MY LIFE AND THOUGHTS

The other day I was really happy to receive a comment on my post about Kamal, from none other than Bernardo Winson, Ph.D., the editor-in-chief of Immortal Muse publishing!   Winson provided some really useful bibliographic background on the “masses/ ass is” passage, reproduced on the bookmark.  It turns out that the poet Zireaux uses this rhyme, not only with reference to Eminem’s ass in Kamal, but also with reference to J-Lo’s ass in an entirely different work called Res Publica (full stanza here).

Subsequently, my indefatigable web master informed me that my site was getting some incoming links from Bernardo Winson’s blog.  Imagine my feelings when I checked it out and saw there is a whole post about me (w00t!).  So what if it’s mostly about what a superficial person I am? 

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Despite my mixed feelings about music reviews, I encourage you all to read my piece on Vampire Weekend in today’s UK Guardian.

My first step in researching this piece was to enter “Vampire Weekend” on the Guardian search form, and see what had already been published. In this way, I learned that the Guardian had in previous months published several items on the subject in question, including, but not limited to: an audio interview with the members of Vampire Weekend; a print interview with the members of Vampire Weekend; a review of a Vampire Weekend concert at the Hoxton Bar & Grill; and a review of Vampire Weekend, the album by Vampire Weekend.

I was reminded of a certain P. G. Wodehouse story, in which Jeeves extricates Wooster’s friend from a romantic entanglement with an opera singer, by arranging for the opera singer to be the fourth consecutive performer of the song “Sonny Boy” at a “clean, bright entertainment” in the East End. The costermongers are so enraged that they throw potatoes at her, and she breaks off the engagement.

“Just whom are these guys trying to get me not to marry?” I found myself wondering.

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In the continuing story of my beautiful friendship with German literary culture, I am happy and honored to report my participation in the 2008 Krautgarden literary series, comprising two sets of readings by young German and American writers, on March 7 at the “Krautgarden Loft” in Chinatown (New York), and on March 14 at Leipzig’s Baumwollspinnerei, former site of the Continent’s largest cotton mill.

Leipziger Baumwollspinnerei

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Why exactly am I so popular in Germany? I actually wrote about this phenomenon—the literary “big in Japan” effect—in my article about Franco Moretti (forthcoming, as “Abenteuer eines Mannes der Wissenschaft,” in a German-language n+1 anthology by Suhrkamp Verlag).  It sometimes happens that works virtually unknown in their country of production become inexplicably popular, or even canonical, in some other national literature.

In my article, I mentioned the example of Michel Zévaco’s Les Pardaillan: a family saga beloved by many Turkish schoolchildren of my parents’ generation, but completely unknown to any of the French people I asked, and also unknown to the former chair of the Stanford French and Italian department, who is not French but has written a well-received book on Proust.

A while after my article came out, I even received an email in Turkish from a student who was preparing for the TOEFL, and wanted me to help her locate an English translation of volume 2 of Les Pardaillan. (She had already read vol. 1 in Turkish.)  As far as I could determine, there is no English translation.

In short, Michel Zévaco is truly, by near-unamious international standards, a D-list writer, who has somehow made it onto the Turkish B-list; and I feel a certain affinity with him in that, while I remain totally unheard-of in my native USA, I am slowly but surely working my way onto the German literary C-list.  In the continuing saga of the Teutonic demand for my literary services…

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Happy new year, dear readers, whoever you may be! Whatever you seek from 2008—be it

tumultuous recollections,
relief from labors,
live pictures or bons mots
or faults of grammar—

may you find, in this blog, at least a few crumbs!

Some of you may recall that I spent the past seven years getting a Ph.D. in comparative literature. Well, in 2008 I will be putting this degree to use as a Visiting Lecturer at Stanford, where I’m going to teach an “academic writing workshop” for seniors who are writing interdisciplinary honors theses in the humanities. I am very excited at this opportunity to convert my own recent dissertation-writing experiences into beautiful pedagogic theories. “Do as I say, not as I did,” I will tell my students, whom I will be instructing in the use of EndNote.

Do I myself use EndNote? This is a technical question. Many scholars don’t; I remember one professor who renounced it on the grounds that he didn’t want any superstructure mediating his relationship with the text. For me, it was always more about how EndNote costs $250. But now I have scored a free copy from the Interdisciplinary Humanities program (w00t!), so you know, bring it on. (more…)