Super Bon!

I have been urged to “blog the hell” out of my trip and that’s just what I’m going to do. There are several topics worth covering.

1. It’s a good thing someone owns www.ihateusairways.com. Though to be fair to them, their practices are basically standard for US airlines and I’m sure any other carrier would be jsut as awful. I’m on a 2pm flight to Philadelphia on Wednesday that will, with a connection, get me to Pittsburgh in time to spend the evening with Mike and Kelly. We are just about to board when the agent announces that the flight is cancelled due to a damaged cargo door. Okay, I can deal with that. We all get in line to be reassigned to new flights. And we stand there. For like half an hour. Maybe longer. I finally call my travel agent for a rebooking. She says she’ll call me back. In the meantime, they finally give up and send the entire flight back through customs and into the main terminal. By the time I’ve been back through and picked up my bag and gotten into line at the counter (which is also not moving) there are at least 2 or 3 people in tears at how they’re being treated. I guess I should be more hyperbolic about how much it sucked, but I am focused on just getting to the ‘Burgh and seeing my friends. And I have a bunch of diss proposals and MA theses to read to keep me busy. I finally hear back from my agent. She’s got me on a 5:30 flight, with a tight connection in philly that should have me there by 8:30. I can live with that. But I still have to stand in line to get my new boarding pass. When I get up to the front, I am told (along with my planemates) that our original flight is “uncancelled” and will leave at 4:30 or 5. I am moved back to the old flight. I get my boarding passes and go back through customs and all that, where there are now huge lines. Whatever. I’m getting to Pittsburgh, right? So I get to the gate, I sit down and I’m peacefully listening to music and reading about what makes heavy music heavy when they cancel my flight AGAIN. This time, it’s standby. I point out that I had a confirmed seat on the 5:30 flight. No good. I am “involuntarily rerouted” onto an Air Canada flight through New York City with a USAir connection. I run to that gate. They board all their passengers, take 2 people from my flight ahead of me, and shut the door. I am not going to New York.

I run back to my counter, where I am put on standby for the 7:30pm flight out of Montreal for Philly. There is a 10:30 flight to Pgh. Now I am getting worried about being in Pittsburgh in time for the 11:30am defense the next day. Luckily, after a couple tense hours of waiting and a nasty dinner, I am one of the last people allowed on the flight. I ask if my luggage will get there. They assure me it will. I am just happy to be getting on the plane. Needless to say, when I arrive in Pittsburgh at midnight, my bag is nowhere to be found. A woman who was on the 2pm flight with me turned to me as we talked to a very nice lost luggage agent and said “I told you so.” I told her I had no choice but to believe that the luggage would get there. I’d rather have faith in people and be disappointed than protect myself from disappointment with cynicism.

I was pretty damn disapppointed though:

# of total hours in Montreal airport: 7
# of contacts with customs: 3
# of apologies from USAir staff in Montreal: 0
how screwed I would have been if I didn’t get on that 7:30 flight: very
# of outfits available for me to wear to the defense that I hadn’t worn for 17 hours on Wednesday while running around an airport: 0
# of people I hugged on thursday anyway: a lot

What’s interesting about this is that while all of the agents were reasonably nice, the system as a whole treated me and everyone else on that 2pm plane like crap. There was a great Atlantic Monthly piece on the Valujet crash back in the late 90s that talked about “system accidents” where no one person is responsible. That’s certainly the case here: airlines are running on the narrowest of margins and the result is that they have no room for error. And so you wind up standing in lines of customers who are in or near tears.

Happily, the return flight on Saturday was uneventful.

2. The defense went great, the committee was happy with the dissertation, I was just happy to be there. In a feat of determination, Zack immediately shipped out the diss to Routledge to put it under review.

3. I know what you’re all waiting for: the scandal and the fighting, all reality show style. To tell you the truth, that aspect of the trip was just sad. I didn’t get into with anyone, and everyone was positively welcoming and kind. Still, there was this kind of darkness around the story. I’m sure it sucked for the newer students who weren’t involved in anything and I’d forgotten that while some of the content in the story was old news for me, I was completely tight lipped about it while I was there, the story did air some material that had previously been secret. I certainly went out of my way to keep the students out of departmental conflicts while I was there. I think it’s part of my job. So I did have to face up to the fact that I’d broken one of my own biggest ethical rules (which is basically not to lay my shit on my students) in the when I talked to the paper. But it was the right thing to do. Doesn’t make me feel good about it.

But I was impressed with the editorial in the student newspaper, which you can view here I was also impressed when the waiter at the Thai restaurant recognized Carol from the City Paper article. Ah, fame.

3. Another interesting aspect of the trip was that it was very musical. I acquired a lot of music, talked a lot about music, and even picked up a new effects pedal (more on that in another post). I got demos of the sea, like lead’s split 12 inch and they sound huge and amazing (that’s the band of Jeremy, who sometimes graces the comment column of this blog). I got the new Collapse Into Reason CD, wherein the former industrial goth band goes all synthpop. But it works and it’s very well done and frankly I wouldn’t know they were goth if Ian hadn’t told me (Ian’s the guy writing the dissertation on heavy music mentioned above, so it’s amusing that his band just stopped being heavy). Figuring that my gravy train of free tickets from the dean’s office might be up, I went and cashed in my store credit at Paul’s Compact Discs and picked up some Pelican, Arcade Fire, Explosions in the Sky, and Boards of Canada. Inssert comment here about the irony of going to Pittsburgh to pick up CDs by bands from Montreal. And another friend burned me some Gorillaz (it’s like all the good parts of Blur), Bjork and assorted other stuff.

