My revision (or, Will this Ordeal Never End?)

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I'm probably going to do a lot more revision between now and Friday.  I wasn't all that unhappy with my intermediate draft, except for the big disaster with the DVD featurette.  I'm thinking now that I should have taken Toffee up on her offer to pretend that didn't happen.  On the other hand, I can see that the new thesis really is more scholarly, and it looks like nobody has ever talked about the Sherlock Holmes stories from this angle, so I actually am "creating new knowledge," which is supposedly the point of academic research.  So, yay me!
But still, this has been so much more work than I ever would have expected.  I have never revised anything as much as I have this paper, and I never completely shifted a paper's main point before.  If I've learned anything that's super important about research, it's to really think things through from the very beginning.  I should have done more of that thinking on paper, too, so that I could have gone over that stuff again and again.  It probably would have saved me a lot of time later on.
Here's something I might have used if it had been published more than 5 days ago:

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Unreliable Narrators

Well, I found out a lot about unreliable narrators in a hurry, but I had to go to another school to see the books I needed.  I photocopied the parts I needed, and I think I got everything that mattered.  The best one, for me at least, was one Dr. Toffee recommended, The Rhetoric of Fiction, by Wayne Booth.  This is an old book (1961!), but it had what I needed and I could understand it without having to read it five times, which was what happened with a couple of things I looked at when I first started researching.  I also found a couple of books that I might have tried to use if I'd found them sooner, but they were way too intense-- it would have taken too long for me to get anything useful out of them.  
It appears that Dr. Watson can be classified as an unreliable narrator, and he's not like others that Booth mentions, because he seems really, really reliable.  We don't even suspect him of being unreliable.  However, he's unreliable in a weird way:  he doesn't seem to be hiding anything to protect our good opinion of him, but simply to be ignoring things that we would find of interest.  He wouldn't see himself as unreliable.  

More research! Will it ever end?

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Yes, I'm doing two posts in one day again, mostly because I don't want to work on my paper right now, but if I don't do any school-related work, I'll feel guilty.  So, I'm supposed to talk about the new research I have to do for my revision. 
First, I need to find stuff about unreliable narrators.  During my conference, Dr. Toffee said something like  "discussing that would build my ethos as a serious scholar."  Really, I don't know how serious a scholar I am, but I'm sure working like I am. 
Next, I need to go through the stuff I already have about Watson, and maybe get some more.  Okay, I'm going to have to get some more.  I don't think it'll take too much time, but if it does, I guess that's the way it goes. 
Finally, I need to take a day off and think about something else, research-wise, because I've got a political science paper due in a couple of weeks.  That one is about McCarthyism (I'm going to argue that those Tea Party people are just McCarthyists -- or is it McCarthyites?-- with new outfits, and they are going to bring the Republican party down), and my instructor looked worried when I told him my topic.  After he suggested a couple of authors, he said, "I look forward to reading your paper," but he looked just as worried.  I don't care.  My aunt doesn't have health insurance, and those guys pissed me off.

Here's an article that brought home to me just how much of a slacker I am.

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Stasis Theory and Me

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I mentioned a while back that I blew the first assignment for this course (like almost everyone else!  Only Lisa and some guy who dropped a couple weeks ago got it right).  We were supposed to analyze a newspaper editorial using "stasis theory," which none of us had ever heard of before, and Toffee told us to go to the (very helpful, if only I'd thought it through) Purdue OWL website to learn about the theory (she talked about it a lot in class, too).  I guess I thought that I just had to say something about the theory, but it turned out that what she wanted was for us to write about what kind of argument the editorial was making.  In class, she said the topic of the editorial was irrelevant, which I took to mean that the theory would work on anything (which it does), but what she really meant was that we had no reason to spend any time talking about the editorial's topic in our essays.  So, of course, we all talked about the editorials' topics and barely said anything about the theory.

Well, that's what happened, and later on we discovered how serious she was about the theory, since she's been applying it right and left to everything.  This week, I'm supposed to journal about what kind of argument I'm making in my research paper.  My thesis is "A filmed version of a Sherlock Holmes story has to be an action film unless it is told from Dr. Watson's point of view" (yeah, I'm not happy about the wording yet).  Anyway, I think it's an argument of definition, since it depends on how you define an action film. 

Forgot to mention-- Big drama during conferences

I can't believe I forgot.  Lisa did my peer review last Friday.  She's already heard all about my project (she went to see Sherlock Holmes with me a couple weeks ago-- my notes were in too big of a mess, and the DVD wasn't coming out soon enough).  She thought that I did a pretty good job, but she wanted to know more about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and she suggested a few places where I could add that.  I may add some, because his non-SH stories do connect with my thesis in a way.
Anyway, Lisa's draft (probably the fifth or sixth one) didn't work right.  I could tell it when I was doing the review.  I think she tried too hard.  She had her conference yesterday, too, and she burst into tears when she sat down at the desk.  What do you do when somebody does that in front of you?  Dr. Toffee gave her a pack of Kleenex (she had it ready like she was expecting someone to cry), and then she just told her how to fix it.  It sounded like Lisa tried out a bunch of different theses (is that the right word?), and the one in the draft she submitted was the one she should have gotten rid of.  She was arguing that parents choose names for their babies in an effort to try to control them before they are born, and she got kind of emotional (in the essay, I mean).  Issues, right?

A Research Disaster!

Well, I can hardly believe it, but my project has blown up in my face, thanks to the filmmakers, of all people. The DVD has a short piece on how they were faithful to the Conan Doyle stories when they made Sherlock Holmes into a modern action hero. I was crushed. I didn't know how to deal with this kind of problem, so I e-mailed Dr. Toffee. She said we would talk about it at my conference (where we were supposed to be talking about my draft). I met with her yesterday, and it's not as bad as I thought it was. She offered a couple of solutions. First (and I thought this one was pretty generous of her), she said we could just pretend this never happened, since I already did most of the work and had the draft finished. I got the feeling that she thought this would be the wrong choice, but that could have been my imagination.  Second, I could change the thesis (I went with the original one, which is exactly what that stupid featurette was arguing.  Doh!).  I decided on the spot to shift the thesis to that Watson-point-of-view idea I had.  We looked at the draft for the rest of the meeting, and she showed me how a lot of the stuff I had would still work.
I knew before this that she was going to insist on some kind of major revision (that was part of the assignment), so I'm not upset over that.  I'm just so pissed off at them!  And yeah, I know it's stupid to take it personally, but still . . .

Anyway, there's some news about SH (the character).  The BBC has a new series coming (hope we can see it here) of Sherlock Holmes in a modern setting (see below), and the article says that "a comedy [version of Sherlock Holmes] tipped to star Sacha Baron Cohen and Will Ferrell – has also been announced, which will be produced by Judd Apatow, famed for Anchorman and Knocked Up."  How about that?  I'm guessing that Ferrell will be Watson and Cohen will be Holmes, but it could work the other way, too, I think.



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