LID Day 1 + Bureaucracy, not in that order

And we’re back to cancer blogging.  Yesterday I spent a couple hours at the Jewish General getting my records in order. I forgot how much bureaucracy there is to being a patient: Keeping files, updating files, moving between offices, the whole gig.  Though I have to say that prior experience has meant I know how to work it, at least at JGH.  Everyone was super helpful and nice.

Of particular importance was getting some forms to Manulife, my private insurer.  In Quebec, there is a public system but private insurance covers lots of things, some of them not covered by the public system and some of them covered but foisted onto private insurers when possible.

As part of my radioactive iodine treatment, I need my thyroid hormones to be low enough for it to work.  There are two ways to do this: 1) become hypothyroid. This involves stopping my synthetic hormone drugs for about six weeks and making myself very sick, soporific, and generally living in a miserable haze and being unable to work or do much of anything. 2) receive two shots of thyrogen, 24 and 48 hours before radioactive iodine respectively.  You can guess which is preferable.  Thyrogen costs about $1600 for a course of dosage and Manulife requires pre-approval.

You can guess what happens next.  I have my Dr’s office fill out the forms and fax them to Manulife (and have the receipt to prove it).  That was in August.  Last week I call to ask why I haven’t heard back.  They tell me they “never” received it.  So I have to get the documents again, scan and email them, and find a responsible person.  Luckily I did.  This is the third time in my experience Manulife has “lost” a claim (or part of a claim) for an expensive treatment for which they require prior approval.  What conclusion am I supposed to draw?

Also, for the record, I contracted McGill Benefits to ask for an advocate with Manulife, they refereed me to MAUT (aka, our fake faculty association), who promised me they will get back to me, just like they did in August.  I’m still waiting.

Of course if worse come to worse, I will just pay out of pocket.  It’s just that I shouldn’t have to, and I shouldn’t have to chase down my insurer on top of staying on top of various tests and other medical arrangements in advance of my treatment.

UPDATE!  The responsible person at Manulife saw my materials through the bureaucracy and got me prior approval about six hours after I contacted her.  So it was a runaround but in the end one person in a faceless bureaucracy who gives a damn can still make a difference.  Hats off to the mysterious “Kristen C.”

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LID Day 1: I am now on my low-iodine diet, which requires that I (effectively) consume nothing prepared by anyone else.  If you’re curious about how it works, Thyroid Cancer Canada has a fresh and up to date brochure, based on the latest science.  The short version: for a vegetarian, it’s vegan, no soy, no dairy (duh), nothing from the sea, and nothing high in iodine (like iodized salt, which is in everything).  But non-iodized salt is ok, so I can go with that.

My first LID meal was lunch, and involved home-made hummus (including boiling the chickpeas ourselves, with some baking soda following the Ottolenghi recipe; though Carrie’s hummus skills are quite formidable at this point) and toast from no-knead bread (half wheat, half unbleached white flour).  Tonight is a salad and leftovers from a paella based on Mark Bittman’s instructions in How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, with short grain brown rice, a giant cauliflower from the Marché Jean-Talon, onion, garlic and bell peppers.  And way more saffron than he suggests.  In addition to the dry chickpeas, I had to track down salt-free vegetarian bouillon (thank you JTM Vrac), and vegan margarine for the toast (ok, not amazing, thank you Carrie for finding it at Loblaw’s).

(Not) Her Master’s Voice

Roughly two weeks ago, Wolfgang Ernst came to Montreal. I missed both talks, as I was at the University of Michigan.*  But we did meet up on Saturday for a visit to the Musée des ondes Emile Berliner, whose back areas are filled with old media technologies, as well as many versions of the His Master’s Voice logo, ranging from pictures to larger-than-life models.

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Francis Barraud’s painting has captured the imaginations of media theorists and historians like Amy Lawrence, Michael Taussig, Friedrich Kittler, and of course Wolfgang and me.

Later in evening, Wolfgang wondered aloud whether a dog would actually listen to a recording in this way. I wondered back what would happen with cats. He laughed and said a cat is something completely different.

