projects current and forestalled
Have spent most of the past week thinking about BtVS. Watched "Lessons," discussed with Heather aka renenet, rewatched, discussed with S., and, most recently, have been working on two -- count 'em, two -- academic projects involving the show: an article and an abstract, both due on Tuesday.
The abstract is a proposal for a paper on queerness, monstrosity, and the closet in BtVS, to be co-authored with truepenny, and I think we finally finished it last night. We both find abstracts really difficult; the reason we're English PhD students is that we have a hell of a lot to say about our chosen texts, and they want us to condense our line of argument down to 2 pages? Very frustrating. But I must say that working on it together was much more bearable than working on it alone.
Which is what I'm doing with this damn article. Also about queerness in BtVS, but more tangentially; it's primarily about friendship, the redefinition of heroism, and probably something I haven't figured out yet. I keep falling in love with bits of it and then realizing that, while smart, they're actually bits of another paper entirely, and having to save them to a different file (because I have trouble deleting them); and then I keep making these throwaway comments that truepenny has to point out to me are actually kind of the point of my argument.
This is half my life's work, this written critical analysis thing. Admittedly, it's my least favorite half, but still. I've been doing some variant of it, or preparation for it, for eleven years. You'd think I'd be good at it by now. Well, okay, I am better at it than I used to be, in that the end product is smarter. But it seems like the process should get easier, and thus far, to my perpetual dismay, it has not.
My slacker tendencies and my perfectionist tendencies do not go together very well, and I have yet to find a way to mesh them; they just sort of duke it out for control of the command center on an alarmingly regular basis.
As a result of all this, I have not had time to vid. I'm sitting in front of the computer twelve hours a day, and I can't let myself vid. Haven't even let myself update the site, which needs updating. Grr, argh.
Okay, back to work. BtVS repudiates heteronormativity by something something blah blah blah...