One of the promises I make as CheeseQuest is never to bore you with whining and complaining about my work. I know I've broken this rule on occasion, but the Quest is all about bringing you enough fun facts to make you wish you were writing my dissertation. I hope you'll also cheer me on when it comes to this crazy article I'm writing. Seriously, I thought it would take me two weeks to bang out a first draft. But production is a bit slow. I feel like Nestor Almendros waiting for "the golden hour" to shoot Days of Heaven, by which I mean I can only write the equivalent of Almendros shooting twenty-five minutes of film for an entire day. The Paramount Studios breathing down my back, freaking out about the budget overruns, my narcissistic perfectionism, and the long delays, is my dissertation.
Let me get back on track before I run too far with this analogy and turn into Terrence Malick, the brilliant but underproductive director of Days of Heaven. (CheeseQuest! Step away from the analogy!) What I meant to write about was the state of knowing too much, which one of the Cheeseville U. faculty members always says can torpedo a work. As I'm finding out now, knowing too much causes you to write in too much detail. Each detail leads to more qualification, which, if you're not careful, can lead you to make razor-thin changes in your interpretation. If you're writing from a particular theoretical standpoint, it can cause you to do backflips in order to get your evidence to fit your thesis, which you should never do. And because you've got tons of evidence, your thesis becomes ever more complicated; you may lose track of it completely. I have the additional problem of finding each detail endlessly fascinating. Ultimately, as I am finding, knowing too much makes your work very late, and you're often unhappy with the result. I spent all of yesterday trying to figure out my protagonist's views on race. This was actually one of my priorities as I was gathering my evidence, because the minor political dustup I am writing about happened in 1954, pretty much to the day of the Brown decision, and my protagonist was an adopted southerner. He personally benefited from segregation and opposed Brown as inimical to southern tradition. The problem that has stumped me is that he had an opportunity to spread a rumor smearing an African American man as a communist, and to the best of my knowledge, he didn't.
Why? I tried to answer this question by looking at his autobiography, but I give that masterpiece almost no credence because the letters he wrote at the time directly contradict it. I looked at his libertarian magnum opus, and while it gave me a good idea of his philosophy in 1960, it was quite unlike what he was writing in 1954. What caused him to shift his views so radically? I tried to figure out his political lineage: which conservatives influenced him? This also stumped me, most likely because he cut his teeth on anti-FDR politics during the Depression, and I've read absolutely nothing in graduate school on contemporary opposition to the New Deal—only the anti-ND conservative movement that culminates (maybe) in Reagan's presidency. I looked at the liberals he seemed to be attacking, but this only led to more confusion because they didn't say what I thought they'd say.
You can see where I'm going with this. Despite all these lacunae, I know too much. I wouldn't even have been asking these questions had I not known this rumor was spreading. It does figure in how the scandal played out, but it's kind of a sideshow. It has to do with race, however, and I'm pretty stubborn about figuring out racial politics. It's political that this guy apparently chose not to spread this rumor. But is it important? I can no longer tell.
