(no subject)

Doing a looooong Milton paper. What little I've been able to write sounds very obvious, very undergraduate: the trouble is I'm tackling what I take to be the main of it, not some angle. And that ramifies too far too quickly: I have pages and pages of notes of things to throw in, but with little idea in what order to include them, how to organize them. I've left the notes on the Word file itself as a kind of talisman: "Look, I'm 75% of the way done!"--except 65% of that is just lists and mentions and various stabs at outline fragments, all spaced out cheatingly. The air conditioning broke down today and I couldn't get a crucial book from the library. I've never written a paper this long--and two days after it's due a second one of the same length is. Feelings of doom alternate with realizations that all of this should be manageable. I just have to make a firm outline, then expand that to include details, then write things out as paragraphs, till my mind can contain what I have behind and what ahead and I can just write free. Also tons and tons of quotes, the more than fifty word, block quoted space-killing kind. Sweet, sweet quotes. And secondary sources to step in and sternly say what I already mean, just more officially. Thank Space Jesus this isn't my area, these Renaissance sources are remarkably good at displaying/faking complete omniscience about entire swathes of history and human thought. I feel I was good at this once too--where did all my rhetoric and bullshit get to? Seems like there's a button in my head and I just push it and things come out, when I'm not writing a Long, Official Paper. Time to sleep in front of a fan, I think.