Super Bon!

Actually, I thought they both were. Kerry didn’t look like his Republican caricature, so the dems call it a success. But he missed a couple opportunities to really put it to Bush, especially when Bush said he knew how hard war was from watching it on TV. How come that didn’t make the highlight reels?

Bush looked alternately pissed off, defensive and pathetic. He’d clearly rehearsed his opening remarks and it was downhill from there. You can’t criticize him for not being on message, though.

Still, the fact that we expected so little out of each of them makes it kind of a draw. Which is too bad. But then, it does appear that Bush has found a way to make it difficult to debate a stupid person.

It was awesome to watch the debate with Canadians, though. When Bush started talking about not signing on to the International Criminal Court, the looks of horror on everyone in the room were priceless.

In the good old USofA, when the president says “we didn’t sign on because then they could have tried some of our people as criminals” to some (like the people with the big US OUT OF UN banner near our old Pittsburgh house) he must sound like’s protecting god and country. Here, people just recognize that it’s evil.

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In other news, Will Straw (namecheck!) took us to this nice little place with 15 kinds of poutine beforehand. Poutine is comfort food, good on cold nights when you’re really hungry. The bottom fries get soggy, but by then the cheese has melted so it’s more, well, like nachos but with fries. Same concept, though. It was good in that soft food sort of way. I had a strictly don’t-ask-don’t-tell relationship with the sauce.

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I’ve been at this for weeks now and not a peep about recording. Still none, as I’m waiting for a new computer for the studio. In the meantime, I noodle on my instruments inbetween writing sessions and class prep, and a new copy of Tape Op arrived in the mail yesterday. It is definitely the best recording magazine anywhere. It’s also the only one that’s a) political and b) moderately feminist. Which is quite an achievement in an industry where they still sell microphone preamps with breasts in other magazines, and many writers still assume their audience is all male. I only skimmed it in bed, but there’s an article about a woman who made an album with just an old PC and a library card, and the end column (usually an oped about music) has been given over to urge people to vote in the US election. How cool is that?

Sorry for the long (in blogtime) hiatus but I am just way overcommitted right now. Two grad courses is a LOT of prep time, and this SSHRC application is a never-ending vortex of additional statements, half-page summaries and so forth. Plus, there’s the semblance of retaining a domestic life, letters of recommendation and sleep.

Luckily, there is also chocolate, for which you can thank the following rantings.

Another One From the Archives

Friedrich Kittler’s, this time, in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter

He’s quoting an 1913 essay from Karl Abraham, one of Freud’s disciples. Abraham instructed his patient not to write down his dreams (only psychoanalysts may write down dreams!) and so the patient instead stumbles over to his phonograph (phonographs at this time, it will be recalled, could record as well as play back).

…he ingeniously tries to save from oblivion the dreams he considers important. He own an apparatus for recording dictations and proceeds to speak the dreams he considers important in the bell-mouth. He Characteristically, he forgets that for the last couple of days the machine has been malfunctioning. As a result the dictation is difficult to understand. Patient is forced to fill in a lot from memory. The dictation had to be complemented by the dreamer’s memory! the dream analysis proceeded without notable resistance, thus we can assume that in this particular case the dream would have been retained even without any recording.

The patient, however, was not convinced by the experience and instead repeated the experiment one more time. Follow a dream-filled night, the machine, which in the meantime had been repaired, delivered a clearly audible dictation. But according to the patient its content was so confused that he had difficulties enforcing some kind of order. . . .

Kittler reads this as part of his several-age schhtick on the almost political opposition between the psychoanalytic and phonographic projects, but I’m just more struck by the machine breaking down (hmmm, sense a theme?) as a mnemonic for consciousness. In my reading, Abraham is exactly wrong, not because as Kittler suggests, he is in competition with the device, but because the interaction with the device, the exteriorization of the dream, is precisely what stimulates insight in the patient. Even the struggle with the more “faithful” (OH PLEASE SAVE ME FROM THE NEVERENDING DISCOURSE OF FIDELITY) reproduction of the fixed phonograph is a call to engagement, if not an “incitement to discourse” as Foucault would have it. But then of course, the whole thing’s taking place in a psychoanalyst’s office, which along with the Catholic confessional, was ideal-typical for Foucault’s whole schtick about the incitement to discourse. Mmmm. A big analytical circle we have here.

