Epistemographer

So, it’s a weird thing to be chugging along, writing a chunk of one’s dissertation. It’s not that you really stop doing research, it’s just that the additional research takes the form of spackle that you need to slather in the gaps where you realize that you don’t have something that you need.

In my case today, the spackle I needed was something on how porn first started showing up videotapes – there’s a lot of conventional wisdom on the subject, and a lot of speculation, but hard historical facts are difficult to come by. So, I’m following up on a citation in Fred Wasser’s book Veni, Vidi, Video, which points to a Wall Street Journal article from May of 1985 about someone who bragged that he was the first person to market pornography on a videocassette. The guy’s name was Reuben Sturman, which rang a bell. Pulling up Amazon, I check a hunch and confirm that he’s one of the subjects of Eric Schlosser’s latest book, Reefer Madness. With that in mind, I’ll be heading off to the Strand tomorrow to pick up a copy, since the odds of my being able to get a book this new and popular from either the Cornell library or (via Jenny) the NYU library are slim to none. I’ll buy the book, read it, and digest it.

All for what’ll probably amount to a paragraph (if I’m lucky) in a several-hundred page dissertation. It’s kind of exhausting if you think about it.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 4th, 2003 at 2:09 am and is filed under Dissertation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.