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Kevin picked me up, and we went up to Pleasantville and did NYRSF things. In my case, that meant I read manuscripts, marking everything from commas to unclear antecedents to dubious logic and awkward jumps.
There was one author--this is a manuscript not yet accepted or laid out--who used "Orient" explicitly to mean "the Middle East, China, and Japan" [but not, apparently, any of the area between]. Two sentences later, she had me muttering furiously and scribbling suggested rewrites in the margin, for where she'd described Asia as exotic and "outside of common human experience" (between a third and a half of us humans live in Asia); I suggested "American" instead of "human" there. And I remembered what it is about the word "Oriental" that bothers me, which I hadn't quite articulated in a recent rassef discussion: that weird exoticism, of a place that may be interesting or even important, but is seen as inherently distant. I haven't read the books being discussed, but the critic clearly considers both Jerusalem absolutely central and thoroughly exotic, and hasn't considered that there are many people to whom it is neither of those things, or one but not the other.
This author was also somewhat repetitive, and careless with quotes, antecedents to pronouns, and numerous other things: I not only left it heavily green-stained, but was surprised at how little the person before me had marked.
Most of the manuscripts weren't like that--in some I just marked the odd comma, or places where the underlining wandered into the space between words.
In between times, I let the cat out, explained to a four-year-old that no, we don't have to get the caterpillar down from the wall to prevent it from falling down, and chatted with my fellow unpaid editorial types, including Graham Sleight, who was in from Britain for a week and responded to my name with "As in 'Yet Another Web Log'?" Eventually, we had dinner--barbecued burgers, potatoes, and fruit salad--and Kevin got me back to the train, promising, or maybe threatening, to come by tomorrow evening with proofs for me to read.
We have fun.
There was one author--this is a manuscript not yet accepted or laid out--who used "Orient" explicitly to mean "the Middle East, China, and Japan" [but not, apparently, any of the area between]. Two sentences later, she had me muttering furiously and scribbling suggested rewrites in the margin, for where she'd described Asia as exotic and "outside of common human experience" (between a third and a half of us humans live in Asia); I suggested "American" instead of "human" there. And I remembered what it is about the word "Oriental" that bothers me, which I hadn't quite articulated in a recent rassef discussion: that weird exoticism, of a place that may be interesting or even important, but is seen as inherently distant. I haven't read the books being discussed, but the critic clearly considers both Jerusalem absolutely central and thoroughly exotic, and hasn't considered that there are many people to whom it is neither of those things, or one but not the other.
This author was also somewhat repetitive, and careless with quotes, antecedents to pronouns, and numerous other things: I not only left it heavily green-stained, but was surprised at how little the person before me had marked.
Most of the manuscripts weren't like that--in some I just marked the odd comma, or places where the underlining wandered into the space between words.
In between times, I let the cat out, explained to a four-year-old that no, we don't have to get the caterpillar down from the wall to prevent it from falling down, and chatted with my fellow unpaid editorial types, including Graham Sleight, who was in from Britain for a week and responded to my name with "As in 'Yet Another Web Log'?" Eventually, we had dinner--barbecued burgers, potatoes, and fruit salad--and Kevin got me back to the train, promising, or maybe threatening, to come by tomorrow evening with proofs for me to read.
We have fun.
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From:
Orientalism
From:
Re: Orientalism
What I wonder about--but this will be Kevin and David's issue, mostly--is whether the critic is reflecting weird attitudes in the books she's writing about, in which case it deserves explicit attention, or if these are her own biases, or both.