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Any recent books you recommend? I'm leaning into non-fiction lately mostly because of the declarative style (Empire of Pain was especially good in this regard, and read like a real-life version of the Godfather on account of the facts alone), but I'm down always for any new well-written novels.
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# ? Jan 24, 2022 00:41 |
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# ? May 5, 2024 04:21 |
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Eason the Fifth posted:Any recent books you recommend? I'm leaning into non-fiction lately mostly because of the declarative style (Empire of Pain was especially good in this regard, and read like a real-life version of the Godfather on account of the facts alone), but I'm down always for any new well-written novels. I haven't landed much non-fiction, but I'm just running into a Contemporary Fiction course this Spring. It focuses on Haunted House stories and I've read some good ones: First, Carmen Marie Machado's Her Body and Other Parties is a good but uneven collection of short stories where one -- an almost-a-novella called "The Resident" -- really stands out. I can also dig on Silvia Moreno-Garcia's Mexican Gothic and Alma Katsu's The Deep. I want to say those are all out in the last two years. I also really wanted to like Helen Oyeyemi's White is for Witching -- it falls into the "I know it's solid but I just can't get into it" bucket. It reads like a rough draft of something really good. Like the kind of book where the Netflix miniseries could be better than the read. And I read Robert Marasco's Burnt Offerings, finally. I think the line on Offerings is that it's where Stephen King got his best ideas for The Shining. That holds up in the specific sense that Offerings is one good thing after another, but reading it after The Shining kinda spoilers things. King stuck so close to Marasco's story. I'm not going to say that King did it better but he sure as hell didn't do it any worse. Apart from that: Station Eleven and Midnight Library are also both worthy reads. Not great but good -- what I'll call "well crafted" since each story hits its beats in ways that are both predictable and satisfying. On the flipside, Station Eleven could be, like, a kind of sprawling, multi-perspective epic and a really good one, but feels like it pulls the eject seat at the first possible opportunity. Midnight Library almost overstays its welcome, and if what I'll call the second act had gone on any longer I might have put it down. But I didn't, so there you are. Last: Joe Abercrombie just delivered his last book in the Age of Madness trilogy, which is the first thing I've liked from him since he finished First Law. If you liked Law, Madness is just as good; a lot of the same without feeling derivative. Brainworm fucked around with this message at 23:43 on Jan 30, 2022 |
# ? Jan 30, 2022 23:38 |
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Brainworm posted:I haven't landed much non-fiction, but I'm just running into a Contemporary Fiction course this Spring. It focuses on Haunted House stories and I've read some good ones: Do you use the same method reading for fun as you do texts to prepare for a course? Speed reading, and reading it multiple times?
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# ? Jan 30, 2022 23:49 |
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Fuschia tude posted:Do you use the same method reading for fun as you do texts to prepare for a course? Speed reading, and reading it multiple times? I do not. When I get to split the difference (like I did with these books), I got a nice, leisurely read the first time through. Then when I'm preparing to teach (like I was last week) I'll blast through them a few times to remind myself where everything is. Especially for plotted novels, the repeat-skim method is kinda joyless. There is one exception: I subscribe to Fantasy and Science Fiction and a handful of other short story markets. When I read those, I'll sometimes check the first paragraph of each story to see what's interesting. I almost never read each issue in its entirety. That's not a ding on the quality of a good short story market -- just that there's some amount of stuff that falls under "good, but not for me."
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# ? Feb 1, 2022 15:14 |
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Brainworm posted:Great suggestions Thank you! Looks like Burnt Offerings is next on my list. I forgot to mention in my earlier post, but "One Monday We Killed Them All" was a great recommendation. MacDonald's style in that book was a pleasure.
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# ? Feb 1, 2022 17:56 |
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Eason the Fifth posted:Thank you! Looks like Burnt Offerings is next on my list. I forgot to mention in my earlier post, but "One Monday We Killed Them All" was a great recommendation. MacDonald's style in that book was a pleasure. Yeah, that passage about the town dying just a little slower than the country around it was a joy. I would slog through a hundred pages of anything after a hit like that.