I also have 4 lo-boy songs very-close-to-finished and played those for a few people, and handed the CD over to Mike, who seemed quite happy. I am so hoping I can finish that CD this fall. We’re also going to explore an internet collaboration.

4. America vs. Canada thing: I had conversations with a lot of people about right-wing attacks on universities, a topic that never surfaces up here. I don’t know if it’s just the mood or the moment or if it’s in fact getting worse (quite possibly it is) but it was weighing heavily on many of my friends’ minds. Mike told me that students at CMU are pushing Horowitz’s Academic Biull of Rights, which is bullshit and unenforceable but an insult to the humanities and social sciences. We hatched a plan for an oped to respond. We’ll see if it happens. If it does, it will be funny.

5. Andrew Weintraub and I are going to write an article on lowness. We’ve been meaning to do something together since we co-taught that seminar on Music and Communication in fall 2003. He’s starting with gongs, I’m starting with bass. I already had a piece on “the brown sound” in Other Magazine awhile back, so I’m all over it.

Okay, these are getting shorter. I’m running out of steam. I’ve been reading up on this 10th anniversary of the referendum stuff and the bizarre new manifesto. I will try and say something intelligent about that in the near future. Good night and thanks for letting me bitch about my flight.

. . .for Zack’s defense and assorted meetings. I am looking forward to seeing old friends and purchasing some fine American goods while on my trip. I will report back about the recent unpleasantness. If there’s anything to report.

Carrie and I haven’t made the shopping list yet, but I imagine it will include:

–Penzey’s Spices Taco Seasoning
–Dryel Dry Cleaning Sheets for the Dryer
–Suger Free Nestle Quick

[Will Straw stop reading here]

So remember that entry about the radioactive cat? Well it turns out that Tet is a minor local celebrity. Very minor, but still. Someone showed up at the vet with a printout of the Chat Radoactif blog entry (still on the page below) and their cat, ready for iodine treatment (there’s only one vet in town that does it). We learned this when we took him in for his checkup today. “The famous Tetrys” the vet called him. As for Tet, he still hates the vet — fame or not.

From noted feminist theorist Elle Macpherson:

Q: How important is fashion in our world today?

A; What’s really important is our health, our family, our well-being. Fashion is not important. But if we can feel creative by putting together certain outfits that make us feel good about ourselves, well, that’s a way of expressing ourselves and that’s very important.

The Globe and Mail occasionally encloses magazines with the newspaper. We don’t ask for them, but they come. They’re all sort of knock offs of other magazines. This quote was from Sir: Canada’s International Magazine of Style for Him, Volume 1, #1. I found it in our bathroom (where Carrie usually deposits said magazines), started reading it while, well, you know, and then took it to bed with me as some light reading while I fell asleep.

I’d like to say I’m above it all, but I’m not. We work in a much better-dressed department than any we’ve been in (though Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society at Minnesota produced some very smartly dressed black-clothes-and-theory-glasses-wearing grad students while we were there in the late 80s and early 90s). Will Straw tells us that he thinks Canadian academics just dress a little better than their American counterparts. Maybe so. Maybe it’s a Montreal thing. I don’t know. But rather than ignoring the magazine, I read it. I’ve got a reading on fashion in my repetition seminar and did a bunch of other readings on the topic this summer in preparation for the course. I guess it’s on my mind.

—

In other news, the first half of that co-edited double issue of Social Epistemology is out. I am a bit embarassed by the intro that I co-wrote with Joan Leach, not because of what we said — I stand behind that 100% and it was awesome to work with Joan on the project. But the intro’s in desperate need of a copyedit. Hopefully, the content will outweigh the form. That’s the thing about Taylor and Francis — they’re not the kind of press that will save authors from themselves (ie, invest any money in copyediting). Ah well, everyone seems to have their publishing war story of this sort. I still remember when I was at Illinois and James Hay got his copy of The Audience and Its Landscape, which he coedited. He’d written a loving dedication at the top of his essay, and somehow it got smushed into his article. That was just sad.

I spent several hours today (1) on Intermedia for Bad Subjects and that should be out soon, too. The advantage of web publishing is that you can hide your mistakes once you find them. Like I occasionally do on this blog.

—

1. Every Sunday I hope to spend the whole day doing nothing but sit in front of the TV and watch football, and every Sunday, I wind up working with the TV on all day.

http://www.pittsburghcitypaper.ws/news/story.cfm?type=News%20Feature

I have occasionally deferred answers to questions in this space about my leaving Pitt in 2004. No doubt, this article clarifies a little but not a lot. It’s also a big step for me personally. I decided that it was better to do the right thing and risk pissing off a lot of people than to stand by and do nothing.

I’m going back next week for a defense. Zack Furness, my final Pitt advisee, who wrote a wonderful dissertation about biketevism. Whatever else can be said about the department climate or the administration, there are still a lot of great students there.