Super Bon!

The Milwaukee trip over thanksgiving was its usual pleasure (though this was our first trip to Milwaukee for said purpose). One of my colleagues commented that she found Americans’ devotion to thanksgiving bizarre, a sentiment echoed by other Canadians I’ve met. I don’t have a profound answer except to say that like Halloween (my other favorite holiday), it is largely pointless and fun oriented. In our case, we decided it was a holiday to celebrate (with) friends, and indeed that is what I like most about it. Thanksgiving is all about celebrating the good and voluntary things in like. But I explained it to my colleague a little differently: I said I was working on taking more time off, and TG was a good excuse. And it was, even if it wasn’t totally “off.”

Milwaukee, or its suburbs anyway, was uncanny for me — familiar and yet strange. Wide streets, big houses, little suburban downtowns, gridded streets and bitingly clear skies, especially when it was really cold on Thursday. Wisconsin does not look exactly like Minnesota, but it’s similar enough that it turned on my “home” switch. I guess it reminded me how exotic I still find the spaces of Montreal — my childlike fascination with the metro, with the narrow streets, and even my glee at the bizarre and utterly unique layout of our “loft” apartment are all propelled by some kind of sense that I live in an exotic, different, wonderous place. So I guess I’m getting both sides of that wonder travelling back and forth. Or something.

Politically, the trip was also a bit of an eye opener. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel is your average conservative midwestern newspaper, filled with banal accounts of local goings on, and no real international coverage — despite plenty of jingoistic editorializing. Example: on the op-ed page one day was a commentary on a school teacher who required her students to write antiwar letters for some exercise. Now, I’ll grant that teachers requiring kids to take a political position is not something I support, at least not on that level. But their supposedly neutral solution? To have the kids write letters to soldiers’ families. Yeah, that’s so much better. Reminds me that a couple years after I graduated high school, my school had compulsory rallies in support of the second Gulf War. Good thing I was gone or I might have gotten into even more trouble than I did. But that’s another story. My point is simply that for all the Globe and Mail‘s conservatism in the Canadian context, I am somewhat spoiled by the tenor of Canadian politics. I couldn’t even read the “A” section of the Journal-Sentinel I found it so upsetting.

On the political note, I found myself sitting next to a self-professed Canadian conservative on the flight from Montreal to Toronto. I haven’t had many decent conversations with people who vote conservative, probably because there are hardly any in Quebec. When he learned that I teach at McGill, he asked if I had encountered any anti-American sentiment. The content of my answer is worth another post, though I might have covered that sometime last year. I can’t remember. Anyway, pretty soon we were talking about trade regulation (he wants less of it), socialized medicine (he’s absolutely devoted to it), food additives (he’s against them), foreign policy (he believed the Bush administration on Iraq but is now really pissed about being lied to). You know what he sounded like to me? A moderate member of the U.S. democratic party. Not on everything, mind you, but it was an interesting way to pass the time on the flight, and he clearly liked educating me about the conservative platform. Oh, and he thinks Harper is a lame leader.

We got home late Saturday night and spent Sunday recovering, which of course means watching football and lounging around the house (okay, and going through piles of email, but that’s another thing). At 5:30, the Grey Cup came on, and started out as a B-O-R-I-N-G game. “Wow,” I thought, “it is a lot like the Super Bowl.” We switched back and forth with some NFL games. But the second half really took off and we were pretty glued to the set, especially for the overtime, which was delightfully different from the NFL’s sudden death. More a slow death, really. Even though I was rooting for the Alouettes (I still have yet to reside in a city whose professional football team was won a championship during my presence. coincidence? Hmmnm. . . .), their disintegration in overtime was spectacularly entertaining.

Oh, and Carrie said the landlord gushed on the voicemail about my new bilingual outgoing “leave us a message” voice message. And I’m listening to Death From Above 1979 as I’m composing this message. So I guess the Canadianization and Quebecization project (that’s a long “o” in “project”) is going pretty well.

That’s the report for now. Next up, some thoughts on theory with a capital T.

This week’s reading for my Repetition seminar was particularly easy (compared with the thicker theoretical stuff we’ve been doing), but I found it quite refreshing, actually. Probably because the authors are quite clever. Anyway, this was a good thing, because next week we’re going to slog through Derrida’s differance essay. That should be fun in its own, perverse way.

In the meantime, I head off tomorrow for Milwaukee for a few days. My copy of My Freshman Year just arrived, so that should make for some good gossipy, and somewhat cheeseball airplane reading. I also finally bought a copy of Shaping Technology/Building Society which I have perennially checked out from the library. I also think I still don’t own Steve Waksman’s Instruments of Desire which is weird since I cite it a lot, teach it, and have about half of it photocopied. I have a whole list of books I love but don’t own. Which is weird, because I’m not exactly shy about buying books.

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My latest publication to appear is my first to appear in French. “Pour en finir avec la fidélité (les médias sont des instruments),” Mouvements #42 (November/December 2005): 44-53. Pretty cool. I wonder what I said.

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I didn’t actually mention the intellectual content of NCA in my last post. I served on two panels. I was a respondent for a panel on eBay, which had only two authors, but both papers were great and are part of a forthcoming book called Everyday eBay It’s so odd that there hasn’t been much cultural work on eBay and online auctions in general (though one can find endless business analysis and writings by philosophers about “online trust” which is really just a form of administrative research). I also chaired a panel of highly-ranked student papers, which is always cool. They were all well done.

But the thing that struck me was the number of conversations I found myself in about Communication Studies. What it is, why it matters, what’s special about it, how it differs from the other humanities. I think the answer is sociological, rather than substantive (as it is for all disciplines: try making a purely analytical distinction between the domains of anthropology and sociology — you can’t do it!). But so many people are so caught up in this, and I guess the question matters, since it was posed not only at panels I attended but also at lunch with an editor from a major university press. My least favorite solution, though it is favored by several constiuencies in NCA, is a subtractive model, a situation where scholars distinguish Comm Studies from other humanities and social sciences by showing how it’s not history, sociology, literature, anthropology, etc. through rejection of the ideas and methods of those fields. It’s motivated by a kind of shame, since Comm Studies is a less prestigious field (at least in the US; I can’t quite clock its place in the hierarchy of fields in Canada) than other traditional humanities. The effect of this shame is to reproduce itself, since it discourages students and young scholars from pursuing erudition so that they might remain certain that their work is “inside” the field. As I explained to the querying editor, our field is at its best when it goes in the opposite direction, when people take chances they couldn’t take in other fields, and where happy accidents occur in interdisciplinary collisions that are the direct result of the fact that the Comm Studies is unable to police its borders as effectively as more traditional “disciplines” like history or sociology (recognitizing that they too are complex and heterogenous as well). If you look to the best work that Comm Studies field calls “its own,” much of it bears the stamp of that peculiar situation.

Spoiler Alert

So as you may know, I am a fan of Lost, an ABC series that’s been quite popular lately. On Wednesday’s episode, Shannon, an annoying white woman, sleeps with Said, a “strong silent type” Iraqui character. It’s network TV, so you just know because there’s a shot of them lying together in a state of undress, but when the deed happened, I said that one of them was going to be punished for the sin of what amounts to an interracial coupling (nb, “Arab” or “Iraqui” is not technically a race) as far as American television was concerned.

Sure enough, the episode ended with Shannon getting “accidentally” shot in the stomach.

And so, once again, we learn that sex out of wedlock, especially between people with different pigmentations, is a capital offense in the United States. Or on mysterious uncharted tropical islands in the Pacific. Certainly on television or in the movies.