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# ? Feb 3, 2022 01:28 |
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Any tips on how to get out of the literature phd racket if I no longer want to be a professor? Where (if you know) did your colleagues who didn't get tt jobs wind up?
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# ? Feb 3, 2022 14:10 |
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Happy Sisyphus posted:Any tips on how to get out of the literature phd racket if I no longer want to be a professor? Where (if you know) did your colleagues who didn't get tt jobs wind up? I think the first piece of advice is to avoid asking some version of the degree question: "What do I do with a PhD in English/Equine Studies/&c?" It's a loser question for any PhD program that's really a five-year vo-tech program for the professoriate. That's most English PhD programs, which are basically teaching and research apprenticeships. A better question is "what can I do with the specific skills and experiences I've picked up during graduate school?" Just for instance, I ran the Writing Center and (later) the FY writing program when I was a graduate student. I did hiring and firing, process and project management, and worked with a real budget. A friend of mine -- I'll call him West -- had a similar set of responsibilities w/r/t a University Press. That said, West is now an in-house librarian for a big law firm in Georgia. But both of West's former co-press-managers are senior editors (one at Scholastic and the other at Grove). Those careers were built on the fellowships they used to pay for graduate school, not on the degree program proper. Another grad school acquaintance of mine manages a tourist cave (i.e. a cave that you pay admission to tour, camp, spelunk, and occasionally go missing in). Another is in stasis as a traveling adjunct with a pretty successful house painting business (this was the position he was in before he started graduate school). For them, graduate school was more like a standalone experience than a bid to enter academia. More broadly -- outside my fellow travelers from graduate school -- the Big Deal is teaching at private boarding schools. We're talking about the heavy-hitters outside major metro areas, with international populations and endowments and students who drive Land Rovers or better. If you like teaching but don't like College Academia, those jobs are no joke. My kid sister (who's a ceramicist/sculptor) went on that market a couple years ago and got hired in at $93K plus a college house and all the boarding school dog chow her family can stand. That's not a one-off. The offers I've seen in my division are in the 80s and 90s. Keep in mind: someone with a lower offer wouldn't show it to me. But they're out there, and common enough that even some of our hires who probably won't pass their two-year review can get them. The second-biggest non-professor space is Academic Administration, especially at R1s. I'm not talking about Deanships as much as I am about director positions at Teaching and Learning Centers, Advising Centers, and so on. These are 9-5 jobs in the main, and the people I know who have them like them. Most of those people have PhDs and at least some teaching experience. The local R1 just hired away a couple of our Associate Profs in Lang & Lit to run their off-campus study programs, which describes a pretty common career pathway. IDK if that's helpful. If you're interested in boarding school jobs, I think my advice is to choose a region and sign on with an agency that serves it. That's where the bulk of the offers I see are coming from.
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# ? Feb 10, 2022 00:55 |
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Thanks for the response and the advice. I've since made some headway--actively doing applications now because I'm hoping to bail on my program before next fall.
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# ? Apr 1, 2022 01:36 |
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Sorry to just drop a lengthy essay and ask for your opinion on it, but what do you think about the argument below? I'm almost a decade out of grad school and only have minimal experience with rhet/comp and writing studies, but I seem to remember a lot of these issues being present in the departments at the time, and I can't imagine they've gotten any better. quote:Pity Writing Studies, the Field That Hates Itself Eason the Fifth fucked around with this message at 19:01 on May 16, 2022 |
# ? May 16, 2022 14:57 |
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Eason the Fifth posted:Sorry to just drop a lengthy essay and ask for your opinion on it, but what do you think about the argument below? I'm almost a decade out of grad school and only have minimal experience with rhet/comp and writing studies, but I seem to remember a lot of these issues being present in the departments at the time, and I can't imagine they've gotten any better. So first: I like the argument, but I also don't know that I have the breadth of experience it takes to sanity check it. That said, it rings true. Twenty years ago, Rhetoric and Composition was still seen as a dynamic and vigorous field. When I did my graduate work it was all about looking back on the then-recent Bartholomae/Elbow debates and looking at the evolution of Writing Centers. And then the whole field just seemed to fold up. It doesn't seem too off-base to claim that R&C repeated the mistakes of Eng. Lit. and so I don't know that I need a whole lot of evidence to be convinced, right? I was also always puzzled that R/C fell under (or adjacent to) Lit programs or in academic Humanities divisions more generally. The more natural fit would have been as a track or specialization in Ed.D programs -- that's really where (a) there's theory of teaching and (b) there's some experience supervising quantitative (statistical) research among graduate students. And in practice, you'd see tight coordination between R/C in e.g. first-year Seminars and Ed.D informed retention and success strategies. Anyway. Where are you thinking this piece would land? That changes your revision strategies a bit.
