Passing When I Don’t Want To

As an English-speaking white person, I’m often mistaken for a Canadian. This happens to me on the phone as well as in person, and it’s been particularly acute in the last couple weeks (doctors’ appointments plus random calls here and there). As with any other country, there is all sorts of tacit knowledge you have if you’ve grown up here. Little things about how the medical system works, names of chain stores, bits of popular memory, etc. It takes years to catch up on tacit knowledge in a place, and I’m learning, but more than twice in the past two weeks I’ve had to stop someone and explain that “I’m an immigrant, so no, I don’t actually know how it’s done. Would you please explain it to me?” Which is kind of weird. I’d been playing the American card to get a free pass for my lousy French with Francophones for two years (works great, especially because I do know a little French and can occasionally make it through a broken exchange now — beyond commercial transactions — with strangers), but suddenly, I’m playing it in other contexts too.

In many ways, it’s a privilege of whiteness (and a midwestern “non”-accent) that I can pass at all, and I’m sure it’s benefitted me more than once. But like all social privileges, membership in the club comes with certain expectations.

Interestingly, it happens the othe way as well. Americans who don’t know me now have questions about my place of origin and my citizenship. So far, that’s just amusing.

Hot Weather Thoughts

–I always notice that the internet connection is slower when there’s bad weather. Lots of rain, lots of heat, whatever. What’s up with that, sympatico?

–It is always hotter by at least one magnitude when you’re walking around on a sunbathed sidewalk downtown in the middle of the day. Bad idea #157

–There is something about Indian food. It’s heavy. But it’s still okay in hot weather. Same with some kinds of Mexican. I don’t get that either.

–I think I broke Endnote. Or MS Word or something. Seriously. 45 minutes with tech support and he says “no, I’ve never seen this one before.” The guy’s really helpful, though, so I suspect we’ll be back on it tomorrow.

–There turns out to be one or two okay songs on …And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead’s Madonna album. Still, what a disappointment.

–If I wasn’t worn out, I’d post something more clever about teenagers and nerds based on something I read or scan in something for my new book series, but that will have to wait for now. It’s a busy week between socializing, appointments and trying to keep the writing up (oh yeah, and taking care of an overdue review or two).

A New Series: On Books, “The Book,” Writing, Etc.

So I’ve decided to start using my “category” function and start doing “series” on various things. The topic that’s been on my mind a lot lately is publishing — the state of the book, the way publishing works, debates about open access and the public status of scholarship, etc. I’ve also been collecting some odds and ends to scan and comment upon. And so, if this is interesting to you, great, and if not, feel free to skip.

I begin with a news item forwarded to my departmental listserv (a listserv, by the way, which I am not supposed to publically acknowledge exists — oops!) by Tobias:

Rice University Starts An All-Digital Press

Here’s a quote:

Henry estimated that the start-up costs and annual operating expenses will be one-tenth of those associated with traditional publishing, which can include unsold inventory of physical books and a lengthy editorial process.

Yes, thes software will be open source, but notably the published material will not be open access. At least, that’s not how they’re talking. They’re talking about cost savings and likely they plan to charge their readers and libraries. The thing about cost savings and the internet is that the cost is usually passed on to someone else. Sure, professors can upload their own text to the press. But that’s basically saying the professors should perform for free typesetting labor that used to cost money. It cost money because someone was compensated for the work.

Or on-demand printing. Who’s going to do the printing? If it’s me, the reader, the press just offloaded another cost. And I’m not going to sit and read a whole article (yes, I really do print it out off JSTOR if I’m going to read it seriously), much less a whole book, on my computer screen or on my iPod for that matter.

I am in full favor of entirely digital publishing, but publishers and institutions are going to have to recognize that there are real costs associated with publishing that have to do with the work involved, and not with the arrangement of physical stuff (and let’s not forget that bits have a certain materiality as well). Rice’s initiative reads to me like more like the cold calculation of a dot com capitalist than an attempt to overcome the limits of paper publishing in the service of disseminating knowledge.

One More for Old Time’s Sake

I just got news of Syd Barrett’s death from cancer at age 60. Barrett, in case you don’t know, fronted Pink Floyd in their early days.

