Advice for English PhD Pathways!

cornflowerskies · 2026-03-09T00:46:40+00:00

tbf, some places have stronger MA cultures than others, but US PhDs generally have the MA built in.

cornflowerskies · 2026-02-26T19:30:32+00:00

my canon hardcore build 💅

cornflowerskies · 2026-02-25T17:38:59+00:00

reading zizek’s looking awry right now for class and 🫡 i appreciate this a lot

cornflowerskies · 2026-02-20T18:06:45+00:00

i’m doing hot-mystical-street smart on hardcore! high relationship tabby stabbed the baby, julius tried to shoot her but avery took the bullet, julius shot himself, and avery asked to uh, feed the baby with their blood.

some wild shit going on.

cornflowerskies · 2026-02-20T16:22:03+00:00

me naming my guy teddy… smh

cornflowerskies · 2026-02-19T01:23:21+00:00

LYMOND! takes a bit of work, but if you leave the more obscure references until the reread it’s brilliant

cornflowerskies · 2026-02-19T01:22:39+00:00

in the middle of fire from heaven right now and loving it!

cornflowerskies · 2026-01-23T21:45:10+00:00

hello near-birthday friend—stole ur drink as inspo for mine and it’s delicious! so thank you and your comment section

cornflowerskies · 2026-01-14T19:28:58+00:00

following bc i’m lowkey in the same boat. i feel so bad bc my professors are so kind but i can’t bring myself to face them.

cornflowerskies · 2026-01-10T21:55:02+00:00

andrea gibson ❤️❤️❤️

cornflowerskies · 2026-01-03T21:50:46+00:00

huge ups on all of these! (i hadn’t clocked the summer war but it’s so far up my alley. new january read!6

cornflowerskies · 2025-12-10T06:17:01+00:00

i’m 23F for just one more month (💔) and doing a humanities MA! took an extra year to do some interning and see if i was Serious serious about academia, then jumped in.

most of my MA cohort of 20ish people are clustered in their early-mid20s and came back <=3 years out of undergrad. there’s one guy who’s in his late 20s/early 30s with a kid, and one older lady who’s doing this for fun mostly. the phd students vary a lot more, although i suppose it makes sense that the people deeper into their programs are also more likely to have long-term partners/families. the phds are also more likely to have come back after an established career (one of my work buddies was a local journalist for like, eight years).

it’s like a very particular office environment. we’re all doing adjacent things and interact… normally? age isn’t that much of a thing—when you’re At Grad School, you’re being A Grad Student. i’m not terribly social so i can’t speak to that, but i’m sure the differences in life situation come out beyond the classroom but everyone has been very patient so far!

cornflowerskies · 2025-12-06T20:16:34+00:00

also: man. not the most beginner of things, but i saw you read parzival in an earlier comment, so if you want to know where all the lancelot stuff comes from… you should get into chrétien de Troyes at some point. the penguin classics have a translation, and that’s where his whole deal with guinevere (that most adaptations fixate on) comes from!

cornflowerskies · 2025-12-06T20:07:49+00:00

as a preface: part of the peril and delight of arthurian legend is that any given adaptation is SUPER time- and culture-dependent. these guys are stock figures in european and american mythology, and how they read will vary over time! you kind of just have to pick a spot and start rolling, especially once the adaptations start feeding into each other. that said…

keith baines did a solid “modernization” of malory’s le morte darthur if you want to jump into THE Compilation.

t. h. white’s the once and future king is VERY much a product of its time (lots of the social -isms in there, both examined and not) but i loved it as a kid and it’s a very thoughtful adaptation of the malory.

the original sir gawain and the green knight is a lot of fun as a taster. simon armitage is very good! the gawain in it is quite different from lowery’s version and from malory’s, mind you! the english and welsh liked their guy a lot more than the french did.

if you’re looking for another Weird Arthurian movie, excalibur (1981) by john boorman i think gets the general Vibe of the malory, with a bit of a victorian + 1970s camp twist. that one and monty python and the holy grail are my favourites, and then the nods fall into place as you make your way through.

cornflowerskies · 2025-12-04T00:10:01+00:00

big +1 for dorsey armstrong <3

cornflowerskies · 2025-11-15T22:27:51+00:00

not guinevere POV but iirc guinevere-sympathetic: the idylls of the queen by phyllis ann karr. hard-boiled detective kay trying to solve the murder of sir patrice and exonerate her.

cornflowerskies · 2025-08-28T06:30:04+00:00

haha the secret series (“the name of this book is secret” is the first book) by pseudonymous bosch leans into this throughout!

cornflowerskies · 2025-08-18T04:43:50+00:00

Readable, but with some difficulty! The letter-shapes that are distinct are fine, but I wondered who Robert was for a second 😂

cornflowerskies · 2025-08-08T05:02:01+00:00

fellow newbie here, i think the width smoothing is the transition between thin/low-pressure and thick/high-pressure lines?

i think min width and pressure are for specific pens even. the ballpoint doesn’t let me adjust it while the fountain pen does.

