Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Cartesian Dualism, Coffeehouse Edition

I'm at a coffeeshop, working on revising my rejected article. Today I decided to get a medium coffee instead of my usual latte or mocha, for a variety of monetary, caffeination, and caloric reasons. And behold! I am wired! jittery!, so physically loaded with caffeine that you can see me shaking when I hold out my hand. And yet, my brain is mush. Not alert at all. Like oatmeal.

Spirit is willing, flesh, etc. etc. Just goes to show you how well one can separate off the body from the mind --- or perhaps how well the mind can barricade itself away from the threat of having to do actual work. I am feeling a little overwhelmed, though. There's something wrong with this artcle but I can't quite figure out how to fix it, or where to begin. It looks a lot like this:

(look ma, I made it all by myself!)

I'm starting to think this whole "interdisciplinary" thing is a crock. A crock of stinking fish heads, no?

I suppose I must go hide out in my attic again and try to work. I hope to either reconnect brain to body or first part of argument to second part of argument. It looked fine to me the last time I sent it out --- I wonder what exactly is wrong here?

2 comments:

Bavardess said...

Ugh, I hate that feeling when you're wired but mentally paralysed at the same time. I don't know the background re: the article, but have the reviewers given you useful comments/critique to work with? It is frustrating when something isn't quite working but you can't put your finger on why (though maybe it's worse when the reason it's not working is obvious, but you don't know how to begin fixing it!).

Academic, Hopeful said...

I too am trying to hold together at three disciplines - master of none, I believe. But it has been liberating in certain ways (the front end, crap for back end/ analysis).

Not sure if this is helpful, but perhaps go back to make overall argument less ambitious, choose to focus on first or second set of themse, and make a few tidy claims. Maybe the two can't be pulled together and are actually two articles? That said, sometimes you can still use the two parts, you just need to sharpen the signposts for the reader and dink it into shape, say by using it as evidence for a slightly different argument that works better.

Feel like I am asking you to suck eggs though, so excuse me if this is all v obvious.

You featured in my last blog post by the way. Take that as a calming, blogland ego stroke...but not sure it cuts it when you have manky fishheads to worry about and caffeine pumping.