Ever since Barack Obama became president, I’ve pondered the role of racism in regard to his presidency. Now that we are in the final days before the 2012 election, I have finally come to a conclusion about the issue. Racism is alive and well in the US, but you cannot chalk up  the large number of people who hate Mr. Obama simply to racism. Instead, I have concluded that base-level racism just puts people at a different starting place. I look at it this way: a lot of people really hated Bill Clinton when he was president, but at the heart of the matter, he more or less was a good ol’ boy Southern white guy. Racism gives the same people a different starting place with regard to Obama. The hatred for Obama is fundamentally probably no worse than it was for Clinton, but the race issue puts these same people at a higher starting point, therefore the overall level of hatred is higher.

In 1997, I completed my Ph.D. in German literature/cultural studies/translation studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Here are the abstract and table of contents of my dissertation:

Abstract

The three dramas of nineteenth-century German playwright Georg Büchner represent an interesting case study of how literary reputations are made and how the value of literary texts is determined. This dissertation undertakes a detailed examination of the reception of Büchner’s dramas in Anglo-American culture from 1919, the year the first English-language translation of one of Büchner’s plays was published, through the 1960s, when Büchner had become an established part of the canon of world drama.

Employing a methodology based on the work of Hans Robert Jauß and Michel Foucault as well as several contemporary translation theorists, the goal of this dissertation is to investigate some of the factors that influenced the building of Büchner’s literary reputation in the United States and England. Based on the findings of this case study, it is also the goal of this dissertation to make a contribution to the on-going development of a non-normative, reception-oriented approach to translation studies.

The research of this dissertation is based primarily on the published English-language translations of the plays of Georg Büchner, the texts that were published with the translations, and the published reviews of the translations and performances of Büchner’s plays in the United States and England from the beginnings of the reception of Büchner’s works in England and the United States in the early twentieth century to the 1960s, when Büchner’s reputation had been well established in English-language culture.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Theoretical Groundwork

• Translation Study as a Linguistic Study
• Translation of “Sacred” or Canonical Texts
• Translation as a Process
• Translation as Rewriting
• The Power of Reception: The Cultural Turn in Translation Theory
• Translation and Horizons of Expectation: Histories of Reception
• Translations as Cultural Manipulation: Rewritings as Regimes of Truth
• From Theory to Practice: An Interim Conclusion

Chapter 2: German-language Büchners

• Büchner’s Life
• Early Failed Image: Büchner as Young German
• The Socialists’ Büchner
• Büchner for Social Democrats and Naturalists
• Büchner’s Reception in Germany: The Twentieth Century
• Conclusion

Chapter 3: Anglophone Büchners

• Büchner in America: The Socialists
• Büchner in the Early Twentieth-Century: The Great European
• Büchner in America: The German-English Version
• The Other English Büchner: Büchner after World War II
• Büchner and the Canon of World Theater
• Büchner and the 1960s
• Büchner as an English Classic: Conclusion

Chapter 4: Büchner as Reception Case Study

Appendix A: English-language Translations of Georg Büchner’s Works through 1980

Appendix B: Performances of Büchner’s Works in Britain and the United States through 1980

Works Cited

Back in high school, I started doing four-way bargello needlework. At some later point, I moved on to needlepoint (in bargello, the stitches are the same direction as the canvas; in needlepoint, stitches are diagonal to the canvas). Every time I visit a used bookstore, I check out the needlework section. I’ve bought a lot of needlepoint books over the years, but by far, my favorite designer is Mary Norden, and my favorite book of designs is Ethnic Needlepoint. I’ve designed most of my needlepoint projects myself over the years, but I’ve now stitched several designs straight from this book. Here are two of them that date, roughly, from the mid-2000s:

Back in high school I worked as a dishwasher and cook at a local restaurant. One of my coworkers brought her needlework to do for a little while in the afternoon if business slowed enough for us to take a break. She did bargello, and I was fascinated. I got a copy of Dorothy Kaestner’s Four-Way Bargello and–with the help of my coworker initially–started what has turned out to be a lifelong hobby.

I still have some of  the designs I did back then. They are all closely related to designs in the book, but even back then, I was altering the designs myself.

My personal web site had long passed its expiration date since most of the content is now hosted in content-specific places: photos on Flickr, my thoughts in my blog, etc. So, I’ve put it all in WordPress and integrated the blog directly into the personal web site. I’m in the process of (finally) uploading all the old photos that I originally published here into Flickr.

