Eves and Eyes

YIKES

Holy Moly, do we ever live in one giant-but-not-so-giant-as-you-might-think closed system! Warm and dry thoughts for all of my east coast friends and family. You guys are throwing a great party over there. Yikes.

Istanbul, in a weak show of solidarity, is balmy as can be.

I'd like to wish those of you with a working internet connection a very happy Halloween. May you sustain nary a chiding belly ache.

[Audience looks around] "What just happened?" "There must be some context we're missing."

Tomorrow I'll descend into NaNoWriMo* and may or may not emerge again until December - and I'd rather not be plagued with guilt over this temporary abandonment, so here's an itemized update for:

Graduate Applications (based on the late December/early January humanities deadline):

• At this point, duh, have your list sorted and professors contacted -
• and your writing sample done (or at least have a completed first draft under the eyes of a trusted editor friend).
• If schools want official transcripts, order them. The bureaucracy around these things is such that it can take anywhere from 2 weeks to over a month to sort out and send off. Generally, though, schools will accept unofficial transcripts (you know, the ones that you've invalidated through mere contact, protracted or otherwise) as a scanned pdf.
• Ditto GRE (and related) scores, if you failed to maintain the sense of existence in time and space necessary to order them after you completed that three-hour migraine...

In November, we'll be contacting professors about letters of recommendation and sending them updated resumes or recent papers, and writing statements of purpose.


On November's Bookshelf

• Auerbach's Mimesis
• Borges's Collected Fictions
• G. Lewis's translation of the Dede Korkut stories
• Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold and The Autumn of the Patriarch
• Marshall Berman's All That is Solid Melts into Air
• and Julian Barnes' Flaubert's Parrot

So! The house is scary professional clean, the laundry is all done and drying, the fridge is stocked, and that's what's in the stew pot.

Cheerio, friends.



*For those of you who've had trouble donating to their awesome program, this should help. And! in the kickstarter spirit, I'm offering a super awesome postal surprise to the first 5 people who donate 10 USD+. So come support a worthy cause and administer that solid kick in the pants you know you've dying to lay on me ever since I was a little jerk-hole in middle school! WIN.

Birthdays and Beacons

First of all, a great big Happy 60th Birthday to my father, kicking off Birthday Season in grand tradition. Diamond Jubilee got nuthin' on us!

And to celebrate both my father's retirement and the long-awaited end of the Spring semester, I want to share our summer anthem, courtesy of They Might Be Giants. Fair warning: it does actually get stuck in your head a bit.

Now let's see: I promised some beacons of excellence in academic writing, didn't I? Let it never be said that I don't deliver the goods! But no suggestions from you all? My faithful and most delightful readers? Have you really not once read something well-written and enjoyable for a class or research? Sounds like someone ought to go have a little chat with your professors, for this simply will not stand.

Well, I suppose that means you'll be all the more pleased with me for rounding these up for you.

In no particular order:

• Douglas Robinson, on translation practice and theory. His work can mostly be found on his academia.edu profile. Bless him and whoever taught him how to share.
• Donna Haraway, on feminist theory and the history of science. You can download a PDF of her article "Situated Knowledges" here.
• Borges, though perhaps better known for his fiction, nevertheless is an excellent writer of non-fiction. His 'Selected Non-Fiction' used to be available on library.nu (sadly shut down), but perhaps the more industrious of you have found an alternative. Any news on the book-sharing front would be much appreciated.
• Anne Fadiman, while not strictly an "academic writer," is the reigning queen of creative non-fiction. Her personal essays are clear, engaging, beautifully written, and incredibly informative. Makes for a great palate cleanser. You can listen to her reading an excerpt from one of her essays here.

I hope that will hold you for now, and if anyone has anyone to add to our list of Those Deserving of Praise and Admiration, please do share the wealth!

Happy Sunday, y'all.
Tune in next week for some tips and suggestions as we start the search for our perfect graduate program. Who said summer was for beaches? I'll be courting myopia, not melanoma...

If you just can't wait, here is an article by yours truly on how to get and stay in the academic loop (and thereby never miss yet another freaking deadline).

Toodle-oo!

A Handy Mission Statement

 If you have not read George Orwell's essay "Politics and the English Language" I urge you to rectify the situation immediately (links provided below, no frets). Although of course I first absolve you of the oversight. The title is a bit misleading, allowing people who write in academia (and therefore, theoretically, not in politics) to think its wisdom and chastisement don't apply to them.

