How to Holiday. Part 2

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay
Cream meringue (cake), topped with strawberries

I haven’t had a foreign holiday in years, but I haven’t really been very good at taking a decent break at home,  either.  As long as I was sharing myself between librarianship and research, my annual leave tended just to support my research habit.  But this year, I’ve done substantially more research.

I decided that this year, I would have to do better when it came to taking a deliberate break.

I’ve continued to pursue domestic projects, stayed abreast of family preoccupations, done some more weeding (so much weeding!), and read a great book, Being Mortal, by Atul Gawande.  This was lent to me a couple of weeks ago,  and it proved well worth devoting the time to.   But by Thursday, I was itching to go on another outing.  A holiday surely has to involve going places, if only locally.

Tea House on the Loch

I fancied tea beside a river.  ALL I typed into Google was, ‘tea’, and it came up with the ideal cafe.  Does it read minds? We didn’t even know there WAS a small loch at Gartcosh, so this was a pleasant surprise.  It turns out there’s also a garden centre, which might be useful to know in future.

I’ve also visited a friend, and when I got home, I found that the book I ordered the other day had arrived.

Well, this was fatal. It’s a song book.  I looked right through it, looked up the two lady composers and their illustrator, played the songs over, then decided I’d better write down what I had discovered.  An enjoyable use of an evening, but this hardly counts as taking a deliberate holiday from research! Indeed, it merely piques my interest as to how the ladies ended up writing their book. Did the friends reach out to the publisher? Or vice versa? Or did someone put them in touch?

The Thomas Nelson ‘child singing’ motif

Meanwhile, my crowded bookshelves have an extra book, and I need to remember that I’m taking a holiday!

The Silent Movie Solo Date

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

Some months ago, I came across a book that had been given the title of a popular song.  I got the book. I understand it was categorised as ‘sensational ‘ at the time.  This does not denote ‘stunning’. It was a genre, and not the highest literature.

Later, it had become a silent movie, and I wanted to watch it. Indeed, from a research viewpoint, I needed to see it – though I’ll grant you it does seem counterintuitive that a musicologist would want to watch something without sound.

I couldn’t justify going all the way down to London to watch it,  but I managed to find it at NLS.  (Sometimes the spelling of a word, or the presence/absence of an apostrophe makes all the difference in something’s retrievability.) 

But why did this film matter to me? I wanted to see if the original song might have been played at various places in the movie.  There’s no direct link between the film  – or the book – and someone I’ve been researching, but they did sing that song.  A lot.

It takes a while to get a silent movie converted to a DVD, but finally, today, I went and watched it.  The NLS has a Glasgow outpost for digital media.  It’s located in the former transport museum at Kelvin Hall, just a bus-ride from home.

Stakeholders in this building are the NLS, Glasgow City Council, the Hunterian Museum and the University of Glasgow, and there’s also a gym facility and a cafe – so you encounter staff in orange polo shirts and shorts before you pass an enormous hall laid out for University exams. Then a museum store. And then, finally, there’s the NLS!

I tried to imagine myself in a cinema with an audience and a cinema pianist or even a small ‘orchestra’.  It was a far stretch, sitting in a neat, up-to-date viewing room with modern tech and my notebook in front of me!

The film I’d found was the 1923 re-release of an earlier non-surviving film, but it wasn’t quite the whole movie … that’s partly because the lead actor died before they’d finished shooting the movie. Seems strange that it was still released, doesn’t it? I couldn’t tell if what NLS had, was all that had been shot, or slightly less; it didn’t end neatly.

But as for the song? Yes, I found what I was looking for.  So it was worth sitting in silence in a viewing room for 2 hours on a Saturday morning!

As a film adaptation, though, it was interesting to see what was omitted from the narrative, as well as a curious change. Towards the end of the 1875 novel, the heartbroken heroine hints that she’d contemplate impropriety. It’s just a hint – it’s the hero who says the idea is unthinkable.  Whereas in the film, she says (the words appear on the screen) that owing to the situation her beloved is in, they have absolutely no hope of a shared future. 

I hadn’t anticipated a film watering down something that must have been scandalous when published nearly 50 years earlier.  I didn’t notice anything about BBFC classification at the start,  but I imagine it would have been considered perfectly suitable for general viewing.  I wonder if that has anything to do with it?

Maybe I shouldn’t overthink it.  Back to my notebook and my original thoughts!

The Ability to Touch-Type

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay
Neutral face emoji - straight line for mouth

Whilst I was working on my first PhD – the one I didn’t finish – my mother, concerned that I would never get a job, urged me to do secretarial training. Reader, I was twenty-two, doing doctoral research. You can imagine the conversation that followed.

