Down to Work!

For the first day in a long while, I've finally done some school work. Ahh...being back here at school is all too familiar, coasting on my favorite cocktail of coffee and vivarin. My eyes are irritatingly blurring from staring at the computer screen for the past four hours without break. Ughhh! I guess vacation is officially over.

Last night I stayed over at B's--we had a date to watch 24. I've said it before and I'll say it again: "I LOVE JACK BAUER!"

This morning I made a procrastination-trip to Old Navy before getting to school. Once here, I paid off my library loans after months of deliquency, returned my slides to the art history department and met Bezukhoff for lunch. After finally being cleared for registration, I got shut out of the research seminar I need, so I have to wait to hear back from Berger and Gibson on that one. Some good news: I got an A in the German Modernism class! I was so sure I bombed on that final, but I guess once again I've managed to pull off a minor miracle.

Since lunch I've been working on the WWI paper. I finally came up with a thesis (of sorts) but I don't think it's very strong. I guess what I'm going to say is something about how debates about the “New Woman” had begun even before the war. What the war changed (in Germany) was was the nature of the anti-feminist arguments. Whereas before the war, misogynist rhetoric had been grounded in the science of biology and evolution, after the war, it became linked to an increasing association between women and the capitalist bourgeois culture that was being rejected by both the political left and political right. Whereas a lot of historians look at Weimar cultural misogyny as a product of male anxiety and post-war trauma, I'm going to argue that intellectuals were not really attacking women, but rather, were attacking the liberal/capitalist order. (And I guess at some point in the paper I'm going to try to draw a connection between the idea of "woman" and the inflation crisis).

Possible problems:
I feel like this is sort of an intellectually cheap exercise b/c it's never clear whether art and ideas are solely the product of individual personalities or whether one can use them to draw broader conclusions about the culture at large. I feel like I have this same issue with everything interdisciplinary that I try to write. Arghhh!!! Oh well... Whether or not this is a valid exercise, I'm going to try to do it anyway. I think I can justify extrapolating a few cultural generalizations from these works... In any case, the proliferation of certain images can't be ignored (ie the prostitute as archetypal woman). I just hope the paper doesn't come out weak in the end.

Anyway, I'm sick of sitting in this chair and sick of working on this paper, so I think I'll pack up and go home. It's already 6:30 and I have to call Hammer back...

(PS: Still waiting to hear back from Narc on the Whitney trip. I'm going to lose my fucking mind!)