Daniel Heller-Roazen discusses his book – Inner Touch: Archeology of a Sensation – in this talk (.mp3). I want to be like this guy when I grow up. (h/t Prologus)
Perverse Egalitarianism
an otherwise excellent blog
Daniel Heller-Roazen discusses his book – Inner Touch: Archeology of a Sensation – in this talk (.mp3). I want to be like this guy when I grow up. (h/t Prologus)
Perverse Egalitarianism 
The bio on Heller-Roazen is freakin’ amazing; the guy speaks 9 langauges!
The lecture he gives is quite good, I’m looking forward to reading the book
I hope he’s in the process of learning his 10th language, and OCD part of me just find the idea of 9 languages so discomforting, I say he goes for Old Slavonic…
The trouble with claiming to know nine languages is that you could always run into someone who does, in fact, know one of those languages . . .
I don’t see any reason to doubt that he indeed does know the languages – I think it’s mostly research ones like Arabic or Greek or Latin… But you’re right claiming to know languages could be quite dangerous when coming in contact with multi-lingual people. I claimed to have known Yiddish and then I met Shahar and in a couple of targeted phrases, he utterly shuttered by self-proclaimed adequacy. However, I believed that I knew the language, so it’s all forgiven now. Actually, I’m surprised for what counts as “knowing the language” in the US doctoral programs – I think reading a children’s book or a text from a newspaper with a dictionary would count as passing the German exam in most cases… Things used to be very different, I am told, but now that students mostly come to graduate school unprepared to take on a completely new language, some programs drop the requirement of two research languages and do one, or you can substitute it with statistics… Sad indeed…
I have studied with the man; he does know these languages. At least, I know six of them quite well, and in all of those his knowledge far surpasses mine.
I am currently reading his book and I am very excited about it.
can anyone upload the mp3 somewhere again please? they changed the website on upenn and i can’t get it anymore.
thanks!
I came around here looking for this as well. After googling the name of the file, I came up with this:
[audio src="http://mediamogul.seas.upenn.edu/writershouse/Heller-Roazen-Daniel_Theorizing_KWH-UPenn_11-21-06.mp3" /]
Hope you enjoy it!