Maybe it’s just this: on first reading, the broken version of the phonograph seems to make manifest the actually process of communication, when in fact, the the fixed version actually does a better job, because its perfection, after all, is a total sham. It’s all the more artificial, and all the more engaging. Take that. lo-fi purists! Turns out the better copy is the worse copy, and therefore “better” at engaging the listener.

I feel better for getting that off my chest. And you?

Alarming Developments

We live in a “bad” neighborhood according to the tenants’ insurance mavens, so in order to be insured, we had to install an alarm. the installation was this afternoon, which of course puts a dent in the workday, but what can you do? I’ve never had one before, but they sure do seem like a pain in the butt. They also encourage paranoid behavior. And I mean that structurally. We mustn’t give out our code to anyone. Must create lots of unique codes for all possible classes of people who might enter or pass through the domicile. Must worry about how potential burglar will come through windows in order to place glass break detector and/or motion sensor. It’s all a ruse as part of our deal on insurance. Actually, the one thing that’s cool is the connection of the fire alarm to their main monitoring system, which might possibly save our cats’ lives in the event of a fire (and of course more of our stuff, too). Even that sounds paranoid, but there’s something about being a documentary scholar that has always had me freaked out about fire. I mean, paper is so, well, flammable. And there goes whatever project I’m working on. Of course, in grad school, I remember that an ethnographer friend shared the same fear, and so deposited some discs in our place that contained all his interview transcriptions, just for safe keeping.

You know what they say about data: it (sic) doesn’t exist unless it exists in three different places.

RSS

So Steven Rubio says I should get an RSS feed for my blog, which I’d love since it would lead to more search engine hits and of course make his life easier. Here’s the thing: I barely know how to code this stuff. I just modified a b2 template for this page, and then buried the url in a frameset so you wouldn’t have to type something long and ugly. Plus I get that weird header. All the instructions I’ve found online are way too advanced for my skill level. Anybody have a like to “rss for dummies” or somesuch?

well, Lisa Gitelman’s collection anyway (Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines). I ran across it again as I was prepping for tomorrow’s sound seminar. This is one of my favorite quotes of its type, though I’ve got a good mental radio one I’ll dig up someday.

Letter from Ike Leonard Isacson to Thomas Edison, sometime in 1914:

Dear Sir,

I am a patient, in the hospital for Insane, at Elgin, Illinois. I am not Systematized. The Idea is. I must be a System. I wish you will please Install a System for me. Hoping to hear from you. I remain. Very respectfully,

Ike Leonard Isacson.

Gitelman notes that Edison scrawled “Noans” (short for “no answer”) across the top of the postcard. She’s struck by the accidental profundity of the statement, and so am I, though neither of us has any idea what it means.

First things first. The party last night was awesome. Good conversation and good music.

There’s a raging debate in the “comments” section of Michael Berube’s Blog about Tom Frank’s new book. I even dropped a line there. It’s turned in to the standard debate about the populism of cultural studies (and left treatments of popular culture in general), which I just think is such a nonstarter these days. Yes, there are some great moments in Frank’s work on Kansas, but I don’t think Frank’s critique of cultural studies as populist (ongoing for quite some time now) is very well-researched or grounded in the history of the field. Yes, there are lots of populists running around (many in fields other than cultural studies) and yes it’s silly to read buying as transgression, but even John Fiske backs off that line in his last book.

Let me put it this was: it’s like saying physics is bankrupt because some idiots claimed they had figured out cold fusion over a decade ago. The nature of academia is that fields produce both good and bad work, and on that score cultural studies is a pretty standard field. One judges a field by its best work, not its worst.

It’s time to question the proliferation of self-congratulating critiques of cultural studies populism. I mean, I don’t know any serious scholars who are publishing that sort of thing or have in close to a decade. Maybe I run with the wrong people, but Fiske’s books are looking mighty dated these days. Let someone take on the faux populism of cultural history, which is alive, well and apolitical, and then we’ll see the fur fly.

Frank simply that he believes in his own authenticity more than he believes in other people’s, and his writing on popular culture consistently looks down on other people. He needs his critique of cultural studies so you don’t see him looking down on the very same people. I’m not a populist either — I think it’s a morally bankrupt position — but there’s a difference between challenging people and the positions they hold and condescending to them.

As a side note, the above debate on Michael’s site led me to another academic who blogs — Catherine Liu. Hers is both interesting and one of the coolest-looking academic blogs I’ve seen. Not like I have time to redesign this thing right now. Extra points for Liu: she’s interested in machines, and she teaches in my old undergrad department: Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota, for which I still have fond memories.