It's been an incredibly busy month; even last week's spring break was spent just trying (unsuccessfully) to catch up on work. I did manage to find some time to do a little writing on one of my decades-long projects, but as I said in my journal as I was working on it,
The problematic part is trying to figure out how to fit this stuff together. And how to write it in a way that I’m not going back into that old text and getting stuck in its rhythms and ideas and wanting to just keep everything. It’s really my fear that I’m going to look at that text and get drawn too much into it and become paralyzed so that I don’t know how to put the new ideas to use. I feel like I want to write as much of this as possible in a fresh way so that while I’m drawing on old ideas and information, I’m not getting stuck in that like you get stuck in quicksand. That’s an interesting problem. I don’t mind blowing the whole thing apart, so to speak, but I feel like even just a little contact with it is going to get me so utterly mixed up that I won’t be able to move forward.
Anyway, I bought another book that might be of use to me for this project (or for some other future permanently unfinished/unfinishable paper):
Shu-mei Shih, Lin-chin Tsai, eds. Indigenous Knowledge in Taiwan and Beyond. Sinophone and Taiwan Studies 1. Springer, 2021.
I managed to get a hardback edition at about half the price it's going for on the Springer website, but that was still expensive!
I tried to order another book (or actually a set of books) through the NU library, but I haven't heard from them yet, so I'm not sure if I should just wait or order the books myself:
劉維瑛, 黃隆正, 六然居資料室, eds. 【現存臺灣民報復刻】. 國立台灣歷史博物館, 2018.
Maybe I'll just wait until the end of this week to decide, since last week was spring break.
