AJ, my own personal alarm clock, went off at 5:30 this morning, when he bounced into our room to ask for something to drink. After I tucked him back in bed with a sippy cup, grumbling about the early hour, I lay in bed and thought about my conference paper. Suddenly I had a fix to a connection problem I�d had earlier. And unlike most 5:30 a.m. brainstorms, it actually worked. The only problem is, my paper is now twice as long as it should be. Time to get out the red pen and start slashing.

Odalisk mentioned yesterday that she was amazed at how with archival work, papers seem to write themselves (or, as she put it, "doing research actually may be easier than making shit up"). I�d have to agree with that, although I find it difficult after living with the materials for a while of keeping things succinct, just because there are so many interesting paths to follow. Archival work for me, anyway, seems to result in enormously interesting but incredibly disorganized papers.

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AJ returned to our room at 6:30 with the surprisingly polite request, �I just thought we might watch Really Rosie.� Lately AJ has been conducting his own forms of archival research in provenance studies. He has become obsessed with difference. Really Rosie is an animated film from the 1970s, the product of a collaboration between author/illustrator Maurice Sendak and singer Carole King. The film is based largely on four short Sendak books collectively known as The Nutshell Library. AJ has the books and a video of them drawn from Really Rosie. All three of these sources are slightly different from one another. AJ loves to compare them and point out the differences between them. He notes the changes in voices between the two videos and the changes of costume and the repetition of words between the books and the videos. He has been conducting similar research on other items � retellings of fairy tales, my speech patterns, the wardrobes of his school friends, the order of the marbles he likes to roll down his marble maze. His thoughts seem much less disorganized than mine, though. He doesn�t seem to have trouble with simultaneous contradictions and he�s much better at limiting his criteria.

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I am not a scientist in part because my preferred modes of inquiry are less structured by pre-conceived criteria. I am more interested in models of change and social adaptation, things that can be hard to quantify because the defining criteria, the philosophies that lie behind them, are often the very things that are changing. I like the job of reinventing analytical methods. But there are times where I wish I could plug my data into an analytical machine to help me sort it all out. With so many options, how is it possible to understand what�s true?

What�s true of course, is some kind of amalgam of all of the false truths. This is what AJ has already discovered in his quest to own his favorite stories. It�s all in the presentation, I suppose. It makes you wonder just how much of history is made by historians.

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