Sometimes I feel like this blog needs an obits category. I’m at that age now where contemporary musicians and writers who influenced me in one way or another are beginning to die with some regularity (collectively, I mean. I don’t think an individual can “die with some regularity”). That’s probably a post in itself for another time.

Alas, I have little anymore to say about Barrett — I haven’t given him a thought (or listened to his music) in years. When I was a teenager learning to play rock bass, Barrett was a musical influence for his creative use of dissonance and effects (I was fascinated by psychedellic effects in music), and also a figure of intrigue, mostly for the reasons outlined in the Guardian obit. I always liked the bootlegged solo material better than the two released studio albums, and Piper at the Gates of Dawn most of all.

Just like Bono Said It Would Be + My First Bilingual Wedding

There we were on Sunday watching the world cup and the tension during the overtime was palpable. Not just because the score was tied, but because we had a wedding to attend. At the end of the first overtime, I set the digital video recorder to capture the rest of the game, even if it went into quadruple penalties, and Carrie Nick and I caught a cab to the corner of Ontario and Papineau. Right there was a bar showing the game. Nick and I peered in the window, trying hard to ignore the stench of dogshit on the sidewalk, hoping to catch a glimpse of the end of the game. Carrie, perhaps more olfactorily aware than Nick or I, headed over to the restaurant where the wedding was being held to discover that the game was being projected on a giant overhead screen in a large, air-conditioned room (where the reception would later take place).

And so it came to be that my life was just like those awful Bono-narrated commercials shown during the beginning of World Cup play. For 30 minutes, or however it went on, the wedding had to wait. The crowd — all in our fancy clothes — stood and watched and gasped and yelled (predictably, there were more France fans than Italy fans). As it was ending, they served us some sparkling wine of unknown origin (I now know better than to assume it was champaign). The penalty kicks decided the game, some discussion ensued, and the wedding took place. It was actually a wonderful way to conclude a soccer game and begin a wedding.

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It is often said that Montreal’s bilingualism means that everything takes twice as long. This is true in the case of voicemail messages (ours included) but what it means in contexts like a wedded appears to be more like regimented turn-taking. One reading in English, one reading in French. Time is not yet an issue. My French is not yet good enough but I have a sense that they French readings were more romantic, while the English readings were more well, English. It makes the ceremony somehow more polyvocal than other weddings I’d attended. I’m sure what that means, only that it did indeed feel different.

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There’s not a lot else to blog about a wedding — it was a wonderful time, of course, but I have no further anecdotes, so I’ll finish with the World Cup for now. Montreal was transformed for the past month. I’ve been dutifully writing each morning, so I have skipped the morning games and most of the afternoon games, too, until it got serious in the end. But I’ve always enjoyed watching soccer for precisely its differences from American televised sports: the continuity of the game, the rustic game clock that continues ticking even when the ball is out of bounds, the impossibility of capturing the game statistically (particularly meaningful as I’ve been writing about the statistical capture of hearing this month). The spectatorship is also incredibly public. I’ve always understood the Super Bowl party or football sunday in general to be a domestic event. World Cup watching happened at bars and restaurants all over town. You could set your watch by the horns honking after the game.

I did not find the internationalism particularly touching, because it seemed more like an ensemble of nationalisms. I think the racism that has repeatedly emerged during the competition suggests (once again, thank you Etienne Balibar) that nationalist loyalties are at their base tied to noxious racial politics, even in sport, an activity that does not require reference to nationhood. But all the same, it was a giant party, and one that I missed large swaths of in order to pursue my work. I have no regrets because I’m happy in no small part because of all the writing I’ve done this summer.

But in 2010, I’m taking a month off to watch the games in South Africa and hang out in different places all over the city.

Two Wins, One Season

Last night, the False Consciousness needed neither bagpipes nor a team more focused on hot dogs than outfielders to win. The other team tried, and we won anyway, 25-19. It was an offensive game to be sure, with more than a couple 7-run innings (there is a mercy rule in our league for such situations). I got my power swing back, there was some avant-garde fields and baserunning, and our cricket-playing rookie Anou scored a major catch on a line drive and some base hits even though she didn’t really know the rules of the game.

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And now, time to catch up on some other entries.