Epistemographer

Several years ago, the faculty in my department decided that the length of time between the dissertation defense and the actual filing of the dissertation was far more than preferable (in some cases, stretching up to a year or more). With that in mind, they instituted a sort of gatekeeping mechanism, a “pre-defense” that would ensure the quality of the dissertations as students got to the defense proper.

Initially, many grad students were dubious – “What the hell, this is just one more hoop to jump through!” The pre-defense, however, has grown into a really useful aspect of the graduate experience; discussion of the actual mechanics of the dissertation gets shifted to the pre-B, freeing the defense itself up for a discussion of the broader issues and implications of the dissertation.

So, my pre-defense was today. I spent about two hours in a room with my advisors this afternoon, and I can honestly say that I haven’t thought that hard in months (if not years). There are a few aspects of my dissertation that I need to explain better, but for the most part the general structure is sound – the general work-to-be-done seems to be on the order of adding more depth rather than fundamental reorganization. This is good, and reassuring.

That said, it’s back to work for me. A defense date has been set for July 30th, and I’ve got a lot to do before then. That in mind, however, the end is most definitely in sight.

As for what’s next, there’s news a-coming (I’m waiting for final confirmation before announcing it here)…

So, after a good day and a half of writing, revising, discarding, rewriting, shutting my laptop in frustration, pondering, tossing and turning, writing some more, discarding some more and generally just trying to get the thoughts careening around in my head to calm down long enough to focus, I think I’ve finally got the first sentences of my dissertation set:

“I was born in 1976, less than a year after the Sony Betamax consumer videocassette recorder first appeared in American stores, and a VCR has sat atop my television set for as long as I can remember. I grew up in a world of videotapes and took for granted easy access to thousands of movies, each available for a few dollars and a quick trip to one of my two favorite places in town, the local video store.”

You wouldn’t think that this would be so hard, really, but in the past 24 hours I’ve worked through and discarded a baker’s dozen ways of structuring my introduction, none of which worked, which meant that I didn’t know how to start the introduction since I didn’t know where it was going. I’m only finally satisfied with the above sentences because I know exctly what they set up, where they’re going to take the introduction, and the introduction as a whole only works because I know exactly what I’m trying to set up in the dissertation itself…it’s like putting the top level on an elaborate house of cards, which will only be stable if every card in the lower levels is precisely placed.

Or, maybe I’m really tired and not thinking straight, in which case this isn’t going to make nearly as much sense when I wake up. Right now, I’m going to sleep for a bit…

Tonight I think I finished my fourth chapter (which will actually be the sixth chapter of the final thing, thanks to the screwy way I wound up working on things)…the ending isn’t as tight as I’d like, but I’ll need to return to it after writinig the two chapters that precede it, since it relies on some arguments I’ll be making in those as-yet-unwritten chapters.

So, I’ve got two chapters left, one on the social culture of video stores (all about video store clerks and people hanging out while talking movies) and one on remediating films as texts from celluloid onto video (basically the chapter about letterboxing and colorization). These are the fun ones, and the ones I’ve been most looking forward to writing (hence me saving them for last, when I’m more than a bit burned out by this whole “writing” thing).

After that, it’s just a matter of writing an intro (basically cutting and pasting out of dissertation proposals and a talk I gave at the Media Ecology Association a few years ago) and a conclusion (about the idea of not being able to program one’s VCR, from a talk I gave even longer ago at SHOT).

My goal, pie-in-the-sky as it may be, is to have a full draft ready by mid-March. That is, of course, assuming no illness, no derailment, a constant level of motivation, and the continuation of this godawful draining schedule I’ve been on for the past week. Of course, I’m also going to be taking days off at a time, heading down to NYC without a single word of dissertation material, so I should be able to rejuvenate myself in fits and spurts.

Of course, if something terrible happens, like say I actually get an interview for one of those jobs I applied for, then I’d have to get a job talk ready, and either this whole schedule goes out the window or my head physically pops off of my shoulders. [irony] Hopefully, I won’t have to worry about anything awful like that. [/irony]

After several days of wrestling with a chapter that just wouldn’t work, I realized a structural problem with my dissertation, and just spent the past hour and a half gutting and rejiggering. Once the smoke cleared, I was left with an outline that included one chapter more than I’d planned, but which also made a heck of a lot more sense, both in theoretical and narrative terms. That said, the tallies on the sidebar have been rewritten, and I feel like I have a strong sense of direction and purpose in my writing for the first time in a good three weeks.

Back in New York City for the next week, with nothing on the agenda but dissertation writing and exercise (both of which I’ve sadly been neglecting while out of town). With that in mind, I’ve established a self-imposed moratorium on the reading of blogs of any sort until I get my next chapter finished…while this may not be easy (especially since the primary season is about to kick off), it’s entirely necessary. I’ll still post stuff here, if nothing else updating the dissertation progress sidebar throughout the week.

