This post is meant to demonstrate solidarity with you as move from first ideas to the hard work of working through large amounts of material at the same time you're still looking for just the sources you'll need.
The picture I took this morning is of the floor just to the right of my chair at my desk.
On April 7th, for an international conference being held at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, I'm scheduled to read a paper called "Andre Umstaende: Erection as Self-Assertion in Heinrich von Kleist's 'Marquise von O..."
The paper isn't done yet.
After five full days of reading and writing during spring break, I worked on it all day this Friday, Friday night, all day yesterday, yesterday evening, and will now turn to it today again as soon as I'm done. I've got a great idea (that was the proposal the organizers of the conference accepted) and I've got a couple of dozen pages of notes and even some paragraphs. I've got 12 important articles about the story (see them lying there?), I've got an important book called "Fragments for a History of the Human Body" and theoretical works by Irigaray, Burke, Schopenhauer, and Herder. And most important, I've got the work by Kleist that I'm reading so closely that I've almost worn it out.
Moving from the original good idea to the development of that idea is just plain hard.
I'll let you know how it goes.
Keep letting us know how your projects are going.
We're in this together.
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