whoops. but i got a message from someone else named patrick morgan, requesting my url...so maybe there's an army of patrick morgans who infrequently blog to display all the turmoil they create for themselves.
my advisor is now officially hampering my dissertation's completion. i can't even think about the project without the template of whatever it is he wants (it's a vague template) sneakily layering itself over terrain i used to find fun and interesting. now it's all filtered before i even let myself think about it...i'm so concerned with finishing eventually that i worry about his criticism while questioning its validity/relevance. i have written and discarded so much stuff that i actually don't remember what the thesis i started out with was. well, an exaggeration that was. but really. when i began this thing (guess how long ago) i loved my topic. i was learning with gusto - "this is fantastic," i thought, like a bonehead, merrily skipping about the stacks in search of books on potentially related topics to explore. i went through pens and pens and pens, sticky notes were all over the kitchen table. and then i turned in what i thought was my first chapter. and this began a looooong cycle of handing in work, never to hear anything about it until i asked, getting the same comments, and i resisted because i wanted this to be my project. i had no idea about how to write a book, and nowhere near enough about the topic to do that, and i just wanted to absorb, actually teach myself something about what it was i was doing and how it related to the rest of the world. and years later i am now afraid of my own ideas because they always seem to be wrong, and anyway who cares about ideas when there are font issues to address, and citation format...and don't forget the philology. how stupid i was to believe that i could write a dissertation that was not acutely philological in bent! how silly to think that it would be clear to everyone that the focus was not supposed to be linguistic! (you know, in some fields, this is usually the major section of any respectable work, and the point is buried somewheres in there...).
so slowly i've slouched into dissertation torpor, kind of. i fight it - i managed to turn in 2 chapter drafts in the first half of 07 - but this temporary enthusiasm is invariably quashed by the apparent worthlessness of my work, at least this is the impression i get from the Fount. because of this worthlessness, i have discarded five chapters outright. at one time i was excited about those chapters...i knew, certainly, that they were not final drafts. but i thought they might be provocative. maybe you should never really ask even academic friends to read your stuff...but maybe they would say something if it was utterly incomprehensible, yes? and if it was incomprehensible, why and how did we discuss it afterward? anyway. lost time.
i am pretty tired of this, now. the writing, i mean. this blog, that is. i feel a little better. and i have made a decision: for all intents and purposes, I QUIT. it is becoming more obvious every time the Fount and i communicate that he will never let the work follow a trajectory and mature. he will never let me finish. so i quit, although the image of firing the Fount is more empowering. ah, the same. i do want to make something clear, however. and it sounds odd, probably. i am quitting in order to complete the project i started. i am going to have to spend some time regaining control over the direction and composition of this book, to allow that excitement i felt initially to grow once more. i will do this for me. fuck the Fount.
