The first bar: Before I tried procrastinating with a new top bar, I was just letting the blog sit idle. That worried me, as I knew it wouldn't communicate that I was on hiatus. So I made this one quickly last week.
I had a number of airships that I stole off the web, but I liked this junker the best. If I was running a steampunk RPG, I'd be driving that baby and smuggling stuff.
The second bar: No longer feeling adrift, since I'd reached my page count the day before, I was "gaining confidence." The airship has moved a tiny bit toward the far side of the image.
You might notice that the sky has changed colour. I overlaid a blue sky with fluffy clouds, which should become the dominant sky as the end approaches.
This was the day I got several requests for interviews. I was metaphorically "blown off course," distracted by prepping for the interviews, especially the televised one. "What to wear? What to wear?" I had also lost several pages to reorganizing a chapter the day before, so I needed to visualize the lightning and wind to get my focus. You may also notice the docking tower coming into view on the right side of the image.
Coming out of the interview storm (still have the televised one to do), and ready to write my allotted pages for the day. Need to get done this damn chapter on methodology and theory so I can get to the three elements of the aesthetic.
Got into the discussion of "punk" in steampunk, and the erroneous assumption even some scholars have made that "real" steampunk must contain a punk ethos. Found Christine Ferguson's "Surface Tensions: Steampunk, Subculture, and the Ideology of Style" an invaluable partner in this conversation. The combination of anger at lazy academics and delight at Ferguson's article produced many pages. I did some retouching to the airship so it would look more natural in the image. The lightning it clearly behind us, and the ship continues advancing.
I was about to return Political Science Fiction, edited by Donald M. Hassler and Clyde Wilcox, to the MacEwan library, unable to recall why I'd checked it out in the first place. I scanned the table of contents, and focused on the word aesthetics in Patrick Novotny's chapter, "No Future! Cyberpunk, Industrial Music, and the Aesthetics of Postmodern Disintegration." It contained a section on bricolage and detournement that fit very nicely with the ambivalent positions Rob Latham set up for nostalgia and regret in retrofuturism, which fueled another great day of writing. I just missed passing the half-way point this day.
The second chapter is in, but as I enter the third on Neo-Victorianism, I'm worried about making it to the end by June 15. Hard to stay on track. Graduate school is a marathon, not a race. Must endure!
Rough day. Writing the Neo-Victorian chapter proved more work than I'd initially thought. Made good use of Lansdale's steampunk books in this section, surprisingly. Still made good time. Need to ascertain what the difference is between meaningless bricolage and meaningful detournement as they regard neo-Victorianism.
Keep checking back for further updates!
