Landed, but not grounded

I get a lot of questions about my attitude toward having cancer. I don’t actually feel as though I am exercising an act of will, or being stoic, or heroic, or brave or anything else. These are clichés, as well illustrated by the Onion article “Loved Ones Recall Local Man’s Cowardly Battle With Cancer”:

“Most people, when they find out they’ve got something terrible like this, dig deep down inside and tap into some tremendous well of courage and strength they never knew they had,” said Judith Kunkel, Russ’ wife of 11 years. “Not Russ. The moment he found out he had cancer, he curled up into a fetal ball and sobbed uncontrollably for three straight weeks.”

That’s the thing, it actually takes more effort to run around screaming “oh shit oh shit oh shit!” than to simply, well, deal with it. (Though I guess I’ve never tried the running around screaming part, so I will have to defer to those who have more experience than I do).

So let’s start with the diagnosis. A cancer diagnosis, even a thyroid cancer diagnosis, is supposed to be devastating. To me, it was a relief.

I don’t know how cancer diagnoses work in other medical systems, but the medical culture here is that one does a test and either schedules a follow-up a few weeks later or gets a “we’ll call you by X date if there’s anything to worry about.” I had a biopsy in September and I had an appointment 3 weeks after the biopsy. Maybe 8 days after the biopsy, I get a phone call asking me to come in at 8:30 the following morning. You don’t need a PhD to figure that one out–they weren’t calling me in urgently to tell me it’s benign. So in a way, the phone call tells you.

Carrie and I spent that night worrying but we couldn’t really do anything, and there is still reasonable doubt since nobody has actually said the words “you have cancer” to me. I imagine that is one of the crappiest parts of the medical profession. I’ve had to dole out my share of bad news as professor and chair but it’s not life-and-death bad news. I remember the appointment only in pieces, and in fact could not tell you how I was told. But I do remember in vivid detail the surgeon going over the risks of surgery and its necessity. That’s where I first learned about the anatomy of my neck–the parathyroids, the thyroid lobes, and the recurrent laryngeal nerves (you’d think I would have come across that one in all that physiology reading for the Audible Past but since they weren’t ear-related, I more or less tuned it out).

In my case, the diagnosis turned out to be a relief, especially in retrospection. I had been feeling like crap for months, with a diffuse set of symptoms that were hard to explain and impossible to attribute to a cause. Some were outright bizarre. For instance, I had become incredibly sensitive to pressure changes. Some old farmers can predict the weather from their knees. I was able to predict the weather from my neck, and pressure changes made me feel pretty sick. Once the right lobe came out and the surgeon looked inside, it was clear that one of my major causes was that the tumor was essentially strangling me. If cancer had not been found and if the surgery would not have been performed, it might have eventually killed me. Though probably my diffuse symptoms would have become more and more acute and I would simply have wound up in a hospital in much more unfavorable conditions. Instead, I can no longer predict the weather. That’s what the internet is for, anyway.

With a thyroid cancer diagnosis, anyway, I went from not knowing what was wrong with me to understanding exactly what was wrong, and what it would take to make it right. Yet, cancer itself is incredibly abstract. In its advanced stages, it is intensely painful. But it is not causing me any physical pain. Nevertheless, I know it has to go.

This week I received a CD from Owen Chapman, my colleague at Concordia. Entitled Calling the Voice-O-Graph, it is an album of sample-based music though he also plays some of the parts himself. If you click the link to the online part of the project, you’ll see the idea behind it is pretty interesting: free music in exchange for dialogue, or more accurately, commentary. That works well when you don’t have to sell your wares to get by. Owen’s attitude toward the record is like my attitude toward the articles in the “text” section of Sterneworks. We’re both more concerned about an audience than about revenue since we both draw a salary by other means (thank you, Canadian taxpayers). I read it as a slight escalation of the process you can see at places like bandcamp, where you have to give your email address to the band. In fact, there’s a great deal of free stuff available online in exchange for your email address and the implied right to promote to you.

