Hola

Here's the backstory to this blog: last June, I graduated from university, having completed a BA in Comparative literature with a 2:1 (I was only 4 marks off a first! was SO annoyed about that!), got home, had about 4 carloads worth of crap that all got shoved in the garage and I haven't looked at it since.

I've decided to become an artist, and in order to convert my shed into a studio, I'm having to clear all the stuff out of the garage in order to transfer all the crap from the shed into there... I think you get the picture. So all day today, I've been trolling up and down a ladder putting stuff in the attic, and right at the bottom of an absolute MOUNTAIN of old pots and pans and folders and bedding, I found a box full of my notes from various books over the past three years, along with some old notes from A-level History (which I failed spectacularly at, but there's nothing wrong with the notes).

At uni, and being lazy - as in too lazy to walk for 45 mins up a steep hill to get books out of the library- I relied heavily on the internet as a resource for information; and reading other people's notes and essays and things really played a large part in helping me form my own ideas about.. whatever it was I had to write on, and to be honest, I think I learned more from them than I did from sitting in a two hour lecture playing hangman with the person sitting next to me, while a dusty old professor droned on about Bluebeard and the significance of the colour red.

So. These things are just taking up room in my garage, basically, and they're of no use to me anymore, but rather than chuck them away, I thought I'd put them up here so that others can get the benefit of the information I've collected over the years (and so I can still keep them for reference without them taking up any more room!). I'm the most disorganised person I know so I've never really been very good at keeping all my notes in one place, so some things will be fragmented, but I hope the bits and pieces that aren't will prove to be useful.

I may or may not include some of the essays I've done - it depends how much time I have on my hands and how bored I get waiting for my parents to sort THEIR crap out in the garage so I can get a wiggle on with converting the studio, but if I do post them up, feel free to quote me in your work, but please do reference me. And as a note to new students, universities have a special thing where they scan your essays into a database which does a check to make sure you haven't plagiarised anything, so don't bother doing a cut n paste job, because you WILL be found out and kicked out of uni (and you'll probably get more of an arse-kicking if you're a student in England, because when you hand in an essay, they make you sign an 'I haven't plagiarised' form, so you really would be fucked.

It's not worth it, just do the work yourself - you'll learn far more and feel like you've actually achieved something at the end of it too.

i'm just working through the mountain of stuff so just putting it up 'as is' - many bits are in bits and pieces so if i find, say, another sheet of paper on 'the golden ass', i'll just add it to the entry that already deals with the golden ass.

Like I said, this isn't like spark notes - it's not uniformly written down and presented, it's literally just the notes i've scribbled down in lectures and seminars, and things i've done while reading books in preparation for essays; so you're going to have to do the legwork trawling through them yourself- I haven't the time nor the patience to make it look pretty. The information is there if you want it.