Done!

I'm finally finished with the semester. My two major papers, the one an 8-page exercise, the other a heavyweight research paper that ended up running to 34 pages, are written, and everything's rosy. Now for a few days off.

As this man would say: Is nice! I like!

From the bottom up

I'm sure many of you are familiar with - indeed, have perhaps even used - a certain product by the name of Anusol. Much as its name suggests, it is intended as a remedy for afflictions afflicting the parts of the body one doesn't display during polite conversation. Obviously, in this brand-conscious age, their marketing gurus decided that hinting at the nature of their product rather too graphically was bad for business. So, equally obviously, it was decided to rebrand.

O brave new world, that has such people in't! What name, then, did they choose for their product? See for yourself.

Wonderful. As if I hadn't had enough trouble during my formative years with my surname and all it rhymes with, it seems it will now dog me throughout my working days as well.

Nobby, you work for Pfizer, don't you? Can't you have a word with them and...oh. I get it. Ha ha. Very bloody funny. This was your doing, wasn't it?

Ugh.

I am in paper research/writing mode right now and I think Dante Aligheri missed a trick when he didn't include this as one of the circles of hell. 15 hours yesterday, probably something close to the same today and tomorrow. Saturday I have off - I'm helping Kate move her stuff over to Brooklyn, then going to some British friends' place for wine and mince pies. Then it's back to the grind, probably pretty much til I go home for Xmas. Still - it will be worth it not to have anything hanging over me when back in Blighty.

Far from home?

One article that caught my eye in the news today and which seems to be common to most of the papers whose sites I frequent (mainly the Guardian and the Telegraph - I like to strike an even balance between Pinko Commie Do-Gooder Propaganda and Foaming-at-the Mouth Little Englander Diatribes) is this rather interesting piece of news that 5.5 million Brits - nearly 10% of the population - live abroad on a permanent basis. I suppose, thinking about it, I'm one of them. I haven't really lived for any length of time in the UK in the last three and a half years, and with my position at Columbia secured for the medium term, I'm not likely to any time soon. Apparently, this puts the British diaspora (a strange term) on a par roughly with the Indians and the Chinese.

Anyway, the wonderful thing about these news websites is that they have caught on to the blogging revolution, and allow people to leave their comments at the bottom of a good number of articles. This does two things - firstly, confirm my long held suspicion that a good percentage of people who post on internet BBs or leave comments on newspaper articles are mentally unbalanced, and secondly, provide some food for thought. Particularly the hilariously rabid Telegraph comments - read them for yourself.

While I was increasingly amused at the flight from reality that some of the comments above displayed - a yearning for a sort of mythical England that never really existed - it did get me thinking about my own lot. Why did I leave, and am I coming back? If so, when, and under what circumstances?

Short answer: no. I don't plan to, at least. Once I get my doctorate, I want to find a teaching job in the US and build a career - if I'm lucky, a home and family as well - over here.

I didn't leave because I hate the UK or think, like the Telegraph readers, that it's been turned into a PC over-taxed Socialist hell-hole of a police state. I mean, there are things I don't like about my native land - the random drink-fuelled violence in most city centres on weekends, the fact that everything is ludicrously expensive, veneration of the lowest common denominator, the unbelievably inane celebrity culture, the weather - take your pick. But Japan and the U.S. have their faults, too - everywhere does (God knows the U.S. and Japan are way worse than the UK in terms of celebrity worship and dumbing down).

It's just a case of quality of life, really. I have my passion - Japanese literature - and I took a decision that the USA would be the place to pursue it. Money isn't my sole motivation, but over the course of a career in American academia I stand to earn 2-3 times more than I would in the UK. That makes a huge impact on quality of life, especially as it's worth so much more in real terms. Even now, that's true. My $23,000 p.a. PhD stipend in simple exchange terms is worth about one-third less than what I would get were I at SOAS in London (ca. ￡13,000, I think). But - and this is the key - it goes about one-third to a half further here. It ain't riches, but I have a higher quality of life over here than I would do doing the same thing back in the UK.

I do like it here, though. No doubt about it.

I know New York is not the USA. When I'm job searching later, I will do well to remember that, as I could possibly end up somewhere godawful like Arizona or Wisconsin, and then I'll probably look on things in a very different light. But right now it just seems a better option in so many ways...