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# ? May 26, 2022 19:14 |
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Haha sorry, I didn't mean to imply it was mine. The author is Fredrik deBoer. I found that the essay was able to articulate things I'd felt back in grad school but hadn't given much thought to besides just, you know, feeling a generalized grad student resentment. Mostly I was looking to see if what I remembered/what the essay argued was a fair or unfair point from someone (you) who has insight and present experience into this corner of academia. Thanks for the reply!
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# ? May 26, 2022 19:35 |
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What is the "point" of Snow White in terms of literary value or child development or pedagogy?
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# ? Jun 7, 2022 20:41 |
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Brainworm posted:On the flipside, Station Eleven could be, like, a kind of sprawling, multi-perspective epic and a really good one, but feels like it pulls the eject seat at the first possible opportunity. i'm curious what you think of her latest novel, if you've read it. it's a sort of weird metafictional spinoff of Station Eleven that is partly about pandemics and time travel and takes place in multiple periods, but its also very clearly her processing the whole experience of being the author of a popular novel about a pandemic during a pandemic. it also includes some characters/elements from The Glass Hotel so in a way it is sort of evolving into a multi-perspective epic though in a very different way
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# ? Jun 8, 2022 16:31 |
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Not sure if this is up your alley or not, but here's the question: Hypothetically, if you could travel back in time, but you were only fluent in modern English, how far back could you go and still be able to understand and communicate with people?
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# ? Jun 9, 2022 00:19 |
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The Zombie Guy posted:Not sure if this is up your alley or not, but here's the question: Hypothetically, it depends on how much effort you want to put in. The most recent linguistic change that would affect your answer is the Great Vowel Shift which, roughly speaking, separates Chaucer's (Middle) English from Shakespeare's (Modern) English. The linguist who's spent the most time working out how Shakespeare's English was originally pronounced is David Crystal, and David's son Ben has made a career out of producing Shakespeare's plays in what both David and Ben call "Original Pronunciation" or "OP". OP Shakespeare kinda sounds like Thom Yorke's been drinking cough syrup, or maybe like an Australian doing a bad Scottish accent. You can see a video of Ben Doing an OP "To Be or Not To Be" here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYiYd9RcK5M So I think if you travelled back to Shakespeare's London, you'd probably have more trouble figuring out how to live without toilet paper than you'd have understanding what other people were saying. You're in about 1600, and on more-or-less the right side of the Great Vowel Shift. Middle English -- or pre GVS English -- sounds pretty different. Here are the first few lines of the Canterbury Tales: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVG77xTPH6E Understanding Middle English is a bigger ask. Chaucer wrote about 200 years before Shakespeare, and I think it's safe to say that English changed more in those two hundred years than it has in the five hundred since. That said, Middle English is actually pretty easy to understand. Ezra Pound wrote that "anyone who is too lazy to master the comparatively small glossary necessary to understand Chaucer deserves to be shut out from the reading of good books for ever." Pound was also a fascist but on at least one point -- that a clever reader can learn Middle English in an afternoon -- he's basically right. So if you wanted to see Chaucer beat a friar (or see what went down between him and Cecily Chaumpaigne), you'd want to arrive on the scene at least a couple days ahead of time. Great Vowel Shift aside, the next earlier version of English is Anglo-Saxon a.k.a. Old English a.k.a. English 1.0. It started in or around the 5th century and ran until 1066, when the Norman conquest mixed enough Old French (really Anglo-Norman) into Old English (a grab bag of Germanic dialects) to eventually render Middle English. Here's an example of Old English straight out of Beowulf: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CH-_GwoO4xI You're not getting that in an afternoon, or even a week. So I think the answer to your question goes something like this: 1) Zero effort: You can go back to sometime between 1400 and 1600. It's English but it sounds funny. 2) A little effort: You can go back to sometime between 1066 and 1400 -- probably at the later end of that range, since the Norman conquest didn't just suddenly displace Old English. It's English grammar with a whole lot of new words and everything's gonna sound funny, but you'll catch on before you really, really need to poop. 3) Not a chance: 1066 and earlier. You're basically starting a language from scratch.
