Two Things: Introductory edition

the embarrassment of introducing oneself

1. Hello!

Introductions are so embarrassing. It feels much more necessary to do this on a newsletter platform than when blogging, for some reason. Back in the day (2014), I used to blog a lot, both on Tumblr and on Blogger, which is miraculously still around. Those blogs include mostly middle-school angst and yearning, and no, you are not getting the urls.

I’ve written three to five versions of this initial post because I keep finding myself halfway down the plodding path of trying to pack too much information into a confessional or lyrical piece. You can’t be mysterious in an introductory post—you want it clear. Sure, it should be fun and engaging and maybe, if the juice flows right, lyrical, but still, it’s an informational medium. So finally, I changed tack from waxing poetic about the Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference (you will probably get that post soon) to just writing whatever this is.

Anyway, welcome to my newsletter! It is called Two Things, but its url is “Diglossia.” I learned the term from Dr. Kareem Abu-Zeid’s class on translating cultural context at the Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference. Here is what the word means:

diglossia. noun [mass noun] (Linguistics) a situation in which two languages (or two varieties of the same language) are used under different conditions within a community, often by the same speakers. The term is usually applied to languages with distinct ‘high’ and ‘low’ (colloquial) varieties, such as Arabic.¹

Slick, right? For this newsletter, this word led to the constraint of discussing two items or ideas in each edition, or one idea with two facets. Thanks to my brilliant friend Rachel for suggesting the constraint! In one of the rewritings of this post, I thought “diglossia” was way too pretentious, so I’ve redone the newsletter title to be “Two Things.” It turns out that the two titles also work with the constraint, which is kind of nice.

Beyond the title and constraint, I have a very nonspecific vision for this newsletter. I mainly got the idea because I need a better way to tell people what I’m up to, and I figured that I should also leave space for myself to revive my floundering writing practice if I’m already at it.

I chose Substack despite some misgivings because it is free and I have already written a handful of pieces for Reboot on here, but am still considering putting this on some other platform. More on that later, maybe, but for now—thanks for being here!

2. What I’ve been up to

In most editions, I’ll just leave “what I’ve been up to” in the footer/afterword/colophon section of the newsletter, to leave space for two other things to be discussed. But I have nothing to add for this edition that wouldn’t wind up being its own post, so here’s a list of things I’ve been doing!

• I unexpectedly went to Milan for 24 hours after visiting family overseas and almost getting stuck there. It was a very lovely coda to a complicated trip, and then I also got upgraded to business class on the way back! I am now in the process of forcing myself to forget what flying business was like because that can probably never happen again.

• I got Covid in this current surge a few weeks ago. Please mask up, friends, and take any recommended antiviral medicines (like Paxlovid) if you can get and tolerate them. Sometimes all you need to do is ask your doctor or an urgent care practitioner in order to get an antiviral prescription! I don’t have any special tips on what has worked for me while ill besides resting, but clean air club has a good resource that I used. Remember, you can always go back to masking (even just in certain situations!), even if you’ve stopped.

• My first paper was accepted! My position paper on web accessibility as a resource management issue was accepted at ASSETS 2024. I’ll update this newsletter with the paper when it’s out.

• I went to Bread Loaf this year, with the generous support of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Scholarship! Magnificent doesn’t begin to cover it. Bread Loaf was living the dream.

• My friend Lénaïg and I published a review in the Poetry Project Newsletter, on Sarah Riggs and Lindsay Turner’s translation of Love is Colder than the Lake by Liliane Giraudon. I highly recommend it!

• We have two books in translation coming out next year! The Dream of a Common Language by Adrienne Rich will be out in French translation in January, and La Main de la main by Laura Vazquez will be out in English in May. They are co-translations with my friend Lénaïg Cariou! Both of them have been a very long time coming and I’m so excited for them to be out in the world!

That’s all for now. Hope you are staying cool and safe this summer!

1. Definition from the Oxford Dictionary of English, 3rd edition.