Keep digging

2 hours researching, 2 hours processing data, page count = 203

I find myself spending as much time working on career stuff as on the dissertation today. Had a great lunch with a colleague who's a corporate grantmaker, and who had really good advice about choosing my next gig and planning for the future. Later, I had a good call with another colleague who's been both a community organizer and a funder, and she was really helpful too. I feel like I'm doing all I can to make this interview next week successful, and no matter what happens, the process is valuable and worth it in and of itself.

One of the many great things about the New York Public Library is that in addition to their vast collection - I visited my cart full of 19th-century Latin American budget documents again, finishing Bolivia, Brazil, and starting on Chile - they'll get you into local university libraries if they have a volume the NYPL doesn't. So this morning I went to the NYU library and consulted an extremely helpful sources on the history of Latin American party systems. I feel like that part of Chapter 1 is going to be rounded out pretty nicely, all things considered.

This evening I finally saw There Will Be Blood, the runner-up in this year's Oscar race. It's about an oilman in early 2oth-century California, and what he has to do to succeed. I dunno, I might have liked it better than No Country for Old Men. It had more of an ending, even if an odd one. Even being two and a half hours long, it didn't really drag. The music was very Kubrick-ian, including a jaunty classical piece over the closing credits just after something horrible and inexplicable has happened.

Since most of the movie is set during one of the periods I study in my dissertation, I found it interesting on that level. The sheer will that it takes to generate economic development when there's nothing to build on is always sobering. I guess that's one of the themes of my dissertation, the costs of order: there's never an easy choice, you can have internal peace with a strong army and militarized police, but be worried about a coup, or you can avoid coups with a weak army and politicized police, but be worried about insurrection. The characters in this movie made awful, impossible choices, but did plenty to get themselves into those messes in the first place. There's a metaphor in there somewhere, but it's beyond me to capture it right now....

I think I might go back to the library tomorrow and keep working on the budget data, so I won't sign off for the week just yet. Hasta pronto!