New book from master teacher Harvey Molotch

Our master teacher for The City, Harvey Molotch, has a new book out from NYU Press: Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing. Here is an e-interview with him from a recent edition of the Chronicle of Higher Education.

You can find the book's blog here.

Enjoy!

"Be the Pathologist": An Interview with Draper Alumnus, Scott Bankert

Scott Bankert graduated from Draper in May 2010. As an instructor of filmmaking and urban arts in Tisch, a fiction writer, an active volunteer for an NGO, and a husband and father of two, Scott leads a life which not only reflects the varied nature of his academic work, but also some of the many diverse ways in which our graduates are consistently putting their scholarly research into creative and productive practice.

Within his responses, Scott raises some interesting thoughts on the difficulties and complexities of interdisciplinarity in scholarship. If you have thoughts about this subject--we'd love to hear them! Feel free to add them in the comments section below.

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When did you graduate from Draper?

May 2010.

Did you attend as a full or part-time student?

Part time.

Do you still live in New York?

Yes: in Jackson Heights, Queens.

What was the topic of your Master’s thesis?

My thesis was entitled "Impossible Cities: Personal Accounts of Wonder in the Global Everyday," a participant observation-driven analysis of urban social space in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Why did you choose to pursue an interdisciplinary degree at Draper?

Like the majority of Draper students, my scholarly interests are varied, necessitating a multi-disciplinary approach to shepherd them in a meaningful way toward their common essence. I understand that the traditional academic paradigm of single-discipline inquiry is still very much practiced and protected at most universities, even as we hear promotional claims about departmental collaboration and interdisciplinarity in packaged press releases. The inevitability, however, of interdepartmental, hybrid scholarship as an essential and necessary form of scholarship is fast becoming a reality.

The tricky part, however, for any interdisciplinary exchange, is that we not tread too lightly on any single area--that we not simply extract bits and pieces of knowledge for use elsewhere, which could unravel these principles once they’re uprooted from the literature of their field. It’s a combinative process with cumulative results; it’s about bringing our ideas under control and shaping them into a coherent body of knowledge. This requires that we always be attentive to what is working and not working. And when it’s not, to abandon ship and move onto the next experiment. It’s all about experimentation – about testing the limits not only of our subject matter but also how we think about it.

What I have so often been surprised by regarding interdisciplinarity is the richness of meaning embedded along the peripheries of disciplines, where ideas are always freely flowing back and forth providing incredibly fresh and compelling insights. I am speaking here not only of content sharing but also of methodological exchanges, wherein lies the sympathetic contextuality of multiple perspectives. For example, our aim must be to not only adopt, for instance, pathologic concepts, but to also think like a pathologist, to be the pathologist – here is where we strike gold! This is the new frontier for scholarship. How else, I ask, could a scholar navigate so many hectic and disparate points of entry? To rarify them. And expose the world in a striking new way. This is why I chose to do my postgraduate studies at Draper.

Are you still in academia?

Yes, I teach filmmaking and urban arts at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, both in New York and around the world, while also continuing to pursue my research interests and presenting regularly at conferences.

What special activities or projects do you enjoy outside of your academic work and/or career?

For one, I write poetry and fiction. I was even lucky enough to get one of my short stories, “A Strange Little Problem,” published in Anamesa’s Spring 2010 volume. I also volunteer at an NGO called Instituto Criar in Brazil where I regularly travel to teach socially responsible filmmaking to street kids as well as serve as director of curriculum. But most of all, outside work, I enjoy spending time with my wife and two daughters – the three of them teach me something wondrous and new every day.

What do you like best about New York City?

What I like most about New York is that it keeps coming back for me, as if to say: hey, I’m not done with you yet… This city, even after twenty years, constantly has something else it needs to say to me; it’s inexhaustible.

What do you like least about New York City?

When I arrived in New York, I fancied the city as one terrific protoplasmic entity. In time, I have come to see the inner orbits of its inhabitants and now have a much different take. The reality is that New York possesses many of the same social and spatial predicaments any other megacity might have around the world. I have come more and more to relate New York to Lagos, Douala, São Paulo, Mexico City and so on. Sure, it’s not quite as extreme perhaps in certain respects, but it's well on its way.

