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.

Election Season is Fast Upon Us!

Fall is great for so many things. Soups, sweaters, gourds, new vacuum cleaners. Doing your civic duty. Celebrating my favorite candy-laced holiday...

One day I'll be celebrating Halloween in a temperate locale, where one's costume choice isn't entirely dictated by the thinness of one's blood. Just you wait and see. Although I've managed alright in the past. Boris was a clever choice, 'cause you get to wear a fedora and a trench coat.

Best Chilly-weather Costume Ever

And who's to say Professor Trelawney doesn't wear great big baggy sweaters and scarves upon scarves upon scarves. (Hey whaddaya know! I spelled her name right...)



What else means Fall? Oh, that's right: (inter)National Novel Writing Month!

Who's in? You may not say it much, but I know how much you miss the fevered, adrenaline-soaked madness of exam week.  Those late nights at the library, the bitter anguish of an evening's work lost - just because your computer weakly refuses to condone your impiously motivated mortification of the flesh? Impious my ass! What better way to justify your existence than to make it miserable? The Pope knows what I'm talking about.

Well, it's Bayram, so Husbee will be home and we're looking forward to a quiet week of finishing writing samples, small flurries of translation, stocking up on coffee, and trying to get ahead of other commitments - 'cause November is going to Rock.

If you're not quite up for reliving a month's worth of that last week of thesis writing, but still want to feel involved and glowey - sponsor me! The money raised goes towards the school programs NaNoWriMo organizes, and of course adds fuel to the fire of shame that'll make sure I finish what I start.

Shame-fire is invisible! But effective!

Oh man. And here all I wanted to do was gloat about having sent in my absentee ballot...

Rock on, civic pride. In case you're not sure which way to vote, you can read my review of 'Why America Needs a Left' here.

Let's hear it for Fall!

Krikes Amighty, What a Summer

I hope everyone had a fabulous summer, completely devoid of melanoma, heat-stroke, and mosquitoes. By those (and other) criteria, mine was a proper blast. Let's hear it for my parents and for all those summer birthdays that make the whole season a veritable parade of cakes!

Ah, but now we're back and that giant calendar I patchworked to the bedroom wall reminds me that December (and its deadlines) is Just Around The Corner. It's cool - I didn't slack off or anything. Finished a promised paper, been doing some reviews, for funsies, and chugging away at the translation of Alanna. And of course, the resettling period is always nice for all those little domestic chores that suddenly present themselves after you've been away. I just now reinforced the hangin' holes in our shower curtain - and yes I did wound myself in the process, thank you. 

Oh no! Alert the authorities! TETANUS!

One last weekend away for a Wagnerian opera at a remarkably well-preserved amphitheater with Husbee's family (and yes, we've got our cushions packed - just like those crazy cushion-toting Ancients) before kicking ourselves back into high gear for the new academic year.

And guys, this is important. Who wants to learn English by hypnosis? 

Happy Fall!

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.