Canadian Bankruptcy Politics and other news

Weclome to the first of a double-post Tuesday night. I have been busy learning the intricacacies of curriculum revision at McGill and it turns out that well, it’s complex. Kind of reminds me of scientology, like if I get far enough into it, someone’s going to take me aside and tell me that aliens actually created the world. Or maybe just a giant spaghetti monster from space. Anyway, I’m knee-deep in graduate directordom, having showed my poor colleagues with a rain of documents for tomorrow’s all day meeting on curriculum (AM is the grad portion) and having co-run an orientation today. I feel like I’ve been doing this forever. It’s been about a month.

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I read with interest an op-ed this morning on a bill to revise Canadian bankruptcy laws. The story is familiar to Americans — the goal is to make it harder for the average consumer to take the less damaging road when debt overwhelms them and they need to declare some kind of bankruptcy. The law is similarly noxious to the American one, with one important exception, an exception wrung from the liberals by the NDP when they negotiated a deal to keep the Liberal government from falling: businesses that go bankrupt will still protect workers’ owed pay and pensions. It’s a small thing, really, but one of those differences where I’m interested enough to wonder about the multiparty system. Is it a case where a left party got a progressive concession that humanizes the bill, or is it a case where the difference makes no difference, and the bill is still essentially as inhumane as the U.S. version?

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A new publication arrived in the mail today:

“Digital Media and Disciplinarity,” The Information Society 21:4 (2005), pp. 249-256, wherein I argue that there is no point to turning digital media studies into a discipline, but that the field does raise some interesting questions toward the construction of a new set of objects and problematics (which is not to say that it’s there yet). Yes, this is a “state of the field” essay in a “state of the field” journal issue.

Back from Toronto

and this week begins, how shall we put it, the “rude awakening” phase where optimism meets actual fall-semester work.

Toronto was indeed lovely. As predicted, we did nothing touristy* and instead just hung out with friends. Our hosts, Greg Elmer and Paula Gardner, were even kind enough to throw a party Saturday night where we could meet lots of local people, which was an absolute blast. My favorite conversation was a roomful of Ontarians explaining to Carrie and I how the knowledge of Canada we’ve acquired in Quebec might need some correction, no doubt from more objective Ontarians like themselves. I continue to be impressed with this country’s “antifederalism.”

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* Okay, we did stop by this Ukranean festival at lunchtime on Saturday that was pretty cool, but that was a neighborhood thing, really. I got too see Conservative Party propaganda there, which included Greg and Paula discovering that someone had given their unsuspecting child a balloon with a conservative party slogan. When they discovered it, he promised to turn it into a “punching balloon.” They do learn early, don’t they?

Last Trip of the Summer

Tomorrow, we are off to Toronto for a couple days. Wish it could be longer, but we’re going to do ABSOLUTELY NO WORK on the trip so it should be nice. We are bringing the French flash cards Carrie made, though.

My coursepack is in at the copy shop. All is right with the world.

Six Feet Under Finale — No Spoiler

We had some people over and watched the last three episodes in a row. That was pretty harsh.

I can honestly say that no show has ever had a longer funeral scene, and no show has ever made me more aware of my own mortality. Maybe that’s because several of the characters are within a year or two of my own age. . . .

Still, it had a better ending than most series do.

EDIT: There is now a spoiler in the comments. Read at your own peril.

Me-Meme

Just when you thought blogging wasn’t simply a form of nacissistic self-indulgence comes further proof that it is. My friend Masoo — who I mostly know through online interaction over the last what, 10 years? — posted the following meme on his blog and after seeing the results for a few others, I bit.

1. Reply with your name and I’ll respond with something random about you.
2. I’ll tell you what song/movie reminds me of you.
3. I’ll pick a flavor/color of jello to wrestle with you in. (Maybe.)
4. I’ll say something that only makes sense to you and me.
5. I’ll tell you my first memory of you.
6. I’ll tell you what animal you remind me of.
7. I’ll ask you something that I’ve always wondered about you.
8. If I do this for you, you must post this on your journal. You MUST. It is written.

