Reader/writer/recusant-mama to the rescue. Bless her.

She solved a problem I didn’t know I had — the best kind of solution. Or rather, I knew there was a problem, but I thought it was me. Now I realize I was missing a link. She is my link.

She started as an idle curiosity. I ordered up every early edition of her work — well, all but the latest, which lives exclusively at the Folger. [Sidenote: this dissertation should be subtitled, "Or, Getting the Most Out of a Year at the British Library."] When I went in today to look at them, I expected to spend an hour or two, make a handful of notes, and get back to bibliographing the books that are more central to the project. Instead, I found myself literally bouncing in my chair. Biting my lip. Grinning.

“Thank you,” I kept whispering. I damn near squealed.

When I came home to Flavia’s post on leisurely archive-perusing, my heart ached with wanting. The wonderful thing about the kind of program that I’m doing is that it gives time and space for that sort of thing during the term. With only two courses, very loosely structured reading lists, and vast swathes of unstructured time, I’d been able to wallow about in this and that, reading more or less whatever I chose. I was able to tailor what I read to a loosely defined area of research, so that when it came time to write the papers (except in one disastrous case), I was prepared to go whole-hog, and write swiftly. This is also how my undergrad thesis came to make any form of sense — I had a whole summer of idle reading on a fellowship to familiarize me with the field, so that I came to the project’s start vastly more prepared than I otherwise could have been.

Dissertating, by contrast, has felt hideously rushed. I chose to write in an area entirely new to me, where I did not have my bearings and where, frankly, I do not have time to get my bearings fully enough to be comfortable writing. I crashed through a handful of Seminal Works of scholarship, ingested most of my primary material in a single gulp, and have been progressing by fits and starts (emphasis on the “fits”) ever since. It’s disorienting and frustrating and I’ve cried about it more than I’m willing to admit.

I crave time and space. Now, I know that to a certain degree, that desire carries an inherent fallacy – work expands to fill the time allotted to it, and if there’s anything a writer wants, it’s always more time, more time. But this is at least a five-month project, not a three-month one. I need to stretch out and read more, instead of narrowly, intently reading only bits and scraps that I am absolutely certain will be wholly relevant.

This project is in many ways a promiscuous one, especially disciplinarily. It spans a lot of more or less discrete areas of study, and hopes to synthesize them in order to make new sense of a single author’s printed output. I’m good at synthetic work, and in the case of this project, I think this kind of approach serves particularly well. But synthesis demands a broadly-cast net and a lot of patient waiting — and what I’ve got is a jury-rigged fishing pole and about five minutes.

So when my (slightly insane) recusantish lady came to rescue me today, I counted it as a big old heap of blessings. I had somehow managed to reap a sliver of the benefits of spending ages in an archive without actually spending those ages. And praise be for it.

Breakthrough. Direction. Scope. Your little mouse is back on her game.

[... For now.]