As I mentioned in my previous post, I'm down to my last 3 ½ months here, as unbelievable as that is. One of the many things that means is that the time I have left to finish my research and write my thesis is dwindling, and I still have a long trek ahead of me to finish up.
Still to go on the reading front is my current book, in addition to 3 other long-ish articles, 2 of which are in Bulgarian. After that, I'll be camping out at BAN's audio and video archives, transcribing and analyzing the recordings of the folk songs they contain. Following that will be a fairly intensive week of fieldwork during Holy Week, as I'm hoping to watch celebrations on Лазарувден (Lazarus Saturday, the day before Palm Sunday in the Orthodox Churches), Palm Sunday, and Easter Sunday. Somewhere, in this whirlwind of academic interest, I will also be interviewing Kremena Stancheva, one of the prominent members of the Filip Kutev Ensemble, and then meeting with a few people who are helping me out with other, mainly ethnographic, niches of my research.
Destination? May 4.
Things are going to be made slightly more difficult by my absences from the country. This Sunday, I'm heading to Berlin for five days, and then two weeks later, I'm going to Thessaloniki (which trip I am looking forward to with an extraordinary amount of anticipation) for another five days. The icing on the fluffy Travel Cake will be my trip back to the States on April 20th for my brother's wedding.
But: If I can somehow adhere to this condensed, somewhat manic schedule, I will be in great shape heading into the "writing leg" of my grant. I had in mind a budget of two months to churn out around a 50-page thesis, and this schedule will give me that. We'll see how well that goes.
I've had my doubts about how well it was going to go because for the last couple of weeks, to be honest with you, I think I've started to mentally check out. I'm going to the school of my dreams next year, and nothing else really seems to matter at this point. I've had a one helluva classic case of senioritis. But the realization that this veritable mountain of work, the very justification for my time here, remains to be done snapped me out of it. Today, at least. We'll see about tomorrow.
But despite my less-than-100%-applied approach the last week or so, I haven't been totally excreting my time away. Renewing my efforts to learn more of this idiosyncratic South Slavic language, I've begun working in my old textbook again, and on Saturday, I went to my first conversation swap.
It was an interesting affair, multifarious and disorganized, but I managed to find my way to a table where I got some practice speaking Bulgarian (and, inadvertently, a little German) with some indulgent native speakers and a few fellow learners. It was good, much-needed practice.
All the time I've spent in the library deciphering dense, Communist-era texts has done wonders for my reading and comprehension. I got to the point, after I got going today, where I read an entire page on which I could identify most of the words and figure out their meanings by context and etymology; I typically only have to look up about 10% of the words in these texts now.
This method of learning has presented two problems, however: The vocabulary I've assimilated, made up largely of terms specific to Bulgarian folk singing and ethnomusicology in general, is in a maddeningly academic, ennui-inspiring register, and therefore of little help to me in everyday conversation, and, of course, it hasn't improved my verbal skills at all. My ear, through repeated bombardment, has gotten marginally better, and if I think and speak slowly enough, I can eventually--to the patience-testing chagrin of my listener--articulate my thoughts back thereto. But what I really need, at this point, is regular conversation on a wider range of topics, so the conversation swap was a welcome test of my skills.
So the theme of the week and, I fear, for the rest of my time here, has been and will be forced productivity. We'll see how long I can keep that up. Til next time -
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