Nicholas Walmsley

Yale UP published the most recent novel by Hamid Ismailov, translated by Shelly Fairweather-Vega, and his novels frequently veer into MR territory

is it a form of aural Orientalism (auralentalism)? like always hearing the muezzin when films and tv shows want to let us know “we are in the Middle East now” end/

e.g., I listen to a slew of podcasts on Central Asia and all their opening themes are arrangements of inter alia dutar dombra karnay nay doira et al

what is that effect whereby soundtracks immediately trigger an association in my mind’s eye with solace or region? 2/

Is there a technical term for the phenomenon of soundtracking a broadcast with instruments and sounds assumed to strongly associated with a given place or world-region and therefore to trigger a given response in the listener or viewer? 1/

ooh-la-la. (excl.) anything Zinedine Zidane does

thinking again about how indiana had a top-tier academic department (founded as a military language training program) where one could take full courses in sorani and kurmanji kurdish and persian and actually gain expertise and they just decided to destroy it because the classes were small

anyway he’s now a high-powered civil servant and quango CEO and somewhere in there’s a didactic take about fast-runners and slow-pokes

another co-eval became a Tory MP and junior minister which is very on-brand even for post-colonial SOAS

reading an interview with a SOAS alum and it’s … basically me but one year out

same department same regional focus same timeframe same
BA—>MA progression

sure it was a long time ago but there were so few of us and yet he doesn’t ring any bells

this paper I’m preparing online at a conference next month?

I started on it 7 8 or 9 years ago and thought it would get presented at a conf that was then cancelled once becoz Covid and then again becoz funding issues

now I’m back on it and I don’t have to start from scratch

here’s the thing

everything that I have successfully managed to get published started as something for one thing and then became something for another entirely different thing

One of the coolest things my mom ever did when I was young was to stand in line at 6am at the Albertson’s Ticketmaster outlet to get 7th grade me floor tickets to this, my very first concert ever. $19, unbelievable.

that is the best thing you’ve ever done in your life

also this must’ve been one of their last shows?

all this stuff that’s going on at the moment *waves arms at everything*

it will be the subject of but a minor spat on a sparsely-attended Sunday morning panel at an academic conference in 75 or 100 years time

it’s a metaphor

two of my favorite activities in academia are 1) writing rec letters for worthy students and 2) essay-conferences

in both you get to apply an honest and holistic appraisal of a student’s full capabilities and I think they appreciate it more than we give them credit for

you know warm weather has arrived in Astana when it starts snowing

ai exists it wrote a book about itself teaching a Frenchman to learn Uzbek poetry back in the 60s and then released that in Uzbek in a series of telegram posts before chatgt was even a thing, and it'll probably win a nobel prize for said novel наўел өвәл yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300...

celebrating St. David

it’s a bit nippy out

who doesn’t love a good academic hatchet job

Bruce Fudge taking apart Stephen Shoemaker’s monograph on Quranic studies is a delight

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Ronald Merrick in the Raj Quartet is in the pantheon of literary villains alongside Widmerpool in Dance to the Music of Time

if nothing else I want to keep ploughing through in order to find out how this odious character gets his deserved comeuppance

the application of Cyrillic or Latin alphabets for Uzbek are also simpler than Cyrillic for Kazakh or Arabic for Uyghur both of which are widely expanded beyond the basic letter-set 3/

but I’ve studied plenty of Chagatai in written-texts where vowel harmony is ubiquitous and I’ve benefited immensely from good old-fashioned grammar books that show and explain all the varieties of suffixes and conditions governing their application 2/

I have been studying and working with Uzbek for two decades or so and have definitely experienced both modern Kazakh and modern Uyghur as more difficult due to the firm adhesion to vowel harmony and the related complexity of affixing 1/

it’s been a long time since I studied a modern-language but now I finally understand why the Communicative Approach irks so many people especially when it comes to Kazakh

just gimme vocab lists and a good grammar guide and diagrams for correct suffixing because it’s an effing nightmare

New Wes Anderson Movie About Sad Guy Who Joins Bird Watching Group or Some Horseshit Film auteur Wes Anderson unceremoniously announced today that his next movie would be “a sad guy watching birds or some horseshit.”

thehardtimes.net/culture/new-...

silly Josh, you with your standards and whatnot

Yes Minister - Damned Silly Thing YouTube video by Alan Eden

whenever someone asks me for advice

youtu.be/laCv8nGq1Co?...

Best Wuthering Heights Adaption: Cliff Richard's Heathcliff YouTube video by Found Footage Fest

oh my I had forgotten that CLIFF RICHARD starred in a musical-version of Wuthering Heights that *actually made money*

youtu.be/GCUn4qpFj8I?...

there are a slew of new books on Uzbekistani art and architecture and they cost so much you have to be a member of the president’s family to be able to afford to buy them