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# ? Jun 9, 2022 21:44 |
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Very informative, thank you for the answer!
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# ? Jun 9, 2022 22:51 |
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Baron Porkface posted:What is the "point" of Snow White in terms of literary value or child development or pedagogy? I don't know. I'm not being flip when I say that guessing the "point" of something like Snow White -- whichever text you're referring to -- means plumbing authorial intent. And when it comes to Snow White, which was at least one folktale before some version of it was set in print by the Brothers Grimm, it's nigh impossible to pin down the author(s), let alone what they might have wanted to accomplish. But teaching Snow White is a different thing. I think I'd point to Snow White as an example of pre-Shakespearean storytelling and especially as a pre-Shakespearean character. As far as I can tell, Snow White (the character) doesn't have any flaws (ways of thinking or acting that hurt herself or other people). Yes, she's gullible. Like, after some rando shows up with a magic bodice (that suffocates her) and a poisoned comb (that puts her in a coma), she's still credulous enough to take poisoned apples from strangers. But I want to say that the moral vision of Snow White never calls this out as a fault. (Sort of like how the Harry Potter book never call out Harry for not braining Draco Malfoy on day one -- the moral vision is something like "use violence when it's unavoidable," not "use violence preemptively.") And so Snow White -- or at least the versions I know -- aren't character-driven stories in the sense that we'd expect from a Shakespearean or post-Shakespearean text. There's no moment of revelation where SW is like "wait a minute. I've got to set some boundaries," and then struggles to distance herself from a toxic ex. You've also got to stretch to find SW's motivation. In a Shakespearean story (and in a lot of post-Shakespearean ones), characters want to be seen a certain way. That's what drives their actions from the beginning of their story to the end. You might make a case that Snow White wants to be seen as innocent, and I guess she is, but that's not really interesting. And it's not really there. From what I remember, SW doesn't have to strategize in order to appear innocent or beautiful. She just is. I think for modern readers, SW's stepmother (the witch queen who'll kill to be the hottest babe in the kingdom) is a lot more interesting. She's got everything you'd want from a Shakespearean (or post-Shakespearean) character: a desire to be seen a certain way, and habits of thinking and acting that hurt herself or other people. That said, she's less interesting because there's no risk of her ever changing her behavior. You'd have to add that element in if you were going Gregory Maguire her (i.e. rewrite the story from her perspective -- assuming that GM hasn't already done it).
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# ? Jun 10, 2022 13:54 |
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Earwicker posted:i'm curious what you think of her latest novel, if you've read it. it's a sort of weird metafictional spinoff of Station Eleven that is partly about pandemics and time travel and takes place in multiple periods, but its also very clearly her processing the whole experience of being the author of a popular novel about a pandemic during a pandemic. it also includes some characters/elements from The Glass Hotel so in a way it is sort of evolving into a multi-perspective epic though in a very different way It's on my list but I keep putting it off, mostly because I'm afraid it's going to be an exercise in self-indulgence from a writer who can really do better.
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# ? Jun 10, 2022 13:57 |
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The witch seems like she's been elevated to a more prominent spot in pop culture in recent years -- I haven't seen them, but there are entire plays and I believe a TV show specifically to develop her, aren't there?
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# ? Jun 10, 2022 16:39 |
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Heath posted:The witch seems like she's been elevated to a more prominent spot in pop culture in recent years -- I haven't seen them, but there are entire plays and I believe a TV show specifically to develop her, aren't there? I was checking this out and found IMDb's page of Snow White movies. What a wild ride. quote:Grimm's Snow White (2012 Video) quote:Snow White: A Deadly Summer (2012) quote:Snow White and the Three Stooges (1961) quote:Snow White: The Fairest of Them All (2001 TV Movie) quote:Schneeweißrosenrot (1991) No surprises on that last one I guess.