What was the last book you read for fun?

I just finished Jean Baudrillard’s Fragments. If there could ever be a “holy spirit” of the Draper Program, then so be it Baudrillard.

“By contrast with the cosmic evolution of matter, which seems to pass from the wave state (the first phase after the Big Bang) to the gaseous, and then to form liquids and solids, our social mechanics, the mechanics of the masses, seems to move from the solid (our primitive notion of the mass is of something solid, compact, and inert) to the liquid (the mass of flows and networks, a fluid, viscous, floating mass), and then to the gaseous state (the mass of even higher dilution, an intangible substance, scattered, infinitesimal in its density, but one which still makes up the main part of cosmic matter), to end up as a pure wave form, where the very concept of mass disappears. In short, the social concept of the mass in a sense travels a path opposite to that of cosmic matter – from solid mechanics to wave mechanics, from matter to total immateriality.”

Jean Baudrillard, Fragments (pg 56)

If you could change anything about ______ [fill in the blank: New York City, the world, the economy, your hair…] what would it be and why?

If I could change anything about the world… That each of us could begin to participate in the battle to save ourselves from ourselves: to educate ourselves to understand what is truly the matter with our way of living hopefully in time to stop the planet from melting and to stop so much suffering and injustice. But with what can we make it happen? How can we focus our attention? A great cultural séance? Herein lies the central downfall of life in the 21^st century; we are too distracted, lazy, selfish and ignorant to take action. Don’t worry, just keep on consuming; that’ll make you feel better. It’s what the corporations and politicians that serve them are counting on, after all. Alternatively, we could each select a single mission, such as prohibiting the use of Styrofoam or volunteering at a community center. It’s all about taking action. We should always consider using our advanced degrees to make a real and lasting difference. Publishing a paper sure feels good, but who is it really serving in the end? This is the challenge each of us faces – to commit to making a difference.

How do you feel about social media and which, if any, do you use most?

Of course social media has great potential for exchanging information and knowledge on an astronomical scale. Technology, however, is neutral, indifferent. The culture that emerges around it is what determines its faults or virtues. I fear the culture that has formed in this case is largely vapid and narcissistic. We are simply paying too much attention to ourselves instead of focusing on the important issues of the day.

Do I use any of it?

You’ll find me here everyday: 40.709792,-73.99292

At least that’s what my network is telling me.

Interview with Robin Nagle in The Believer

Draper's director Robin Nagle was recently interviewed by The Believer on her work and research as the anthropologist-in-residence for the New York Department of Sanitation. Check out the full interview on The Believer website, here:

http://www.believermag.com/issues/201009/?read=interview_nagle

Interview with Richard Sieburth, Draper Master Teacher in Literary Cultures

Draper is privileged to have Professor Richard Sieburth as our Master Teacher in Literary Cultures. Richard has a joint appointment in the Comparative Literature and French Departments at NYU, is a noted Ezra Pound scholar, and is also a respected translator of German and French texts. His English translation of Selected Writings by Gérard de Nerval won the PEN/Book-of-the-Month-Club Translation Prize in 2000 and his translation of Emblems of Desire: Selections from the "Délie" of Maurice Scève was a finalist for the PEN Translation Prize.

Richard's most recent translation, The Salt Smugglers by Gérard de Nerval was published in August. This week, he took the time to answer some questions about translation for in.ter.reg.num.

1. How did you come to be a translator?

When you grow up, as I did, in a bilingual household (German-English), you tend as a child to be fascinated with the secret language your parents are speaking (you imagine, in order to exclude you). I imagine most translators are driven by this kind of infantile curiosity: not Freud’s child voyeur who happens to “see” some primal scene (a tergo or not), but rather one who “listens” to or “overhears” a language not primarily intended for him. The act of translation would thereby involve the fantasy of readdressing this forbidden language to yourself, and then reperforming it in your own tongue in order to recapture its intention.

Later, while in boarding school in Switzerland, I spent a great deal of time traveling across the cantons in trains. You become a translator by simultaneously observing the landscape flowing by beyond the train window and noticing, written below it like some sort of allegorical inscription, the quadrilingual command: NICHT HINAUSLEHNEN/ E PERICOLOSO SPORGERSI/ NE PAS SE PENCHER AU DEHORS/ DANGER! DON’T LEAN OUT. Are these all saying the same thing?