The following Tuesday morning I got my answer. As part of an assignment for my graduate seminar this term, I asked students to make a 1-minute remix of Hildegard Westerkamp’s Kits Beach Soundwalk.** The goal was simply to get them comfortable with audio editing and not to worry too much about the final product. But of course some students have lots of audio experience (probably more than me!) and they got creative with the assignment. The following video happened when I put on Eric Powell’s contribution. My kitten, Galaxie, jumped up on the desk and started sniffing the speaker frantically. Recalling my conversation with Wolfgang, I ran into the next room, grabbed my phone and started filming. By this time, she was on the other speaker.  She listens in a state of distraction, but finally loses interest when she hears her sister playing in the litter box a room away.

If Barraud’s painting is an allegory for the mimetic promise of sound recording at the moment of its historical emergence, my collaboration with Galaxie is an allegory for modern, distracted conditions of listening.

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* In some kind of recursive loop someone asked me in my Michigan Q&A what I thought of Wolfgang’s work (specifically his approach to sound and materiality), probably right as he was giving a talk on sonicity at Concordia. The short answer: Ernst is usually understood as a materialist but he is at least as much a romantic.

** I had assigned it as an example of “critical media practice” or “DH multimodal scholarship” avant la lettre.

BONUS CONTENT:

I’ve been working on Dennis Gabor and the history of time-stretched audio. I am not sure how this fits into the project, but since it involves time stretching and cats, I will find a way (thanks to Ryan Diduck for the link):

 

New Text: The Low Acuity for Blue: Perceptual Technics and American Color Television

(coauthored with Dylan Mulvin) “The Low Acuity for Blue: Perceptual Technics and American Color Television,” Journal of Visual Culture 13:2 (August 2014): 118-138.

This piece is the first of a pair of articles on colour television that Dylan Mulvin and I wrote together (the second has been accepted to Television and New Media and will appear in 2015 or later; an online, image-rich Scalar version will appear once we’re through copyedits).  The work began, I think, in 2010, when I had an “oh, holy shit” moment while finishing up the MP3 book.  What if everything I’d written about compression had happened already with video compression for colour television?  Dylan was my research assistant and I sent him off to find out.  He read up on the material, and based on what he found, I decided it didn’t transform my story so radically that I had to change it.  But the material was really interesting.  And there wasn’t much in terms of understanding colour TV as a cultural technology.  So we dug in deeper and fanned out a bit, and produced two pieces.  Along the way we got to know Susan Murray, who’s writing a whole book on the rise of colour TV in the US (her source materials are super cool to look at), and also got familiar with Carolyn Kane’s research on colour and video.  (Andreas Fickers has a book on colour TV as well, but it’s in German).  Of course, there’s tons of work on colour in cinema and art, but television and video are very different cases (as the four of us all argue), and it’s been a fun spinoff project.  It also helped shape Dylan’s eventual dissertation direction: a history of the materials of commensurability.   You know, like the actual kilogram.

So I can say that this project is a great example of how the Canadian grant system can work well: funding goes to a doctoral student, research gets enhanced and new directions emerge, and prof and student publish something together that they never would have alone.

Ambiguous Cancer Update for 2014+New Website

It’s been a long time since I’ve blogged about cancer.  Partly this is because being post-treatment is part of my life.  But every year I go in for a scary scan, and every year it shows the same thing: there are some nodules in my lungs, probably metastatic thyroid cancer.  They have been growing very slowly.  This year’s scan showed the biggest one had grown by 3mm.  Since 2011, it’s been “watchful waiting,” since the alternative they offered me was exploratory lung surgery that had no curative purpose–all it could do would be a positive diagnosis.

This year, things are different.  They have decided to do another dose of radioactive iodine, combined with lithium (this part is based on new research) which is supposed to make the cells hungrier for iodine.  To refresh your memory, radioactive iodine is administered as a pill.  I am then radioactive for a week and have to stay away from people.  Happily, this can now be done as an outpatient treatment, so long as I have a toilet of my own.  I managed to get it schedule while Carrie is giving a talk at Michigan October 30th.  So I will be glowing for Halloween.  Not actually, but I kind of wish I did glow.

