Progress of a Sort

Today was a momentous day. I'm not kidding. It started innocuously enough, with Pocket of Bolts and me going to good Caribou before breakfast. This is a way to really maximize the morning productivity burst, because the morning caffeine happens at the same time as the beginning of work, rather than taking a half-hour or so away froom it. Pocket of Bolts was still full from last night, and I had a piece of gingerbread cake (with frosting).

Research wasn't going especially well, though. I mean, I was doing the work very diligently, but I was just feeling overwhelmed. Walking back from the coffeeshop, I was talking about this with Pocket of Bolts. The problem was, I had written about 70 pages of a chapter, and had only covered the first thirteen hundred years. There were six hundred or so more years to go. Then suddenly I said, Maybe I should just scrap the final six hundred years. (This would make a lot more sense if I gave the details, but I'd rather this blog not be googleable!) It amounts to roughly a third of my project, but that third all lies in the half that I haven't done yet. Pocket of Bolts said: That's a great idea.

It is a great idea. The more I thought about it, the more wrought up I got. It's a strange confusion of feelings, guilt (it's like cheating), disappointment (in myself, because the project turned out to be beyond my strength after all), intense relief (because what's left seems orders of magnitude more doable), and general nervous energy. When I got home, I wrote to my adviser about it. He wrote back almost instantly, as is his wont, that it's a great idea, adding various additional arguments in favor and suggesting that my hypothetical obstacles to the plan weren't so important.

So it seems almost like a done deal. I feel really strange, almost (but not quite) more upset than glad. However, on the up-side, you could say I finished two chapters today (in the sense that I eliminated them from the plan). As Pocket of Bolts says, If you keep on at this rate you'll be ready to defend by the end of the week.

In the afternoon, I went out to chat with the Reporter. He gave me a present (at right), a silk table-runner made in his home town. Chinese people, in my experience, tend to be really good at giving thoughtful interesting presents. I am not so good at it. For one thing, I am really unclear as to when one should give presents. For another, it's typical in China to give presents that come from your hometown, the specialties of the place so to speak. Almost every place has some kind of specialty. But I'm not sure what my place is, that is to say, where I'm really from. Is it where my parents live? where I went to graduate school? Chicago? To Chinese people, I suppose it's where my parents live, but even my roots there are loosening considerably. Then there's the problem of what that place specializes in, and how to get some, and whether the recipient would like it even if I did manage to get hold of something. It's all very tricky. Anyway, my general policy is to thank the person with sincere appreciation but not reciprocate in any material way. Instead, I try to be as helpful as I can with my, ha ha, intellectual capital, as it's the only resource I actually possess.

It was fun talking with the reporter. The piece of paper also visible in this picture is a cool thing--we got to talking about a very famous Chinese fiction-writer, who has written a great number of books. It turns out, someone made a poetic couplet in which each character is taken from the title of a different one of his books. It's actually a pretty good couplet, having the proper parallelism and such. As usual with Chinese poetry, it's difficult to translate, and of course the whole game is lost in translation. But it goes something like:

Driving snow day after day. He shoots a white deer--
That warrior god of comedy, beside the jade green mandarin drake.