I think I may lay off Bourke and dig into Grossman. She’s a brutally disorganized writer. Blocking and outlining the first chapter was painful. If her first combined with Grossman provide enough fodder for the proposal, I’ll leave the rest for later.
The first draft of the lit review is done. The intro to the essay comes in at about a page and a quarter and the lit review is coming in at just under three pages. The proposed model begins near the top of page 5. I’m using the length requirement for the SSRC as a guideline. Currently, the font is Times New Roman 11-point, but the spacing is still double-spaced instead of space-and-a-half. I feel that I’m on track for length. Now for the model.
I have two sections done and ready for editing. I got stuck a while back while free-writing when I realized that I needed more data. I spent all of January and a good part of February reading. I wanted to just “skim and get what I need quickly” for these sections—anything to avoid plodding and losing “writing momentum.” I’m coming to realize that for someone with lesions in his frontal lobes, there is no such thing! There is only “charting momentum” of the type you see on this blog. Writing cannot be experienced as a flow. I need to work section by section, toward a single draft. I can't just bash out a rough draft at a single shot. Baseball. Writing is baseball—162 games. It’s all about consistency. Instrumentally rational production. No charisma.
Here’s the reading that needs to be finished for the model:
Part of the trick is to stop being perfectionistic about efficiency. I need to focus on comparatively efficient but still withing the realm of the possible. It was always my goal to see it in my head and then make it happen. That led to fast, good drafts when I had working frontal lobes. Now I must embrace what under the old system was gross inefficiency. When reading, I must take in a gross oversample of information, rather than triage reading and distilling what I need from the text “on demand.” Next, I must write a rough paragraph that is likely to also be disorganized and contain to much information. This is simple “journaling.” Then I distill and reorganize by hand, using the paragraph rewrite exercise. No skipping steps and trying to do it in my head. It’s plodding, pure and simple. I do not fly. I plod. I’m the fucking turtle. I need to embrace it.
Okay. I’ve been writing. I’m in the middle of the proposal’s rough draft. Here’s the progress chart for the intro and lit review:
And here’s the progress chart for the model:
I need to make a progress chart for the portion on testing the theory. I also need to get back to the lit review. There are several more pieces I need to read for this proposal.
I’m beginning to understand why I’ve choked on this for so long. I used to do incredible amounts of organization and distillation in my head. Making all these tables makes be very aware of just how daunting writing is for me now. I could never organize because my unconscious mind knew that if I saw how fucking hard everything was for me now, I’d fall apart. The planning needed to stay on focus is simply enormous.
It's slowly dawning on me that the lit review of a grant proposal is counter-intuitive to a graduate student (or to this one, anyway) because it must maim and wound each item to make it fit into its appropriate bullet point. This violates every single principle we've learned about honest critical reading. A lit review is an act of intellectual violence—it is a putsch, a coup. Like all violence, its success is measured not by its erudition, but by whether or not you get away with it. It is utterly political.
Thank you, Nelly, for having me read Latour.
I need to develop a better “triage” reading system. I need to know how much of which book to read when. I’m focused on a new proposal. I think I have enough of Chirot & McCauley and of Bell-Fialkoff. I’ll pick up more prior to writing the review article. I need to get Rae and Bulutgil. Then I need to read Schmitt and start the proposal.
I need to erase the pencil marks the last reader made in Rae so I can photocopy her Turkish genocide of the Armenians chapter. My photocopying for the coming weeks should include creating a file on each genocide.
I had to add Chapter 3 of the Chirot & McCauley to the list. I strongly suspect a large chunk of their causal argument is there. Well, I knew the book would require considerable digestion. At least it's stylisitcally easy. I seem to manage a good ten pages an hour.
NOTE: Actually, leafing through Chapter 3, it doesn't look useful at all. That's quite a relief. Let's skip to Chapter 4.
NOTE: I may punt the rest of Chirot. The book is just an analysis of existing literature with very little that's original added. the "Solutions" chapter comes across as fairly insipid. I may go back, but I feel this book is slotted enough for this part of the project.
Wednesday and Thursday were occupied by class preparation. I was exhausted on Friday and had an afternoon nap. I hope to type up the blurbs and impose the outline this evening. We’ll see how it goes. I've mislabeled Chapter 4 in the chart above as Chapter 3. Worse, the way they write this, it suggests I need to add Chapter 3, as it may actually be critical to causality. I need to control my frustration with the slow pace of this project. There are days that I tend to despair, especially when I have to spend so much time on being a teaching assistant. I almost never get repeat jobs and that mean class preparation takes up a great deal of time.
