Persuading an octopus into a glass jar; literature review writing in a PhD

Persuading recalcitant octopi into glass jars could well be a future vocation.

Certainly i have enough practice. I had wrongly it seems considered my lit review section an an extension of my own thinking, it just needed a bit of shaping. I now know it as a thing that writhes, seemingly with a mind of its own. Seems my having will is not enough to constrain it, it needs to want to go.

Wish it would stop sucking to me, I'm sick of its tenacious clingyness and want it to let go.

The gem with which I have titled this blog comes from Kamler and Thomson (2006) in their text Helping Doctoral Students Write.

How to write to lead a reader in the directions I want...
Involves making it palatable- plain white bread loses its appeal...sprinkling it with glitter doesnt make it taste any better.

Is gritty better than bland? Mmmm masterchef question...

And I get through the tough patch for another day with a little help from Bruno Latour: I put myself at the top of the arc of that excitement.
And then i can tell a story that doesnt want to choke me, let alone the reader.

This links in well with reading some John Seely Brown on the power of pull.
Heres a pdf from a keynote http://web.nmc.org/files/2010-summer-conference/jsb-keynote.pdf, good slides on the difference between Cartesian learning and social learning (again, I nod my head to Latour, Networked learning)
Another good slide: Change the music and you change the film.
What we see, how we see it...all networked...
...its back to Turtles all the way down.