Medical update, 1 December

On Thursday, which was US thanksgiving, I went to the oncologist’s office. Things are basically fine and in a holding pattern. My tumour marker is up slightly, but so slightly that it might be within the margin of measurement error. I get measured so often, I am not at all worried. My blood pressure is still high so we are boosting the blood pressure meds.

Side effects wise, it seems I am less stiff now, but this week’s new side effect is periodic headaches. The usual drugs seem to take care of them. Everything else is also steady: I have good and bad days, and about once a week something happens to my body that takes time, but otherwise no surprises.

I definitely felt overwhelmingly tired upon submitting my manuscript, but that is for another post.

Writing Update: Made It!

About 30 minutes ago I finished a draft of the manuscript. It runs from beginning to end. There are still some notes to myself in the footnotes, but it’s readable. I sent it to my students as promised, and I also sent it in for review. Later this week I will start distributing it to people who said they want to read part or all of it (and provide comments–that’s the deal).

Academic Writing Month or NaNoWriMo or whatever it was called wasn’t perfect, and November is a stupid month for academics to binge write, but it worked for me in a lot of ways. I am not sure I will ever choose to do it again in November, but it was nice to have a goal and make space to reach it, even during a busy semester. The next couple weeks I’ll have to do all the things I put on hold (recommendation letters! reviews!) but that was the deal.

I am also planning to take more time off, especially over break. I did manage mot of my Sundays off, and I think I lost about a day most weeks to medical stuff — either doctoring or something going wrong that laid me out–but I kind of sort of budgeted for that. I came in about 2 days later and more crowded at the end than I thought, but I’ll take it.

Writing and Medical update #2

I am now officially working on a chapter about fatigue while fatigued, though I am not writing about my own fatigue (except for a small conceit at the very end). And as I said earlier, it’s not so bad–I’m a pretty happy person with a word processor window open and a pile of books on my desk (and a bunch of pdfs open in browser windows).

Still, last week was not as productive as I’d hoped. Monday and Tuesday were pretty good but Friday and Saturday were not, between medical appointments and sheer exhaustion. I had to bail on work Friday afternoon after seeing my endocrinologist–I’d planned to sit and write but instead went home to rest. In fact, I was so tired Saturday evening that I bailed on a party I really wanted to attend. And I tend to draw energy from other people, so you know it was pretty bad.

Today I was back at it in full force, but I suspect I’m about two days behind the schedule I’d set for myself, which is going to make it tight for the 26th. We’ll see. Today I far exceeded my words goal for the day and the chapter is taking form and morphing from the rough outline I had, which is good.

As for the fatigue, I feel pretty good today after resting Saturday night and all day yesterday. But toward the end of last week I had that horrible waking-up-tired-after-9-hours-of-sleep feeling. Today was really the first day since Friday it didn’t feel like that. Everything I’m reading on the history and theory of fatigue describes it as an absence of energy or affect but I sure feel like it’s something inside me, and not an absence at all. When it’s happening, it’s like a weight, like tiny stars exploding inside, like a sticky soup that coats the inside of my skin. When I wake up fatigued, I know it’s there right as I’m coming into consciousness.

Is it a combination of drugs? Is it the Lenvima doing something to me? is it just that everybody’s tired now that it’s November and getting darker and it’s that part of the semester? I guess I will find out….

In other news, I cut myself shaving on Monday last week and it kept bleeding. Then it would heal and bleed again. Friday I learned that that too is a side effect of Lenvima, such that I am supposed to go off the drug for at least 72 hours if I am going to have surgery.

#goodtoknow.

Is It Time Yet to Talk About the Conservatism of German Media Theory?

At least in the circles where I travel, Anglophone importers haven’t really reckoned with the political conservatism of so-called* German media theory. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young has a few good lines on the subject in Kittler and the Media, but I have not found a systemic critique, and there is little discussion.

At this historical moment, when fascisms and nationalisms are resurgent and we are in a full-blown climate crisis, I think it’s time for a real discussion.

Here’s a bad translation (via Google Translate) of a recent piece on the future of the humanities by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht for consideration. The original German below for those who want the more nuanced version. The full article is here.

