Midnight Train to Georgia
I know I post way too much, so I'll try to curb myself.
I'm leaving for Georgia on Wednesday (tomorrow?). My friend John, who helped me survive grad school, lives in Rome, about an hour northwest of Atlanta. We're both so close to be doing with our dissertations that we decided to get together, go to some libraries, and just work. I have a lot to do, but I think this is a good plan. When I talked to my dissertation director last week, I was hoping to set up a defense date, but he didn't want to--he wanted more theory (he always wants more damn theory!). So my goal this next week is to redo some of my intro to explain exactly why I'm not going abstract theory on this thing. Hopefully, he'll be satisfied. And as rewards, I've demanded a trip to Etowah Mounds (an Indian mound site) and John suggested the Puppetry Center, which we always meant to go to while at Auburn but never did.
Digression: Once, when I was looking for a book in Auburn's library, I stumbled across a book called Postmodern Puppetry. I probably should have spent some time looking through it, but I was somewhat horrified by the fact that someone wrote a whole book on a topic like that.
Ever start so many books that you despair of ever finishing any of them? I'm in that spot, with Francis Parkman's Oregon Trail, Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma, DH Lawrence's The Plumed Serpent, VS Naipaul's book on the colonial history of Trinidad (I can't remember the title), Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians, and a couple of books on Roswell for an upcoming roadtrip with my friend Mike all partially read. And none of this includes that ridiculously long pinnacle of modernism, Swann's Way, that I should have started already for a book group I'm part of now. And even that doesn't mention Vanity Fair, which I've been wanting to start since January. I need some help...and then there's always the reader's problem when traveling--how many books to take? And which ones?
I'm leaving for Georgia on Wednesday (tomorrow?). My friend John, who helped me survive grad school, lives in Rome, about an hour northwest of Atlanta. We're both so close to be doing with our dissertations that we decided to get together, go to some libraries, and just work. I have a lot to do, but I think this is a good plan. When I talked to my dissertation director last week, I was hoping to set up a defense date, but he didn't want to--he wanted more theory (he always wants more damn theory!). So my goal this next week is to redo some of my intro to explain exactly why I'm not going abstract theory on this thing. Hopefully, he'll be satisfied. And as rewards, I've demanded a trip to Etowah Mounds (an Indian mound site) and John suggested the Puppetry Center, which we always meant to go to while at Auburn but never did.
Digression: Once, when I was looking for a book in Auburn's library, I stumbled across a book called Postmodern Puppetry. I probably should have spent some time looking through it, but I was somewhat horrified by the fact that someone wrote a whole book on a topic like that.
Ever start so many books that you despair of ever finishing any of them? I'm in that spot, with Francis Parkman's Oregon Trail, Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma, DH Lawrence's The Plumed Serpent, VS Naipaul's book on the colonial history of Trinidad (I can't remember the title), Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians, and a couple of books on Roswell for an upcoming roadtrip with my friend Mike all partially read. And none of this includes that ridiculously long pinnacle of modernism, Swann's Way, that I should have started already for a book group I'm part of now. And even that doesn't mention Vanity Fair, which I've been wanting to start since January. I need some help...and then there's always the reader's problem when traveling--how many books to take? And which ones?