128

That’s the number of unread blog posts in my little rss feed on Safari. Yes, I have been neglecting the internet for other things. I’m thinking I need to get rid of some rss feeds and just go back to reading my friends. But enough on that.

So here we are in 2007 and I haven’t been showing you, dear readers, any love. No top-10 lists, no raging at the NYTimes‘ asinine series of articles about Jews who like Christmas, no tales of the compliant dinner party on Christmas night (they all spontaneously cleaned up after dinner), no tale of our venture upstairs to the landlord’s dance party on New Year’s Eve, no clever comment on one of the best football games I’ve ever seen (yes, Boise State vs. Oklahoma and yes I rooted for Boise State just because), no lists of the books that have arrived through the mail or the music that’s arrived through the internet, no reuminations on the nature of the academic process. Indeed, for those of you with an rss reader, no number next this blog’s name at all.

Winter break was lovely but too painfully short. My parents were here for a week from the 20th to the 27th and I really, honestly took the time off. But on the 28th it was right back to work, frantically writing on the book ms. before vast quantities of other unfinished business could not be ignored. In the past week, I’ve commented on a pile of seminar papers and other papers, designed a new website using WebCT Vista (which looks like it was coded by monkeys but does have more useful features than WebCT CE, which itself was perhaps coded by goats but let you post .html files and format your own site) and started teaching again. For all my laments, it was great to be back in class with undergrads again (undergrads and graduate students each offer their own unique delights). Oh yes, here’s the syllabus.

I am, however, in the odd position of being two days into winter term and contemplating the need for a day off. In lieu of that, it’s nice to finally have my hands on and my ears into the Stars album that people have been talking about for a year.

Onward, winter term! I have come to slay enjoy you.

Quote of the Week + More New Book Arrivals

The point of universites for Justi and other cameralists is to make students useful as future tools–servants of the state and upright citizens. If universities had merely the goal to improve citizens’ understanding and widen human knowledge, then one would need no public funding for institutions of such little benefit to the state and common good. […]

The state gets more from academics if it offers them moderate amounts of money and, as compensation, accords them largely ceremonial honors. The wise minister manages academics through their vanity. One gives them “a gracious audience, a short chat,” and if the academic is “in the list of the king’s little entourage,” this ahs greater effect than “when great sums of money go out of the treasury for the promotion of science.”

–A discussion of German 18th century Cameralists’ views on professors in William Clark Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University.

I’m reading around in the book rather than front to back. The stuff on the origins of the idea of the “professorial chair” and other trappings of academic tradition is delightful. Yes, it all really does come from somewhere. Parts of the chapter on orality made me cringe but I’m engaged enough to keep diving in elsewhere.

Other new arrivals (from a visit to the CCA bookstore)

David P. Brown, Noise Orders: Jazz, Improvisation and Architecture

and two exhibition catalogues–

Mirko Zardini, ed., Sense of the City: An Alternate Approach to Urbanism (missed the exhibit)

Giovanna Borasi, ed., Environ(ne)ment: Approaches for Tomorrow (kind of disappointing but one Philippe Rahm installation was very intriguing)

Seasonal Flamewar Disorder

Most of the listservs I receive and most of the online fora I frequent are prodominantly populated by academics. Academics, as you know, have a fairly predictable year-end cycle of finish, grade grade grade, and finish again. This is repeated in April through June though different people’s schools finish at different times, while Christmas affects most schools in a similar way. It also affects other businesses, so I think it may not be limited to academics.

Every year, a major flamewar breaks out on at least one of the lists to which I subscribe, or on one of the fora I read. Usually more than one. It always follows the same pattern: someone posts something mildly controversial (or not, as the case may be). Someone else takes offense or otherwise objects and responds quickly and anonymously. Everyone then goes absolutely nuts. It’s standard flamewar stuff, with some people trying to debate seriously while others pick and choose single lines (not even sentences) out of others’ posts and treat them as if they are logical propositions that stand on their own. That, mixed with a good dose of ad hominem (or ad feminem) rounds it all out.

In fact, right now, every email that’s arrived in my inbox (remember, kids, it’s christmas eve, even for us children of the covenant), with the exception of the digest list for bass players(1), is connected to one of these flamewars. I am sure that I have participated in past years but my New Relationship To E-Mail prevents me from doing so now. Or maybe I’m just older and mellowed.

Anyway, I am coining an appropriate term for this particular annual disorder. And I am doing it on the most gentile of holidays, when all we hear about is peace and good cheer and shopping, but all that sits in my inbox is bile, nitpicking and howling.

Oh yeah, I’m having a lovely visit with my parents. I think we might go to a museum today.