2. What has been your most difficult translation project? What has been the most enjoyable?

Translating the rhymed dizains of Maurice Scève was probably the most difficult from the purely formal point of view: there was so little room to maneuver. Think of Marcel Marceau the mime feeling his way with his hands along the surface of an invisible mirror that is caging him in. Hölderlin, whom I translated in my mid-twenties, was a pure joy. It was what Schiller would call a “naïve” translation, as opposed to a “sentimental” (self-conscious, ironic) or “elegiac” translation. I actually visited Hölderlin’s landscapes near Tübingen just to get a sense of how the light or sound broke across the local hills. I translated Büchner’s Lenz in the course of a (mild) nervous breakdown, though I can now no longer remember which provoked which. Scholem I translated during and just after Sept. 11th, with the acrid after-stench of the Twin Towers floating through my window. Translating Michaux has perhaps been the most total blast. Nerval lies somewhere between a fond sibling and a scary Doppelgänger.

3. Do you subscribe to a particular theory of translation? Do you believe it possible to apply the same theory to all texts, or does each project require a more individualized approach?

The only translation theorist who has made a real difference to me is Antoine Berman. But the more I think about it, the more I tend to believe that there is no Theory of Translation, only a History of Translation. This is what Benjamin means by the original’s Nachleben or Fortleben. Translation merely articulates the history of the original (or the history of its translator’s encounter with it). If a translation does not register the “historicity” (ugh) of its encounter with the original—if it cannot define the “time” at which its language meets (or greets) the language of the original—the “event” of translation has not really taken place. How to theorize the “eventness” of the event? Here’s Hölderlin: “Try taking it by surprise, and it turns/ To a dream; try matching it by force,/And punishment is the reward;/Often, when you’ve barely given it/ A thought, it just happens.” Translation: a way, perhaps THE way, that language “happens.”

4. What would you say is a common myth about translation?

The most prevalent (mis)conception (or myth?) is that a translation is somehow “like” or “equal to” to the original. That it is a “metaphor” of the original, thus somehow “substitutable” for the original. Yes, the words “translation” and “metaphor” are etymologically “translations” of each other. But Benjamin’s great insight is that a translation is not “like” the original (via some sort of “equivalence” theory of truth as the “adequation” of two terms), but that it exists “next” to the original, “after” the original, as a “result” of the original. Therefore the relation is profoundly metonymic, not metaphoric.

5. Who is a translator whose work you admire?

I agree with Ezra Pound that Arthur Golding’s version of Ovid’s Metamorphoses is “the most beautiful book in the English language.” I very much dig Florio’s Montaigne & Renaissance translations in general. Perverse as it may sound, I have a greater interest in translators from English than into English because their work renders the “event” of translation so much more evident to me. [I love watching English-language films with foreign subtitles]. Thus: Pierre Leyris’s French versions of Hopkins (or Coindreau’s French Faulkner), or Celan’s Shakespeare. Or some of the current castings into French of Zukofsky (of course, Zukofsky’s Catullus is an ongoing instigation). But for me THE most important translator has been Pound. Of late, I have been increasingly whelmed by his late Confucian Odes.

6. What advice would you give to someone interested in becoming a translator?

Learn languages, many languages, in order to lose your own. Learn to listen. I.e. Learn to be excluded from what you hear [see above] or think you speak.

Above all, stay in touch with the best of contemporary writing (and singing) in your OWN language. Anybody can learn a foreign language. What’s hardest is then trying to (re)learn your own.

Interview with Draper Alumna Brooke Borel

Brooke Borel graduated from Draper in 2007. Since her graduation, she has embarked on a successful career as a freelance science journalist. Brooke took the time to answer some questions about her career path and her time at Draper.

For those who may not be familiar with the field, what kind of stories does a science journalist cover, and for what kind of publications?

I write for a few different publications: Popular Science, Cosmos, and G: The Green Lifestyle Magazine. The latter two are based in Sydney, Australia, and I interned with them there around a year ago, which is how I got started in the field. I also do research and fact checking for Science Illustrated, which is a sister publication of Popular Science here in New York.

