Shortly before my boss left, she gave me a note cube that has a photo of Oscar Wilde on the side. It's the famous photo of him taken in 1882 - he's got long hair, he's wearing a fur-lined jacket, and he's leaning his face on his hand. I've only used a few sheets from the cube because I find it comforting to have him at my desk at work. He has a "lighten up, Cate" look on his face.
I've mentioned before that I encounter him frequently. Just today, I found an Oscar Wilde quote widget for Facebook. I've also encountered Dorian Gray twice in the past week - BBC7 had a two-part dramatic presentation last week, and on Sunday, I stopped in at Daedalus and found an audio version read by Stephen Fry (who played Oscar Wilde, incidentally, and whose last podgram, Wallpaper, was about him).
I think Oscar's poking at me with his walking stick because I'm revising chapters for my grad class, and I'm starting to panic about my thesis. I've got four months to do a complete revision and polish on my novel. That seems like a lot of time, and it would be, if I were working on the revisions full time. But I'm not. I've got a full-time job, a possible conference in October, and the usual Life Stuff. So not really as much time as it might appear to be.
He would probably tell me to lighten up and not worry about it so much. I've got a scrappy draft done already, so it's not like I'm starting this thesis entirely from scratch. And after all, he wrote the original 50,000 word version of De Profundis (by hand, no computer or typewriter) while in prison doing hard labor. I have it easy compared to that.
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