I don’t know if I’ll get to blog tomorrow night, so tonight might be the last for a few days as I head off to the National Communication Association (NCA) conference in Chicago. Highlights will include seeing lots of old friends, including Toby and Z0R (no, that’s not her real name), who had twins since I last saw them. I present a short paper that was supposed to be excerpted from the introduction to the book I thought I’d finish last summer as of last January (Abject Media). But now that book’s on the backburner (in favor of a shorter work on digital audio that seems a bit more timely and due to be finished next summer), and so it was a scramble to get the talk together. On the other hand, since I’ll have all of 10 minutes, I don’t think it’ll be a big thing. It never is. I also won an award, or rather co-won it: Critical and Cultural Studies Division Book of the Year, which is the only award for which I’ve had the presence of mind to submit The Audible Past. So that’s cool. I have mixed feelings about NCA, but CCS has been a great oasis in that organization.
Tonight’s cabride home (hey, I make a decent wage, sometimes I just want to get home!) was interesting because my driver knew my landlord. Talk about a small world. He was remarkably appreciative of my terrible French (turns out I get it wrong on my voicemail message at work — must rerecord) and we got to talking. Pierro the driver used to own a clothing store a couple doors down from the store my landlord owned in the early 90s. “That Stephane, he’s a go-getter — he’s in his 30s and look at him: two stores and he owns a loft!” I’ll have to say hi. I’m hoping that Stephane will drop by tomorrow to do something about the heat — if you can believe it, it’s too hot here. All the locals tell me it’ll be just right in February.
News of the Weird:
My graduate seminar for next fall will be entitled “Seminar on Repetition Seminar on Repetition.” I hope the syllabus will be clever enough to warrant the title. It’s a sort of “topics in sound studies” thing — definitely a new thing for me.
I keep getting queries about my old job at Pitt. Is that normal when someone moves? What am I supposed to say (besides “forget about it if you’re in an academic couple”)?
I got the best excuse for a late paper ever today, but I can’t reveal it in a public forum such as this — gotta protect the innocent!
Bad Subjects is about to set up a collective blog in which I will participate. It’ll be weird to blog in two places, but the collective voice there is an interesting experiment.