Science journalists write about a number of different topics-- basically anything science related. Some have specialties, but right now I'm writing about any science topic that I personally find interesting. My undergraduate work in biomedical engineering covered a wide range of areas, from chemistry and biology to mechanics and electronics, so I feel pretty comfortable covering a number of different fields. My work for Cosmos has been mainly reporting on basic science. G is an environmental magazine, so all of my articles for them are green-themed. And for PopSci, I've done a number of different projects, including consumer product reviews, a book review, and basic science coverage. I write fairly regularly for their blog at PopSci.com, and I have an article coming out in their May print issue, which is the first time I'll have a byline in a print magazine here in the US (I've had a handful in Australia). It's a pretty small piece, but check it out if you see it on the newsstand!

As social awareness and interest in topics such as climate and environmental issues increases, it seems likely that scientific reporting will be increasingly in demand. How do you think the field is changing and developing, and how do you see yourself involved in that development?

I think that there has been a vast improvement in science journalism over the past decade or so, and it is continuing to improve. I think the main challenge is finding reporters who both understand the science that they are covering and can write about it in ways that the general public can understand. I see myself as part of a larger movement of people with science backgrounds who have moved to journalism as a way to participate in science communication and to bring science news to the public. I think the current issues today, from climate change and other environmental issues to medical breakthroughs and controversies, will really impact people's lives directly, and that more people are realizing this and are seeking ways in which to become better informed. Hopefully this demand will continue, and the need for people like me will continue to grow with it.

How has your interdisciplinary background been useful in your career?

Although I really liked many things about my undergraduate program, and it covered a wide range of topics in science and technology, it was a pretty narrow program on a larger scale. I had hardly any opportunity to study anything outside of science and math. I think we were required to take a total of six social science or humanities courses during our entire four years as undergraduates. I don't think this gives students a broad enough view of the world, or the opportunity to see how their field might connect with other, seemingly disparate fields.

My work at Draper allowed me to explore so many different areas of study, including the history of science and science's relationship to both social and cultural forces. I think this gave me a unique perspective on science, and I'm not sure I'd be where I am now without that perspective. Also, just on a personal note, I liked that each Draper student had a unique curriculum, yet we were all able to take classes together. Each person really brought an interesting set of skills to the table. There aren't many programs out there that allow for such a broad set of academic interests.

What were your research interests when you started at Draper? Did these change throughout the course of the program?

I was actually pretty unfocused when I first started-- all I knew is that I wanted to write and that I wanted a better basic understanding of the humanities and social sciences. After a semester or so, I started realizing that I could pull from my experiences with science in both my writing and my research at Draper. I mainly took science studies and gender politics classes, as well as some science education classes outside of Draper. At the time, I hadn't considered the possibility of being a journalist, otherwise I probably would have tried to take classes at SHERP, which is a great program. Instead, I was focusing my work on the debate on gender bias in university science and engineering faculties and labs, which is what I wrote my thesis on.

So yes, my interests evolved during my time at Draper, and they are still evolving. I think it takes some time to figure out exactly where your niche is in the world.

What advice would you give current Draper students, particularly those who are interested in pursuing a career in your field?

This is actually advice that was given to me by Andy Jewett, my thesis advisor. He said this during a seminar at Draper a couple of years ago: be tenacious. And he's right. It's easy to get discouraged when you are looking for jobs, particularly in the current economic climate. But you just have to keep trying, submitting your resume and letters of interest, networking. Something is bound to come from all of that, but you have to keep trying in order to make it happen.

For those interested in pursuing a career in science journalism, or any kind of journalism for that matter, I think the best thing you can do is find an internship. One way to get jobs is to show what you've done in the past, which means you need published clips. But it's sort of a Catch 22, because in order to get published, you first need some sort of writing job. Most internships give you a chance to write, and you have a handful of bylines by the time you are finished, as well as some good connections. After that, you just have to be tenacious until you find solid work. Also, I know the climate isn't that great right now, particularly in publishing. But even if print is dying, there is still a need for people to write content for websites and other electronic media, so don't be discouraged. Just get your name out there and see where it takes you.