So I have the dubious distinction of winning the Graduate student essay prize this year for an essay titled "Indelible Ink of the Palimpsest: Language, Myth and Narrative in H.D.s Trilogy". Did that title mean anything to you? No? That's okay - probably doesn't mean much of anything to most people. Though the metaphor of the palimpsest is interesting. It's based on the early, early practice when people were writing on vellum (sheepskin) before they imported paper from the Chinese, of reusing vellum by scraping off the top layer with the ink and rewriting on it. [It would have been a bit like writing on your leather coat and then scraping away the top layer - by the way, that's where we get the term 'sheepskin' when referring to degrees because they were written on it. In fact, there are some schools in Britain that still use sheepskin and being a calligrapher is an actual profession over there - I know, I sat in a lecture with a bunch of them] The problem with this practice (or in the case of people who study manuscripts, the cool part about it) is that sometimes the indentations made by the first writer as they scratched across the vellum with their styluses were left behind after the ink was scraped off, so you could see shadows of the earlier writing through the later writing on top. So the metaphor refers to literary situations where you find echoes of earlier writing in later writing.

Cool, eh?

Anyway, the distinction is rather dubious, not because the cash prize is paltry (nothing like the Laurence Decor - now that was a nice cash prize, AND I didn't know about it ahead of time and was terribly/delightfully surprised when they called my name), but because it requires me to present a 10 minute precis of the paper at the graduate end of year reception this afternoon. I spent three hours last night trying to condense 30 pages of writing down to 4 - I still only made it to 5 - they'll have to sit through 12 minutes. And it wasn't because I was procrastinating - I didn't find out till noon yesterday that I'd won. Ergh!