I finally managed to formulate my thoughts on translation as a practice in a more coherent and systematic fashion. It only took about eighteen years. The first idea came out in a Poroi essay published in 2005 after a conference at the University of Iowa on empathy. It seems to have been viewed 540 times… Continue reading When Dragons Show Themselves
Author: russellv
Pop Quizzes and Ordering Quizzes
This semester’s Introduction to Russian Culture is smaller by choice than the last several years, as we did not have a graduate student who could teach it with me. So I lowered the cap to 40 (from the usual 60) and have been teaching it solo. This, I admit, is easier from the standpoint of… Continue reading Pop Quizzes and Ordering Quizzes
September Light
Very cool to see the places of the plays when I release a new song on SoundCloud, as the algorithms do their work. “September Light” is a new 3-minute piece I released a couple of days ago, inspired by the sharp but fragile, delicate light in the Northern Hemisphere at the end of September, which… Continue reading September Light
Dostoevsky as Problem
My “Loving Russia” was published earlier this summer at The Massachusetts Review, with an epigraph from Susan Sontag’s 2000 New Yorker essay “Loving Russia.” Though the essay’s done and out in the world, it’s still something I’m working on, or maybe working through is the better expression. As part of that on-going work, I presented,… Continue reading Dostoevsky as Problem
Insights and such
Boy No. 1, who is now twenty-one and knows more than his father about such things, says it’s all about the algorithms. I am still hoping that Crack: A Tone Poem has in fact reached the people SoundCloud’s insights page is telling me it has reached. They are… …in the US 53 listeners; in Australia… Continue reading Insights and such
Crack: A Tone Poem
I did a limited release of Crack: A Tone Poem on SoundCloud yesterday, which quickly had just under 50 plays. That by itself is not extraordinary, but I was surprised by the places where the plays came from: 6 from the the US; 3 each from the UK, Australia, Canada, and Germany; 2 each from… Continue reading Crack: A Tone Poem
Trusting Up to Thirty
Thirty is the number I have somewhat arbitrarily taken as my limit number for Introduction to Russian Culture for the coming semester: ten artifacts/episodes from “Old” Russian culture, ten artifacts/episodes from “imperial” Russian culture, and another ten from the (again rather arbitrarily designated) post-1917 to the present “period.” I say arbitrary, but there’s an organizational… Continue reading Trusting Up to Thirty
Squint Eye
I released a song on July 31, which seems to have pushed Ba.Ren.Chi above 14,000 plays on Jamendo. I still like that service because of how well curated it is, the simplicity of uploading and keeping track of content, and the fact that it’s free to anyone. SoundCloud shares some of these features, though it… Continue reading Squint Eye
Fulbright and Sea of Intimacy
I’ve been selected as a Fulbright Scholar to continue — to finish! — my book on the Adriatic. Watching the welcome videos from Donna Brazile and a senior official in the Department of State this morning, I couldn’t help feeling relieved that I did not receive this award during the presidency of the previous person… Continue reading Fulbright and Sea of Intimacy
Racializing Travel Narrative
Continuing my reading “around” the Adriatic, I picked up Jan Morris’s 1980 book The Venetian Empire: A Sea Voyage and read the parts that focus most on the Adriatic, skimming the other parts. The Venetian Empire in the period she’s interested in exploring included Cyprus, Crete, Constantinople for a brief moment in the 13th century,… Continue reading Racializing Travel Narrative
Russell Scott Valentino 