(10:36 AM) | Adam Kotsko:

Being Advised

1. I need to do a survey of the academic journals relevant to my work. That is, I need to sit down in the library some day and pick through the last few issues of a bunch of journals, making note of the kinds of things they are interested in. That way, if I write something and want to try to publish it, I will have a record on file of which journals might be a good fit.
   
   
2. I need to publish things other than translations. This advice came in the wake of my announcement that I had several possibilities to do further translations. Sub-advice included taking advantage of my translator status to write an essay on the piece I've translated. I already have an essay on the Derrida piece that I'm not quite comfortable publishing as it stands, and I should probably add revision of that to my docket. He also thinks that since I have read a lot of Žižek, I should probably try to write a really good essay on him and get it published, so as to be on record as knowing about Žižek -- after all, it's not as though I can write down, "I know about Žižek -- just ask John Holbo" or something. Plus I could probably revise my Wesley paper, leaving intact my devestating critique of Actually Existing Wesleyanism, and find a venue for that. But the main thing is not to clog up my entire future career with translations, because it would be really easy to get typecast into that kind of role. It's a necessary role, and I enjoy doing that work, but it's not all I want to do or even the primary thing I want to do. I didn't learn to read French in order to become a French translator, for instance; doing the translations would ideally function to keep my French skills sharp.
   
   
3. I need to work toward actually speaking French. The immediate help from this would be that I could read more directly "in French" rather than doing an on-the-spot translation in my head. I'm trying to get away from the latter already. I have a "vocabulary building" book that has phonetic pronunciations for everything, so I have been able to notice basic patterns in the way things are pronounced. Still, that's obviously very limited. I need to buy some language tapes (even though they are now available on CD, it seems customary to continue to call them "tapes"). I need to add it to my disciplinary regime. Eventually, it would be good to supplement it with lessons at the Alliance as well. This seems to me to be good and timely advice.
   
   
4. If I end up really liking these early Christian things, I need to learn Greek and/or Latin. Having done German should make Greek a lot easier. For instance, having just done the "overloaded adjective construction" in German, I realized that it was parallel to a grammatical structure I had come across in my self-directed Greek studies and that I didn't understand at all at the time. (By mere coincidence, this was toward the end of those studies. The structure would be the equivalent of saying in English, "I am a young for wit and sexiness renowned man" instead of "I am a young man renowned for wit and sexiness.") Thankfully, he skipped over the "actually speaking German" advice for now.

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