• The food in the UK (London excepted) just doesn't compare. Here, it's cheap, varied, plentiful and usually delicious.
  
• New York is the safest big city in the USA. I don't feel, as I do out in London or Cambridge from time to time, that I could end up getting glassed just for looking at someone the wrong way.
  
• Americans (even New Yorkers) are just more friendly than Brits. People start conversations with strangers on the subway, they say "Bless you" when people they don't know sneeze; they talk to people. On a related point...
• They think the Brits are charming, sophisticated and (if female) incredibly sexy. I'm not going to argue with that...had I been an American in London, I doubt I would have had the same experience. I can get free drinks for being British and start up a conversation with almost anybody very easily.
  
• I've said this before, but it's WAY cheaper. $2 to anywhere in the city on the subway, vs. ￡3-5? A 2-bedroom apartment 20 mins from Times Square for $800 per month?
  

There's more I could go into, but I think I'd probably end up giving the impression I was bashing the UK, and I'm really not trying to do that. For one thing, I can't watch cricket in any capacity over here, and that's a serious problem.

'Course, I'll always visit the UK as much as I can; most of my friends and family live there, after all. But I think in the long term, I'll join the British diaspora in our attempts at global domination (once again). I guess in the final analysis, I'm not coming home.

A Spot of Trumpet-blowing

The instrument in question being my own. Yesterday, I had without a doubt the best 2 hours I've had at Columbia since I got here. I've been taking a seminar course with Prof. Carol Gluck this semester, mainly because my field of interest often crosses over from literature to history, and Prof. Gluck is one of if not the most pre-eminent figures in the field today. Seriously, she's a hugely respected, nay titanic Japan scholar on a world scale.

The class was a translation workshop - we had had four translation assignments throughout the term in addition to our reading, two Meiji and two post-war ones, and last week, in a writing workshop, we had been informed that our translations basically sucked, that to use CG's words, "they were only just beginning to emerge out of the swamp". So I think probably all ten of us, all grad students, were expecting to get ripped apart for the two hours for which it was scheduled. We had copies of everyone else's translations in front of us, heavily marked up, crossed out and so on by CG, so everyone could see where everyone else had made mistakes.

Forty-five minutes and two or three eviscerated classmates later, CG starts talking about the mechanics of academic translation. And she says "Now, Rob..."

Here it comes, I thought.

"...Rob is the master at this."

Huh?

"His translations are fantastic. Read his work, he writes beautiful English. Right, the rest of you, look at his Aizawa translation. That's English. That's how it's supposed to be done. You'll recognise his one in the pile by the star I put on the front of it because I couldn't believe how good it was."

Oh, so that's what that meant. And why none of my translations had any marks on them. I thought she'd just forgotten. That was not what I was expecting. "The master?"

"It's not because he's necessarily smarter than the rest of you, but because he's been doing this longer. So, Rob, how do you do it? Why don't you tell the class some of your secrets?"

Bloody hell, I thought. So I did.

They're few and far between, these moments. The ones that make all the hard work, the lost social life, the breadline existence and all the hours spent in the library seem worthwhile. That was one of them.

You have my permission to refer to me as "The Master" from now on.

Nights're getting longer

Into December now, though it didn't feel like it last week as it was 67°F (about 19°C) last Friday. The first time in my life I've ever been outside in the month of December in just a thin shirt and been perfectly comfortable. We're back on form now, though, it's down near freezing in New York and will probably remain so for the next six months or so, God help us.

Not much to report, really...nose still at the grindstone, much as it ever was. Looking forward to paying a visit back to Blighty, though I won't be there for long - just 10 days or so.

We have a couple of visiting professors from Waseda here right now, one of whom, Unno-san, is heading back just before Xmas. So we had a little sobetsukai at a Vietnamese restaurant in Chinatown (the guy's a coriander (cilantro) addict). One of the dishes was minced prawns cooked around a sugar cane...I'm pretty sure you weren't supposed to eat it, but some of our party did anyway, as you can see. Food was excellent, and we went for gelato on the lower East Side afterwards. A lighter moment before the real heavy lifting of paper-writing begins.