Given that I’m utterly exhausted this evening, I doubt I’ll say much.

I did, however, meet my word goal for today. It was a modest 1,000 words, but I’m happy to say that I have almost finished the contextual and theoretical sections. What’s more, I don’t think I’ll have to do a lot of editing/revising to get those 1K I wrote today in submittable shape. I say that now, but who knows what I’ll think when I look at them again.

I finally found a way of making a reference to the fact that statues from antiquity always appear to us as blank white marble rather than in the garish colours they once appeared in. I do think it says something about how we understand our cultural heritage that we quite literally project whiteness and all of its connotations onto everything. Which, to my mind, makes it all the more extraordinary that the epics of the postwar period were so consistently shown in lurid Technicolor (or a related process).

I did some drawing in some stuff from this absolutely batshit book called Modern Woman: The Lost Sex, from 1947. If you ever want to get a glimpse of what nutjobbery women of the postwar period had to put up with, look no further than this book. Seriously. Check it out sometime.

I’ll be taking the weekend off of Dissertation writing, so don’t expect any updates until Monday. I make a firm point of giving myself the weekend to work on other projects, i.e. my novel, non-writing related blog posts, watching films, taking hikes, etc. It keeps me sane (no small task, I assure you).

When I return, though, I really am going to start working on Chapter 4 again. I promise. I really want to feel like I’m making progress on that front again. I think it’s going to be a chapter about…something about imperialism, utopian narratives and spectacle, and the impossibility of political stability. I’ve already written a ton of stuff; I just need to get it into something coherent and cohesive.

When I get back to work on Monday, I also need to start moving into the direction of submission. I’m aiming for mid-May (end of May at the absolute latest), which I think is doable. I just have to stay focused.

Stay focused.

It’s one of the hardest things to do, but…I can do this.

I have to.