Another Day, Another 1000 Words

You know what's the best thing about blogging, the very best thing about blogging, as compared with, for example, writing a paper for a conference or an article? You don't have to re-read what you've written over and over and over again for the ten days, four weeks, three months it takes you to write the wretched thing. You say what you want to say, and then it's out there. You don't have to proof read it more than once, you don't have to take it through editors and copy editors and readers' reports and yet more copy editors. It's just there, what you want to say, in type so that everyone can read it.

I spent all last week very productively working on a paper for a conference, but, guess what? It's not finished yet, so I get to start all over again. I don't want to reread again what I wrote a week ago. It's fine, well, it was fine until I had to look at again a few minutes ago. Now I hate it. It sounds so lame and uninteresting. Really, I'm going to say this in public? But the truth is, I have no idea anymore whether it's any good. It's like saying any word too many times, it becomes desaturated of meaning (even that phrase, "desaturated of meaning" is desaturated by now). It couldn't possibly mean anything because how could anything mean anything? Sigh. Funnily enough, in the process of working on this paper, I've been looking over my book and it reads fine. Indeed, it's hard using it to help me write this new piece because I just want to quote directly from it without paraphrasing my sources yet again. I got it right that time, can we go home now?

I read something really interesting in Harper's this morning by Susan Faludi, about mothers and daughters and the feminist movement, which pertains in a spooky way more or less directly to the paper that I'm working on. But I can't write about that now. I have to get back to rereading what I wrote last week.

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