Monday, June 19, 2006

It looks like some people do read my writing

I am currently waiting for my Hollywood contact to call me to tell me she is on her way down here. But, last night when I was surfing the internet I found two new scholarly citations of my work. The first one is really interesting. Unfortunately, I was only able to view an abstract. They want alot of pounds sterling to show me the actual journal article online. I will wait until I can get the article for free. At anyrate The European Journal of Public Health published out of Oxford University recently had an article by a group of medical scholars out of Germany with the intriguing title of "Mortality from External Causes among Ethnic German Immigrants from Former Soviet Union Countries in Germany." The article cites a paper I gave at the Association for the Study of Nationalites (ASN) conference at Columbia University in 2001. The title of my paper was "The Deportation and Destruction of the German Minority in the USSR." There is now medical proof that communism is bad for your health.

I also found an article in Ukrainian on the deportation of Crimean Tatars that cites my 2000 ASN paper, "The Deportation and Fate of the Crimean Tatars." I found it funny that the first footnote referencing the paper refers to me as "young" and "American." Now I can not get David Bowie's song, "Young Amercian" out of my head. I wonder what it would sound like in Ukrainian?

Finally, I got an e-mail from Professor Karin Bauer of McGill University, the author of the unreadable abstract "The Domestication of Radical Ideas and Colonial Spaces: The Case of Elisabeth Foerster-Nietzsche - Session: Gender Perspectives." She did not like my post describing her abstract as feminist gibberish. I always find it highly amusing when powerful people feel threatened by people like myself who have absolutely no power. She claimed that she did not get her job by writing leftist and feminist nonsense. I do not believe her. But, I felt great Schadenfreude at the fact that a professor at one of Canada's most prestigious universities would respond in such a defensive manner to anything written by an unemployed guy living out in the middle of the desert. I laughed for hours at the thought of the powerful and mighty getting worked up over the musings of a man armed with nothing more than a Tucson-Pima County Public Library card. I know that is not an enlightened attitude to take. But, it did make me feel very good. I still feel good about it. I must be doing something right.

1 comment:

Chris O'Byrne said...

Otto, you are truly awesome!