Two down, one to go

I have nearly 50 pages of research paper that I've come to think of as 50 pages of complete garbage. OK, not garbage exactly, but nothing more than a massive pile of sentences and citations in need of reshuffling and (massive) editing before anything resembling a 30-40-page paper emerges. There are about 100 ways I might have approached the texts I'm writing about that would all be better, I'm always convinced, than whichever approach I'm currently working with. Picking any one and going with it seems to require background reading I have not done, which makes me wonder whether there's some way to make better use of the enormous mountain of background reading I have done. And the more I think about it, the more I'm at a loss for what, in simple or not-so-simple terms, the paper is about.

Which is to say, there's a very good reason it's not my narcissistic blogging that's made it to the front page of the NYT mag.