“There is nothing like having risked your life with people over something immensely important to you.” —Guyot
I am obsessed with civil rights because I associated it with school. It was the big event of the day when I started. School was freedom in itself, and freedom was also taking place.
This is the feeling I would like to recapture, if I can; I see it in glimpses.
I began to fear school when I learned to associate it with abuse. I do not want to write down the images as that gives them power.
The question is how to fight them and I did know this at one time, before they got so bad. It is strange but it only now occurs to me that the same tactics could work again. I will try this.
*
I think I will also call C.V. as a padrino from the spirit world or something like this, so he will stop haunting the present manuscript. I might have imaginary conversations, make wry faces and say qué mal va esto from time to time.
At a practical level, there are too many fragments of essays for this book. Each one is a beginning, each one takes a different lens. I can say it is a cubist book, it looks at things from different angles, but it still has to be cohesive, and it cannot be the Aleph.
I have just figured out the answer. Series of overlapping essays, no I will not think of this project in that way. I will have a book that makes a much more confident claim. What does not fit just lives as articles, to be taken up later or else not.
All right — this clears my mind. Now I get to figure out which lens I am taking, what scope I can really have. And unbelievably, although the title may not say this, the actual topic of this book is … fractured subjectivity!
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Sometimes it takes awhile to figure out which pieces belong to a given project and which are spin-offs. Keep everything, and let the ideas migrate. It’s possible that an article will come back as a chapter, after all. I think it must be a problem/opportunity for many people: when I look at CVs or publication lists that come up on the MLA bibliography, it’s clear that some scholars write books, mainly books, but have a few ideas that didn’t fit in a book and become articles, and others write mainly articles but managed to develop one book. I am not sure yet whether I am an article writer or a book writer. I look like an article writer but I think it is possible that due to life constraints I have been unable to see how to proceed with big book ideas that I really do have, and that in effect I have been writing spin-off articles up till now. Even my book-in-progress is in a way a spin-off.
The minute I saw myself as an article writer it set me free to write … two books. These things are tricky. When I reconceived my current book recently I was able to detach two articles and send them out separately.
Well, I am having scope issues with this book and I see it is because it meets 2 needs and they are different.
1. Gather together all my unfinished conference papers into a book of essays on their general theme; have them or some of them out as articles in the meantime. A practical way to clear the decks and have things regularly in pipelines while also preparing a book length mss.
2. Write a closely argued and theoretically tight book on race.
Option 2 is what I most want but it is not bureacratically as practical as option 1 because the research is not finished and I have notes but no draft. My hope is apparently to do #1 and have it morph into #2 in the process. This is creating a difficulty because if it is to be #2 then ideally each piece would be cast toward that. I think this last is the problem because it is getting me ahead of myself. Chapter 1 is an old conference paper, just a conference paper and old, but it exists. The last chapter is finished as an article but is very old — I gave up on publishing it and should not have done. I should have fun with the chapter 1 article and modernize the last chapter article and send them both out, and see where I am then.