Conference Report

I’m not sure I’ve ever experienced anything like the last week. Our department has (nominally) 14 faculty members, so it’s not a particularly big place. And yet there were three conferences in a single week, all based in our department and all exquisitely executed. I couldn’t have managed full attendance at every event given other obligations, but I did at least manage to make it to all three.

The first conference was more like a workshop — not open to the public or anything. It was a meeting of the Augmented Reality Research Team (though we’re really more writing about various forms of Mixed Reality than Augmented). We brought in a couple guests and each did 40-minute presentations with responses and discussion. The result was just like one of those workshops that I sometimes travel to attend — where a small number of people have intense exchanges of ideas for a couple days and get to know each other. Except that this time, it was with some of my own colleagues (plus a few others), which is an experience relatively few people get to have. Most of the time, departments don’t have occasions to meet to discuss their own professors’ work-in-progress.

Thursday was the [CTRL] : TAS symposium. I was only able to catch Ken Wark’s keynote, which was exceptionally clear and crisp, and as usual, he didn’t shy away from challenges in the Q&A (no, video games really aren’t a form of narrative). I was especially taken with his approach to putting Gamer Theory online before its book-form publication to solicit commentary. I am tempted to do the same thing with the mp3 manuscript, depending on cost, time, and a few other factors. I think I already have the necessary resources.

Friday and Saturday was the symposium of Crime, Media and Culture, which I also caught only a little of — though I did manage to crash both of the social events (a benefit of being married to one of the organizers). But all the participants were praising the event; and the panel I attended was outstanding, and one of the more politicized sets of papers I’ve seen presented on the McGill campus.

Today was all about recovery. Since I don’t know how to celebrate Victoria Day properly tomorrow, I’ve got a dissertation or two to read.

A Whole Week of Conferences

I’ve always said Canadians love conferences, and this week is an intense one, with me not even leaving town.

T&W: I’m at a workshop for my Augmented Reality Research Team (well, it’s not my team; I’m just on it)

Th:

[CTRL]: TAS : Technology : Art : Society — organized by a grad student collective (Anna Feigenbaum, Horea Avram and tobias c. van Veen), with the always-provocative Ken Wark as keynote and combining academia, activism and art.

F-S:

Crime, Media and Culture Symposium — co-organized by Carrie, Will Straw and Anna Leventhal and featuring a bunch of cool people from here and away.

The gadget report will have to wait.

Back from DC — more family gossip

Wow. I don’t know if we’ll do that drive again. It was over 14 hours there because of traffic jams. When it’s already a long trip, a few traffic jams can really mess you up. I have a major gadget report coming your way, but in the meantime, the family history discovery of the year was this:

My aunt Helen (my mother’s sister) copyedited Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics. She did a lot of copyediting work out of high school, and did a bunch of books from the Modern Library. But in the midst of some other recollection, she casually mentioned a dinner with Wiener and his wife and so I inquired further. Turns out she’d copyedited the book and they’d become friendly afterward. Indeed, her name — Helen Avati — turns up in the finding aid to his papers. She was surprised to find out that I was interested. I was simply blown away by the small-worldness of it all.

Wiener’s Cybernetics and The Human Use of Human Beings make short appearances in my mp3 manuscript. And so another circle is closed.

Last year’s discovery is here, though I somehow forgot to mention that another one of the family shoe store’s customers was Enrico Caruso (who makes a brief appearance in the Audible Past), and there was at one time supposedly a picture to prove it, though nobody seems to know where it is. I doubt it still exists.

Vegetarian Paella and Travel

I’m up early, so you get a blog entry before I hit the road. We’re off to Washington DC for a few days for my annual family get-together around the Myron M. Weinstein Memorial Lecture. Some years we fly, some years we drive. This year, we’re driving. It’s a long drive, but we like the time together in the car once in awhile (we used to do it twice a year back and forth to Minneapolis when we were in grad school) and the drive is mostly beautiful, at least until we get to New Jersey. The long drive at the end of school is a good head-clearing exercise as well. And we’ve got a lot of head-clearing to do.

In the meantime, here’s a recipe for vegetarian paella. It’s not really much like paella I’ve had a Spanish restaurants, it’s somewhere between Spanish-themed risotto and paella. But it was a hit at our end-of-term student potluck last weekend. We doubled the amounts. The recipe is lightly adapted from Rebar: Modern Food Cookbook

Vegetarian Paella

Olive Oil for stir-frying
1 large onion
6 garlic cloves, crushed
½tsp red chile flakes
2tsp salt
1Tbsp chili power (yes, that’s a tablespoon)
1Tbsp sweet paprika (ditto)
2tsp minced thyme
2tsp minced oregano (we use Mexican)
2 large red and yellow peppers
1 can chopped tomatoes, with juice
1.25 cups arborio rice
3 cups vegetable stock
½ lb asparagus or green beans (I prefer the asparagus; we couldn’t find either in good condition for the party version and left them both out)
cracked pepper
½ bunch Italian parsley
1 bunch scallions
parmeggiano reggiano

We strongly recommend making this dish in a cast iron skillet or pot.

