i called poach this afternoon to see if she's in the last throes of her tuesday-due thesis, and to be generally encouraging in the hope that she'll be that to me in 3 weeks' time, heehee. she sounds quite chirpy, and we talked about SARS paranoia and the underrated nature of potential. incidentally, her thesis is called *drumroll*


"Mad Fathers and Sick Mothers, or vice versa: An Examination of the Crises of Self-Narration and Historical Development in the Medical Institutions of the Postwar British Novel"


i think you see why the woman is super-organised and i am not. mine will be called, approximately, a study in the poetics of the riddle, or something equally fluffy and useless that tells you absolutely nothing about the topic, as i don't know what it is myself. (i am also told i have to submit an abstract, which doesn't make me happy. abstracts are for people who know what they are doing, and such people usually have it down pat in the introductions anyway.) and what's more, the woman has the perfect epigraph too, a poem by grace paley, published only recently in the new yorker.

oh by the way, i thought i'd spread the good news. at least, if you're the kind of person who, like me, loathes having to compose bibliographies, here's a biblio generator i found. it won't mean you have to type less, but it does mean that it generates all the fields you need for any kind of citation and formats it for you, automatically alphabetising entries and detecting similar authors. you can save it as a .txt file and upload it to modify it whenever you please. it's not a free service, i'm afraid, but at $4 for 3 months you're more than getting your money's worth, to save flipping through the bloody mla handbook, and probably leaving out something or other and having to hunt for it again.my life has been a joy since this came my way.

and now, boys and girls, having done my good deed for the day (for a higher existence next go-round?) i go to my virgil essay.