fivefteditrix.bsky.social
Freelance editor, mostly of scholarly things; v. occasional feral Victorianist. Focusing on the mournful signage.
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yeah, it's weirdly self-righteous, or at least self-important, behaviour.
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I'm sorry for your loss.
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Ooh, I like that
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Oh, no, you do need those boots. I think I might also need them.
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It's such a nice little thing to semi-accidentally hand-sell a book.
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Define it; at least one reviewer will grump about it if you don't.
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Solid choice. I just made myself a grilled cheese like I'm 12
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have a wonderful summer, wise one!
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Nearly all UPs (as opposed to scholarly presses generally, which include for-profits like Routledge) are working under incredible constraints and w/ shortfalls, as Ken Wissoker's excellent thread abt Duke made clear, but there are the "doing the best they can in spite of" ones and . . . the others.
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Did I miss something (the latest iteration of that dumbass screed) or are we just doing general venting?
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And the stupid cyclicality of it is exhausting (as you suggest, this is not fundamentally new backwardness). We just get a few decades of halting progress under our feet, and here come the eugenics and the reactionary gender ideologies and the environmental despoliation again . . . (here too, fwiw)
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I can tell you that as a real live human copy editor for a journal, I take four passes over every piece I touch—two while I'm making suggested edits, two when author changes come back—and every genuine professional will be similarly committed to taking care with your work. AI won't.
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Book acquisitions, I meant, sorry. Where I see this stuff used and talked about most is in or in relation to production, already an area where houses are forever looking to cut costs. (AI does not, of course, actually do that, as you point out.)
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Yes, I was going to say. (As far as I know, no one is yet using this stuff in acquisitions, thankfully.) Still bad, though, and consistent with broader trends in UK publishing particularly.
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Third-party for-profit companies that offer packaged book production services—sometimes just layout and printing, sometimes also including things like design and copy editing. Presses lean on them to varying degrees because they cut prod costs. They make up about 40% of the overall industry now.
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(The other problem with them tends to be greater-than-average use of packagers, which are terrible from a labour perspective and also more likely than not to make absolute slop of your page proofs.)
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These people are so deeply unserious that their unseriousness sort of defies processing
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Yes, which is one reason the thread is great. (Somewhat similarly, it's Muse that makes Hopkins its money, in fact.) Faculty often have no idea of the complicated system of offsets that keep the whole rickety machine moving, and do not, in my experience, want to investigate on their own.
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(And keep in mind this is Duke, whose titles are often much buzzed about—so what is the situation of smaller presses with even smaller ops budgets that don't tend to get the same level of notice, do you think?)
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The people like bird pics
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it's very nineteenth century shit. on which note, you want to read this when there is brain free for it: press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...
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the media wants us to be excited because it's the first ministerial summit here in however long and banker boy is deigning to visit to pipeline us up. we've been under a state of emergency for three days, MB for four. I opened the windows at noon today: first time I'd been able to since Friday a.m.
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It's nice to meet a fellow low-key Charlotte hater.
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My book project co-writer (who is currently an AD undergrad and so dealing with a lot of AI-related misconduct cases) were just having this conversation yesterday w/r/t fabricated citations. People of our respective vintages know enough to tell they're fake. Your average first year does not.
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This is (thankfully) already the case in some fields. E.g., my younger sister is in a graphic design program meant to prep her for work on video games, etc. Students who opt (as she has) for the track that includes trad art skills as well as CAD are getting hired faster. That thinking will spread.
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One doesn't actually need a PhD and a faculty job to grapple well with one's undiluted Deleuze or Hensley or whomever; one just needs curiosity and patience, and lots of people have those.
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* Para-academic forms & readings are obv. often great & needed too. In my late teens I got comfortable w/Baudrillardian analyses via TWOP recaps of American Idol; I know such stuff's valuable. But there's a tendency to condescend to "civilians," as a prof friend calls them, that's fully wrongheaded.
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They're a fun show (when Brock is not in a petulant mood)!
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Even the smallest conferences take wild amounts of (mostly unacknowledged) work. I might recommend energy drinks and/or requisitioning a grad student to serve as a conference assistant, if you haven't already done.
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How do I make friends with your friends?
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That, we'd both say, is a good thing—too many books are. (She's ~100 pages in and already planning a second reading. I am only about 20, but I've hand-sold two copies on the basis of those 20)
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I honestly think a lot of it is that many left-liberals are former nerdy kids, and nerds are not known for their skill with catchy taunts
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That Howard is an HBCU probably makes the difference there.
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I've been trapped in my chair for four hours because Maisie requisitioned my lap as nap space. Not a lot a human can do about it.
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Yes, exactly. I don't worry about it anymore; it's entirely a problem of their behaviour, not mine.