I've reflected before on the way that our relationships with works of art have a continuing existence beyond our particular encounters with them - the relationship that I have with a novel, say, continues in the spaces when I'm not actually reading it - and that the nature of those relationships can shift quite markedly in the spaces between the encounters. One good example of this for me has been The White Hotel, which has really opened up for me over the course of the semester, and particularly over the last week or so, during which time I've had it on the 'back burner' of my mind, allowing it to simmer as I've had Lacan &c in the foreground in the hopes that the twain would meet somewhere in my half-thought thoughts. Anyhow, have just browsed through the text itself; reading very much framed by the demands of the particular paper that I plan to write about it and the time constraints under which said paper-writing will need to proceed (as to which, see below). But finally, I like this book. I really wouldn't have expected to at all (after my first reading), but I do.
Right, this is how the (university-related) big picture looks right now:
Thesis [7 November]: 8400 words (/10 000). This is the major worry at present - I made a bit of a dent in it today (Thursday) but am still pretty far off from wrapping it all up into a decent argument. Plus, that 8400 is nowhere near as concise as my academic writing normally is, meaning that in effect it's somewhat less than that figure (though, circumstances being what they are, a bit of flabbiness in my prose may not be such a bad thing, as it'll bring me closer to the required word length).
Contemporary Historical Fictions [7 November]: Basically finished. Although I haven't had the time to pull all of its threads together, I'm pretty happy with the way this one has turned out.
Reading The Subject [7 November]: 1800 words (/4000). Well, this is what they call 'progress', I guess. After really struggling with the bloody thing, I've managed to carve out a reasonable recapitulation of the Seminar and plot an approximate narrative for my own paper (looks like it's going to be three of three English papers I've written this year in which Derrida gets a guernsey). The plan is to finish this tomorrow (well, today, but it counts as tomorrow once I've slept on it) so that I'll have two full days and nights, plus whatever of Monday I need, to do the Thesis.
Recent European Philosophy [17 November]: 0 words (/5000). And this is what they call (planned) 'lack of progress', I know.
