#yasanggok

[obstinaterixatrix]

actually let me tell you sometimes museums with chinese stuff will have these huge intricate detailed depictions of ancient city life and one of my favorite things to do is zooming onto one single tiny face to appreciate how wacky it is. someone made that shit hundreds of years ago on a scroll/panel/wall ten feet across like “who gives a shit it’s not like anyone’s gonna see the details or whatever”. I give a shit. and I love it.

[gloomstudy]

Soup!

lol of course you send me the food question

soup: comfort food?

干炒牛河, one of my most favorite cantonese dishes! :)

send me some lovely asks?

[violinandchill]

Gershwin and Schubert! (PS this is jinstudies' main!)

Oh hey!!

Gershwin - Favorite genre of musicI can listen to literally everything BUT country. But if I have to choose one, probably romantic era classical.

Schubert - Describe your aestheticIt’s a bit of a costumed aesthetic, so here are a few words to describe it:coffee, rain, debussy/chopin, cloudy sky, bonsai trees, more coffee, oversize sweater, glasses, pastel hair, black and white, more coffee, sleep, studies, cherry blossom trees, city view, busy streets, and of course, coffee.

ask

[musicalsquares]

I Want To Play Cards

[lettersfromhav]

Hope it's not too late to send a question about getting to know you! What's the last book you read that greatly impacted you?

Not too late, no! Ask me things whenever, honestly.

The last book I read that had an impact on me, hmm. In answering this I’m realising that I haven’t actually read anything new since January - this is what happens when you’re done with coursework and just teaching and researching all the time. I re-read Alexandra Harris’s Romantic Moderns recently and was reminded of how good it is, and how (when I first read it) it restored my faith in my own project, because the things Harris is talking about (how modernity doesn’t always HAVE to signal a break with tradition, thank you Ezra Pound, and how some of the 20th century anxiety about the rapidly approaching future/war/mechanisation could be alleviated by looking to the past instead of plunging boldly ahead à la Futurism or similar movements) are things I want to talk about too, and just apply to different content. And it’s always nice when you’re in a moment of doubting your own work and you come across something that validates your position, while being just different enough in content to still allow for your own discourse on the topic.

I also have a quote taped to the wall beside my desk from a book I haven’t actually read in 3 years but keep coming back to: James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. That book isn’t taught much anymore, and a lot of criticism doesn’t have a clue what to do with Agee, who was this disgruntled poet sent out to Alabama in 1936 by Fortune magazine to write a “lifestyle” fluff piece about tenant farmers and instead wrote hundreds of pages about the human reality of people living in absolutely depressing conditions and tried to bridge Romanticism with Realism and make people aware that yes, actually, these are human beings just like you up in New York City, and writing about this is hard and maybe the text produced is incoherent sometimes but you know what, life is incoherent sometimes, and cruel, and we should take care of each other. This is someone who, in all sincerity, wrote things like, “The world is our home,” and, “Inwhat way were we trapped? where, our mistake? what, where, how, when,what way, might all these things have been different, if only we haddone otherwise? […] How did we get caught? Why is it thingsalways seem to go against us? Why is it there can’t ever be anypleasure in living?” and, “Oneby one we are becoming stronger, and one by one in the terribleemptiness and the leisure we shall burn and tremble and shake withlust, and one by one we shall loosen ourselves from this place [. ..] and we will know how to do things right; it will be verydifferent:) (?:)” And yes, that closing punctuation, parentheses and question mark and colon and all, is Agee’s, because Praise is a singularly weird book in its formatting sometimes. I don’t know, I just really love what he’s trying to do, and critics sort of throw him under the bus as being too emotional or too insecure and it’s like, fuck you guys, at least he tried to write about things that mattered to him (and I happen to think the work he produced is beautiful). Clearly I have a lot of feelings about Agee, haha. I’m working on an article about him, actually, which is one of my summer tasks. It will have to be a lot more professional than this was just now, but I hope you see my point about why this text is important to me.

[moriemur]

@yasanggok replied to your post “american universities: it is entirely possible to score 90% and above....”

This was my reaction to British unis, to be honest. Though that said, the grading system in the UK seems totally arbitrary in comparison to American unis, and it's the bane of my existence right now as I apply to American unis for my PhD and have to get them to understand my MA marks are actually considered very good despite it otherwise coming off as hORRIBLE by American grading standards.

idk, because I grew up in Scotland so 70% has always been an A? it’s just How It’s Done in the UK I guess, means you can get crazy high outstanding grades because most people are in the 60s? i have no idea. it’s just what i’m used to. english school exams have A* which apparently means something, we had ‘band 1′/’band 2′/’band 3′ A which is I guess the same as firsts work at university

@youcanthandelthetruth replied to your post “american universities: it is entirely possible to score 90% and above....”

So like, how many questions are you expected to get wrong on a test and still be doing okay?

a pass is 40%, not sure how it works in between that and a 2:1 which is 60% and a first is 70% and upwards. i only have experience in the humanities so there are no ‘tests’ of questions you can either get right or wrong; everything is essays and discussion. basically the marking system is stingier. i got an 82 in last term’s translation and was told that’s a really, really unusually high mark to be getting in second year. afaik an 82 in the US is a B. lol.

youcanthandelthetruth replied to your post “american universities: it is entirely possible to score 90% and above....”

Also what does a person have to do to be The One Professor?

In most Commonwealth nations, as well as northern Europe, the title professor is the highest academic rank at a university. In the United States and Canada, the title of professor is also the highest rank, but a larger percentage achieve it, about a quarter.[4] In these areas, professors are scholars with doctorate degrees (typically Ph.D. degrees) or equivalent qualifications who teach in four-year colleges and universities.

is what wikipedia says. we don’t get taught by anyone without a phd (except like, GTAs) so what that looks like to me is ‘p much everyone who teaches is a professor’ -- in the UK you have to be professor of something, like holding a specific chair, but like because of the devaluation of the term in the US, universities have started making up more chairs to stop all the academics from just going to the US for the title, so where there was originally just a (single) ‘professor of music’ there might now be a professor of composition as well, and some ‘associate professors’ whatever the hell that means

this is my understanding having spoken to academics and having had a professor of genetics for a father who complained a lot about this; i don’t know much about the american system except i see loads of people on the internet who are like.....in their twenties and claiming to be professors which is outlandish af

[lastarpeggios]

@ikchen​ @yasanggok​

I know it’s a bad habit, but I also feel like it’s my duty not to keep myself in my “everything is fine as long as I avoid indications of the opposite” bubble, you know? I want to hear what people think, even those with radically different opinions than my own - assuming that their comments reflect what they think. I used to assume comment sections just brought out the worst in people and that people weren’t as harsh in reality as they were on the internet, but then Brexit and Trump happened, and polls failed to predict exactly how ‘harsh’ (I  know that’s an understatement... my English fails me here) people could be. I don’t want to give hate a voice, but hate has already been given a voice, a political one even. Seems like it’s becoming a majority, that’s what I’m worrying about. I hope the actual majority is a silent one here, avoiding getting pulled into debates that don’t lead to anything by remaining silent, but the political landscape recently has made me question exactly who is the majority here...

[obstinaterixatrix]

it’d honestly range from ‘oh it’s perseus’ mom’ to ‘well I don’t know shit about this but you can obviously tell it’s klimt because it uses shapes’