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# ? Jun 11, 2022 01:10 |
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Also: I've just signed my employment letter and am now officially a Dean (along with being chair of our English department and the Honors Program). So if you're curious about what it's like to be an administrator in Higher Ed,. ask away.
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# ? Jun 12, 2022 00:55 |
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Brainworm posted:Also: I've just signed my employment letter and am now officially a Dean (along with being chair of our English department and the Honors Program). So if you're curious about what it's like to be an administrator in Higher Ed,. ask away. Do you worry about friends asking for favours, and trying to take advantage of your position? Follow up; you seem like a cool and interesting Goon, so how would you feel about providing an awesome quote that I can put on the cover of the novel I'm writing?
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# ? Jun 12, 2022 01:57 |
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Brainworm posted:Also: I've just signed my employment letter and am now officially a Dean Also, this is your life now:
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# ? Jun 12, 2022 08:20 |
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The Zombie Guy posted:Do you worry about friends asking for favours, and trying to take advantage of your position? I don't worry about it. My friends know me better than that. It helps that one of my best friends -- the best man at my wedding back when -- is now the President of our Board of Trustees. We've been working around that for maybe ten years and know how to steer a conversation clear of hairy topics. For my Faculty friends it's a little easier. The decisions I'm involved in are more structured and predictable. You can save yourself a lot of time by making rubrics for things like hiring, compensation, and so on, and then running them through your campus processes to make sure they're as equitable as the limitations of real life allow. Like, people aren't always going to like your decisions or even agree with them, but a focus on consultation and process will help everyone respect them. The Zombie Guy posted:Follow up; you seem like a cool and interesting Goon, so how would you feel about providing an awesome quote that I can put on the cover of the novel I'm writing? Glad to. Can (should) I read it first?
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# ? Jun 12, 2022 13:44 |
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Brainworm posted:
Yeah, I just have to write it first. *glances at single scrap of paper with "Reboot + Sliders?" written on it* It's coming along nicely.
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# ? Jun 14, 2022 21:28 |
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The Zombie Guy posted:Yeah, I just have to write it first. I'm getting ready to start on one, too. IDK if anyone's interested in a writing accountability group (peer pressuring each other into making a weekly page count) but we might be able to make that work.
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# ? Jun 16, 2022 20:09 |
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Hi! I have read this thread all the way through and find the whole thing absolutely fascinating. I also have many unfinished novels (Nanowrimo veteran since 2004), and I find that idea intriguing.
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# ? Jun 20, 2022 23:38 |
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Re: Snow White I feel like the fairytales overall don’t tend to have a whole lot of well written characters. However, I wonder if that’s just because the written version of those stories is like a stripped down version versus what you’d have actually told your kids when those stories were circulating in the first place. Hear me out. You know how if you get a recipe from Apicius or Form of Curry or something, the instructions are vague, and the measurements are rarely mentioned, because “everyone knows” that you add salt to the thing. In the same way, could it be that the written stories were like a very “the five W’s of reporting” type frame works? I know that when I was a kid, the stories my dad or other older relatives would tell me to entertain me had way more fleshed out … everything versus what they looked like when I saw the written version. Mind you, I’d be reading the translations, because my Sanskrit reading is barely passable, and I speak none of it. Even the Tamil stories are almost impossible to read in the original, because the dialect they’re using is way way old. Maybe part of it is that you lose something in translation, but I suspect that the people telling those stories aloud really did add a fair bit of spice to it.
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# ? Jul 13, 2022 13:36 |
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Just wanted to pop into the thread and say thanks. I came across a link a while back from another forum (can’t remember why) and saw your book “Shakespeare‘s Storytelling” being mentioned. I didn’t care for Shakespeare until I took a class on it in University and fell in love with the stories. I got my first job after finishing my education degree and will be teaching High School English and have to teach Shakespeare. I did it during a practicum but felt I could do better on trying to key into the students why the stories are so great and how they can see it in modern stories. The book has been instrumental at getting a better understanding at how to integrate that. I haven’t finished it (only on page 64 after two reading periods) but it’s already been a great help. It’s also just been a fascinating read from a personal perspective. Great job, I’m glad I picked it up.
