Sir, I Need You to Keep Your Hands Away from Chapter, Sir, Away From the Chapter

When I earned a summer dissertation fellowship last May, I felt as if a burden had been lifted.  I would have the time to finish "This Damnable London Chapter: Radical Frustration and the Dissertating Subject" by the end of September and spend the Fall Quarter hard at work on evolutionary romance.  I had reason for optimism: 36 pages of distilled prose from 129 pages of notes and an entire summer in which to refine it further.  Only no refining happened.  Instead I decided to dig deeper into the historical record in order to verify (according to what I now realize may have been an enthusiastically embraced but utterly unreal standard) the claims that I had made. First excised from the original 36 pages: an essential but highly selective account of Haeckel's influence on London.  I hadn't read enough Haeckel—I hadn't even read all the Haeckel London presumably had—so the strength of those claims could be considered suspect.  Note the infected language: "enough," "presumably," "could be considered," "suspect."  So I read more Haeckel and more American reaction to Haeckel.  I accumulated another 76 pages of notes.  The tally?

May 1, 2005: 36 pages polished, 129 pages of notes
June 1, 2005: 32 pages polished, 205 pages of notes

So I put aside the chapter for a week and focused on reading Theory's Empire and producing an account of the early years of Critical Inquiry.  Exactly the healthy distraction I required to refocus on writing.  Reading the rigorous but a- or anti-historicist accounts of literarture liberated me to chance tangents I wouldn't have in May.  I expanded material I'd thought polished a month previous and finished June with 48 pages of polished prose and barely three more pages of notes.

June 1, 2005: 32 pages polished, 205 pages of notes
July 1, 2005: 48 pages polished, 208 pages of notes

I put it down again and focused on reading for pleasure.  Spent a day with China Mieville, another with John Clute; one week re-reading Octavia Butler and another the articles and books I'd be teaching in the Fall.  I returned to my chapter refreshed but unprepared to encounter this steaming pile of unsubstantiated leaps of a logic unrecognizable to Man or Beast.  (Not all Beast, mind you: a literate house-cat island-hopping shelves in a campus bookstore would recognize the "interdisciplinary" nature of my disaster.)  I could hardly stomach my own complacency.  I had though this deserving of reward?  After seven solid hours of prodigious hyperventilation I managed to lift the pencil and make the first incision.  Four days later, the patient was alive but paralyzed from the governing logic down.  An intralineal drip nourished it, but as I looked at it in that bed I knew that unless it could someday manufacture evidence of its own, it wouldn't matter what I placed between its lines.  I knew I could rebuild it.  Better.  Faster.  (a rehabilitation montage—complete with uplifting '80s quasi-hair metal anthem, frantic but purposive-seemingly displays of vigor, and a fade out, 'cause if you fade out it seems like more time has passed in the montage—ensues.)  By the end of July it could walk again and almost seemed to understand the evidence I presented it.

July 1, 2005: 48 pages polished, 208 pages of notes
August 1, 2005: 39 pages polished, 208 pages of notes

But there were still problems.  The prose waffled.  If the prose waffles, I reasoned, blame the batter.  So back to the stacks I ventured.  By the time I escaped,  September and the first week of October had fled.  The quarter had started and the last of the dissertation fellowship wasted on further research.  The current tally:

October 19, 2005: 39 (unpolished) pages, 392 pages of notes

Which means that I finished the summer with three more pages than I started it with but without any confidence that I'd written anything of value.  When June rolled around I only had 36 pages...but I believed them sound of thought and evidence and structure.  Now I have 39 pages which could be random noise keened from the depths of Pi and am buried beneath a suffocating amount of research.  (Just in case you wonder why I haven't followed up on this or this or this.) 

Comments

[Adam Kotsko]

Sometimes I also like to write a post and then think, "No one could possibly even begin to imagine commenting on this," but then they always do.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Ironically, I usually put more work into the ones I don't think the preterite will read so that when the elect do, they'll be rewarded. (Like a toy prize in a bag of mustard greens.)