discrete progress

It worked yesterday ...

Goals for today.

1. Integrate Bennett into the pamphlets chapter. Also that one moment in the discussion of The Second Maiden's Tragedy.

2. Write a paragraph of the conclusion.

If I do more, that's great. But I'm keeping the bar set low.

I dreamed last night that I had an appointment to meet my dissertation director in one of the multitudinous coffee shops downtown. First I couldn't get out of the house because Mirrorthaw wanted me to watch a Western starring Sharon Stone and Gina Torres; then I couldn't decide whether to wear jeans or shorts. By the time I was leaving the house, I was already two hours late, and it was getting dark, and people kept coming up to me wanting rides to places I wasn't going. Then, when I got downtown, I couldn't remember which coffee shop I was supposed to meet my director in. And it was getting really dark. So I came home to phone her and apologize (and why is it when there's a telephone in my dreams, it's always in the niche that used to be in my parents' house until they remodelled?), only to discover that the house had been overrun by people (mostly undergraduates) filling out applications for a short story contest, under the direction of a hectoring and unpleasant man. So I had to fight my way to the phone. There was a message (and the answering machine was our current one, in this niche in my parents' house that doesn't exist any longer and never had an answering machine in it anyway), but I couldn't hear it because the undergrads were being so noisy and the hectoring man kept shouting at them.

Then I hit another common pattern in my dreams, which is that I'm trying to call someone and I can't dial the number correctly. I couldn't remember my director's phone number, and although she was on the list of phone numbers on the wall by the phone, the number was wrong somehow and kept connecting me to people I didn't want to talk to. So someone (Mirrorthaw?) suggested that I look her up in the phone book, and I spent the rest of the dream crawling around on the floor among all these undergraduate legs, trying to find a phone book that had her phone number in it. I found seven phone books that were nothing but yellow pages, but I didn't find the white pages before I woke up.

This is your brain.

This is your brain on academic stress.

Any questions?

discretion

The pamphlet chapter is now 22 pages long (!), and I can cross item #1 off today's list. I am v. pleased.

Also, I need lunch.

dis and dat

I'll take it out before the dis goes to the committee, but just at the moment my conclusion is titled: Buttercup is marry Humperdinck in little less 'an half an hour.

The Equus section is now its own thing, a coda, rather than part of the conclusion. Because it isn't really part of the argument about revenge tragedy. Things feel tidier this way, and it isolates the conclusion, like a steer being cut out from the herd. Or something.

Faced with writing the conclusion, my brain has devolved into a sulky teenager. I don't wanna talk about it, it mutters and slams its bedroom door shut.

In the interests of constructive procrastination, I'm going to go look at the university's format guidelines for dissertations, which they have obligingly posted online.

Bah.

dispossession

Bureaucratic snafu, headache, and lethargy notwithstanding, I have actually made some progress today.

*Gillian Bennett is properly incorporated and making me look smart.

*I've "finished" the coda on Equus.

*The apparatus (title-page, copyright page, epigraph, table of contents) are laid out. This is completely unimportant except that it pacifies the control-freak part of my nature.

*I have a sort of quasi-outline for the conclusion, with a couple bits of actual text in. That paragraph I said I was going to write is proving elusive, but I'm still working.

So here's a question for all of y'all reading this who either are writing or have written a thesis: acknowledgments? dedication? Did you have 'em? Not? Thoughts? Opinions? The format guidelines tell me what to do about them, and so now I'm wondering if I ought to have them.

Now that I think about it, I kind of want to dedicate it to John Webster, because I love his plays and I didn't get to write about them. Uber-geek to the max, that's me.