this is what it looks like when you get scooped. fuck.

A study at last! After a week of staring at stacks of books and feeling overwhelmed by the chaos, I rallied my strength and made some bookshelves last night and this morning (thanks for the encouragement aaron and maura!). Sadly, only decent fiction (both in literary and book quality) fit in these shelves, and so I still need to come up with something else for scholarship on the other wall. All essays, belle lettres, bibles, theology, and everything else had to go downstairs and mingle with elena’s books.

The upshot is that the excuses are over and it’s time to face the draft again. My advisor gave me many great suggestions last week (and the not-so-great reminder that as it stands I have a small, somewhat lame argument brewing). So it’s back to work in the new space now….

reading the dreadful draft....

a deadline approaches after two days of unprecedented productivity. three tips for dissertation writers: 1. retreat to an internet-free zone and resist all impulses to drive into town just to look up one thing 2. get a bigger desk and put it in front of a window 3. make your adviser threaten you with deadlines. it's funny -- throughout the year i was studying for my phd exams, any number of friends pulled me aside and offered bits of advice (mostly of the order: chill the hell out, anne) and when i began writing the dissertation the same thing happened (this time it was more staid: write everyday, outline first, don't over read). in both cases, i couldn't hear any thing they were saying and i likely resisted all of these suggestions. i'm so stubborn and so entrenched in my own deeply flawed process. this chapter -- which isn't nearly done -- has been about trying to take some of this advice and let some of my neuroses go. today it feels possible.

the new study seem to be just the thing i needed to get me going. i've always known that spaces affect me, and so i shouldn't be surprised that it took changing my space to change my relationship to writing. because my old and little desk wouldn't fit up the stairs, i've stretched a huge board over my filing cabinets to create an appropriately large desk for the large task of dissertating. i can spread everything out and actually SEE how to put it all together -- which isn't, of course, to suggest that it's coming together yet. also a deadline tomorrow (one that was supposed to be enforced on feb. 15) makes me more eager than usual to get the fingers moving.

first day of work in the new place. my study is under the eves -- which seems a place Jo March would relish as well -- and i had been anxious that it would feel claustrophobic. but instead it feels right. i spent the morning reading newish louisa may alcott scholarship, even though i should have been finishing the section of the chapter about her father. i keep having to remind myself of what john mcgowan told me -- that reading is the worst enemy of writing -- but i suspect that's an easier temptation to avoid after you've written five books and could care less what anyone else thinks of your work.

it's funny the way this project works (and works me). yesterday i moaned to a friend that i didn't want to write it, not at all, that i should stop right now, move to a lovely place, and content myself with teaching the children. but today it felt possible again (though, to be frank, still not probable), and i actually enjoyed working through the morning's scholarship. for the sake of my work, i just need more days like today and less like yesterday. unfortunately, what's good for my work often feels at odds with my other desires. but alas, that's life.

Facing the facts:
1. It’s a lot harder to write a dissertation than it appears…and to think you mocked those 7th and 8th year students when you were a first-year.
2. It’s really easy to fall into writing an undergraduate research report without really noticing it.
3. There’s a little voice in your head that says, “write faster, write better,” and most days, you want to tell that voice to fuck off, but sometimes you just listen to it.
4. You worry constantly that if it’s this painful to write a dissertation, you’re never going to be able to write the book and get tenure.
5. You’d like your advisor to sit next to you at the computer each day and hold your hand.
6. You potentially have another 22 months of feeling exactly like this.
7. You’re going to get it together today. Right now. This moment. Together.

“To contemplate Spirit in the Infinite Being, has ever been acknowledged to be the only ground of true Religion. To contemplate Spirit in External nature, is universally allowed to be the only true Science. To contemplate Spirit in ourselves, and in our fellow men, is obviously the only means of understanding social duty, and quickening within ourselves a wise Humanity. – In general terms, -- Contemplation of Spirit is the first principle of Human Culture; the foundation of Self-education” -- bronson alcott

it may not look like it, but a hopeful start this morning...

what i have to face when the writing doesn't go well and i feel like i'd rather pull my hair out than think for one more minute about this chapter. he delights in my writing miseries because it means a longer (and hopefully cathartic) run.

