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.