10,000 ways not to make a lightbulb

Supposedly, after trying hundreds upon hundreds of materials that might make a bright yet durable filament for incandescent lightbulbs, Thomas Edison said something to the effect that if he tried 10,000 things that didn't work, he had not failed, he had proved that those 10,000 didn't work.  The quotation has morphed with repeated telling to this pithy version: "I didn't fail, I found 10,000 ways not to make a lightbulb."

Recently, I was talking to a friend who is going to defend his dissertation soon (the same one who was so stressed before submitting -- see earlier post).  It struck me that there are many ways to write a PhD on any given topic, and part of why the process is so frustrating is that you are faced with 10,000 narrow, faded footpaths trailing off into the woods and you have to pick which dissertation you're going to write.  This involves venturing down a lot of dead ends and falling down the occasional rabbit hole before you settle on a solution.  It's a process of discovering and/or choosing all the ways not to write your dissertation.  Even then, you may be haunted by the ghosts of the 9,999 dissertations you didn't write.

I suppose a better analogy is Robert Frost's poem 'The Road Not Taken,' which is so often abused and oversimplified.  The point is that "both [roads] that morning equally lay / In leaves no step had trodden black"; one path isn't better than another, but no matter which one I choose, "I shall be telling this with a sigh, / Somewhere ages and ages hence."  In my friend's case, he wishes he had included more of certain primary and theoretical works on his topic.  Me, I wonder whether I did the right thing by slicing thinly (one-word examples) across a massive corpus of poetry.

Singing evensong in Queens' chapel

However, I'm feeling much more optimistic this weekend than I have since -- well, since the summer, really.  The summer months were consumed by two articles I was putting together, and ever since I've been slogging through the Slough of Doctoral Despond.  I could not figure out a way to bridge from lists of tiny examples to a narrative or argument -- and that's still a concern, one which looks to be resolved by means of an appendix.  But more importantly, in the process of trying, I produced a chapter-sized blob of text that my supervisor actually liked.  Gasp!  Say what?

I'm honestly still confused about what was different this time, especially given that much of the text was unrevised stuff he'd seen before.  Still, it's incredibly gratifying to hear him say that this now seems like a project that won't just "get through" but could be something really strong.  Huh?  And then there was one paragraph I had written about an idea that I liked but couldn't think of any way to expand; he thought this little thing was thoroughly original and should be an article in a major journal.  Come again?

My task now is to draw up a schema of everything that remains to be done.  *Deep breath*  What a difference this good feedback has made, though.  I celebrated that evening by making the most of a special joint evensong with Queens' College choir in their chapel, followed by formal (dinner) and drinks in the bar... and the Tit Hall MCR... and sleeping luxuriously late the next morning.  There may be 10,000 ways to write a dissertation, but it seems I'm finding mine.

Look it up

As my brother will be happy to tell you, I spent much of my childhood sitting lengthwise on the loveseat, reading.  Consequently, my mom's household tasks were often punctuated by hollered conversations such as:

Sarah: What does 'bough' mean?
Mom: Spell it?
Sarah: B-O-U-G-H
Mom: A large tree branch.
Sarah: Ooooh, ok.  Thanks.

I could say so much about how great my parents were at encouraging reading, but that's a rhapsody for another time.  Today, I'm pondering one branch (bough?) of the phenomenon, the result of Mom starting to say, "Look it up."  You see, our household was among the last generation to have bought a full set of World Book Encyclopedias -- gilded paper edges and all -- and from a door-to-door salesman, no less, if memory serves!  This set included a two-volume dictionary, and as I got older I was increasingly referred to the bottom shelf of the bookcase to answer my own questions.

As a PhD student, I'm perpetually driven by the need to "look it up," but at the same time, that long-trusted process is supposed to be only the first step.  My supervisor is always pushing me to go beyond quoting other critics and disagree with them or at least assert something new.  This is what I struggle with just now.  I feel most confident in the "newness" of certain kinds of research, which in fact is just more looking it up.

For example, in one of his college-age notebooks, Tennyson made a little glossary of words from Old and Middle English.  I've transcribed it and am doing some detective work to create a list of his sources.  I'm then checking a concordance to see which little gems from his treasury he dropped into his poems.  Meanwhile, as I read through his Arthurian poems, the Idylls of the King, I collected samples of archaic words he used to give them a medieval flavor.  This is stuff I'm fairly confident has not been done.  But in the end, it's just information gathering.  What I then say about how that should influence our understanding of Tennyson's poetry is... shall we say... under development?  Or just underdeveloped.  Still, nothing solves blockage like a deadline, so I hope I will have something resembling a rough draft by the time I go home for Christmas.  Then commences ALL THE EDITING.