lin·gua·phile

My advisor, who does not actually know I am a fan or that I just wrote a paper for another course partially about fanfiction.

dduane:

Especially insofar as they pay my salary.  :)

At first I thought about deleting DD’s comment because it wasn’t relevant to me, and then I realized that actually in a really roundabout way they pay my salary, too. 

(Source: spooningwithironman)

So every time I’m researching for a paper I get really excited about all of the AMAZING books out there that are relevant to my topic; I make lists, I track down references in footnotes and other people’s bibliographies, I sail through the library shelves pulling down volume after volume, and sometimes when no one else is around I dance down the aisles to the sound of some upbeat track on my iPod.

And then I start reading the books, and they lead me onward to even MORE books, the paper idea starts to form and reform, ideas coalesce and cohere, and I know that everything will be fine, if I can just READ ALL THE BOOKS and condense my response to them into a paper.

BUT INEVITABLY, I get to this point (the point three days before the paper is due) and realize that I have twelve books and articles checked out and waiting for me that I haven’t even read, but that I won’t have time to get to because I need to start actually WRITING this paper and not just reading for it. And then I am SO SAD and also always slightly afraid of what might happen if the one book I don’t read is the one that my paper desperately requires.

lizziebennetdiaries:

This is my first Questions and Answers video, let us know what you think! If you guys like it, we’ll do more in the future.

Don’t forget to Like and Reblog
Thanks to the following people for their questions.

Setalay
EverSinceImmortal
mikazuki-of-the-blue-umbrellas
811Neo
MismatchedMarbles
aseasyash
TheStalkerNinja
Noratrafero
BettyBlonde1994

“I’m a graduate student, my favorite author is anyone who can make their argument in less than fifty pages without mentioning hermeneutics or ‘socially constructing’ anything.”

Just one of the many reasons why I seriously love this.

And the heart is hard to translate, 
It has a language of its own, 
It talks in tongues and quiet sighs and prayers and proclamations, 
In the grand deeds of great men and the smallest of gestures, 
In short shallow gasps.

But with all my education, I can’t seem to commend it, 
And the words are all escaping me, and coming back all damaged, 
And I would put them back in poetry if I only knew how, 
I can’t seem to understand it, 

And I would give all this and heaven too, 
I would give it all if only for a moment, 
That I could just understand the meaning of the word you see, 
‘Cause I’ve been scrawling it forever, 
But it never makes sense to me at all.

This is and will forever be my literary love song: the song that best expresses the way that I feel, not about that sort of love (at least not recently), but about my love of language, of literature, of the words that I work with on a daily basis, to which I have devoted my education; the words I love, and will never understand as well as I wish I could.

And all my stumbling phrases never amounted
To anything worth this feeling
Oh this heaven
Never could describe such a feeling as I feel, and
Words were never so useful
Til I was screaming out a language that I never knew existed before.

(Source: Spotify)

ballsonthetable:

This is particularly accurate since the paper does not, actually, stay away when I fling it from me…IT ALWAYS COMES BACK. IT NEVER LEAVES.

because I am writing a paper (for GRADUATE SCHOOL) about Denis Diderot’s Eloge de Richardson, in which he basically fangirls all over Samuel Richardson’s works

and in the English translation that I read for class, Diderot talks about a friend who is “one of the most tender-hearted men I know, and one of the keenest devotees of Richardson: very nearly as keen as me”

but the word that gets translated as “devotee” in English is “fanatique” in French!

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY FANDOM IS A THING, GUYS!

(Also, I am pretty sure that at some point this summer I will write my first ever RPF because “participants in the eighteenth century Clarissa fandom” is very rapidly becoming one of MY fandoms.)

ballsonthetable:

I’m sure it’s great, and all, but I fail to see how it’s any better than the education I got at my (top-ranked, publicly-funded) state school. Your professors might be “better” or at least bigger names, but your fellow undergraduates will primarily be privileged white people with cash to burn. And I’m pretty sure that a lot of the important conversations I had in college, in class and out, couldn’t have happened in a setting like that.

(I mean, if you’re gonna go private, obviously do it for grad school when they will pay you and not the other way around!)

ballsonthetable:

Had my last 9am class of the semester this morning and my second-to-last class of the semester! Now it is all fun and paper-writing til the end of the semester (or til my copy of Clarissa accidentally falls from my bookshelf and gives me a severe concussion on its way down…).

Only tangentially related, you should follow this blog if you’re into that sort of thing because it is hilarious and I’m not just saying that because it’s run by someone I know.

I have two seminar papers to write but really, I want to write up my own fictionalized account of the epistolary love triangle between Samuel Richardson, Lady Bradshaigh, and Lady Echlin (which, I am not kidding, was obviously a real thing!). And then I want to write that modern Clarissa AU and also that fix-it where Clarissa and Anna live together in the country and are probably extremely gay for each other.