His reply is below and you can read the whole thread here if you are really so inclined. Since he did it for me, I’ll make the offer to any readers of my blog that are feeling similarly nacissistic. Just reply to this post and I’ll answer the questions about you. Note that whatever faint and residual shred of professional dignity I have left after posting this (so soon after my hot chocolate confessions and French lesson) will prevent me from answering the jello question with respect to most colleagues or graduate students.

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Masoo on JS:

1) Reply with your name and I’ll respond with something random about you. Reliably helpful, which is to say, a good person to know.

2) I’ll tell you what song/movie reminds me of you. Maybe something by Dos :-).

3) I’ll pick a flavor/color of jello to wrestle with you in. (Maybe.) I’m just gonna start saying “lime” because it’s my favorite flavor.

4) I’ll say something that only makes sense to you and me. This is another time where I think whatever I say will make sense to more people than just us two. But you are the only person I know who gets to call McChesney “Bob.” (If you don’t call him that, my bad.)

5) I’ll tell you my first memory of you. I feel like you guys were on a couch, but I don’t remember who the couch belonged to.

6) I’ll tell you what animal you remind me of. This should be something Canadian, but being an American, I don’t know what animals are Canadian. How about Yukon King, Sgt. Preston’s trusty companion?

7) I’ll ask you something that I’ve always wondered about you. How do you do it? Guess that’s not specific enough … you seem to cover a lot of ground, in terms of travels, in terms of academic disciplines, in terms of the kinds of people you relate to. In that context, I feel narrow. How do you do it?

High on Hot Chocolate–Fear and Excitement

I actually think I might be a little wired after consuming what is undoubtedly the best hot chocolate of my life (thank you Babette’s). Also my back is still cold from the rain falling on it while hailing a taxi.

Anyway, tonight’s topic is how I am a supreme geek. Specifically, I am always struck with a certain sense of excitement, anticipation and optimism at the beginning of a new school year. And let’s face it, a person’s second year at an institution is the first real year since all the ritual and repetitive elements of institutional life only become apparent after living in a place for a year. Only now can I begin to tell the difference between the ecological and the geological in the life of the university around me, only now can I begin to differentiate between the truly urgent and the truly silly (though I’ll probably get a couple of those wrong this time around).

So, let’s see. School starts in a couple weeks. That means it’s time to finish off the copy packet for the seminar, order the new shoes and new vests for some new looks in the coming year, clean up my workspaces to install a temporary sense of order in my life, take stock of my various projects so that I’ve got a plan of action for the fall and can delegate to my small fleet of new RAs (thank you SSHRC and FQRSC), make sure plane tickets and hotel rooms are booked for conferences, visiting lecturer gigs and my last defenses in Pittsburgh as advisor, and, oh yes, there’s this director of the grad program thing to figure out too(1).

For all that, I’ve still got that childlike nervous anticipation that comes with the leadup to the first day of school. What will I learn this year? Will my classmates be cool? What new friends will I make? Just as the summer seemed like the time to finish the unrealized dreams of winter term, the fall seems like the time to abandon the unrealized dreams of summer and make some new ones. One of the things I like about this job is the ecological sense of the year, and I guess the fact that I am sentimentally optimistic about everybody coming back and “getting back to it” is a sign I’m in the right line of work.

Okay, time to chill out. Tomorrow, maybe, I’ll force myself to make those final choices for the syllabus.

Or not. There’s still two weeks of summer left.

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1. Right now, it’s the little things about that job are confusing me. Like how to manage the onslaught of email that comes with it. For instance, is it more efficient to reply to all emails as I find them, or is it more efficient to set aside one or two times a week to reply to GPD email? And how do I keep track of it since it comes to the same account as all my other email?