Allowing for their differences, in both Owen’s case and the bandcamp case, there is a slightly coercive exchange dimension to replace the economic relationship with music that comes when you buy a record. The music isn’t truly “free” because you’ve got to give something to get something. Even if you are downloading music of bitTorrent or listening to a swooshy myspace track, you’re paying your ISP (and the hits no doubt generate some kind of “value” for myspace as well). Music is never really totally “free”–though what these new strategies do (bandcamp, Owen, but also Radiohead and Saul Williams, among others) is force the relationship into one between audience and performer, even if it’s just giving up your email address to allow some for some more marketing news to flow through email, the sewer of the internet.

The last chapter of MP3: The Meaning of a Format is called “Is Music a Thing?” and is an extended rumination both on the economic form of music and a debate that has ravaged music studies for at least a century. Stated roughly, one side argues that the primary “ontology” of music is artifactual–music is a “thing” that exists in scores, records or some metaphysical notion of “the work” itself. The other side argues that music only exists relationally, in process, and inbetween people. Of course there are many shades inbetween. The position you take on this debate subtends arguments about both what we should do about the music industry and what a better future for music might look like. If you are a historian of sound recording, it also shapes your understanding of what recording does. Here’s one of my favorite quotes in the chapter, from Evan Eisenberg (with some text around it from me). You’ll see Eisenberg was writing in the 1980s:

Eisenberg writes, “when I buy a record, the musician is eclipsed by the disk. And I am eclipsed by my money—not only from the musician’s view but my own. When a ten-dollar bill leaves my right hand and a bagged record enters my left, it is the climax. The shudder and ring of the register is the true music; later I will play the record, but that will be redundant. My money has already heard it.” Eisenberg’s argument is a pretty straight-up variation on Georg Lukacs’ account of reification, where relationships among people become relations among things. In Eisenberg’s world, relations that once existed between musicians and audiences are transformed into relations among cash and records.

I’m not entirely sure I believe this account since it assumes a prior relationship between musician and audience that is somehow less “damaged” by commerce. Let us not forget that before recording, many 19th century relationships among performers and audiences were mediated by money in other ways–whether we are talking about paying audiences in concert halls, cellists playing “middle music” in the back rooms of bars, or middle class women serving as home entertainment systems at the family piano. But let’s go with Eisenberg for now since there is also some bit of truth in his quote. If Eisenberg’s account is true, what happens when there is no cash and there are no records? My physical copy of Calling the Voice-O-Graph is a short run CD-R. The art on it is really nice, but it doesn’t even have a jacket. As far as I can tell, it is a “promotional” copy. But promotion for what? Promotion for the website and the project, of course.

I’m thinking about this not just as a scholar but as someone who makes music. I’ve now got two “music” projects in two states of incompletion, and one of my therapies during all this cancer crap has been composing soundscapes (and increasingly, beats) that will no doubt turn into some kind of recording as well. Then there are a couple random recording projects sitting around that I guess I would call capital S A Sound Art though I wish there were a better term (here’s an old one). I enjoy making the stuff (a lot) more than I think I enjoy the getting out and promoting it (not at all). And with bandcamp and other resources, I’d started to think of abandoning physical copies altogether. There is plenty of great music I’ve discovered online (for those who enjoy abstract electronica, try track 2 here for this week’s discovery). And yet, a physical record does something. I’m Facebook friends with Owen and no doubt got the invite to the release party for Voice-O-Graph. But I get so many invitations to so many things on Facebook that I don’t even remember getting it. And I might well not have been able to go anyway, since the whole out-in-loud-public-places thing isn’t working that well for me right now. (I also don’t really like the promotional culture of social-networking sites, and therefore don’t pay a lot of attention to it. It’s probably an age thing more than anything else.)

Conversely, I dutifully put on the CD this morning, a few days after receiving it, and then went and checked out the site. And here I am writing this post now (Owen, this is your comment!). In fact, the only times anymore that I put on a CD are when I buy them or receive them. Then they’re in the computer and I go back to them, or not as the case may be.