Heat the stock so it’s ready at hand. Measure out all the spices so they’re ready too. Heat the oil and sauté the onion and bell pepper until cooked. When finished, add the garlic and tomato. Add salt and spices, then stir in the rice and coat well.

Add the 3 cups of stock, cover, bring to a boil and the simmer on low, covered for about 30 minutes.

Steam the asparagus or green beans until tender.

Stir in the asparagus, parsley, scallions and parmeggiano reggiano into the cooked risotto. Serve.

And for something positive

It’s impossible to follow up a post on the death of a loved one and sound anything but banal, but here goes:

Friday, I got a call at the office from my old friend Matt Ruben, an urban studies scholar in drag as a literature scholar (or is it the other way around?) Anyway, I always liked his work — sophisticated, critical, engaged in the way that the best urban studies is, and very politicized. Matt got his PhD recently and so has decided to run for an at-large seat on the Philadelphia City Council. The election is coming up soon, so I sent in a donation. It will be tough but he has a chance. How often do you find a political candidate in whom you can actually believe? It’s true that I don’t live in Philly, but sometimes it’s nice to support one of the good guys.

Tetrys: June 1992-May 1 2007


This morning, I found Tet lying on his side, by the door to the patio, like he’d laid down to rest. He passed away during the night — he was still a little warm when I found him.

After a year and a half’s battle with cancer, partial renal failure, and a variety of other complications, the cancer finally got him. His last few days saw a significant upturn, as often happens shortly before someone with terminal illness dies. He came out and socialized with people at our end-of-term potluck for our students on Saturday night, and yesterday he dined on sizable helpings of tuna and 2% yogurt — we’d long since given up on the kidney-saving diet and just offered him food he would eat. He also spent a lot of time sitting on me as I read an essay of Carrie’s and a dissertation during the day, and later as we watched some TV. Up to the end, even though he was impossibly skinny, he had a strong will to live, an interest in affection, and an obsession with the faucet in the bathroom sink. He was a sweet and gentle cat, and we will miss him.

Some Cran Bread to Tide You Over

My mind is just brimming with ideas for this blog, especially as we roll into our 3rd summer (2nd full) in Montreal. Reflections on my big course this term and the project of mass education that universities have undertaken; reflections on our “settling” here and changing knowledge of the city; a few technological matters in addition to Skype, and on and on. You don’t know this, but I also owe you pictures of an anechoic chamber I visited in February.

Unfortunately, I am mired in a stack of final exams. Well, it’s not that bad. They’re doing pretty well on the whole, but my reading speed is directly tied to the quality of each student’s handwriting. Now I know how my profs must have felt, and who so few of them assigned me long-form essay-based final exams. I’ve got those exams, the process of assigning final grades (which is an industrial undertaking in itself with 200 students) and then a paper on convolution reverb to finish before I head off on the annual sojourn to Washington DC for the Weinstein Memorial Lecture next week.

So, to tide you over, here is Carrie’s Cran Bread recipe, adapted from a 47 year-old McCall’s Cookbook (complete with Technicolor-like pictures of food). We brought it over to a friend who had just had a baby, and she asked for the recipe. Whenever we type them up, they will show up here.

Carrie’s Cranberry Nut Bread

Ingredients:

1 cup fresh cranberries (or thaw out 1 cup of frozen)
2 cups sifted flour
3/4 cup sugar
3 t. baking powder
1/4 t. salt
1/2 cup walnuts (optional)
2 eggs
1 cup milk (we use skim)
1/4 cup butter, melted
1 t. vanilla extract

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease a 9” x 5” X 3” loaf pan. Wash cranberries, removing stems; chop coarsely.
2. Sift flour with sugar, baking powder and salt into large bowl. Stir in cranberries and walnuts (if desired).
3. In small bowl, with rotary beater or wooden spoon, beat eggs with milk, butter, and vanilla.
4. Make well in center of cranberry mixture. Pour in egg mixture; with fork, stir just until dry ingredients are moistened.
5. Turn into prepared pan; bake 55 minutes, or until golden brown on top and cake tester inserted in center comes out clean.
6. Cool in pan 10 minutes. Remove from pan; cool on wire rack. Serve thinly sliced.