Episode 1203: >25%

Despite being jetlagged and not having slept properly for nearly two days by this point (the price of taking night flights from Singapore that last half a day and landing in the early morning in London), I've managed to push my essay past 25% of the word count. The argument feels like it's beginning to propel itself forward, so with any luck, the writing will continue to proceed at this steady pace, if not faster. I feel like my style in this essay is a lot more self-assured and assertive, partly because I've quoted sparingly so far from critical literature (and that's partly because there's not a lot of it on Eunoia), so a lot of what I've written so far (and probably will be writing) is close reading (so obviously mostly in my own words anyway) and conclusions I'm drawing from that (so specific points are in my words, backed up by more general quotes dealing with sound poetry). It's pretty amazing that I'm still excited and motivated to write this essay, whereas in my undergraduate days, by now I'd be just looking for quotes to stitch together to fit a conclusion that I probably derived from modifying another quote, assuming I'd even bothered spending this many days on the essay. Looking back, I'm slightly embarrassed to say that I was a pretty lax undergraduate, who was happy to play the system to his benefit (i.e. taking Language Centre modules for credit). In hindsight, going to a small liberal arts college in the USA, or even one of the Ivy League universities, would probably have been a massive wakeup call.