Since then, their representatives at the universities have cultivated the mood of political correctness as the aspiration to uphold the traditional orientations of a Social Democratic to a Socialist left in times of new challenges and the uncertainties that they pose. As if 1989 had not happened – and as if the world had hardly become more complex since Karl Marx. They devote particular attention to the description and demands of diverse minority identities, always under the premise that moral status must also be linked to minority status.


An den Universitäten haben vor allem ihre Vertreter seither die Stimmung politischer Korrektheit als den Anspruch kultiviert, in Zeiten neuer Herausforderungen und der von ihnen ausgehenden Unsicherheiten die traditionellen Orientierungen einer sozialdemokratischen bis sozialistischen Linken hochzuhalten. So als habe sich 1989 nicht ereignet – und als sei die Welt seit Karl Marx kaum komplexer geworden. Mit besonderer Hingabe widmen sie sich dabei der Beschreibung und den Forderungen vielfältiger Minderheitsidentitäten, stets unter der Prämisse, dass mit dem Minderheitenstatus auch ein moralischer Vorrang verbunden sein müsse.


I’ll just say this for now: the way he describes the academic left seems profoundly, even willfully ignorant. There’s another passage where he derides academic networks, as if he himself has not benefitted mightily from institutional and personal connections in his own career. (The quoted bit comes at the beginning of a section entitled “The New Moralism”)

*There is a lot of other good work on media by Germans that is not capital German Media Theory.

**It has been pointed out to me that Gumbrecht is not a “real” German media theory person. All I can say is that that is how his Production of Presence and Materialities of Communication are read in English, and that in the summer of 2018, I saw him presented as an expert on the subject to the Stanford-Leuphana media studies summer school.

Writing and Medical Update

Today is, as planned, my day off. But it’s a good time for a report of where things are at.

I finished the drafts of two chapters that needed finishing this week, and produced more words than planned in doing so (Chapter 3 is at just over 17,000 words when I expected to come in around 13-14000).

Three finished, one to go.

I estimate I’m about a day behind in Chapter 4 (my last one). It could be close at the end of the month. I’ll have a better idea this time next week. Speaking of this time next week…

Medically, there are some new symptoms, though technically we are under the 1-week frame so I don’t know if they are real. I am stiff as hell. It’s like someone took my head off, poured a bunch of sand into my body, and then put my head back on. I move more slowly. Slowly enough that twice this week people have tried to rush around me (once at McGill, once in the metro) and I slow down the people with whom I am walking. I loosen up a bit after moving awhile but this is some serious old man shit.

It could be the onset of winter temperatures, which some people say makes joint issues on Lenvima worse. They also switched up my blood pressure meds a little over a week ago (I didn’t have high blood pressure until I went on Lenvima). I’m now on a low dose of chlorothalidone, and have been on it just long enough for side effects to kick in. Stiffness is on the list there too.

I will report back after living with it longer, when I will have a better idea if this is going to be a thing or if will pass.

November is Binge Writing Month

..and I don’t actually need to binge write. I need to finish.

I have no idea why people pick November for this, but there are NaNoWriMo and NationalThesisWritingMonth and AnyGoodThing. All of these wonderful initiatives seem to be good for writers and help them solve problems. Unfortunately, they don’t solve problems that I have as a writer.

For the last 6 years at least I have been puttering around in a set of ideas that has become a manuscript tentatively titled Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment. Apparently the biggest part is publicly announcing the project, so there you go. As the title suggests, this is not written to be a crossover hit and you should not expect to find it at airport bookstores. It is a bit of a departure for me as an academic writer. It has four chapters, with no intro (violating my first and highest rule of academic book writing) and no conclusion (which I firmly believe nobody will miss). There are two chapters on voice, one on hearing, and one of fatigue. I have not yet figured out where squirrels fit in.

Because I am very stupid/very smart/know myself too well/have unrealistic expectations, I committed to my sound seminar students that this manuscript will be the last thing we read in the course, so they could see my writing in all its glorious messiness before it is published and looks better. I keep telling them we perpetrate this fraud where we talking about writing like it sprung forth from the author’s mind fully formed.

