Washington DC

TU: Arrival of the Books

Thesis Updates

Well, it turns out that I don’t need to make a trip to Washington to get my books. One of the other school libraries in Boston had them, and now I do, too.

So, hurray! I can now spend my days finishing my preliminary research and revising my proposal. I still need to determine which theoretical lens I’m going to examine The Prisoner through. I’m leaning very heavily towards postmodernism, someone like Foucault. But I think I will reread Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage before I return to school in September.

Lots of reading ahead of me! And I still need to finish watching Danger Man.

For fun, I’m reading John le Carre’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and enjoying that very much.

TU: A (momentary) kink the equation…

Thesis Updates

So, I finished Spy Television today. I think I have close to 70 notecards written, and I intend on photocopying the chapter on the McGoohan spy shows for future reference.

Last week, I requested four books through Inter Library Loan for the project–only one of which is in a library in my homestate. So, after some minor complaining and wondering how I was to get two of these (I’m just going to bite the bullet and purchase one), my mom made a brilliant suggestion:

Go to the Library of Congress.

Brilliant.

So, in August, if all goes well, I’m going to Washington, DC to do some research for this project. It may end up being only slightly more expensive to make this trip as opposed to buying all of the books that I need. The LoC has all of the books I need. Not to mention the International Spy Museum, which really won’t help my project much, but it’s a fun museum. 🙂

This may be slight overkill, but it will be fun. And it will make my project-overseeing professor laugh. And in the end, it’ll be totally worth it.

On a semi-related note, I picked up Defend the Realm, the Authorized History of MI-5 (just for intelligence work in Cold War info, more for my own enjoyment than background material). My god, that thing is a CORNERSTONE. It’s massive, weighs more than my AP Euro History book in high school.