thestage

how fortuitous. it seems as if I am back in this boat again, as one of my schools is telling me two letters are missing. both professors in question say they never got a prompt. ...just when you think you're out....

I had several late letters last year, no one seemed to care. Then again, no one accepted me either, so who knows.

which is, of course, why they can do whatever they want to do to you

if they're calling you, you've been accepted. short of threatening them, at that point I think you're past the how-can-I-fuck-this-up stage of things.

maybe I just come from the rougher parts of the internet (omg I typoed this as 'hinternet' I should have just kept it I'm using this portmanteau for the rest of my life), but I don't even know what you guys are talking about in regards to hostility. the closest thing I've seen is rems' bout with capslockia last page, which near as I can tell came from the ether. and I was here last year and I see no real difference between now and then. maybe there are just some people who think any argument is terrible. I dunno.

by which you mean: I self censor based on the possible whims of public opinion (no, you don't think this is what you are saying; yes, it is, in actuality, what you are saying). which is fine if you're being interviewed by hysterical automatons on the today show. it is decidedly less fine in the realm of academia, or if you wish to keep the internet intellectually useful. matter of principle.

all this really means is "don't post anything at all." it's not a black and white issue, there is no big board in which everything you say or do falls under the category of plus or minus. in reality, it is instead a hundred or a thousand or a million little boards, each held by an independent and unknown party. a plus on one of them is a minus on another. if you ever worry about how they all add up, you've already annihilated all discourse. you have removed the system that perpetuates these conclusions from the realm of investigation. and if your <i>job</i> is to investigate and discuss, then any sort of dishonest a priori conclusion along those lines is a failure. if the internet becomes a mere double of what passes for "public" discourse and public behavior in the greater world, we will have spectacularly lost. the analog to the academy itself is rather obvious; if the greater public was privy to all the conversations that take place among academics the pitchforks would've been out long ago. the jig would be up. decorum is one thing, but no one here has behaved in a manner anywhere close to what would be necessary to justify their being removed or silenced on grounds of common sense.

it certainly is safer. it generally is safer to kowtow to the desires of those who hold power. that doesn't mean its right. it doesn't mean that the economy of the situation is as unquestionable as it is inevitable. you may see the internet as a dance in formality, but I'd rather see it as an unencumbered exchange. the point is not that you or I are wrong or more wrong than the other, the point is that you or I or phil do not have the moral authority to make that call. were this place and this process a precursor toward an existence as thoughtless yesmen, then maybe it wouldn't matter. but if I'm supposed to be working within the notion of a freedom of ideas, then this sets a rather stupid precedent. look, I'm not trying to say that phil or his friends in the white room are employed in some sinister game to keep us down and in line. I'm sure he's just expressing frustration over behavior that he finds unbecoming. But so am I. I find his behavior just as unbecoming, should he be willing to hold to what essentially amounts to a threat. If the response is "well, he/they hold all the cards, so his/their frustration takes precedence," then the response would be just as childish and inappropriate as it would be correct. you or he may not want to work with the girl fucking the married professor, but I'd rather work with her than with the guy peeking in through the window.

well lets just say 'morale booster' is not the phrase I would associate with this topic

serious face: I don't know that we should give 22 upvotes to a post threatening us with a vague and universal spectre of surveillance. this isn't a job interview, this is where you go to get blitzed after you already fucked up the interview. it's the sigh after you walk out of the room. I've got enough on my plate without having to worry about which bored associate professor with access to his school's files and a bizarre desire to cross reference may have been pissed off about something I or someone who may or may not be me said about pet peeve X three months ago. not that I believe for a second that this is applicable, but the thought behind it is less than productive. there are enough boogeymen in this process, and enough people elsewhere interested in boiling everyone in the world down to the sum of a series of internet-trace vectors.

whelp. I'm fucked.

the best part is how it is assumed that these diversity things will have "helped prepare you for graduate studies." I'd be like "I'm asian. It has prepared me for graduate studies because I am asian. The part of graduate studies that is particularly asian will be easier for me because I am asian. This one time I was in asia and this guy was like 'hey, what do you think about grad school?' and I was like 'please unlock the secrets for me' and he was like 'come with me' and then I was like 'ok' and we trained in the hills and oh what, you're still reading? you fucking racist, what, do you think all asian people meditate in the hills to find their inner self? fuck you." I think that would probably work.

I'm calling them SUNY Buffalo whether they like it or not it's a cutthroat world out there

murakami in general is pretty good light reading, mr. murakami name/avatar A Wild Sheep Chase is his best

auf gemächlich deutsch, natürlich

snuggle up with some leisurely Heidegger, obviously

yes, I'm very glad Minnesota has this option. I spent one semester at a community college ten years ago. my grades were awful. everything was awful, I hated it, I almost jumped off a bridge, etc. it angers me to no end that I have to deal with these people for transcripts as is. completely irrelevant to anything.

on the one hand: standardize on the other hand: if you run into an adcom full of people with PhD's in English literature who are inexplicably unable to recognize British spelling and grammatical conventions, you probably don't want to be there anyway. on the third hand: even the Brits use "who" when referring to people

only four of them. don't take this the wrong way, but I hope you have a miserable februrary/march

it's a diversity statement. here's a helpful flowchart that will cause ten people to down vote my post: are you poor? -----> are you black? -----> do you know people who are poor? ----> did you once take a class with at least five black people in it? ----> did you, like, totally love to travel in Europe when you were 18? -----> I bet you thought about the peace corps once, didn't you (this is code for "rich, but not a republican") ------> humorous anecdote about the one time you almost got a B in a class because your butler undercooked the puffer fish and you got really sick -----> band camp

if your original comment was meant to speak to non British English literature, then my original response still stands: it's called English literature, the British will naturally be privileged. there was a period from ohh, 1300-1800, in which there was no English literature that was not also British literature. if you want to say that the test over represents, say, pre Romantic literature, then you're entitled to say so (I might agree), but that's a different matter entirely.

you should be genuinely interested in Goethe, he's great. but if you expect to do serious Goethe scholarship as a PhD student, you should 1) be fluent in German, 2) apply to comp lit programs

except it is. trying telling an admissions committee that you are interested in German romantic literature. see where that will get you.

ETS does not assume you should have all this knowledge, they want you to show how much you have. The test is supposed to be broad enough to give you opportunities to show things, and to ensure you aren't ever going to get everything. Of course there is selection bias, it is literally impossible to get this "right"--whatever that would mean. And the field is English literature, it stands to reason that British authors would be privileged. Works in translation are not even considered for serious scholarship.

oh believe me, I know. I recall a question asking to ID a poem where both Keats and Shelley were possible choices. If you hadn't read the poem in question, good luck (and no, it wasn't a Keats ode). I was not responding to the frustration so much as the form behind it, which came off as a curt dismissal of knowledge more than a lamentation of bfat's specific performance (well, I started off by answering a question, really).