Wednesday, December 9

Women in Cangue 枷, 1880 albumen print. Legal history involves telling stories about punishment, and yet, it can be amazingly dull to read. Thanks to Theonlinephotgrapher

Notes on a very unproductive day

Other than delivery of a decent lecture, there was little progress on the things that needed progress (dissertation, Framing Lives project, syllabus for next term). It's not that I'm low in energy, but more that I cannot focus it. I feel myself constantly fighting against distraction -- it actually happened just after I finished writing this sentence! I think I need a vacation. I'm also ready for the year to change.

One thing I got done was a revision of a paper by my classmate HXY. I'm sort of curious about whether this paper can get published, and what readers like Philip C. C. Huang and Mathew Sommer will think of it. What HXY demonstrates is a kind of work that is like a really slow bulldozer. He translates, makes brief analyses, and repeats to build a logical structure that updates and resolves the work of previous scholars. I admire the pure, positive accomplishment that his work represents, but at the same time I can't help but feel that it is dull, inelegant.

Of course the English style takes a double-punch from the jargon of Qing legal history and the fact that H is a native speaker of Chinese, but that's not really what concerns me. Beneath the style there is an affront to my own sensibility that a published paper should have more, should work to create. I think it's time I really questioned this sensibility, or rather assumptions. I need to read more of these papers, in a wide variety of settings. I suspect that H knows what he is doing better than I do, and his quick progress to engage with the top thinkers in his field shows an ambition worth emulating.