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# ? Jul 17, 2022 21:23 |
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PurpleButterfly posted:Hi! I have read this thread all the way through and find the whole thing absolutely fascinating. I also have many unfinished novels (Nanowrimo veteran since 2004), and I find that idea intriguing. Those kinds of groups really do work. At least my experience is that they work. I think I've found that you've got about three months to get through a manuscript. After that, the enthusiasm fades and you (I) end up dropping the project.
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# ? Jul 21, 2022 01:16 |
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dino. posted:Re: Snow White Could be. I think what counts as spice varies from time to time and form culture to culture. And it varies even now. Like, I have some close friends -- mainly professional computer touchers -- who look for technical world-building elements in a story. Like, what matters most in my friend Mark's fantasy reading is that the system of magic, whatever it is, is both consistent and described in a level of detail that makes an assessment of its consistency possible. I think the point is that we're at a cultural moment -- one that's lasted maybe 400 years -- where we've been chiefly interested in stories where characters undergo some process of self-discovery and change. That said, journeys of self-discovery and change didn't just spontaneously appear in our storytelling 400 years ago. They just acquired a new kind of prominence. And some kinds of characters -- characters who are principally acted on by external forces, for instance -- stopped being as interesting as they once were. Our focus kinda changed. We focus on the character, while storytellers at earlier moments focus on the worlds in which those characters live. But that's not an on and off kind of thing. My friend Mark is one of many readers who's at least as interested in worlds as he is in character. And so, yeah. There could have been a teller of Snow White who was intensely focused on that character's internal psychological journey -- same way that the story of Absalom is kinda like King David learning to take responsibility (i.e. David gives his army orders, but doesn't stick around to see them followed, and his son Absalom -- who is objectively a dipshit -- dies as a result). Anyway. The ways that earlier storytellers would strip down a story aren't the way we would strip it down. We generally focus on what characters want and how they try to get it, and focus even further on the ways that the characters ways of thinking and acting keep them from getting what they want. Earlier storytellers strip a story down to different elements, e.g. "and that's why things are the way they are now," or "and that's why you don't take apples from old ladies."
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# ? Jul 21, 2022 02:27 |
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The Black Stones posted:Just wanted to pop into the thread and say thanks. I came across a link a while back from another forum (can’t remember why) and saw your book “Shakespeare‘s Storytelling” being mentioned. I didn’t care for Shakespeare until I took a class on it in University and fell in love with the stories. I got my first job after finishing my education degree and will be teaching High School English and have to teach Shakespeare. I did it during a practicum but felt I could do better on trying to key into the students why the stories are so great and how they can see it in modern stories. The book has been instrumental at getting a better understanding at how to integrate that. I haven’t finished it (only on page 64 after two reading periods) but it’s already been a great help. It’s also just been a fascinating read from a personal perspective. Great job, I’m glad I picked it up. Thanks! I'm glad it's working for you. Just depending on how you want to use it, I've got assignments etc. that I can send your way.
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# ? Jul 21, 2022 02:54 |
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Yeah. I’d be interested in checking it out at the very least. Do you have DM’s? I can send you my e-mail or something.
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# ? Jul 25, 2022 01:16 |
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Brainworm posted:Those kinds of groups really do work. At least my experience is that they work. I think I've found that you've got about three months to get through a manuscript. After that, the enthusiasm fades and you (I) end up dropping the project. I feel this. I did a ton of world building and have been pen pal'ing ideas with my Dad over the past year, but only have achieved one chapter worth anything. On another note, did your recent book give you a good start for going up for Full Professor? I have 2 years until I'm able to go up for Full Librarian, and I'm just looking at how much I can realistically publish before then that's worth enough to my peers/external reviewers.