sometimes it's a bit eerie how alcott's "radical educational experimentation" of the 1830s has been reinvented in contemporary composition theory as original and progressive. here he is on student writing "children have a great deal to contend with, in the attempt to express their thoughts. In the first place, they find it more difficult than better trained minds do, to preserve their thoughts in their memory; while the mechanical labor of holding the pen, of seeing to spelling, of pointing, and of all such details, interferes with the purely mental effort." yikes. it's sounds strikingly similar to the way in which we're taught to teach writing, and this is where, i suspect, i become a bit of a conservative. the mechanics, the grammar, the penning matter to me. i remember the feeling of utter liberation when i received a copy of strunk and white's elements of style during my senior year of high school. the rules, in other words, freed me. but more on grammar later. for now, it's time to write.

this is the look of a dissertation writer who has had a lovely non-dissertating weekend but now it's monday and has to get back to it. i never take whole weekends off from work. this weekend, though, made me think about something a once-friend told me about grad school, about approaching it like a regular old job...taking whole days off so that when you are working, you're really working. might this mean that i'm finally ready for some balance in my life? if my suspicions are correct, then one's dissertation is really always ultimately about the writer. so it's not a stretch, i guess, to think that i'd figure some key things out about how i want to live and work in the process.

this is what it looks like to triumphantly write 846 words in one day (it's so good that a split infinitive is not only acceptable, but necessary). thanks maura for kicking my ass into gear.

a lovely early summer morning in chapel hill means that i had to force myself into my office to get anything done. work so far this a.m.: 1. read someoneelse's dissertation chapter on alcott and feel the same old frustration that arises when you realize someone got there first, and perhaps, did it better than you could hope to. at the very least, they've used the same sources you use, and it's hard to resist the urge to feel defeated. 2. worried that "new organizational scheme" is no scheme at all but rather a desultory collection of random speculation. 3. affirmed that emily's hoodie sweater is indeed the only garment one needs when writing a dissertation.

I woke up this morning realizing that I had spent the last several months thinking through a set of ideas that now feel a bit like a mirage. I’m fighting the urge to wash them all down the drain... I was reading about the swiss pedagogue pestalozzi this afternoon and feeling sluggish and somber. a group "study" at the coffee shop this evening means that once again temptation gets the better of me. this is my friend oren's best attempt at encouragement. he's failing to convince me as i type. write anne, write.

There are many difficult things about writing a dissertation – too many temptations, too many books to read, too many people to talk to – but for me it’s often impossible to sit down and move my fingers. I ran into a professor friend this morning at breakfast (someone I used to speak with a lot and someone whose thinking I really admire) and we ended up arguing about the problems in American education for over an hour (he claims that I’m an educational conservative, wanting to bring back the strict study of grammar and pour knowledge into the students’ brains). I justify these conversations by thinking them directly related to my work, but really, I realized that I often prefer talking about pedagogy to writing about it. Bronson Alcott confides something similar to his journal in 1834: “My ideas, at present, are better than my style, and for many ideas, distinct and vivid in my own mind, I have no signs. This, more than anything else, is, I believe, the cause of my failure.” Alcott decided that if his writing failed, he would walk the country and converse with schoolteachers across America. Perhaps I should find a new pair of walkin’ shoes....

thinking about bronson alcott and jesus this morning. a motley crew of sorts. alcott is always trying to emulate his savior's "unimposing guise" and attempt this kind of seemingly egalitarian pedagogy. but after sitting with my pal alcott for the better part of a year, i just don't know that i buy it. it seems to me that like jesus -- especially in the parables -- alcott always has a rigid telos in my mind. he may seem democratic in his questions, but his specific educational goal for any moment is unchanged by his students contributions. this seems one of the essential hypocrisies in contemporary student-centered classrooms. as teachers, we claim that students will run the show and we will simply guide the discussion. such guiding, however, seems much closer to directing. we let students feel some measure of control, but we're quick to redirect when they depart too radically from our plan. it's still our plan. i for one think we should have a plan, but i also think we need to be honest and forthright about it.

hooray for a quieter coffee shop this morning. the simultaneous departure of undergrads and the dying of the cafe's espresso machine means that i can think in peace. so i better start that thinking...

sometimes i think -- and write -- best directly after a run. i used to run in the woods with a pen and a piece of paper stuffed in my jog bra. whenever the moment of clarity came, i was prepared. now i just talk and talk and talk out my argument as i go. my good old mutt arlo listens patiently and then gets bored and chases squirrels. like walt whitman, i suppose, i believe in kinesthetic learning. i believe in it less as a mainstream pedagogical model (do we really need 7th graders acting out algebra?), but i think many of us do our best thinking on the move.

day 1 of new organizational scheme

it's all about finding a working organization today and deciding what to cut in this darn alcott chapter. it pains me to have so much research and so few places for it. my friend emily told me that a famous historian once told her that one should strive for making use of 10% of the research you accumulate.