#history grad

[astrx-nautical]

I'm in the writing stage of Draft 2 :) Also, my favorite black skirt's elastic is broken and I'm in the market for a new one

[mearcatsreturns]

I have a bookstagram, and I recently followed someone because they posted about the overconsumption issue that most bookish social media seems to have. Today, though, they posted another controversial "opinion": that listening to audiobooks isn't reading, and people who claim to have read a bunch of books that they listened to as audiobooks are lying and/or deluded. Listening to audiobooks, she said, is just consuming books.

I disagreed in a fairly politely worded reply, and I intend to unfollow/block, because I find it unlikely this person will change their mind, especially since I'm far from the only person to point out that this is exclusionary and ableist. But this is tumblr/my house, and now I'm going to be as blunt as I want to be.

I'm a librarian and archivist. So much of the work I and others in my field do focuses on making books and reading more accessible and less exclusionary. It is, in fact, incredibly ableist to negate how important audiobooks are for people who have certain disabilities or challenges, and I would in no universe say they aren’t reading. For that matter, a busy person who only has time for audiobooks and for people who just prefer them--it still counts, as far as I'm concerned.

See, there's a difference between an audiobook and a podcast or long song or radio program. An audiobook is still a book--it was written with a particular narrative structure, and the author plays a defined but limited role (once the book is written, it's written; the author isn't tuning in next episode with comments and corrections based on what listeners said). An audiobook is a book, ergo, listening to one is reading. Using braille is reading, and listening to audiobooks is reading.

The part that has me in full Captain Raymond Holt "apparently that is a trigger for me" mode is that this bookstagrammer called listening to audiobooks consumption. In the context of her other posts about overconsumption as an issue in the bookish community (again, agree, but also...mind your own business), this seems particularly insidious to me. Conflating influencer-driven (and capitalist hellscape) consumption with listening to an audiobook (again, a massive boon for the visually impaired and those with disabilities like ADHD, dyslexia, etc.) is rude at best and dangerously exclusionary at worst. Stop letting comparison be the thief of joy; mind your own business and stop looking at the pages that bother you. Focus on the kindness of leaning towards inclusion, meeting people where they are, and leaving judgment behind.*

*This person also said "feel free to comment if you disagree but please don't be mean or judgmental," as if they hadn't just posted the most ableist and judgmental sludge I've seen today.

tl;dr: don’t be a gatekeeping shithead, mind your own business, and

(gif by matalyn on tenor, couldn't find on tumblr)

[prussianmemes]

babe wake up academia is healing:

living in a reality beyond parody.

[spookyprime]

kon coming home one day: yo who tf is that

tim: this is my new brother

9yo dick, sitting on Tim's lap, eating spam masubi: hi. want to kill tony zucco with me?

kon: ... sure?

You know I had to google how big a 9 year old is and I still think I made dick too small but whatever lmao.

[belle-keys]

Recommendations for media about translation, interpreting, and foreign languages

Movies and TV

Quo Vadis, Aida? (2020) The Interpreter (2005) The Last Stage (1948)

Books

Babel: An Arcane History by R.F. Kuang The Centre by Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi Translating Myself and Others by Jhumpa Lahiri The Interpreter by Suki Kim Girl in Translation by Jean Kwok Translation Nation by Héctor Tobar Alphabet of Thorn by Patricia A. McKillip Translation State by Ann Leckie

Other Important Topics and Subjects

La Malinche The Rosetta Stone The Tower of Babel The Adamic Language Esperanto Philology Goethean World Literature

Documentaries and History

The Interpreters: A Historical Perspective The Nuremberg Trials Biblical Translation St. Jerome - patron saint of translators Shu-ilishu's Seal (first depiction of an interpreter)

[communistkenobi]

Nick I am so sorry we have been friends for so long but what’s the difference between socialism and communism I am too American I am sorry

lol it’s all good! you can view socialism as a form of early communism, or rather, the transitional period through which communism is achieved. assuming a scenario in which there is a successful worker’s revolution, the socialist state has seized capitalist infrastructure and production and uses these things to work towards the ultimate goal of communism, a stateless classless moneyless society (stateless does not mean an undirected or unstructured society, just that the modern concept of the nation-state has been abolished as a result of the abolition of property and class - this is a pretty complex topic though so maybe a simpler way is to think of it for now is a world without borders. this is a scenario in which communism is global and has taken over all capitalist states, ie, very advanced or mature communism, and direction of resources and operations is done through administration as opposed to law and state governments - this is a very rough and general outline). a lot of capitalist infrastructure is extremely useful and necessary for the functioning of a proletarian state, and aren’t things we want to do away with (telecommunications, shipping, transport, medicine, various state and economic structures, etc - although obviously the way these things are run and the way workers are treated in those industries would change dramatically!). some people are socialists and just want a worker’s state without the communism part, some people (anarcho-communists for example) want to move directly to communism from capitalism, and debates about the exact nature and structure of a communist society are some of the fundamental things communists argue about. communism is the goal, socialism is (one of the possible) means. I personally tend towards models of centralised socialist state control and direction of a proletarian society, although I’m not well-read enough to provide you with a totally comprehensive platform on how all of that would work and that’s also like an insanely long conversation lol

[tiredmedievalist]

starting week 2 of my masters :)

(please ignore the deeply concerning number of tabs I beg)

[historicity-was-already-taken]

In the past I have been highly critical of the fact that so much Holocaust memory is constructed through the autobiographical/memoiric writings of men, like Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi. And I remain critical, because that male canon obscures the experiences for women.

