its all because there is one song 'lover, lover, lover ........', so it doesn't tell you much. And then I've drawn graphs. In colour. Then I can set criteria for how I choose which words to look at in more detail. I know it will all come down to 'the' and 'and' again.

Its getting warmer and I can't wear my winter jumpers any more. I had some good ones this year, which I really enjoyed wearing. So  is there anything in the wardrobe I've forgotten about? Or do I need new?

Nothing like a bit of pressure

I have an appointment to Skype S next week and I said I'd send him some sample dissertation by the end of tomorrow. So I looked at what I've written and I didn't think it good enough. So I've spent the afternoon restructuring, signposting the findings and making sure that the arguments are supported.

In summary, Cohen does not stick to any one linguistic style, even in one lyric. He is intimate, like conversation, organised like writing, memorable like poetry and complex like literature. I know you might think 'well I always knew that' but now I have the evidence - at least, I do for my three sample lyrics.

I would have just tinkered with it (again) if I hadn't had the appointment.

Slow roast pork for dinner, so I keep setting the timer for an hour and going to the kitchen to top up the water so that it doesn't dry out. I rubbed it with cloves and cinnamon and the smell is awesome.

Have I found something?

It occurs to me that the way Cohen uses 'the' and the nouns that follow requires a lot of work on the part of the listener/reader. He talks about 'your hair upon the pillow' but he hasn't explained who he is with or where they are, so the reader has to start to work it out. And he uses a lot of metaphor, like 'sleepy golden storm'. Now these are not hard to work out but when he says 'the monkey and the violin', the reader is left to wonder what it means (and I don't think that one is even a metaphor).And 'the gates of mercy in arbitrary space' needs a bit of thinking about. So we like his lyrics because they make us think. And work at meaning.

I have spent the afternoon drawing up a spreadsheet of Cohen's use of nouns and verbs compared with other pop songs. He uses nouns to a level that is more typical of fiction and verbs to a level more typical of conversation. Far more than the other lyrics do.

Is this blog helping?

I sent S a progress report and received general encouragement.

Next, he wants me to start to structure the actual dissertation - write an introduction and set out chapter headings for the rest. I've been working at that all afternoon and managed to produce a few words. But I'm struggling to achieve that lofty academic style. All my career in business was spent writing things that a senior manager might read and could not possibly misunderstand. And now they are expecting me to write in what I think is a fairly obscure, elitist way. I can do it but I'm not at all convinced of the validity. Do I have to talk about our language and Leonard's songs like that?

And then there's this blog. Barely literate, really. And full of syntactically incomplete sound-bites (see, I can do it!).  It gets me into bad habits.

No focus

Starting the dissertation is so exciting that I'm finding it difficult to focus. I have downloaded all the lyrics, eliminated the ones not written by Cohen and put them into directories. The next task is to look at how the repetitive parts of each lyric are dealt with and make it consistent throughout. Since this is stylistics, repetitions are important so they'll have to be in in full. Then I need to combine all the lyrics for each album into one plain text file, being careful not to omit anything. This is all essential but not brain work.

I have been given access to Wmatrix, a tool for tagging text with part of speech and semantic field (what the words mean). I am anxious to start playing with this but really this stage is about six months away. I'm like a kid in a sweet shop - I've already run 'Suzanne' through it!!

Getting started

I can think of nothing but the lyrics of Cohen songs, which is not helpful when you are trying to sleep. I've started the download, but its very tedious, as all 120 songs have to be downloaded separately and put into the directory for the correct album. Some of them he didn't write, so they are excluded, but I'm including the joint authorship ones. And there are several versions of some of them. This task is going to take some time, and I chose a topic where the data collection is relatively easy.

Yesterday was my annual family party, which went well, but in five consecutive years, in August, we have had unsettled weather, so we were indoors again. Today we have done most of the clearing up but we can eat left-over party food for a while, which is a treat!! TSH made brilliant Scotch eggs - eventually. The first batch weren't boiled properly, so had to be thrown away. So he can make pizza dough, scotch eggs and lots of other excellent things but he can't boil an egg!!

Accepted

Sent in my dissertation proposal, which has been accepted. I am going to research the portrayal of the first person narrator in the words of the songs of Leonard Cohen. I am so excited, as these songs are really intriguing poetry.

I'll  be using stylistic analysis as well as computer methods (corpus linguistics).

And we are going to see him perform in three weeks time.