I’ve been doing plenty of work on my essay for the CIiSA unit, mostly doing my best to narrow down my topic to something more specific, and gather sources that aide in the construction of my essay. I reckon the actual writing, 2.5-3k words, won’t take me in excess of 3 or 4 days but the planning and conceptual belt-sanding will take a real good chunk of time.

I felt unmotivated with this unit towards the start of the essay planning process, so I decided to write my essay on something that would make me slightly more interested and more likely to see it through to the end. Some writings on the current post-punk scene in south London seemed to be a good place to start as I foster a lot of interest in it, attending plenty of gigs that fall within the genre. I’ve spent the past ~3 weeks gathering sources and struggling very hard with creating a title and an essay that says something meaningful about this scene. I’ve ascertained that it’s on its last legs, really, and that it has somewhat of a diversity problem with a slew of groups populated mostly by white middle class men, and I also came to the conclusion that despite me and many others trying to claim that the scene is inherently political the actual truth is more complex and nuanced. I soon became sluggish with my advances; I had plenty of articles to reference, some ethnography papers on other genres that I could potentially reference, but I had nothing to say. I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to talk about. I toyed with ethnography, just straight up documentary, a critique, a prediction, but I still felt as though none of these things excited me enough to study them.

I began to solder, as a form of procrastination.