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# ? Jul 28, 2022 07:36 |
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The Black Stones posted:Yeah. I’d be interested in checking it out at the very least. Do you have DM’s? I can send you my e-mail or something. Yeah, I've got DMs. Go hog wild.
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# ? Jul 28, 2022 13:40 |
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Abyss posted:On another note, did your recent book give you a good start for going up for Full Professor? I have 2 years until I'm able to go up for Full Librarian, and I'm just looking at how much I can realistically publish before then that's worth enough to my peers/external reviewers. It sure didn't hurt. I already had two books out, and I'm at a teaching college rather than an R1, so FP should have been a layup either way. If you're thinking timeline, having a book under contract is just about as good as having one in print, and it's much quicker. I spent about a year banging Storytelling around as a set of notes for an undergraduate Shakespeare class before I realized it would actually make a book. Once I was there, it only took about two weeks to get it under contract. I sent it to Palgrave, they said yes. Natch. But it took nearly two years (Jan '19-Feb '21) to go from contract to publication. Granted, covid happened in the interim, but two years is about the standard. A university press is likely to take even longer. And even for articles, turnaround time from acceptance to publication can be like 18 months. So if you've got two years, you're probably not going to see anything published before your portfolio is due unless you're unnaturally lucky. But you've got plenty of time to develop a book proposal and get it under contract, and plenty of time to get an article or two accepted. Definitely do not wait until your poo poo gets published before you go up for Full.
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# ? Jul 28, 2022 14:08 |
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Nice, congrats. Yea, I'm looking at mostly journal publications at this point. Thankfully, my graphic novel scholarship (shameless book link) is helping me out post-tenure more than my library scholarship, but since I argued for it in my tenure portfolio it's relevant to me now. Our guidelines are pretty specific, so as long as I can hit the number of publications I should be good to go. It's just convincing the rest of the Full Librarians/Archivists that I'm worthy enough for the promotion, which still feels like a popularity contest at this point. On another note, as a Dean, do you prefer that faculty come directly to you for an issue or a proposal of a new idea, or would you rather have it filtered up through supervisors/assoc deans first?
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# ? Jul 28, 2022 18:10 |
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Abyss posted:[...]Our guidelines are pretty specific, so as long as I can hit the number of publications I should be good to go. It's just convincing the rest of the Full Librarians/Archivists that I'm worthy enough for the promotion, which still feels like a popularity contest at this point. It can definitely be that, although popularity usually comes across in the, like, degree of enthusiasm expressed in the promotion minute. If you're lucky enough to have concrete, specific criteria for promotion you're in a good place. quote:On another note, as a Dean, do you prefer that faculty come directly to you for an issue or a proposal of a new idea, or would you rather have it filtered up through supervisors/assoc deans first? An open door policy can play merry hell with department politics. Your best rule as a boss in a multi-level system (as e.g. a dean or a division chair) is that anybody can come to you with an idea or an issue, as long as you're not the first person they come to about it. First: issues and complaints need to follow a process. That usually means that a complainant's first stop is a department chair or HR. That's important because you want to separate some kinds of responsibility (e.g. payscale decisions) from random exposure to unverified (and potentially prejudicial) information. I don't want to hear that Alice has accused Bob of sexual harassment. I want to hear about those and similar issues only when some investigative process has reached its conclusion. Second: A lot of people who work at Colleges are both smart and observant. Your Faculty are usually smart but blinkered. They'll have specific kinds of good ideas. Housekeeping, IT, Security, and Facilities, though -- they're the ones who are going to tell you how to turn your 22-seat lab into a 25, which offices the Physics department is just pretending to use, or that you should be renting your floral arrangements instead of buying them. I can't stress this enough: Facilities attracts people who are often very, very good at optimization, process improvement, and thinking through problems. If you're not talking to them you'll miss a lot. Anyway. You want to take ideas, but you don't want to be the first person someone takes an idea to. So if you're going to have an open door for ideas, ask people to come in pairs or teams. That way, everybody who has an idea has had it (a) sanity checked and (b) had to explain the idea to at least one other human being.
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# ? Jul 29, 2022 02:36 |
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# ? May 5, 2024 04:21 |
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Sent you a DM
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# ? Aug 1, 2022 21:11 |