Well, I don't know what's wrong with my archives. They just don't want to cooperate.

I just handed in a paper that I had spent the previous 29 hours working on, with relatively few interruptions.

After some thinking and waiting around to hear back from Schmidt, I was in the library a little after eleven in the morning, reading a book with the preposterous title "The Content of the Form" (the subtitle is a little better: "narrativizing discourse and historical representation.) It was on the syllabus for Murder as a supplementary reading, but I thought it might be relevant for my Pynchon paper, seeing as how I wanted to write about history as narrative. It was pretty much right on the mark, and I sat in a couch cluster with Liz and this other girl [the number one person that I see everywhere but whose name I still don't know - she was at the Yale house party, she lived in Dana last year, she's always in McCabe, just for starters] and transcribed whole paragraphs from it into my powerbook. The library was a good place for breezy work with lots of little interaction breaks - with Blair, Liz (Eakins!), Kate, Jeanne - Spike was out and around the library. I took three copies but decided that I wouldn't look at it until I finished my paper. I went upstairs and found a little carrel (is that how you spell 'er?) to sit and type at - I wrote a page or so of stream-of-consciousness response to the quotes from the meta-historics book. Got tired of waiting to see if Schmidt would e-mail me back, so I came home. Then I went to Rae's room.

I'm not quite sure what to say about the twenty-four hours that followed. It was a remarkable experience even just in terms of the music we listened to (Joe Jackson, Sonny Boy Williamson, the High Llamas, David Byrne, two early Magnetic Fields albums, Elvis Costello, Don Byron, Whiskeytown, Tortoise, Alex Gopher, Dave Brubeck, Lisa Germano, Francoise Hardy, Folk Implosion, several mixtapes including N(oel) and R(oss), and more I'm sure), but I know Ester will get some funny ideas if I just make a list of music. We were both writing our final papers for Pynchon & Melville, both on Mason & Dixon. Hers exploring parallels in the demarcation of space (5 and a half degrees) and time (eleven days); mine positing that Pynchon thought (or wants us to think) of the book as a work of history. I am very satisfied with my process of writing the paper. Starting with nearly four pages of quotes (from the metahistory book, from the novel, from my appendage to the musical) and scattered fragments, I developed various vaguely related ideas in parts of paragraphs and semblances of sentences until a thesis and, more importantly, an orginizational structure made themselves known. At least three or four "introductory" paragraphs were submerged into the flow of the paper - I like this idea of writing each paragraph as if it were an introduction, and then just stringing them together. Once I knew how I wanted the structure to go, I wrote starting from the top down without much looking back. It was nice because every so often I would get to the point where I needed to bring in an idea or a quote that I had started to write about earlier, so I simply dragged the relevant fragments up to the cursor. Thank goodness for word processors. By the time it was finished, I had dragged in not only my history class and White's theory of narrative discourse, but portions of the Tony Tanner article, an allusion to Schmidt's website, various examples from the godsend Pynchon Pages, a linewalker who mentioned the "ticking tombstone," even a reference to Rae's paper. And it's good. I'm really happy with the paper. I mean, I haven't had a chance to read it over with any sort of critical distance, but I think the ideas are really good, and it's pretty darn well written too. Well, considering the time I put into it, it ought to be.

I was working on it, and nothing else, for what I guess was literally almost thirty hours. I was hardly, of course, writing the whole time. We were talking for much of the time, about music (of course) and Pynchon (of course – often about topics completely unrelated to our papers, about the histories of our music collections, about high school, optimism vs. pessimism, dancing, other things. Brigid came by to borrow books (our paths had been reversed earlier) - Barth, Steinbeck, something else. Nelly had fallen down once more, just down, not to the ground; Rae wanted to light her and power her head while it was still dangling over the side of the roof, but she just looked like she was writhing in pain, and it was more than I could take, so I made her stand back up again after a few hours. We played with google, which now won't direct you to this site from a search for my name until the 14th page (although I'm glad to say I'm the first result for "reminced" and "ross talks funny" and even "moose in my backyard") – but I showed it to her anyway, and she was impressed, not put off. We stopped to eat, combining the resources of our paltry pantries to come up with tasty and filling corn-bean-rice-soystuff burritos.

We worked in her room; her at the desk, me on the slippery bed, until I came up here to use Joel's internet and realized that she could just use his laptop. We came up here for a change of scenery and a cup of espresso, wrestled with my frame (it wanted to slide away from the wall almost as much as hers did), munched akmaks and mango slices. I tried to be affectionate in a good way. At around half past five she went to sleep, I tried to work for an hour longer, then woke her at seven and slept for an hour while she worked. Progress picked up in the morning; Joel's father arrived; we moved back downstairs; the fluidity of our time experience (we turned off the clock) played into her paper, as does the Fermata. Each time I thought I was two paragraphs away from a conclusion I thought of a way to expand the scope of my discussion and consider further and outréer questions. I was done my paper (this is a construction that apparently people use?) by around three. Penultimate sentence: "…all history is as meaningless as this tripe." And I even found a way to encorporate that in a friendly way. Then I had time to edit and pretty up a page of sources and a page of extracts (Mellvile-style) as Rae finished hers. Printed it out (thanks that the printer agreed to normal font-size), 12 pages plus two (like everything else I've written this semester, it ended naturally just at the upper page requirement.) It got to be five, so I stopped waiting for Rae and went to hand it in. The sunset as I walked to campus was a spectacle - salmon streaked clouds layered in with passionate purple and flamingo blue - the sort of sunset colors that always give me pause because they seem more appropriate for some insidious flourescent chemicals than the majesty of nature. Waited outside the office with five other papers (Ben had been the first fifteen minutes before, which confused him.) But nobody else showed up, except Marc complaining about set design. So I checked my mail (got my paycheck) and came to Beardsley to wait for Rae here. And she came, to print out her paper. So I'll go bac to LPAC with her, and then see what we can do about this carolling business.

She said:
"Sex is the opposite of death.

It's alright, child, it's natural, stay cool.
It's just the life force
You've got to love it,
you're not above it,
enjoy yourself" she said.
"Take my husband to bed."