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Jun. 26th, 2016 10:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Right up to a (moved back, back again, again back) deadline, thus actually able to write formally, or anyway not in note flurries. I write more slowly than I used to. Not better, just slower. A hard thing to admit, though unusual levels of stress and other new factors could conceivably be involved. And my deviously endointertextual subject - I've commanded my brain to kibosh all exo connections.
(I like "kibosh" almost as much as "akimbo." But love the latter too much to pair them. The one way it seems possible, anyhow - hard to picture a "kibosh" akimbo. Also hasn't Interpol warned against using either word more than twice in a year?)
Googled a bit inside quotes from a rare text I didn't want to type out and got just one cut-and-paste-ready hit, which turned out to be a conference paper making a significant portion of my present chapter's argument, posted a few years before I must have come up with it. Nothing quite like that particular set of mixed feelings, at least when writing on literature. You don't want to have been the first to say whatever important (to you) thing you're saying! You want to catch people up or expose them to what's already there, to highlight what's legible rather than bring it forth from pitch darkness - that's the author's job. But it's still no fun to find you're redundant when it had looked like you weren't, even as an interpreter. Even 10 percent redundant, or whatever this proportion amounts to.
But also corroboration is nice, no matter how sure you are of your argument's value. Assuming the corroborator seems sane. Because while you could always be crazy, even crazy people can tell when others are. Crazy ain't subtle, from outside.
(I like "kibosh" almost as much as "akimbo." But love the latter too much to pair them. The one way it seems possible, anyhow - hard to picture a "kibosh" akimbo. Also hasn't Interpol warned against using either word more than twice in a year?)
Googled a bit inside quotes from a rare text I didn't want to type out and got just one cut-and-paste-ready hit, which turned out to be a conference paper making a significant portion of my present chapter's argument, posted a few years before I must have come up with it. Nothing quite like that particular set of mixed feelings, at least when writing on literature. You don't want to have been the first to say whatever important (to you) thing you're saying! You want to catch people up or expose them to what's already there, to highlight what's legible rather than bring it forth from pitch darkness - that's the author's job. But it's still no fun to find you're redundant when it had looked like you weren't, even as an interpreter. Even 10 percent redundant, or whatever this proportion amounts to.
But also corroboration is nice, no matter how sure you are of your argument's value. Assuming the corroborator seems sane. Because while you could always be crazy, even crazy people can tell when others are. Crazy ain't subtle, from outside.
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Date: 2016-06-27 10:14 pm (UTC)