Sobriquet 38.23

The following post was originally published on 1/22/08.

Well, today sucked. I woke up bright and early only to realize that it was a bit brighter and a bit earlier than I thought it would be, so I went back to bed for a few hours. When I woke up the second time, I felt fairly confident that I would get some work done since I'd had such a productive day on Monday.

Nope.

I sat around for what felt like hours before I began a series of what would amount to false starts for the paragraph. When I finally began writing, it was slow and painful (though the pain may have been the result of too many grossly frosted Pop Tarts and diet Mountain Dews) and when I finished the one paragraph I was able to get through, I really wasn't very satisfied with the quality of the writing or the piece's relation to what directly precedes it in my dissertation. I discovered that some of the ideas I'd thought were central to Elizabeth Curren's philosophy were not as explicitly expressed in Age of Iron as I had come to believe, leaving me with a considerably shorter section than I'd anticipated.

Still, given the longer-than-expected sections I've already written (the segment on the novel, in fact, already exceeds the length I had hoped it would be by about 50%), I am in pretty good shape. Plus, as I wrestled with what I wanted to say today, I made a few minor alterations to the outline and imagine the section on Age of Iron will actually have a somewhat stronger conclusion than I'd envisioned a few weeks ago.

In any case, I also moved forward in my preparations for the next section of the chapter, which was a nice feeling (you know, that whole "I'm not stagnated" thing). So, not surprisingly, after reading the forty plus articles and book chapters published on Age of Iron, I was a bit frightened to look up The Master of Petersburg in the MLA database this evening. Happily, there were about 17 articles listed, several of which I have already read because they also deal with Age of Iron. The number was further reduced by the pleasing fact that some of the papers were written in languages like Italian and German, neither of which I am capable of reading at anything approaching an academic level (I do know, for instance, several swear words in both languages). So, even if I read an essay a day, the ordeal of preparing to write about The Master of Petersburg should be much less time-consuming that that of Age of Iron.

Feel free to play either Blur's "Song 2" or the Rock-A-Teen's 1959 "Woo Hoo" to get a sense of my response to this delightful discovery.

For tomorrow: Read an article. If I have the time or energy, read another article or try to write a bit.