I won’t end this with any grand claims about how the materiality of music still matters. After all, it is a lie to call digital music immaterial (this is also a major theme in the mp3 book). And consumption patterns are intensely generational. I’m not in a position to judge the affective investments of people a whole lot younger than me, and I know that many people my age and older still populate their musical lives with recordings that live as artifacts, whether as CDs or records. That’s also the pattern I grew up with and so my reactions to a CD vs. a link are themselves second nature. So I guess I will be making some hard copies after all.

As for the mp3 book, I have yet to see (at least for me) a viable e-reader for something so thick as a scholarly book. I’m sure it will come someday. In the meantime, I’m going artifact all the way.

There’s some bloggable backstory here. For instance, today I saw a videotape of the inside of my throat. My right vocal cord remained paralyzed but the left one moved all the way over to compensate. Also, it turns out that the insides of people’s throats look an awful lot like meat. But here’s the update, and I will write more soon.

———–

Dear Friends Near and Far,

Welcome to another exciting installment of Cancer Update, which I am both the subject of the news and its author.

HEADLINES: surgery is back on again, for the 12th of February. As always, there is a chance that the surgery date will be changed, but if it is changed, it will probably be the 19th of February. So no Mexico vacation for me but if the drugs are good enough, I won’t care. Once we know how the surgery goes, I will be scheduled in for various radioactive treatments. There are some serious-but-not-mortal risks to the surgery but the risks for doing nothing are higher, so I am as certain as I can be about the decision.

You can stop reading here, but as always the gory details are included for the curious (and to spare me the trouble of repeating them in a lot of separate emails). Apologies for droning on.

THE LONG VERSION:

When we last left off, my surgery had been suspended and I’d been referred for a 3rd opinion. Thanks to some help from a doctor friend here, I got in for a “clinic” pretty quickly at Montreal General. It consisted of a senior endocrinologist (who also acts as an oncologist—he trained my endo), a senior surgeon who is very well respected in these parts, and a med student. They went over my case in great detail and discussed my various options. It turns out that the non-surgical option is not really an option. Given the size of my thyroid and the probable size of my tumor, they would have to give me enough radioactive iodine to kill me in order to kill it. Even with the highest tolerable dose, followed by external beam radiation, they would not get rid of it. It would then likely grow back and surgery might be necessary a few years down the road. Except that a later surgery would be much more difficult and dangerous because of all the burnt tissue inside of me. Worse yet, there is no real evidence-based medicine for a non-surgical option in my case, so we would more or less be flailing around in the dark. They were both very clear that they would recommend surgery to me even with the risks, and that they themselves would choose that path if they were in my place.

One other nice outcome besides a clear path forward is that the consulting surgeon volunteered to be present for my surgery, so I will now have two surgeons instead of one. They will also have various gadgets in place to minimize the risks, and the surgery will take place at Montreal General instead of Jewish General. I guess I’m on a tour now; at least I am collecting cards and proliferating dossiers around Montreal hospitals. The surgery will begin with an all-forces effort to locate and protect my left vocal nerve.

That said, there are still serious risks to the surgery. Because I have only one vocal nerve left, if the second one is damaged or wrapped in cancer, I will have to have a tracheostomy. A trach will not be particularly fun, but is certainly a livable disability. The odds I’ve been given are between 1% and 10% of having to have it, but of course I’m a person, not a population so it’ll either be 0% or 100% when I wake up in the recovery room. I guess the inbetween is if they have to do a temporary trach, which could also happen if the nerve is stunned. Last time, there was some risk of the unfortunately-named “Sternal Split”, and there’s still a very small chance of that, but it’s basically more pain in the short term if they need to dig in a bit to protect my nerve. There’s a long menu of other, weirder risks (such as inability to smile on one side of my face or to lift one of my arms above my head) but as I’ve said from the beginning, it’s likely I’ll get one out of a bunch of possible outcomes, and so I will deal with whatever happens when it happens. I told the surgeons to save the nerve if they can, but if they can’t, then I don’t want clean margins in my neck, I want clean highways in there. If they can save the nerve, they may leave in a little bit of thyroid to be taken out with radioactive iodine. I’m fine with that, too. The condition of my voice after the surgery is a big question mark. If they can save the nerve, it is likely that it will at least return to the condition it’s in now. If they can’t, I’ve heard some pretty divergent things about speech with a tracheostomy. The surgeons seem confident, but a laryngologist I met with today was considerably less reassuring (her answers were a lot of “it depends”).