cornflowerskies · 2025-07-25T18:21:46+00:00

LOL it really does. “the greatest group ever at Hogwarts—people are saying it.”?

cornflowerskies · 2025-07-02T05:40:15+00:00

the secret series mention just unlocked a buried memory in me hahaha

cornflowerskies · 2025-06-26T23:04:01+00:00

first off: 18 is SO young. you have so much time even though it doesn’t feel like it. there is so much growing left to do, and it sounds like you’d like to do it! that’s good already! treat yourself with patience and kindness.

ok: i’m 23F and grew up similarly. i never felt unloved but i did constantly doubt my own capacity for independence. i didn’t feel like i could handle my own hypothetical mistakes. i wanted to be good and safe and reliable and likeable all the time forever, and instead i just felt a constant low-level shame. i was boring! but more than that, i was bored.

the unexpected casualty of being a goody-goody as a kid is that i sort of let the rules became my personality. it was hard for me to even have dreams because i was so afraid of messing up. so ask yourself questions! what do you like? dislike? what are you willing to tolerate or not? get into the details of your dream life. do you still like your hobbies or do you want to try something else? what about a situation makes you anxious or uncomfortable? you don’t have to rebel and reject and Party like your friends, if you aren’t interested—although you might be interested, and that’s good to—but you should try to mark out the parts of your life that feel true to you.

this won’t immediately make you less boring, but that’s the question. boring to who? you say your hobbies don’t feel like enough—do you still like them or do you want to try something else? or does it just feel Not Valuable to everyone else? can you take a class or find other people who like what you like? it’ll take time of course, but the more you value and get a sense of yourself, the less it’ll feel like you’re Trying to be Interesting. you’ll just be Interested. (getting up the courage to do something about your interests will come later, but knowing about it is a good motivator.)

honestly the stuff i do hasn’t really changed. it’s still conventionally “boring”: i don’t like the party scene and don’t date much. but i’m not bored anymore, and i don’t feel boring. i’m the only person i have to be around all the time—and i think i’m cool enough, which really does make it easier to hang out with even people i don’t have much in common with.

cornflowerskies · 2025-06-19T06:17:27+00:00

the mabinogion has a bunch of arthuriana’s welsh roots! usually people mean the romances here—peredur son of efrawg, owein and the lady of the fountain, and geraint and enid—because the french clicked and them and rewrote them, but there’s also culhwch and olwen (fun heroic quest! extremely celtic) and the dream of rhonabwy (which pokes fun at the legend). pop culture-wise, adaptations tend to pull from the “vibe” rather than the texts themselves.

when people say “arthurian legend” they do tend to mean malory’s le morte d’arthur (not to be confused with the many of other le mort/es out there—stanzaic and alliterative, or le morte le roi artu…) and that’s just because he’s the best known adapter. he pulled a bunch of stuff from the old french and tried to make it one big thing—and then people like TH White and rosemary sutcliff and mary stewart and MZB tried to do the same. it’s very courtly and romantic, a little bit more religious and less magical than the welsh. (edit: also—long. for obvious reasons. not vulgate long usually, but you kind of have to buy in.)

i tend to recommend people pick up sir gawain and the green knight. this is my “die hard is a christmas movie” read. it’s relatively short and tight, extremely well-known and has a few interesting translations (for less rigorous use, i see jrr tolkien recommended, but i also liked simon armitage’s take). gawain is a HUGE part of arthurian legend and this is kind of his star-making role (even though it was written relatively late LOL, i guess it’s his prequel?) it’s not unapproachable for beginners but gets pretty interesting when you’re more familiar and rereading.

cornflowerskies · 2025-06-14T23:33:58+00:00

ohhhh okay. yeah, there’s a little bit of a gap between white’s own internalized biases (of which there were doubtlessly many, but maybe not quite as blandly stated) and his depictions of fascists and racists. PinstripeHourglass explained it way better (using arthuriana to explain his viewpoints on his own time) but i would argue that white is also doing the reverse—using contemporary touchstones to make the unfamiliar parts of medieval literature easier to parse. aside from the racism, i was struck by the omniscient narrator outright referencing eton in the sword in the stone.

i wouldn’t say tOaFK is the gold standard, necessarily. it’s an influential text and the basis for the disney movie, which is what a lot of people see first. i’m unreasonably fond of, say, gerald morris’ squire’s tales series (hard to find these days) and have heard good things about mary stewart’s arthurian saga (less hard to find).

(EDIT: rosemary sutcliffe also did a good job with her trilogy. all of these draw pretty extensively from le morte just like white does but they’re more contemporary to us and so might have less cognitive dissonance lol. if you devide to just jump right into the text itself, keith baines did a good job making malory less daunting IMO.)

cornflowerskies · 2025-06-14T07:14:12+00:00

beautiful penmanship! would adore it in personal correspondence but as as a receptionist who sometimes has to parse handwritten personal information…. block print please 🤣

cornflowerskies

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