Hmm, more and more I’m proud of my final Sugar Shock column, “Downgrade U,” and am fairly proud of the Post-2000 Teenpop Essay. I feel like the thing I’m proudest of is ahead of me, though, in some unknown space between education and pop. (I’m kinda sorta writing a book at the moment, which is certainly the hardest thing I’ve ever written.)

The thing I worked the hardest on also depends on what counts as “work.” The Rebecca Black piece was something I’d been thinking about for months, but I wrote it in two or three hours (and had to go back and revise a lot, something I don’t really like doing but still do all the time to blog posts). I think the hardest intellectual work I did alone and with a few colleagues/friends was the series of columns I wrote in 2006 and 2007 between the Paris Hilton piece (linked in a previous post) and the recap. That includes blog posts, comment threads, etc.

I have three published pieces in journals, one co-written, one solo [PDF], and one forthcoming (also the subject of this talk), that were somewhat difficult, more for figuring out an academic voice that doesn’t come naturally to me, and for figuring out how to do citations in ways that I thought weren’t dishonest (the “insert vague concept and attribute it to fifteen scholars” problem).

All of my work is huge trouble to put together! But none more so than the big ideas that I can’t figure out myself yet. I’ve been working on some kind of a “nature of celebrity” paper that I started as a student and am still exploring, but have never made work. I tried writing a paper about why textual analysis of advocacy films is pointless, and wasn’t very happy with it. I wrote a paper on children’s animation in the 1990s — what I call a “soft response” (which is to say, not really a response but…) to the Children’s Television Act. I think that one has some potential, but I need to work on my actual argument.

And of course there’s my phantom Ashlee book that I’ve never tried putting together. I have too many thoughts about it, and I can’t prioritize them. Rebecca Black has been more useful in thinking through some of it than Ashlee is, because whenever I return to Ashlee’s album I just want to write a fan book about how great it is.