Nonetheless, having stated categorically that I would never work as a secretary, nor would I learn shorthand, it did seem a good idea to learn to type properly. Getting my Masters dissertation typed had been expensive. (This was before the days of word-processing packages and personal computers, let alone laptops or tablets.) It was an acceptable compromise, so I attended evening classes, took RSA Typing classes and achieved Stage 3, with a certified speed of 55 wpm on a manual typewriter. (Thats ‘words per minute’). Electric typewriters were certainly in use, but not in the technical college where I attended my classes.

Touch-typing at speed has been my secret strength ever since. But today, I was just copying out a quotation about music educational theory in 1947. I wasn’t looking at what I was doing – touch-typing means looking at what you’re copying! But when I did look, I found modern technology had turned it into a laugh! Here’s what the book said:-

‘The Sol-Fa Time Notation ( | : | : | ) is discarded as being unnecessary’

– then I looked at my copy-typing:

‘The Sol-Fa Time Notation (|😐|😐) is discarded as being unnecessary’

I always did think those ta-fe-te-fe syllables were a bit of nonsense, but I never imagined Microsoft would agree with me!

Being a Fellow at IASH

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

As I’ve already mentioned, I am currently a Heritage Collections Fellow at IASH – the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities, at the University of Edinburgh. I’m halfway through my Fellowship, and (hopefully) halfway through my trawl of the Thomas Nelson publishers’ archives in search of correspondence about their music publications in the 1940s to 1950s.  The book I’m primarily interested in has presented me with a few surprises and thoughts of new directions to pursue, but I shall plough on through the archives until I am sure I’ve captured every whisper about these four little school books.

View from the Scholar Hotel

This week, we had the Institute’s 55th Anniversary celebrations, with a focus on Decoloniality. The Institute has just concluded a two-year project on this theme. There was also a session on motherhood and reproductive justice.

Now, you’d think, perhaps correctly, that my Scottish song book and music education focus has little connection with either decoloniality or motherhood. But I did put a lot of effort into broadening the scope of the music collection to include more music by women and composers of colour, whilst I was a Performing Arts librarian at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, so I was keen to find out what other scholars in more directly related disciplines have been doing.

I think it’s fair to say I felt a bit overawed! IASH is very interdisciplinary, so there were contributions from all corners of the humanities, and by scholars with far more extensive experience in their fields than I have in mine. But there were contributions from the performing arts, and from heritage collections and archives – I felt more comfortable in these areas, and a bit less out of my depth.

I stayed in Edinburgh overnight to make it less of a rush from Glasgow for the second morning.

In the final session, with contributions from past and present directors, I was impressed by the sheer reach and achievements of this amazing institution, and both proud and humbled to be a Fellow here.

O wad some Power the giftie gie us,

To see oursels as ithers see us!

In the context of Robert Burns’s poem, those lines are exhorting us not to get above ourselves, but taken in a different context, they perhaps offer reassurance that others see something in us that we can’t necessarily see ourselves.

‘They thought I was worthy to be a Fellow – in a very competitive application process?’, I mused. But yes, they did indeed select me, which is a vote of confidence in itself.  Sometimes, you need validation by others – it’s hard to be objective about oneself!

Another view from the Scholar Hotel

Image at top of post: The Edinburgh Futures Institute

What’s That You Said? Too Quiet Over Here?

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

Apologies! This has turned out to be quite a week.

I’ve twice woken far too early, notwithstanding leaving the house at 6.45 am to go to Edinburgh.  It was still far too early even for that.

I bought a car. I’ve spent hours marking essays (not a normal activity for a former academic librarian-turned-research fellow). I’ve attended live and online seminars, and I’ve  continued in my archival explorations.  It’s only Thursday night, and I’m knackered.

I’ll be back as soon as the marking is completed!

The Mervyn Heard Award

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

I’m honoured to have been awarded the Mervyn Heard Award by the Magic Lantern Society (UK) in recognition of my research into Scottish publishers Bayley and Ferguson’s Services of Song for magic lantern shows in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Their booklet, Wee Davie, containing a script for a reader, and suitably religious songs, was possibly the first thing they published – or certainly one of the first.

The Mervyn Heard Award is awarded for any written work, archival research or smaller-scale digitisation project.

I’ve talked about these service books in research lectures as honorary Ketelbey Research Fellow at the University of St Andrews in 2023, and at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland’s Exchange Talks series. The discovery of these wee books certainly inspired me to delve deeper into the social history around amateur music-making, other entertainments and educational or religious events, so I owe a debt to the original author Revd. Norman Macleod and his moralistic story, Wee Davie, for starting me off on this particular research strand.

In due course, I’ll be writing more about this topic, most particularly for the Magic Lantern Society itself.

Once Upon a Time (a Moral Tale)

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

I really should have known better. I’m making a filial pilgrimage to Norfolk. I’d call it a flying visit, if it wasn’t for the fact you can no longer fly direct from Glasgow to Norwich.

I played the organ this morning, went home to homemade soup, then headed for Norwich by train.  (It was a more appealing option than a long drive, mostly in the dark, and the prospect of icy roads later.)

