i'm really getting quite distressed about my riddling stuff i can't seem to write at all. i stare at the computer for ages and nothing comes - no sudden insight, but no plodding steps either. i stare at the books and i say, what is it, what is that one idea that will get all this to come together, why can't i make a connection - and my mind stays blank. at this time, however, i think i'm even more stressed about nohrnberg and milbank. i know they're on my side but increasingly i feel that the more i see them or have to see them the more distressed i get. between smites of the conscience and anxiety to please or impress and an increasing sense of dread i really can't get anything done. if i can be alone for a few weeks (tho there aren't many left, it's already february now, only 10 weeks left) i could begin to rewater my mind but these deadlines and meetings (imposed or imagined) are having a detrimental effect on my writing. if i start to think, i've gotta see nohrnberg or milbank on such a day and i should get something written by then, then i stare at the screen and panic and pick up and cast down books equally fast and nothing would stay, and even before i start reading or writing i'm in such dread of what they might think or say and i hear their chastisement / criticism / anger / whatever in my head that i can't concentrate. but when i'm just walking along the street or lying back reading something, suddenly ideas come to me and i can seize on them and get a half a paragraph or just twenty words more down.

i really am not the right sort of person to write a thesis, am i? you need to be a clock-watching steady self-pacer dependable grind to do this, and i'm too much of a whimsical hummingbird about it.

and i'm just writing responses to texts now and still not knowing where they fit into the grand scheme. we came down to three of them. a chronological / historical project tracing the idea of identity through the uses/forms of riddles in medieval/fairy tales to the renaissance (i suppose the identity questions fit in with renaissance self-fashioning or whatever.) incid my archer taylor book on the history of the literary riddles stops at 1600. so i guess the next step from there is to say, well, what happens to the riddle after 1600? and then to put in everything else afterwards. nohrnberg even suggested a three part structure based on my sequence of ideas - that a three part structure corresponding to oedipus's three stage answer to the sphinx. the medieval/children's lit/fairy tales stuff could go into riddles for children, part one. part two: riddles for grownups (the renaissance), which leaves me to figure out what can constitute "riddles for old men" (nonsense/paradoxes/absurdities? this all sounds v erm modern and totally out of my depth and i haven't done any work in that period/area either.) then one on the riddle as a sort of device? at least, a thematic project on the idea of deferral, play, narratives, which is what i'm terribly interested in and lets me put in everything from different periods and angles. then we talked of a theoretical model. coming up with my own theory of the riddle and applying it to one text. the second idea is most fun and interesting, and more suited to the way my works normally works, you know, wormhole writing and all that. and the last idea is what excites me most in a deep and mad desirous way. but the first is the most self-contained, visible-structured and logical of the three projects that is least likely to go haywire in the time left. it's nohrnberg's top choice too. (they have admonished me on this point at least 5 times, separately or together: i have to pick one. can't have both identity and narratives (or the theory for that matter) in one project.) but in many ways it's also the project i'm least interested in, or at least "identity" bores me to some extent. when i got interested in riddles, i really was in it for the "play" aspect than the "identity". and, i feel bad about saying this, but i suspect i'm feeling a great deal more resistance to the chronological model than i should because it seems so much less my own wont than nohrnberg's idea. and much as sometimes i think i'm being horribly proud and pigheaded about it but i want it to be really mine, with guidance, not other people's ideas and framework, with me doing the work. then they might just as well hire me or anybody else as an assistant to do that, mightn't they? but part of me is so discouraged especially since my baby idea about epithets that i had been so keen on because i thought i'd done something different nohrnberg downed as being wrong. this really reminds me of my chaucer paper and professor duggan very kindly explaining that it was imaginative and original but unfortunately not historic. so with this i don't know if i want to keep working at my idea until i can develop it into something more convincing or to give up and say, as i think increasingly, my dear girl, what are your little anthills? there's a reason his ideas are better than yours, and he can see further and deeper and to be so obsessive about a bad idea just cos it's your own seems very foolish. why not take advice and an obviously brilliant idea and do a good project that you can be happy with for now and maybe use that as a stepping stone to do more when you're a) older and wiser and b) have more time! nohrnberg says that i'm trying to build a very big house with too many cards which isn't going to work in the short space of time, and that the idea is to build a better house with the same number of cards. i know he's right but i feel horrible about throwing anything out. and i have no confidence. what on earth am i going to do.