5.10.2012

A New Season


Welcome to Exultation, friends! The Spring semester is drawing to a close and I'm celebrating the insidious approach of summer - with its promise of sunburn, heat exhaustion, and the otherwise free enjoyment of picnics, margaritas, and blissfully air-conditioned public libraries.

Oh, Ecstasy!

Here's the deal: I am staring - hands clasped in rapture - through June towards nine or ten months of gainful unemployment, with the odd editing project here and there. What shall I do with this glorious abyss, you ask? I thought I might take the time to begin working through a decade's-worth of accumulated books and just generally indulging all the little projects and interests that have been on the back burner - not to mention researching and applying to doctoral programs in Comparative Literature and English (oh the humanities!), and will share my circuitous struggles here for anyone interested. Grand ambitions, I know. So welcome to the chronicle of what I hope will be a delightful and productive period of chipping away at the backlogs. 

Fair warning: I live in Istanbul and share my days with the most marvelous cat, but I promise not to let her take over. Just one picture so you can all coo and we can just get on with it. Her name is Dorian, and she wakes me up around 5 most mornings with little jabs at my nose. It is to her that we can attribute any serious periods of productivity.

Incidentally, I'm starting with "Why Translation Matters" by Edith Grossman and a series of essays on Epistemology - acquired, ye gads, last Christmas and birthday-before-last (respectively) and as yet shamefully unread. If you have any reading suggestions (or want a reading buddy), I'd be happy to take them on.

Other projects currently underway are a translation into Turkish of Tamora Pierce's Alanna, the slow and painful acquisition of basic Arabic (with the ultimate intention of reading Ottoman Turkish), and small academic editing projects to indulge my pedantic side. FUN.



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