GOOD NEWS DEPARTMENT:

In the meantime, my voice continues to improve in plateaus. Last Monday I woke up and sounded like “me” (at least in my head) for the first time since November. My voice is still much quieter than it used to be, but the quality is so good that when I saw my surgeon last week he scoped me to see if my right vocal nerve had started working again. My right vocal cord is still paralyzed, but my left vocal cord has compensated nicely. On the telephone people almost can’t tell anything’s wrong, though it’s still harder for me to talk on the phone than in person. Also, I saw another surgeon today who’s been tracking my lungs. He went over the PET scan and there are no clear signs of malignancy outside of my thyroid, though we’ll do another PET scan in 4 months to be certain. If the Quebec healthcare system wants to spend the money on me, I’m happy to oblige.

I have been sneaking into work a little bit, but I’ve been unable to do much of my own writing. That part of my brain seems to be preoccupied and/or diverted to anxiety management. At least the musical part of my brain seems totally uninhibited by the goings on elsewhere in my head.

I will write again if there’s a big update or a change of date for the surgery. Otherwise, the next message you get will likely be post-surgery.

Best to you all, and as always, more news as it happens.

Sincerely,
–Jonathan

Part of chronic illness is managing others’ responses to it. In the sense that lots of people want to know what’s happening and I can’t possibly update everyone individually. So I have resorted to mass emails. Here’s tonight’s.

——–

Dear Friends and Colleagues Near and Far,

I’m writing with another brief cancer update.

Today was a big medical day. In the morning I had a PET scan, which is a whole body scan where they look for cells that take up radioactive material (which was injected into me). On first glance at the scan, the only area that appears to be abnormally lit up (brains, hearts, livers, etc usually light up) is the remaining part of my thyroid. But we need a proper report, which will be another week or two. Late this afternoon, I met with my surgeon and my endocrinologist (who also serves as an oncologist). They both suggested that I hold off on surgery for now while we assess some things. They are also referring me for what is essentially a third opinion. There is also apparently some (very slim) possibility that my right vocal nerve might start working again if it is still there. I’m not holding out for that one but of course it would be nice.

To an observer, the moving surgery dates and all might sound maddening. But given the risks posed by another surgery (especially to my voice), I am 100% in favor of a cautious approach. So for now it’s more appointments, more consultations and possibly more tests. And Synthroid.

As always, my apologies for not writing back to everyone. I’m finding it hard to keep up with email, but I’m hopeful that in the coming weeks I can catch up.

More news here as it happens.

My Radioactive Best,
–Jonathan

This is a post about some issues I encountered at someone else’s birthday party, which makes it inherently pathetic and self-centered. But then, this is a blog, so I get to be pathetic and self-centered once in awhile, right? I apologize up front. For the record, it was a fun party and any non-fun issues are strictly my own and not the responsibility of my hosts or friends. I was totally glad I went.

So, onto the story.

As I have mentioned here, my voice has not been the same since the surgery. Assuming that there isn’t further damage in the next surgery–if there is a next surgery (or from the cancer itself) I will get back about 70-80% of what I have. I’ve been going to an excellent speech therapist (it’s like singing lessons) and every few weeks there is some improvement.

But for all that, I am functionally disabled in the meantime. I used to have much more vocal power than other people. Now I have considerably less, and what is projected is harder to hear. That said, I am not the kind of person who wants to sit at home and be depressed about a disability or being in the middle of treatment. If I feel good on a given day, I should do something. There’s a Quebec saying that is something to the effect of “you have to live your life.” And so I am trying to figure out how to do that.

