*cracks knuckles* #nowreading Nguyen Tan Hoang's A View From The Bottom and very excited for it

“BTS’s rise during COVID-19 suggests that the pandemic intensified the association between Asian racial formation and techno-Orientalist and colonized labor." Awesome work by Julia H. Lee on BTS, Asian racialization, Korea’s imagining in U.S. Orientalism, & COVID.

Two stages of writing: 1) This shouldn't take too long 2) Oh no

I finally learnt how to use the Zotero/Word plug-in this week AND how to do mail merge labels. Feeling pretty pleased at being part of the 2000s at last. (Save a bottle of water, don't give in to the ecocidal algorithms, DIY!)

I haven't read the article yet (I will) but I had to stop and do a double take at the stock photo being everyone's most 'grammable local library(@Orchard).

Got back advisor comments on my first 6,000 words (10% of the dissertation, I keep reminding myself) 🫠 千里之行，始于足下 and all, but I feel even more daunted now...

⬇️ This is golden ⬇️

Anyone who tries to tell you "more words are better" is nowhere near experienced enough a writer to be selling you anything writing related, whether it's a workshop, a book, or a theft machine.

I believe this was a long-running theme on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, especially in the final seasons.

I'm speechless...

So now I'm going to be thinking about the economic and colonial implications of the association between spices and sexuality every time I see the 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ rating system used for romance novels.

It’s just wild and also v mundane that every single book has to be written sentence by sentence, and then you go back and re-write all the sentences.

But then *he* becomes a Bothan (spiritual) 😭😭😭 so it's just nested foreshadowing 💀 Sorry, I still have feelings about that rocks fall everybody dies plot, and never recovered 🥲

This just drives home two points for me. One, wow, you can find some fascinating stuff in the archives. Two, 🥴🥴🥴

You will all be pleased to note that in my family's shared Important Docs digital file I found not only various photos of our passports and birth certificates and vax cards &etc but also, inexplicably but agonizingly on brand, two jpgs of screenshots from the movie Yentl.

Just saw Shang-Chi for the first time and, gosh, that was culturally offensive in such a banal way 🤦🏻‍♀️

Finally finished reading Susan Choi's American Woman in two days - after avoiding it for weeks... 🙈

How do other #PhDSky folks in literary studies annotate novels... Highlighters? Sticky notes?? A separate journal because the idea of marking up their books gives them hives???

Christopher T. Fan's Asian American Fiction After 1965 is currently having me ready to hang up my hat and quit my PhD project bc it so clearly articulates the very research gaps I am trying to address (so I am no longer innovative 😭😭😭) For real though, it is great reading so far; run, don't walk!

Challengers was a genius film 💯 but I'm sorry I couldn't keep in a laugh at the reveal that Tashi's freshman dorm was Rinconada 😆

Always glad and grateful to write for DVAN’s diaCRITICS. My latest is a review of recent memoirs by two scholars of Southeast Asian American literature, Viet Thanh Nguyen and Y-Dang Troeung: dvan.org/2024/05/crea...

This comment goes straight to the core of one of my objections about the use of AI as a writing aid. The process is part of the point of writing texts. If that process is difficult, this is just proof that the process - & the labour of it - is necessary.

I have been struggling over this manuscript rewrite for a fortnight and feeling extraordinarily stupid - when really all I am is human 🙄 A machine could not do this, and I certainly don't want it to!

Sky friends, I have a new essay out today about Dictée, not fitting in, and who I actually write for… IT’S OK IF YOUR WRITING ISN’T FOR EVERYONE medium.com/asian-americ...

This will be me in 3 weeks:

I started this little #AsianAmerican literature scrap pile in February/March, but so far am still the proudest of a piece that I threw together in a 3-day frenzy to consolidate thoughts that had nagged at me for literal years: thenewwhat.substack.com/p/5-literary... #TheSympathizer #LiteratureSky

#amreading East Goes West and The Foreign Student concurrently, which does give the impression that the US was chock full of erudite Korean scholars just bumbling around.

I have four novels that I should read for breadth, but my choice of avoidant light reading (which I also haven’t cracked open yet, of course) is Rosalind Galt’s Alluring Monsters: The Pontianak and Cinemas of Decolonization 😂

Difficult question as I embark on summer writing procrastination: Should my background-noise TV rewatch be Smallville or Charmed?

I am a comparative literature major and highly recommend learning how to read and write as the two most useful skills you can have in order to get a job that does not suck.

Sincerely grateful for the mentors who have encouraged me to submit, pointed me towards journals and CFPs, and even generously shared their own documents as template when I got my first R&R a few years ago, which has helped to prepare me for this level of the peer review process.

I thought it was going to be hot girl summer, but every Sunday I pray “Lord, give success to the work of our hands,” and it’s suddenly become too efficacious; this will have to be hot girl revising manuscripts for publication summer. 🙊