Some questions arrived in the mail this morning from Ekpektatwa, an interdisciplinary arts project in Poland. I decided to warm up by answering them. I think they really wanted an essay, but I went with point form. Sometimes it’s more fun just to answer the questions. 1). What is silence for You? Is it a …
Category Archives: Ideas
A Few Thoughts on Things, Equipment, Technologies (With Heidegger)
I know it’s quiet around here. I’ve been on the road and catching up. It might ramp back up as I am now getting back into writing (which in my case always begets more writing). — I’m currently wrapping up the draft of my “Is Music a Thing” chapter and dealing with smart questions posed …
Continue reading “A Few Thoughts on Things, Equipment, Technologies (With Heidegger)”
Revisiting the Toronto School: Edmund Carpenter
In print I have had some harsh words to say about the so-called Toronto School’s treatment of sound (that’s so-called “Canadian School” to some Americans, but pretend I didn’t say that) in the concept of orality, and I shall have a few more in print shortly. But in preparation for that, I’ve taken a couple …
Continue reading “Revisiting the Toronto School: Edmund Carpenter”
Two New Blogs on Books + One on Speech
This is overdue, but I am pleased to announce two new blogs on the future of books by friends who are also publishing books on books this summer, Andrew Piper and Ted Striphas. See: The Book Report and The Late Age of Print and on a not-totally-unrelated topic: Money/Speech — Okay, I’m off to California …
On Managed Interdisciplinarity
In an earlier post, I discussed the evacuation of meaning from the term “interdisciplinarity” and some forms that I consider to be more authentic attempts to get beyond limits of traditional–and nontraditional–disciplines. One question often left unasked is why universities are now so interested in fostering certain kinds of interdisciplinarity. When I was first learning …
Authorial intent, after the fact
A friend just wrote and said “I’m teaching The Audible Past next week. Anything I should tell them about the book?” Here’s a lightly edited version of my reply: It’s hard for me to answer that. I have done a few class visits where students read the book and just talk about how it happened …
On Interdisciplinarity
Over at the Cat in the Stack (The HASTAC blog–not sure what to call it), Cathy Davidson makes the following interesting comment about interdisciplinarity: We’ve been arguing that true interdisciplinarity can’t happen unless you are put into situations where you are forced to learn from people with whom you do not share experiences, training, or …