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1. The bassists’ list is not exempt. Earlier last week or the week before, someone posted a query on my bassists’ list about Canadian audiences for music. He said he loved playing in Canada and going to shows because audiences seemed better educated and/or more interested in music. He wondered if others shared his impressions. I replied and mentioned some of the things I’d noticed going to shows as well as how impressed I am with the public funding of the arts here. Some other guy got on and posted a self-described leftist rant (I didn’t find it to be so leftist) about the decline of public funding for the arts in Canada. Then a full-on flamewar about Canadian politics ensued. I think the last post on the subject was an American extolling the virtue of the free market system. The moderators finally shut it down. (I love moderated lists.) Remember, this flamewar started from someone saying he liked playing gigs in Canada and asking whether others also enjoyed playing in Canada. There was nothing hostile or flameworthy in it. Textbook case.

New Book Arrivals and More

New Books:

Andrew Crisell Understanding Radio — has it constantly checked out of the library, decided to buy after a recall

Creagher, Lunbeck and Schiebinger Feminism in Twentieth-Century Science, Technology and Medicine — mostly history an anthropology, a good collection. Again, purchased after a recall

Peter Szendy, Sur Écoute: Esthétique de L’Espionage just came in the mail. I’m going to try and struggle through it.

Brian Currid, A National Acoustics: Music and Mass Publicity in Nazi Germany — came across it at the museum

Tim J. Anderson Making Easy Listening: Material Culture and Postwar American Recording — ditto + how did I not know this was out?

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My parents arrive in a few hours. I have no idea if this will curb or encourage blogging, but I guess we’ll find out. I’m looking forward to taking some time off. And some non-directed reading.

Quick Updates

Sometimes my life here feels like a series of events planned by other people. Which is absolutely wonderful — there is always something going on — but of course one important part of life is maintaining friendships on one’s own time and in one’s own way and not under the rubric of an “event.” In that respect, the last 26 hours or so have been wonderful. I decided to let that stack of seminar papers sit and take some time off. We caught up with a friend and couple whom we haven’t seen in too long and did so at a leisurely pace. We also got some culture: we caught The Prestige, which I would certainly rate as the best movie I saw in 2006. Unless something else really brilliant comes along in the next two weeks. The plot twists and combination of 19th century mise-en-scene with science fiction were completely engaging. I hadn’t given Tesla much thought in quite awhile.

Today, we went with friends to see the Rodney Graham exhibit at the Musée d’Art Contemporain. “Lobbing Potatoes at a Gong” was perhaps the most delightful thing I’ve seen in an art gallerysince moving here.

I’d like to write more about each thing, but this will have to do for now. I leave you with some pictures of monkeys sent along by a friend in the know.

Timex Computer

Steven writes in the comments to the subway chord post:

OMG, you had a Timex Sinclair? It had a tape deck? I guess I didn’t know those things had any accessories.

Okay, I remembered wrong. Looking at the pictures, I most clearly had a Timex ZX81.

I actually inherited it from some friends of my parents, probably in about 1986. They had bought it, they didn’t use it, and I wanted a computer for my room where I could practice doing simple programming. (Very simple, it turned out–the thing was way more limited than the Apples, Commodores and IBMs that I was using at that point.) If you look at the picture, it came with this wild printer. I still remember the sound and smell of that thing. Warm and toasty and synthetic ink all at once. But you’ll also notice an RCA cable. That’s because the Timex didn’t come with a disk drive or anything else. You plugged it into a tape deck and used a tape. Like a modem, it used sound to store its data. And my teenage self thought it was very funny to convert it back into sound by playing the tapes in my stereo. I think the manual said not to do that.

Now, I need to say that this was never my main computer. My friends had Commodores and in 1984 (give or take), my family dropped close to $3000 on a Leading Edge Model “D” computer. Let me tell you, I loved that computer. It was the family computer but I was the only one who figured it out and started using it. Especially the modem–I knew about BBSes and got online right away. It also came with a very good (for the time) word processor for the time and I wrote all my papers on that for high school and even college. My undergrad thesis on Muzak was writeen on that computer. Unfortunately, I decided to use footnotes, which was a real hassle given that there was no footnote option in the word processor program. I did it all manually. Carrie even wrote a few papers on it. They keyboard was amazing. I still miss it. It used springs in the keys and was incredibly noisy but you could just beat on it. It was so sturdy. Unfortunately, this was before the days of standard keyboard interfaces, and so it was not possible to plug into the Blue Star 486/33 that my parents bought me for grad school.

In today’s mail

came our permanent residency cards. We can now officially leave the country and return (as well as stay in it). Some facts of note:

–the card expires. In 2011. I don’t see anything about renewal though obviously that’s an option. But by 2011 we could be dual citizens. And Carrie will have tenure. And the sky will open and the sun will shine and birds will sing and harps will play gently in the distance. Oh wait, that’s something else.

–they give you a protective “pouch” for the card. But it raises the question: is a permanent resident card the kind of thing you carry around in your wallet, or is it the kind of thing you keep with your passport for when you travel? I have no idea which category this fits under.

–they sure do make you pour on the ugly sauce before they take your picture for these things. I look like a cross between a mad lumberjack and a serial killer.

–you only have to live in Canada about 60% of the time in a 5-year period to stay a permanent resident, but you must abide by the unspecified conditions of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. I’m going to have to look that up.