In other news, a profile of me and my research was published in the Cornell Alumni Magazine this month – since their website diesn’t appear to be current, I’ll link to a PDF version of the article that I recieved by fax (pardon the quality). The profile is a bit sensationalist, but definitely well-done, and it impressively doesn’t fall into the trap of over-simplifying the kinds of approaches I take to charting the rise and fall of the VCR.

And the best part is that while I’d done the interview months ago, I didn’t even know it had made it into print until last week, when I recieved a phone call from a Cornell alum who had seen the article and wanted to chat. Turns out that he had helped run the earliest U.S. demonstrations of Sony’s U-matic video player (a predecessor of the Betamax which was aimed at the educational and institutional markets), and was also involved with many other early video companies, including Cartrivision, which I’ve written about. We hung up an hour later, and I’ve now got a few more paragraphs of material to weave into Chapter 2.

In other news, I just sent back the page proofs for a review of Fred Wasser’s VCR book Veni, Vidi, Video that will appear in the next issue of Technology and Culture. I’ve also got an article coming out in the next issue of Public Understanding of Science on religious readings of a Hubble Space Telescope image, which I’ll link to once it’s actually in print.

So, that’s it for now – off to work!

Sorry for the delay, you hardy few who read this space on a regular basis – I’ve been busy doing not nearly enough down in Florida, where lots of sun and swimming pool time has been on the agenda. Tomorrow, we’re heading down to Miami for a few fun events, including an evening of Jai Alai (a staple of my trips down here). Plus, at some point I’ll get some good pictures of my trip this far up here, but in the meantime just imagine sun, family, and lots of me writing fellowship and job applications.

In the meantime, here’s a fun excerpt from an e-mail I recieved over the break:

Dear Josh,

We closed our video store 2 years ago. We still have left all of our adult vhs stock, about 2500 titles. We also have thousands of empty vhs display boxes to sell. Do you know anyone to contact for these items?

While my suggestions were pretty much limited to trying to unload the tapes on eBay or through the VSDA‘s classifieds, I figure I’ll lend a hand. So, if anybody out there wants to pick up 2500 adult videotapes, let me know and I’ll try to broker a sale.

When I started grad school almost six years ago, who knew the heights to which I would soar?

Chapters 2 & 3 are in the mail (well, e-mail) to advisors. It’s funny – I know they’re not perfect and need a little more work, but there’s still the same sense of satisfaction when I actually have something good enough to send. Now, here’s hoping that my judgment’s not totally off, and that they are actually good enough to send off for others to read…

On to chapter 4!

Non-Widescreen Version Of DVD Received As Hanukkah Gift

Bernie spoke in reference to last year, when the Greenbergs came close to finding a gift Rosenstein would like. The misguided couple gave their nephew the theatrical-release version of Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship Of The Ring, instead of the extended version which contains 40 extra minutes of footage—a distinction Rosenstein gently explained to the confused gift-givers.

“If we’d known, we’d have been happy to get him the other version,” Hannah said. “Well, this time we were very careful. There were two versions at the store, and we made sure to get the special one. See, Tyler hates it when they cut out part of the movie.”

Confusion over the misleading term “full-screen” caused his well-meaning relatives to purchase the inferior version of the DVD.

“Why do they call it ‘full-screen’ anyway, when it’s only two-thirds of the stupid movie?” Rosenstein asked. “Fucking bullshit aspect ratio!”

So, I’m finding that there are times that I’m writing, and it’s a very workmanlike process … every paragraph is pieced together with a topic sentence, a few sentences of backup, and a transition to the next paragraph. Frankly, much of my writing last month felt like this – I was getting it done, and and struggling along, but there wasn’t really much joy in it. It had to be done, and that was that.

Something a little odd has happened to me in the past week, though: I started to soar. I don’t quite know how to describe the sensation – it’s almost like the feeling I’ve had when dancing, when I so lose myself in the joy of the dance that I’m not consciously trying to move my body. Rather, my movements just flow out of me, coming from somewhere in the core of my body rather than my head.

My writing has been feeling like that lately – I just sit down, know exactly where and how to pick up the thread I left for myself, and the words just pour out of me. I’ve been writing huge amounts, and it’s good, clear prose.

I’m thinking that part of the reason for this is that the stuff I’ve been writing over the past week (basically, my third chapter) is more narrative than much of the second chapter. I also feel like I’ve just got this stuff so solid, and I know exactly the argument I want to lay out, that it’s all crystal clear in my head. Feels really good, even if it looks like a file cabinet exploded in my little study, with photocopies covering every horizontal surface and tacked up on most of the wall space within arm’s reach. It’s interesting – alongside my clarity about what I’m writing is this near-photographic knowledge of where every article and every interview quote is sitting in this mess of paper. I can visualize them all, and I find myself reaching right for the document I need even before I consciously realize I’m doing so.

Speaking of photocopies, I had a funny moment today – read a trade article about an old video convention from 1981, and I realized that of the nine people quoted, I’d personally spoken to eight in the past year. As a historian, it’s a good feeling to realize that you did in fact manage to choose the right people to talk to, and that you’ve got a good handle on what one of my advisors would call the “core set” of actors involved. Go me.

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.