Radio

At various times in my life, I have been involved in creating radio and writing about radio. I love to do both. I believe in radio. And yet I have never been all that much for listening to radio. The first time I was on National Public Radio (US), in the fall of 2002, I remember that I got calls from friends all over the country who’d heard it. And I remember being surprised that they were all listening to NPR.

But of course it makes perfect sense, and my NPR listening friends often assumed I did too. As in, “did you hear such and such an item on NPR the other morning?” I’ve never been a big “talk radio” person, and so no, I never did hear it. But as a member of the intelligencia (1), I was part of the NPR-listening classes. And I grew up with it, since my parents liked it. There was always a radio going in the kitchen with classical music or “All Things Considered” or some other talky program. With those warm, firm, slightly breathy FM voices. There’s nothing like the sound of a broadcast compressor.

Rarely in my adult life have I had a working radio setup in my home. I haven’t bothered hooking up an antenna to my bulky stereo receiver/amplifier since (I think) moving out of a bedroom in my parents’ house. This has occasionally bothered Carrie since there is sometimes something she’d like to hear on the radio. I can’t blame her. I’m responsible for that sort of thing in our gendered division of labo(u)r in our household, and I’ve been slacking on the job. Of course our cars have had working radios, but whenever they’ve had working tape decks or CD players, we’ve listened to those instead — almost exclusively.

Yesterday I bought a radio for the kitchen and dining room area. As part of our attenpt to learn French, we are trying to up our consumption of media in French. So Carrie and I talked about it and hatched a plan to listen to Radio-Canada each day. That way, every day we’ll get about an hour’s dose of spoken French listening in the morning as we eat breakfast and prepare for work. I tried it today and it was nice (it’s me buying, so of course I went and got a good-sounding radio). I heard those familiar pillowy FM voices, though I was only to get a sense of what the people were talking about as opposed to what they were saying. But I guess that’s the point. I’ll develop my ear for French that way.

But here’s the rub: the radio is not a mere means to an end. We know that much if we know anything from the history of technology. So, will I become one of those radio people, talking about this or that thing I heard on Radio-Canada the other morning?

Once I understand it, probably. Except that my radio-listening Anglophone friends are probably tuned into CBC, rather than Radio-Canada.

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1. As an aside, it’s interesting to note that very few of my undergraduate students in the US listened to public radio, whereas when I asked my 200 student intro course how many of them listened to the CBC, well over half the hands went up. I guess that’s what a stronger commitment to public broadcasting in a smaller country will get you.

Happiness Theory

Steven Rubio links to a Pew Foundation Study on happiness in America. Among other things, it suggests that there’s a connection between wealth (or income anyway) and reporting of happiness. Here’s the methodological issue — are people who report that they’re happy actually happy? This is a classic problem of social survey analysis based on self-reporting. People can lie and misrepresent. For instance, there may be greater self-pressure to report happiness at high income levels and unhappiness at low income levels. The other thing we don’t know, because the published report doesn’t tell us — is how the range of happinesses plays out across income. In other words, they trumpet the numbers about 50% of people making over 100K a year saying they are “very happy” but what about “moderately happy” or “not too happy”? Also, the whole “money doesn’t buy happiness” thing isn’t quite dead. After all, fully half the people making over $100K a year weren’t very happy (or so we are to surmise from the limited information available). Well, it’s pretty much certain if they’re not happy at $100K, they’re not going to be happy at $500K or any other number. They must have other issues That is, if we can even trust them to self-report their moods.

Certainly, we can’t trust bloggers to self-report their moods. I mean, I do sometimes, but not always. So I’ll tell you about something that made me strangely happy today.

As I may have mentioned in this space before, my role as an administrator is one of the parts of my job that I, er, “enjoy less.” Today, a mailing came out over the McGill listserv for graduate programme directors about a new policy that didn’t make much sense, at least the way it was worded.(1) Now, that listserv is normally for announcements, and I’ve never seen much discussion on it. But one by one, graduate programme directors posted their objection to the new policy as it had been worded. Math, Biology, Architecture, Psychology, all marching to the same drummer. I mean, I’ve been to meetings for grad directors, but somehow for just a moment I felt like something bigger. Even though it was really just that stupid listserv behavior where one person posts something and a bunch of people chime in with a “me too.” Hmm. Online community or delirium not enough sleep?

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1. If it’s not clear why I don’t like administration, it’s because I find myself thinking about issues like whether and under what conditions faculty should be allowed to write on defense copies of dissertations. As opposed to, say, Verso’s new collection of speeches by Osama bin Laden or whether psychoacoustics partakes of the same universal subject posited by other psychological science or, well, a different one.

Whale Butt + Flush Your Cache + New Text

Whale Butt

Okay, it’s not really a whale’s butt per se, but its back. One of the highlights of our trip was a whale-watching tour with open-air expeditions. While others piled into their commercial boats with blasting music, we got into this tiny rubber boat (the pics on the company’s website make it look bigger than it is). But let me tell you, it could get fast and it could get close to the whales in the bay. For the last hour of the tour, we followed a group consisting of a calf, it’s mother, three males jockeying for position, and a dolphin that was — apparently — just looking to have a good time. At one point the calf started following the boat and the group actually swam around and under us. It was pretty damn cool. Of course, there was this disturbing structural similarity between whale watching and whaling: “hey! look! there’s one over there! let’s go get it!”

Mexico was great, Puerto Vallarta was great. We stayed for most of the week in this bizarre resort area (Carrie’s dad’s ex-girlfriend got us an amazing deal for the week, so we figured this would be a good chance to “try out” the whole resort culture thing). You know, I’d love to say that I’m above all that, but it was really nice. There was a bar serving bad mixed drinks in the pool. You could sit out on the beach, you could sit out by the pool, you could have Mexican food for breakfast (this is the best culinary idea ever — I am seriously having refried beans for breakfast again sometime in the near future). We had a giant room facing the ocean, as this picture of the sunset testifies:

The cable TV was acceptable. Mostly we watched reruns of American stuff, but there’s something I love about the Mexican male announcer’s voice. It’s booming and authoritative but in a totally different way than you’d hear on a Canadian or American network.

It was a bit of a trek into town, but the bus was super cheap and easy to take in. The town itself is overrun with tourists this time of year but still manages to maintain its personality in spite of that. It’s kind of hard to explain, but it’s just the people and the environment, and the homicidal bus drivers. Of course, there’s tons of shopping and I spent parts of a couple days searching for a guitarron to take back with me. I found one, but it wasn’t in good condition and I was getting the gringo price for it. It’s probably better. I have no idea how I would have gotten the thing home. Carrie had better luck in the hat-and-boots department. And the food was great. Did I mention that the food. . . ? Oh, sorry.

By Monday I was horribly sunburnt on several parts of my body and I had also forgotten I had a job (though I have since mostly healed and remembered the job part).

It turns out my struggle to speak French here has somehow magically helped my Spanish (last used in Barcelona in 2003, since I don’t know a word of Catalan). I even managed a half hour of smalltalk conversation with a cab driver at one point. Of course when I got back and went to the Mache, my French had been seriously damanged. But it’s coming back.

Finally, I recommend that nobody over 5 feet tall consider flying economy class with Air Transat. Oh my god. I’ve never actually been in pain from having my legs jammed up for five hours in an airplane before.

Flush Your Cache
The blog has a new look, but if you’re still seeing the old one, flush the cache on your browser. There will still be a few more changes, but it’s coming along nicely.

New Text
I’ve got a very short review of David Harvey’s new book on neoliberalism in this month’s Tikkun. I guess I’m now officially Jewish intelligencia.