I estimate that I need to produce about 12,000 words this month. Maybe a bit less or a bit more, and this number includes citations, bibliography, and quotes from other people. That part is totally within the realm of the possible. Word count IS NOT THE PROBLEM I HAVE. Distractions and self-doubt aren’t my issues either, so I can spend all the time I want on social media or noodling on musical instruments and don’t need to be too worried about how fast the words come, because they ebb and flow and because I am a very happy person with a word processor window open and my desk a mess.

In fact, my problem as a writer is I love being in the middle of writing. I love going down rabbit holes. I always take time for the bizarre cheap laugh even if it’s at best orthogonal to the argument. Can I write an entire history of the intertwined fortunes of psychoacoustics and information theory through cats? Why, yes I can.

So my problem is a) doing what I’m supposed to do and b) finishing projects that have no actual word limits or time limits. And because I’m writing in a slightly different idiom than usual, I also have some new technical challenges. But it’s time, dear readers, to get this one under review and to get comments from from friends and colleagues.*

So this November, I am binge-finishing.

Even so, my rough weekly goal is somewhere between 3-4000 words. What I need to accomplish in November: cap off one more chapter, and then turn a mass of ideas and notes and readings into a coherent argument about fatigue that is readable by human beings.

My campus time is circumscribed to Wednesdays and Thursdays (which are my days “for other people”) and an occasional afternoon or evening event. I write best in the morning anyway. I am incredibly, caught up with letters of recommendation. I have no theses to read. I have a bit of reviewing to do, which will happen weekday afternoons. I’ll keep the entertaining fairly minimal.

I have booked all Sundays off, and Saturdays are for writing work only. I sometimes like to work for 60-120 minutes after dinner, but only sometimes, and only when I feel like it. I am not going to push too hard.

Here are some dates:

November 26th, I will assemble the full manuscript (all 4 chapters in one doc, continuous pagination, ToC, and instructions for readers. I will then send it students. I might also just go ahead and send it to the press for review and to colleagues for comment, since I’ve done the work.

November 25th. I will spruce up the fatigue chapter, which Carrie will have read on the 23rd (or sooner) to tell me what it needs in short order.

By November 11th I will be working with a human-intelligible structure in my fatigue chapter such that I will have clear signposts for when parts are done.

November 4th and 5th, I am hoping to cap off my chapter on audile scarification, which needs a re-organization (it’s top-heavy with theory, and now repeats stuff that has been moved to the first two chapters). If I need some time on the 9th, I can also use part of that day.

This schedule only semi-factors in two things: 1) surprise work from other people, which I may have to accommodate in some cases (page proofs and the like) and 2) feeling like crap, which happens about once a week, and doesn’t always preclude writing (but might be good for the data-entry part).

When I am feeling good, I’ll do the intellectual heavy lifting. When I am feeling bad but good enough to work, that’s time for data entry–quotes, bib, looking stuff up, etc.

In case I fail, my students get a manuscript with an unfinished final chapter and I try to round things out the first week of December, or even the second week.

In December, I would like to play with my synthesizer more, so there’s the reward. Also, starting in February, Mara Mills and I will be making the run on the other book I’m working on. Yes, I’m working on two books at once. NEVER DO THIS.

*If you are eager to read the draft version, and are willing to a) provide comments on at least one chapter within 2 months of receiving it and b) promise not to post it on the internet or share it with other people until it’s cooked, you can send me an email.

White hot hands theory

It could be the weather.
We’ve had some particularly bad weather the last few days. I’ve started paying attention and it could be that my hands get tingly when there is a pressure change. So maybe bad and good pain days are not entirely arbitrary.

My sample size is too small right now, but I’m going to pay attention. Sadly, this appears to be a rare side effect in my online cancer community, so I don’t have anyone else to confirm with.

The tingly pain is only one of 3 side effects in my hands. The other two–hypersensitivity and dryness that leads to skin coming off–seem to have no relationship to the weather other not wanting a lot of direct sunlight on my hands for a long time.