Schreib! Dein! Buch!

I'm back in Berlin, this time living in schicky-micky Prenzlauerberg. Even though P-Berg is supposedly not cool anymore, walking along sidewalks that are not littered with trash is surprisingly refreshing.

I live 5 minutes away from this.

And this.

And this chill dude.

And while I'm enjoying the delicious spring weather, I can't help but feel disappointed that I'm most definitely not on the southwestern beaches of Turkey right now. My adventurous Groupon purchase, a 1-week trip to Antalya and Cappadocia, was unexpectedly and inexplicably canceled 4 days prior to the departure day. Boo. So instead of exploring ancient Greek ruins and a desert of rocks shaped like penises, I'm spending an extra week in the StaBi, banging my head agaiwriting my first chapter.

I had a productive month in Bonn at the Beethoven archive -- although technically I was living in Bornheim, a small town/suburb of Bonn that is 5 minutes away from both Pink Wagner and a herd of starving sheep:

Mounted on the side of someone's house. I was surprised to encounter exactly the same pink Wagner in my surrogate-advisor's living room.

Going jogging in Bornheim is a real treat:

German cows go: mööö

And meanwhile, in Bonn, I discovered a ton of great archival material... which, instead of reading about here, you can read in my dissertation in 2017! Or maybe the book my dissertation will (hopefully) eventually become in 2020.

.... at which point eggplants around the world will be raised in triumph.

Sneak peek: dissertation will feature a mini-case study about a lady who wrote 5 devotional (and at times somewhat sensual) poems to Beethoven in the museum guestbook from 1903-1912. I finally tracked down a pilgrim from amidst the faceless nameless masses!

But for now, I'm getting down to business and trying desperately to get words on e-paper. This ad from the Deutsche Bahn magazine was designed specially to taunt me:

I'm trying, I'm trying!

The thing I find most bizarre: imagine spending years of your life (and €€ on bogus writing tuition and self-publication) to produce a book. Finally you receive your first exemplar in the mail. You stroke it lovingly, smell it, hug it to your chest. You open the cover to find your name printed in crisp ink. And, tears welling in your eyes, you... wear it on your head.

So THAT'S what books are for!

But in all fairness, I feel like this ↑ about 80% of the time.

There is something about this idea that's been nagging at me. When you spend days on end sitting at a cubicle, in a long row of hipstery grad students all typing into their computers, cranking out pages and pages of text that almost no one will read... at a certain point it starts to feel like the whole enterprise is just a vanity project.

And whether our research strives to make a genuine contribution, or whether it's a fancy pretty hat to wear on our own heads, is actually a serious methodological question. Let's say I encounter some poems in a museum guestbook that were written by the central demographic of my dissertation (i.e., raging weirdos of the 19th century). I could approach this material in three ways:

[commence Scrubs-like voiceover]

1) "Oooh, another juicy morsel! I think I'm seeing a pattern emerging in these guestbook entries, but not quite sure yet... I'll need to collect more examples, read a book or two on amateur lyric in nineteenth-century Germany, figure out which poetic language was standard at the time and which is specific to Beethoven... maybe over the course of the next year or so I'll figure out whether this can be made into a broader argument about raging weirdos! Cool!"

2) "Oooh, another juicy morsel! Let's see... how can I connect this to the argument I already have? raging weirdos(19th century) = cosθ + Beethoven.* I feel like I should bring in some historical anthropology to show that I'm well-read... Also need to find a way to include that kickass analogy I came up with the other day. And it would be nice to recycle that paragraph I cut out of the previous chapter, it made me sound like a philosopher for a second. Cool!"

3) "Goddamn handwriting. What does it saaaaaaay?!?"


Any historian can see that #2 is a big fat methodological no-no. But I have a suspicion that even the best historians lapse into this kind of thinking, imagining the finished project like a trophy while we're still elbow-deep in material. And ultimately, fantasizing about the end-goal -- though enticing and occasionally motivating -- leads to a feeling of emptiness. I have to feel like what I'm doing, or finding, is real, not just some arts&crafts project I'm selling on Etsy.

Something my advisor said in a recent conversation was encouraging. I asked, "is my dissertation marketable?" He started rubbing his temples like ermagerd no I hate this question and then said, "Well... first it has to be good."

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*Ok ok, for all you readers who actually understand the maths, please hide your chuckles behind your hand. Is theta even a math thing?  Is that thing I wrote even a function? Is 2 a number?