I’m clearly too personally invested in the topic of my dissertation. I have found a lot of the ideas that I’ve been working on sneaking their way into this novel I’ve recently started writing–the book is rife with hipsters, ironic cool, searches for political sincerity in a hypermediated world, and an out of control celebrity industry. If I’m not careful, the novel will end up saying more of what I want to say than the dissertation itself; or I’ll have to write a chapter about myself. I would title such a chapter merely “Solipsism.”