I've understood for a while that women write for their families while men write for history, but I've finally figured out how to put words to another piece of it. Because women perceive their individual experiences to have been unimportant, or as a tiny part of a whole, their writings are much harder for laypeople to understand.

One of the most moving Warsaw Ghetto resistance memoirs I've read so far has been I Remember Nothing More: The Warsaw Children's Hospital and the Jewish Resistance by Adina Blady-Szwajger. Towards what I'm going to call the first ending of this memoir (pg. 153), she writes:

When I finished the last page of my memoirs, I went back to the beginning. I read them through-and suddenly realized that something was wrong. I had wanted to bear witness to the true events of those times, but I had done it very awkwardly. Over the last forty-five years, the world has changed, new generations have grown up, and everything that happened has faded in the mists of history ... Everything has changed - even the streets I wrote about are no longer on the map of contemporary Warsaw. So much of what I wrote has ceased to be clear and comprehensible ... We have crossed the barrier of shadows, and one by one we are leaving. The young are left behind. And it would be a good thing if something of those years remained for them. And so we need to explain, not just to reminisce. I don’t know whether I am able to. I am not a professional writer, or a chronicler. But I must try ...

This type of ambivalence towards one's right to record their memories over such a traumatic past is a typical presence in women's Holocaust memoirs, but so is the issue Blady-Szwajger so eloquently points out above: the memories recorded are niche, interpersonal; recording events and landscapes and individuals which have not penetrated collective memory, and remain obscure to laypersons. At the time, the massacre of a Ukrainian shtetl was the most memorable moment in a writer's life, but from the lens of us, as students of history, it may be a blip in the larger history of Einsatzgruppen actions at the beginnings of Operation Barbarossa.

Because male writers are much more likely to understand themselves as purveyors of history, and not simply as small, modest pieces of a collective, many of their writers include attempts to contextualize events they personally experienced within the larger history of World War II and the Holocaust. Whereas women, simply remember.

[astriiformes]

Working on my degree proposal and for all I am hard on myself for my (slightly higher than average, but still fairly average) GPA, mostly because I worry about it hurting my chances at grad school, I feel like it still says something that I actually do have straight As in my history of science classes in particular. If nothing else, I'm more than a little proud of myself for that

[astrx-nautical]

100 Days of Productivity: Day 7/100

What I did: 

Applied for job at Company X (this was day 6 but I didnt post lol)

 Did a little bit of research on Cameras and Mics to use this summer on oral histories- I think I’ll take them to Best Buy and see what one of the experts says 

More readings on the Portuguese period ( I <3 Sanjay Subrahmanyam)

Currently Reading: Notes on Political Thought in Medieval and Early Modern South India

On the Docket: 

1. Pilates - really good for the back i fear 

2. Clean Car before Maintenance tomorrow 

3. Apply for role at Company Y

4. Begin “For God or Empire” by T.C Jacob + reading log

[itsjustanne]

I've gotten really interested in collections policies. I've had a little experience in this area, so my supervisor has directed me to updating these thing. Now that I've updated the policy as best I can (according to the American Alliance of Museums guidelines), I'm working on updating the way we store basic information about our collection.

[voyage-of-venus]

My Current MA Student in Art History Notion setup!!! ✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:*

[mirrors-slightly-askew]

17 september 2023.

i am really very grateful to have a few hours in the early morning, with the sun and a crisp chill and an hour to read the newspaper and learn about the city's history and one man's post-retirement viola journey. feel like my eyes did way too much work today. i'm burning out by trying to fly through my syllabi rather than let it take until the end of the semester. don't know how to make myself feel more settled, less like there are a million things i need to do and yet feel like i can't do just one. feel like i need a good hour outside doing nothing yet, i tried that, and i wouldn't let myself be a part of it.

on my mind:

should i reread the mortal instruments?

the good feedback i got on my first history paper ˶ᵔ ᵕ ᵔ˶

how the dialogue in plays seem to contain so much

i love my big wool sweater

soul feeling a bit parched

[ode-to-clio]

Detail of Repose from Mischief and Repose, John William Godward (1895)

[kaiserin-erzsebet]

Please pick a side in an argument that (jokingly) happened at a history department graduate student party:

[thegrapeandthefig]

If I see one more "Veni, Vidi, Amavi" translated as "we came, we saw, we loved" I'm going to fucking lose it. The 1st person plural perfect tense for these verbs is "Veninus, Vidimus, Amavimus".

Where is that fucking latin lesson Monty Python gif when I need it?