My dad’s first cousin is a now semi-retired sheriff’s deputy in a rural county in Kansas. He emails out a weekly report of his work. I’ve written about him before.
This act of kindness was in his latest email:

I was dispatched to [Redacted], KS to check on a homeless woman. She had about worn out her welcome in [Redacted]. She told me that she was traveling to Huntsville, Alabama from Decatur, Alabama, but got side tracked . . . The woman was barefoot, was wearing warm up slacks with draw strings to hold it up. She had not bathed lately and the weather was hot. She told me she was waiting for a truck to come by that was going to Huntsville, Alabama so I told her about a bigger truck stop in [Redacted], KS. She danced across the hot concrete at the convenience store to get to my patrol truck. We stopped in [Redacted] at the Law Enforcement Center long enough for the Detention Officer to bring me out a pair of rubber shoes that are issued to prisoners. We then proceeded to the truck stop at [Redacted]. She really liked the rubber sandals. When we got to [Redacted], I pointed out McDonalds Restaurant and gave her a $5.00 bill. The woman thanked me and then took my hand and said a prayer for me and my safety. I drove away feeling like I might have transported an Angel unaware. It was quite a surprise.

I happened to read a little of today’s Austin American-Statesman while I was eating breakfast this morning. Today, the paper’s Politifact Texas column examined the following claim by Rep. Lamar Smith:

“Illegal immigration and unemployment are directly linked,” Smith said on the House floor July 1. “There are 15 million unemployed Americans in the United States and 8 million illegal immigrants in the labor force. We could cut unemployment in half simply by reclaiming the jobs taken by illegal workers.”
Smith later said his assessment reflects “simple logic.”
“If our immigration laws were enforced, illegal immigrants will not be able to get or hold jobs,” he told us in an e-mail, “and they would be available for citizens and legal immigrants.”

I’m always skeptical of appeals to common sense, as they are often oversimplified at best. This claim is a good example. The Politifact journalist talked to several people who are knowledgeable in applicable fields, including some from conservative think-tanks. The consensus is that deporting illegal workers would result in more legal jobs over the long term, but would not result in a short-term one-to-one replacement, thus reducing unemployment as Rep. Smith claims. Factors include:

• Many jobs held by illegal immigrants are ‘under the table.’ If employers had to pay legal wages and taxes to get that work done, they would be able to hire fewer legal replacement workers
• There may not be a big enough pool of appropriate legal workers in places where many illegal immigrants hold jobs (think: the meat-packing towns of the Midwest).
• The skills of the (legally) unemployed don’t match up with the skills necessary for most of these jobs currently held by illegal immigrants. Most unemployed have much higher skills than the mostly manual-labor jobs held by illegal immigrants and would not take such jobs

From How facts backfire on boston.com, this is not surprising, but depressing nonetheless:

In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.

If you’ve read this blog for any period of time, you know that I hold very pessimistic views of the economy. I worried about the housing bubble long before it burst–though I admit I knew nothing about the financial instruments that Wall Street was creating that enabled the bubble and made its bursting a bigger economic event.
Lately, I’ve been concerned that the cycle where the US issues government bonds to essentially enable our lifestyle that allows us to buy lots of imports from places like China, and China buys those bonds to ensure that there continues to be a market for their goods. That cycle can’t go on forever.
Today, I was listening to a recent Planet Money podcast about Greece’s current debt problems. One of the people interviewed on the podcast made the following statement which seems to say the same thing I’ve worried about (emphasis added):

Most of the developed world is screwed . . and that makes this crisis particularly different than anything we’ve seen in our lifetimes. . . The countries that aren’t screwed are the emerging market countries. They have very low levels of debt, both public and private sector. So, they’re not impacted to the same extent. It’s been a complete flip-flop. The developing world is now where the rich world was 30 years ago. . . The world has been turned on its head, so now the emerging market is lending money to the rich world, so the rich world has continued to spend more than they’ve made for decades.
What we’re talking about here is an adjustment that’s going to happen not just in Greece, around the rest of Europe. It’s going to have to happen in the UK, it’s going to have to happen in the US as well. People at some point are going to have to develop a better connection with what government spending means for them personally. We’ve had the better part of a couple of decades where people have lost that connection. It’s viewed as manna from heaven and it’s just an entitlement, something that everyone has deserved that has no impace, or should have no impact, ever on them. They should be able to borrow unlimited amounts, get unlimited amounts of government services and benefits with no repercussions. It’s not all free money. The money has to be paid back.

Everything You Need to Know About Fast Food
Of all the interesting stats in this infographic, this one caught my attention the most (emphasis added): “Super heavy users,” [are] those customers who visit the store at least ten times a month, making up 75% of McDonald’s sales.”