Since the surgery, I hadn’t been out to anything more than a dinner party, and even dining out has been kind of fraught because even moderate restaurant noise makes it difficult for my voice to be heard. It is easily masked. Carrie and I dined recently at Bombay Mahal and while she could hardly hear anything I said, I had an entertaining time watching her try to eat the “extra spicy” dosai she’d ordered, so that sort of made up for it. (The waiter said “have you had our food before?” she answered “yes, but I’d still like some extra spice.”)

Anyway, Saturday night was a party celebrating two of my friends turning 40 so I thought it would be a good time to give this whole outside world thing another try. Sooner or later I have to, so if not now, when? The party was held at a bar, starting at 8:30 and then migrating upstairs two hours later for dancing. I figured I can at least dance if I can’t talk, right? And I was clever–or so I thought. This whole being disabled thing means I’ve got to experiment and figure out something that works for me in the big bad normalist world. So I took some index cards and a sharpie, and came up with a series of stock phrases that I could flash at people, such as:

“How, how’s it going?”

“My voice is messed up so I made these cards.”

“Cancer sucks. I feel fine. Thanks for asking.”

“I don’t know yet. I’ll know more Monday or Tuesday.”

“Tell me how YOU’RE doing.”

“Yes, please. Water.”

“Great party!”

“Happy 40th birthday!”

“Tell me more.”

“That’s awesome/I agree/I’m happy for you.” (select whichever one is appropriate)

“That sucks/I disagree/That’s too bad” (select whichever one is appropriate)

“If you could hear me, I would have a clever 1-liner right now.”

and so on. I brought my sharpie and some more blank cards to improvise on the spot.

My hope was that with a little prompting, other people would talk and I would listen, aided by the cards. But two things happened.

First, people were self conscious about asking me stuff. So I tried to talk. Today I was incredibly hoarse as a result. I should know better. They were trying to be nice. And I do like to talk, so the temptation is great.

Second, it turns out I wasn’t the only disabled person at the table. In more than a few cases, each time a card came out, friends had to reach for their reading glasses in order to be able to see them. Foiled! Some disabilities, like farsightedness are “normal” but I obviously didn’t even consider them, since they are not my own. Others, like my voice, are “abnormal” and therefore marked. Though marked disabilities are equally unconsidered by those unaffected–I always hated phone menus that require you to speak; now they do not even recognize my voice as a voice.

As the disability studies motto goes, “someday, you will join us.” That is what is so difficult in thinking about anything like systematic accommodation. Bodies fall apart or are “absent” in different ways, and accommodations may themselves introduce new issues into play.

I still plan to get some kind of portable voice amplifier (or more likely, buying whatever is out there as a template for something more advanced that I help design). But first we have to have some decisions about my course of treatment. I don’t want to drop a few hundred bucks on something I won’t be able to use.

I am happy to report that I can still dance. If by dancing we mean “semi-rhythmic movements on a dance floor.” I was never very good at the whole “particular-body-part-in-a- particular-place-at-particular-time” thing.

——

Postscript: I learned that film critic Roger Ebert is a thyroid cancer survivor, though he’s had a particularly rough go of it. He’s written a few things about it, but they’re pretty sobering, since he no longer eats or speaks with his own voice.

Yet another short one. I feel like I keep doing these forum things when I should be doing full articles. Oh well, such is the life of a chair. I also have this book manuscript on its way, so I shouldn’t complain. Anyway, it’s timely and apropos, what with that Thomas H. Benton guy publishing another scare-the-students-screed in the Chronicle of Higher Ed (no link provided, as I don’t want to endorse it).

“The Pedagogy of the Job Market,” Journal of Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 6:4 (December 2009): 421-424.

Also in that forum is a piece by Carole Blair on the politics of handbooks. There’s a little too much score-settling for my taste but I share some of her misgivings about the recent “handbook” craze among publishers. If you have access to a university that subscribes, this link should get you there (a VPN may be necessary).

