Super Bon!

you’re starting the school year. I’ve had six continuous nights of socializing (before tonight) which were absolutely outstanding, especially a labo(u)r day party which perfectly started off the school year/ended the summer. But the reality is that I’ve been having a blast every night since the fun started last Wednesday with a birthday party. Which is great because I’ve also been working like, well, I don’t know what. I have been busy at my desk composing a variety of bureaucratic documents and how-tos (not interesting enough to detail), a Bad Subjects op-ed on New Orleans that I am frankly having a lot of trouble writing (everything seems so banal), and of course yesterday I had to get together my lecture for today and prep class, which included installing Ableton Live on my laptop, which is a nice thing to have installed on one’s laptop. Today’s class was, as one student wrote, a “first class first class” and it’s really fun to have a mix of new students and people I had in classes last year. It’s like difference and repetition. Har har.

In my copious free time I am taking stock of various research projects and getting set up to unleash my RAs on them.

The Fall 2005 North American Tour begins tomorrow, with the first of two trips this month to Duke for The Word on Music, which should be really good for me, intellectually. A bunch of interesting music authors will be there, and it’s always nice to see my friends in the triangle.

I just learned of this book series. Normally, I hate journalistic rock criticism, but somehow I’m drawn to it. Maybe it’s the formalism of the enterprise. I just ordered a bunch. Will report back.

In the meantime, I’ve got a few books from the authors I’m meeting at this symposium on Friday to polish off:

Aaron Fox, Real Country
E. Taylor Atkins, Blue Nippon and
Maureen Mahon, Right to Rock

and a couple theses to read.

I should post reading lists more often. I’ll try and make an entry from the road. It breaks my heart to miss the Thursday night NFL opener with Carrie, but there’s always next week.

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.

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?

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.