I went through RAI in March of 2010 and it was relatively painless apart from the unpleasantness of isolation and a hospital stay.  There can be nausea the first day or two, and I couldn’t taste sour for about a month.  For two weeks before I have to go on an insane low-iodine diet.  (The diet is insane because iodine is in pretty much every processed food and most commercially available salt.)  The outcomes of this year’s treatment, close to the 5th anniversary of my first thyroid cancer surgery, are unclear.  It might do nothing.  It might slow down the growth of the cells a little.  It might clear them out a lot.  Or it might get rid of everything (for now), which would allow me to actually claim that I am in remission.  We don’t know.  But the risks are relatively low.  And honestly, this is what I wanted them to try in 2011 when they found the growing spots in the first place.

There’s not much else to say on this subject until mid-October.  I may do a low-iodine food blog starting around October 15th, since that will be fun and experimental, and I’m not fresh off a 17-day hospital stay (as I was in 2010 when I last went on the diet).  And there’s not much for you to do.  Food gifts are unnecessary now and will be useless while I am on the low iodine diet, since if I don’t cook it myself and know exactly what’s in it, I won’t eat it.

I owe the world a voice and swallowing update, but I’ll write that separately

AND BONUS NEWS:

Unrelated to the latest treatment plan, I have created a website called http://cancerscapes.ca .  I blogged my cancer experience in 2009-10, and now it can be read in proper form from beginning to end.  I also made a series of audio projects during cancer treatment, and they are now all listenable (total duration=@30 minutes).  The “..and this is my voice” piece was  anthologized by New Adventures in Sound Art in 2011.

Cancerscapes is a living archive.  The text section of Cancerscapes will automatically add new entries as well, like this one.  And who knows, there may someday be more audio to include.

What Is Music Technology For?

(x-posted on the Social Media Collective Research Blog)

In late March and early April, I attended three events that together signal some interesting shifts in thinking about music technology and sound.  The first, a day-long symposium on March 24th I co-organized with Nancy Baym, was entitled “What Is Music Technology For?”  It came after a weekend-long instalment of MusicTechFest, which brings together people from the arts, industry, education and academe to talk about music technology.  For our more academically-focused event, we brought together humanists, social scientists, engineers, experimentalists, artists and policy activists (among others) to discuss our mutual interests and investments in music technology.  Rather than editing a collection that would come out two years from now, Nancy and I decided to try assembling a manifesto, a project that gave direction to the day and also helped us think in terms of common problems and goals.

The result is now available online at musictechifesto.org, and I encourage you to visit, read and sign.

That event was followed by two others which I think show at least a possibility for a sea change in how we talk about music technology and with whom.

The following weekend found me at the University of Maryland, for their “Sound+” conference.  I presented a (still early version of) my work on Dennis Gabor and time-stretched audio, and listened to a wide range of papers from (mostly) English and literature scholars on sonic problems.  But of course Maryland is home to the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, and that combined with a critical mass of people interested in theory and interdisciplinarity meant we also had some conversations that looked outward, especially a roundtable on mutual sonic interests across the humanities and sciences at the end of the second day.

The weekend after that (4-5 April) found me at the Machine Fantasies conference at Tufts University (across town), which brought together musicologists, anthropologists, composers, engineers, artists and computer scientists to have conversations about what it means for machines to make music, and how we might think about both the pasts and the futures of music technology.

Combined with other events, like the huge MusDig conference at Oxford last summer, there seems to be a growing interest in working across established interdisciplinary boundaries.  In other words, while humanists and social scientists are used to talking with one another, and while engineers and computer scientists are used to talking with one another, there now seems to be a growing (and one hopes, critical) mass of people who want to work across intellectual and institutional boundaries.

Speaking as someone coming out of the humanities and “soft” or “critical” social sciences, this is a major change brought on, I think, by several concurrent developments (and keep in mind this is musings in a blog post, not a careful intellectual history):

1.  A renewed interest in making, probably heavily lubricated by the turn to the “digital humanities” in some fields, but also by a re-assessment of the role of critique.  A generation ago, I came up learning that to be critical required one to be separate.  But increasingly, we are seeing integration of critique with other scholarly modes. Anne Balsamo’s mapping of the technological imagination in Designing Culture captures this beautifully.