We live in a world where people are more private about their ailments than their sex lives (the same has been said about money, but that’s a whole other subject). If I had to guess, such privacy stems from stigma, the desire not to be perceived as weak and the death taboo. No matter the cause, almost all protracted illness carries with it a certain stigma in many social quarters, and stigma is something that can be wielded against people at unfortunate times. As I’m fond of pointing out, one of the unfortunate side-effects of broad secularization (overall a great historical achievement) is that people no longer seem able to deal with the fact that they, and everyone they know will one day die. So people stay quiet about their ailments. I was one of them. I kept to myself about my various symptoms before I got my diagnosis, despite the fact that I’d had problems for months.

When I learned I had cancer, I had a decision to make. I could treat the illness as a private matter, telling only my closest friends and family. But that would mean all sorts of unexplained behaviors and absences for months on end. By the nature of my job, I lead a public life. Professors don’t just disappear from large lecture courses in the middle of the term. Department chairs don’t just suddenly abandon their posts in the middle of term, and even casual friends don’t just stop returning phone calls and emails without raising questions. Moreover, creating a divide between those who know and those who do not meant a whole lot of extra work for me in managing my identity and who knew what about me. So I decided to take the plunge. I would just tell everyone. I suppose there’s still and inside and outside as you won’t be seeing photos of my scar here (healing nicely, thanks to my surgeon’s artistry and nightly doses of neosporin) or reading various gory details of various, ahem, post-surgical events (apologies to Gone Feral readers who may have wandered over). But basically, I’m out.

Living as half of a heterosexual couple, I can’t really say what it’s like to be queer and out, but I have read enough and talk with enough people that there must be some parallels in the liberation that one feels. I am, of course, tremendously privileged and lucky to live and work in an incredibly supportive environment. From my time on two survivor listservs, I know that this is not the case for everyone. So there’s probably a class and education element. But it’s been incredibly eye-opening for me. Maybe it’s just me, but I feel like health and the body are still places where ideology does its work most effectively. I get on the metro car in the morning, and apart from someone who is obviously hurting in some way, I assume I am in a car full of healthy bodies who have no interaction with the medical and psychological complex. I go to work and assume the same thing. My problems are my own, theirs are their own. The death taboo does it work: we live as if we are surrounded by undamaged bodies.

But of course this is not the case. Almost everyone has some level of interaction with medicine or psychology, and it’s a fact of bodies that they break down, they do not work as they are supposed to, and they create all sorts of mysteries within themselves.

I opened myself up to a tremendous wave of emotional support from friends and strangers alike, and that’s been great. But something else happened that because of the ideological blinders, I never really expected. I started hearing about other people’s medical issues. A lot. Once I took the first step, there was a conversational space for other people to talk about their issues and tell their stories. It has been tremendously freeing to talk openly about things that are not often openly discussed, not for some kind of thrill of breaking taboos, but for the much more mundane pleasure of connecting with people. I’m not saying people should sit around talking about their illnesses and bodies all day. But they shouldn’t feel like they can’t when the subject is apropos or it’s an issue on their minds.

That is not to say that there isn’t awkwardness. I did not ever envision the day I’d stand in front of 230 undergraduates and declare to them that I have thyroid cancer (complete with CAT scans of cat thyroids for illustration in a powerpoint). Being McGill students, I got a ton of incredibly nice emails, many of which are still owed a response (keeping up with the email and cards has proven impossible though of course I’m grateful for every single note). Today I had to explain to my grad seminar what was wrong with my voice and why I was using a microphone. And why I might disappear for part of the semester.* That’s not the first-day vibe I usually go for.

The same is true with strangers. At least once a day when I’m out or get a phone call, someone asks what is wrong with my voice. So I tell them that I’ve got a paralyzed vocal cord from thyroid cancer. I don’t know who said that coming out is a constant, ongoing process, but again I feel that there is some kind of parallel between what disability studies scholars sometimes call normalism (you can guess what that means) and heterosexism. In both cases, you’re assumed to belong to a dominant category until suddenly, you do not. And when you do not, you must explain yourself.