So …

  • Glasgow to Edinburgh
  • Edinburgh to Peterborough (LNER buffet delivers tea and fruit cake to your seat! Kudos to LNER)
  • Peterborough to Ely
  • Ely to Norwich
  • 22.22 reach hotel.

There was only one setback. You can’t get anything to eat or drink from Peterborough to Norwich,  unless you pay a vending machine via Contactless.  I took this to mean, ‘using your phone’ – which I’ve never done.  (Only later did I wonder if card payment might also have worked…)

No buffet-car on the trains, and not really time to leave the platform in search of sustenance.

And so my Sunday dinner, at 22.22, was this:-

Better than nothing!

I had also apparently booked a hotel room with no breakfast. This has now been rectified!

I said this was a moral tale. It’s this: one should never, ever venture into East Anglia on a Sunday night without a sandwich in one’s handbag (and a drink in a flask)!

Paddington Bear and Queen Elizabeth could have told me that …

Distractions!

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

You know what it’s like, working from home. The Plus: surrounded by all your books and papers, and the kettle just ten feet away from your desk. The Negative: trying so hard not to get distracted by – well – STUFF! No-one has ever suggested I have ADHD. But maybe I have? Take this morning. All set to start on time, I set the washing machine going, and make a cup of tea.

I’ll need more teabags in the caddy, I muse. But I manage not to go and get them. I’m only working this morning, so I want to get on.

Mug in hand, I read my emails and start checking train times for a lecturing gig.

A family member drifts in. My home office is in an alcove off the dining room, on the way to the kitchen. Ah, well. (They’re going out this morning anyway!) I adopt a friendly, interested but BUSY demeanour: (let’s call it FIbB).

Continue what I’m doing. Train times sorted, email written, and on with the lengthy article. To be accurate, on with a wee literature search to back up an assertion in the lengthy article.

The washing machine beeps to say it has stopped. I ignore it, and work on.

Another family member drifts in. Only a couple of minutes … FIbB face again.

Progress is being made. Suddenly it’s time for elevenses, so I think I’ll just hang the laundry out …

The blinking drain outside the kitchen has blocked! I am remarkably good at unblocking drains – it’s a dry day, and I’d better get it done – it barely takes ten minutes – otherwise there’ll be another overflow next time we use the washing machine OR the dishwasher!

As I stand out there, sleeves rolled up, the first family member reappears, seems in the mood for chatting. FIbB face doesn’t work so well out in the garden, apparently. I suppose I don’t look busy in the same way as when I’m at my desk.

In my own defence, I did spend another three extra hours working later, so my conscience is clear, and I’m happy with what I achieved. I remind myself that working on campus isn’t without its interruptions, either – just different ones. And had I been on campus, that drain would still be blocked – but I might not yet know about it …

Rainy-Day Bus Trips: This, too, is Research

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

Not all research materials are scholarly journals (obviously), and in the Arts and Humanities, not everything is online. Nonetheless, I needed to read a substantial magazine article, and the nearest copy was in our renowned Mitchell Library.

I woke this morning to grey skies and steady, insistent rain. My first thoughts were that the seedlings planted last night had had a good start to their grown-up garden life, and then (on a different train of thought), that I was going to get rather wet going through to Edinburgh’s Morningside this afternoon.

Then I remembered that article in the Mitchell.

Researching in the Rain

Did I feel like another soaking in one day?  No matter. It’s a research morning, and this is research.  Indeed, I found useful information that’s immediately relevant,  so I’m glad I made the effort.  I did get rather wet, but I got the feature copied, rewarded myself with a takeaway latte, and headed home. It’s a  salutary reminder that not all research is high-flying or glamorous; that there’s worthwhile data in non-scholarly publications as well as historical old sources  – and after all, there’s plenty of time to dry out before the next outing!

NB. Scotland isn’t  kind to neat, efficient-looking collapsible umbrellas, but my large, pink golfing umbrella is going to have an airing later. Glamorous, me? No!

Absorbed in Indexing …

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

I returned my edited, copy-edited manuscript to the publisher today, and turned back to the small matter of my second index. One index wasn’t enough for Yours Truly – I needed to index all the historical publications that I’ve alluded to, which is not at all the same as a list of modern references – it includes lost works amongst those that are still extant. 

I did make the list a couple of months ago, but I realised now that it wasn’t in the most useful order.  Worse still, I had used tabs rather than a properly formated table, making it just a bit more fiddly to manipulate.

Hey-ho, time for a reorganisation exercise. So I got started … I do quite like bibliographical lists, but this one’s quite an undertaking.

I sat at that laptop so long today that my eyes are dry and scratchy (hello, eyedrops) whilst my neck twinges when I move my head.  Owch.  I tried a heated oat-pack, and  eventually opted for Voltarol gel. Here’s hoping!

I haven’t remotely finished the task yet – it’ll have to wait now until I’ve been to Dundee tomorrow.  The trip will probably be a welcome break.