For our purposes, the essay might be more aptly titled "How to Communicate Complicated Thoughts Clearly and Effectively, and the Importance Of Doing So." 

The problems Orwell spots in political writing can and does apply to all academic fields: 

The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose...

That machete-sword thing he's unsheathing over there is for brutally killing, and thereby ending the writing careers, of anyone who persists in either laziness or incompetence. Death to he who uses language as an instrument for concealing or preventing thought. Grrr. Arg.

The Mad Hatter is an excellent specimen of literary delight, but heaven help you if you've been channeling him in your academic writing.

You can find the full text of Orwell's essay here, as beautifully formatted as it is on paper. I have no words for Mt. Holyoke's comparatively unreadable version, but you're welcome to click and gawp if you need a quick fix. By this weekend I'll have corralled a respectable collection of rigorous and aesthetically pleasing academic writing which I believe is working to reverse the process of general decline. If you've read anything that you think fits that general description, please leave a message after the beep.

The Sincerest Form of Flattery

Friends, I would like to share a peeve with you. A peeve of the petly variety, and one I believe many of you share.

Bad Writing.

Bad writing can be found everywhere, and is mostly avoidable. Come across a badly written blog? Don't read it. Or hate-read it, if your grammar sirens aren't paralyzing. A badly written novel stays on the shelf. Badly written poetry goes out of print.

Badly written academic work, tragically, is often unavoidable. It's on the syllabus, or it's related to your research. Or maybe it was written by someone in a department to which you'd like to apply, and like any diligent potential applicant you want to acquaint yourself with the work of potential advisors and colleagues.

Torture, as we of the Gitmo generation know, is illegal. And mean. And really just not all that effective. Which I suppose makes the vast majority of academic writing in violation of the Geneva Convention. Come on guys!

Academics, by all accounts, have to read a lot. And reading a lot, it's widely believed, is crucial to writing well. But the vast majority of the academic papers and books I've read during the course of my academic career have been convoluted wormholes of headache-inducing ineffective communication. And I don't just mean the professors suffering from Publish or Perish fever who don't edit their work and frankly don't give two figs about the suffering of their potential future readers. I mean Big Names. Like Spivak and Butler. Even poor Derrida is completely misread, and while I'll allow that some of that is laziness on the part of researchers who would rather read a paper about his writing than his writing itself - but only some of that recalcitrance is laziness. Some of it can probably be attributed to the sheer overwhelming volume of work, and the incredibly low bar set by so very much of it.

Where did we go wrong?

Well, I won't go into that. But I will go ahead and give you the silver lining (which I feel I should tell you is pretty glorious): having identified a problem, we have ourselves a cause! Even the most crowded of fields have wide swathes of unreadable research, and if you have the stamina and super-human decoding power necessary to synthesize and reformulate, you can raise that bar.

Stay tuned. The next installment will highlight the rare gem that is quality academic writing. Please, if you've stumbled across any particularly excellent writers in academe, do share. As many ways as it can all go wrong, there must be as many ways for it to be done right.

And in the Batter's Cage...

We have Emily Apter's "Translation Zone."

From Princeton University Press:

Translation, before 9/11, was deemed primarily an instrument of international relations, business, education, and culture. Today it seems, more than ever, a matter of war and peace. In The Translation Zone, Emily Apter argues that the field of translation studies, habitually confined to a framework of linguistic fidelity to an original, is ripe for expansion as the basis for a new comparative literature.

Organized around a series of propositions that range from the idea that nothing is translatable to the idea that everything is translatable, The Translation Zone examines the vital role of translation studies in the "invention" of comparative literature as a discipline. Apter emphasizes "language wars" (including the role of mistranslation in the art of war), linguistic incommensurability in translation studies, the tension between textual and cultural translation, the role of translation in shaping a global literary canon, the resistance to Anglophone dominance, and the impact of translation technologies on the very notion of how translation is defined. The book speaks to a range of disciplines and spans the globe.

Ultimately, The Translation Zone maintains that a new comparative literature must take stock of the political impact of translation technologies on the definition of foreign or symbolic languages in the humanities, while recognizing the complexity of language politics in a world at once more monolingual and more multilingual.

I guess their blurb kind of gives away the punchline, but let's give it a go in any case.  Tally ho!