The term “academic writing” is controversial, not least because it implies that academics have an odd and persnickety way of writing. In a blog post for The New Yorker, Joshua Rothman examines the genre, looking back on his time in grad school to argue that academic writing is a “fraught and mysterious thing.”
Neomysterativity
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Behind the Shower Curtain
"Psycho glories in narrative fractures and perverse behavior; it subverts the expectations of an audience already habituated to Hitchcockian suspense by pushing even further, masterfully administering a dose of sheer shock. Hitchcock, on the other hand, struggles to arouse even suspense." How to watch a film about the master of film.
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“It is the last hour of the city watch.”
In an act of grand generosity, Ilya Bernstein has made his translation of Osip Mandelstam’s poetry available for free via Google Books. (h/t Keith Gessen)
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My Life You’re Writing
"Blackness in the white imagination has nothing to do with black people." Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen: An American Lyric, is interviewed over at The Guardian on everything from Serena Williams to her emotionally volatile book signings to the inescapability of racism.
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Amazon’s Top Book Lists
Amazon has churned out a number of top books lists this year. We've already mentioned the Editors' Top 100 Books, but there's also the Customers' Top 100 Books, the Top 10 Literature and Fiction, the Top 10 Cookbooks, and the Top 10 Science Books.
Card Collection
Now that the Library of Congress is shut down, it’s as good a time as any to remember why we have it in the first place. At Brain Pickings, Maria Popova looks through a collection of vintage catalog cards, two of which include early entries for A Room of One’s Own and Ulysses.
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To the Arthouse
Back in 2008, Patti Smith kicked off an exhibition with a reading of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. It may not surprise you to learn that the punk legend, after getting through one sentence, broke into “free improvisation.”
Looking forward to reading this article to explore what seems a foreign land to me. I don’t have any personal experience with it, but from the stories I’ve heard about dissertations, to me it sounds nightmarish, especially the preliminary requirements of making sure you’ve read EVERYTHING ever written about your topic (e.g., Jane Austen’s elbow). I would fear a perpetual distraction that would lead me from Jane Austen’s elbow, to her lace sleeve, to a lace factory in Milan, to the current state of competition of Italian lace makers with China, to Chinese characters, thus to the art store to buy some new brushes and paint.
Thus goes the life of those who float along like tumbleweeds. Our ilk is best suited to (short) poetry as we lack the stern focus and iron spine of the academics. :)
Moe Murph
First Job Out Of School Working In Harvard School of Architecture Mailroom With 10th-Year PhD. in Irish Medieval Studies
Can’t resist. the 10th Year PhD in above message was a towering, broad woman with a shock of long, bright-read hair. She wore a purple cape, pinned with a Celtic medal pin that floated behind her as she strode the Yard to the architecture school.
She was in pitched battles with the Medieval Studies Department (who wanted her out if her paper wasn’t in that year), with her Advisor, and with the Administrator for the architecture school, where she ran the mailroom. She was a great pitcher of battles.
I don’t remember what she was writing about, could have been cloud patterns in Ulster or something, but I expected the difficulty may have been that Harvard, the department, and medieval Irish weather all refused to bend to her will. She told a great story about a professor who would stride into department events, sit down, and demand in a Falstaffian voice of the wait staff:
“Brrrriiinnnggggggg Me My Brie!”