2.  A new openness to humanistic and interpretive approaches in the world of music engineering and science.  I can’t say that I know them to have been “closed” in previous generations–that may well not have been the case.  But I have personally spent the last 10 years or so in dialogue with people in a variety of scienc-y and engineering-y spheres of music technology design, development and research.  I have found a great deal of openness to and interest in the kinds of ideas in which I usually traffic, and what began really as a “study of” a group of people has evolved into a series of “collaborations with.”  To that end, and to provide a little institutional leverage (or play space), I have joined McGill’s Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music, Media and Technology (CIRMMT, pronounced “Kermit,” like the frog).

3.  Some of this may also be the result of changing institutional configurations and easy familiarity with tools. Two generations ago, when places like Stanford’s Center for Computer Music and Acoustics were getting off the ground, to do anything with computers and music (or music and technology more broadly), you needed a space and resources, you needed specialized equipment, and you needed specialized knowledge.  Today, those tools are cheaper and more available than ever.  There is something lost when people aren’t heading over to the mainframe or computer lab and running into each other that way–common spaces are so central to interdisciplinarity.  But there is something gained when we all have an easy sense of the available tools, and some of our questions are beginning to converge.

4. Some of the theoretical concerns of humanists, like what it means to make or listen to music, what it means to be a musician or fan, what technology is or should be, how the various music industries ought to be organized, and what the nature of an instrument or instrumentality is–these questions are suddenly on the table and pressing issues for everyone.  The answers we come up with now can have practical impact as we imagine the next generation of music technologies, or worry after the increasingly precarious status of people who make their living from music or sound work. In other words, we are in the enviable–and impossible–position of having a lot of thinking to do, and having a chance to act on those thoughts.

These are exciting, challenging, messy and incomplete developments.  They hold a great deal of promise.  It is up to us to pop our heads up from our silos, to think big, and try to work together in different kinds of spaces to move some of these shared agendas forward.

Trigger Warnings Are About Violence: An Open Letter to James Turk (and the Montreal Gazette)

Dear James Turk:

Faculty can either take a stand against sexual violence and intimidation on campus, or we can passively promote such a climate, but there is no neutral position to occupy.

That is why I was surprised to read your very dismissive-sounding remarks in this morning’s Montreal Gazette article on the subject of trigger warnings in university classrooms.  It is possible you were misquoted, in which case I would welcome a clarification. But here is the quote that most concerns me:

Professors never want to gratuitously make life difficult for people, but this takes it to a silly extreme. You will end up with a situation where the only thing you could read in a literature course is (akin to) My Little Pony.

Let’s get a few things clear: trigger warnings are not about changing what you teach.  Even the controversial Oberlin motion simply asks professors to exercise good judgment. A trigger warning are not (as you later suggest) about restrictions on academic freedom, except the freedom to shock students.  It is also not about coddling or sheltering students. Professors use them to avoid gratuitously stirring up past traumas that we are unlikely to know about ahead of time.  The idea of the trigger comes out of work on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. It has been taken up in activism against sexual violence and by the refugee rights community.

Right now, both those issues ought to be foremost on the minds of university professors. Our campuses are international, which means we may well have students who experienced some kind of state violence in our classrooms.  Our campuses are also far too tolerant of sexual violence, a problem university administrations (including my own at McGill) have often been slow and late to address. We can’t know which of our students may have experienced sexual violence. But we do know that students who have suffered sexual assault often face increased difficulty completing their studies if they don’t have adequate support.

It is true that we can’t anticipate how materials in our classes might affect students. But we are not as stupid as the examples in this article make us look. The issue is not My Little Pony or other hypotheticals like bee stings; the issue is obviously violent or disturbing content. Anyone who teaches avant-garde material can come up against this, and anyone dealing with issues of gender or sexuality in their courses can come up against it. A warning about violent or disturbing material allows students to prepare themselves or step out briefly. It is humane and decent. We won’t catch every trigger, and that’s not the point. The point is that there is a big difference between doing nothing and doing something.

Perhaps there are professors who will object, saying that their pedagogy depends on shock and surprise. They should be free to continue working that way, but students should be informed enough that they are free to not take those courses.

It may well be the case that faculty members have also been affected by sexual or state violence in their lives, so a policy about triggers on a syllabus might also be to their benefit.

Sincerely,
Jonathan Sterne
CAUT member