So I explain myself. I figure it’s good to raise awareness, it’s easier than making something up, and it’s made life with cancer immeasurably more tolerable and simpler.

————-

* Teaching while undergoing treatment sounds insane, but it’s not. That’s for another post. Just trust me. Also, I’m co-teaching the class so if the going gets rough at the wrong time, the students are not hung out to dry.

Okay, we’re back and it should be really, really fixed this time.

First, OMG.  WordPress says this is post number 1000. I feel like I should do something special. Here’s a pony:

Okay, I cannot possibly tell you the best of anything over the last 10 years. I don’t think that way. So here’s some stuff I discovered in the last 10 years that I really like. I knew about some of the pre-2000 stuff before 2000 but maybe didn’t really appreciate or understand it. Also there’s lots of stuff from before 2000 that I love that’s not here. Feel free to explore for yourself, or not. These appear in no particular order except for the first one.

Life:
all of the awesome friends and colleagues I have met in the last 10 years–some people don’t meet this many wonderful people in a lifetime; tenure, Montreal, Canada, global travel and knowing people all over the planet as well as all over the continent, writing books, TV on DVD or downloaded, listening to the ocean and beach vacations in general, regular vacations (notice a theme? thank you, Canadians), saying no, reading in languages other than English, seeing youth in other people, the beauty of natural structures and plants (in moderation); driving a lot less. Actually, this list is harder than the ones below. Actually, as I write this I wonder “how have I really changed in the last 10 years?” Don’t answer that.

Music:
dubstep, stoner rock, post-rock, post-metal, IDM, glitch, ambient, dub, lounge, a gazillion other electronica subgenres and sub-subgenres, classic jazz (a rediscovery from high school–I just hadn’t listened to it) all sorts of various Canadian indy bands, letting other people select, plugins and softsynths, editing instead of punching in, simplicity over complexity, and that it is impossible to distinguish the electronic music of abstract DJs and “new music” composers but they sure do like to argue when they get into the same room. Oh yeah, bitTorrent, myspace, bandcamp, usergroups and lateral learning online.

Ideas:
Science and Technology Studies; German media theory and its various offshoots; process sociology and early sociology of science; disability studies; all the other amazing sound books that have come out in the last 10 years (and the sea-change in music studies when I wasn’t looking); my hidden realist streak and reacting against some of the doxas of cultural studies like constructivism, the retreat from normative thinking and an instrumental theory of culture; large-lecture pedagogy; lecturing and not lecturing in graduate seminars; doing real research online and getting journal ToCs sent to me; IP politics; oral historiography; phenomenology (but only as seasoning); long-term history–the 18th century was really not that long ago.

Food:
dried porcini mushrooms, cheeses that are illegal in the US (and some that are legal but I didn’t know about), neighborhood fruiteries, fast and low-effort risotto, things you make in the ice cream maker; the concept of the “nite”; Carrie’s famous guacamole and the ceremonial super bowl cheese dip; the foods of places I’ve visited; the sweetness of broccoli stalks when you peel them; caffeine addiction (2008 to be exact, and it’s tea, not coffee); and a bunch of kitchen techniques, gadgets and recipes not worth mentioning. Except Epicurious.

Politics:
All of Canadian and Quebec politics.

This list was composed quickly and with not too much thought, and probably edited later when I thought of something better.

Oh, yeah. Cancer. Like I could forget you! (I mean, me. Wait.) More on that later in the week. Today I had two doctor appointments and enjoyed Barbara Ehrenrich’s Bright-Sided while waiting. For a taste, go here (thanks, Nick). Her breast cancer chapter is called “Smile or Die.”

As for predictions: no flying cars by 2020. Thank you and good night.

The man wants to start blogging again and so of course the site slows to a halt. Pardon the dust. I should be up and running again in a couple days.