Winter Break Reading
Looking back over the last six months of so, I have spent relatively little time reading completed books that weren’t either for teaching or directly related to something I was writing, or for something like a review of a tenure dossier. Of course, I read lots of incompleted books: dissertations, drafts of books, books being reviewed for publication, etc.
In contrast, a little over two weeks of winter break afforded me lots of time to read and so I indulged in the following texts:
Michelle Murphy, Seizing the Means of Reproduction
Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget
John Harwood, The Interface: IBM and the Transformation of Corporate Design, 1945-1976
Joanna Demers, Listening Through the Noise: The Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music
N. Katherine Hayles, How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis
Melissa Gregg, Work’s Intimacy
Alex Galloway, The Interface Effect
I’m jumping around in Richard John’s Network Nation but can’t say I’m done with it yet.
and of course a pile of articles.
In 2013, I plan to do better on the finished book front.
2013 Academic Plans
1. Refuse requests for “to spec” writing. I did five essays like that in 2012 and while each one was a pleasant diversion from my main research agenda, the sum total–alongside grant applications–have taken me too far from the work sitting on my hard drive waiting to get out. I won’t declare bankruptcy on existing obligations but won’t add to them for awhile. If a request for a project comes in and there happens to be something cooking on my hard drive that’s a match, then we’re golden.
2. In the first instance, use the space opened up by these refusals to get my own new stuff out as I’ve been meaning to. I’ve got a series of signal processing pieces that need to be finished shown into the daylight. I’ve also got a stack of research on impairment phenomenology waiting to be read and written up. I’ve put in a massive grant application for a project on instrumentality.
3. Read more finished books that aren’t directly related to a paper I’m writing or a class I’m teaching. This category excludes books that are under review or come to me as part of tenure and promotion dossiers. Too much of my current reading is instrumental in nature. Articles are good too but I’m better about that in general.
4. Spend more time talking about people with that stuff, enjoying colleagues around town, students, etc.
5. Write more for nonacademic publications, other’s people’s blogs, op-eds, etc.
6. Continue to travel for presentations a little less. Avoid heroic travel at all costs.
[Crickets Chirping]
..and that was 2012. Sorry for the silence here. I’ve been lax about posting links to interviews and other media appearances here (doing so instead on twitter and facebook) — which is bad because a blog is a much better archive.(1) It’s also not enclosed inside someone else’s proprietary scheme (let us not speak of which moments Facebook’s algorithm chose for me as my 2012 highlights).
This fall was an absurdly busy and surprisingly difficult term in some ways–despite some really wonderful highlights–which deserves a proper autopsy. In the meantime, I’ve got some grading to finish up and a couple deadlines to hit, so please excuse my return to silence.
One of the nice things about a blog is that you can leave it and come back to it, which is apparently what I do. 2013 will bring some more content as I move into new undertakings.
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1. MP3 has been getting lots of nice reviews, too (best review title goes to “Music for Cat Heads” in the Dutch magazine Gonzo (circus)) , but I haven’t been systematic in compiling them in part because I have a strange physical aversion to reading them. My eyes glaze over and I can’t make it through.
Baby’s First Quebec Election
This comes a little late but sobeit. Tuesday we voted for the first time as Canadian citizens. We’d registered a couple weeks back, and the volunteers there assumed that as Americans we would expect fancy electronic machines. They warned us, “it’s very old fashioned.” And it was: we arrive at the polling place (a short two block walk from our home). We stood in line for a few minutes, as there were about 10 stations spread around a room. Each station had two or three people checking ID and handling ballots. They checked my ID, gave me a ballot and a pencil. Then I went behind a cardboard screen and marked it with the pencil. There was a single choice on it: which representative of which party I wanted as my MNA. Then I folded the ballot, tore off a receipt, and dropped the ballot in the box and handed the receipt to one of the women at my table. It was very old fashioned, and it was the opposite of efficient or automated. There were lots of people there and everything was done by hand. Here’s the thing: sometimes democracy should be efficient. It was nice to walk into a room full of people making sure the electoral process happened right.
Tuesday night I listened to the results with one ear as I carved through the deluge of paperwork I’ve got these days (that’s the subject of another post). It was actually quite exciting in our riding: liberals by 1 vote, then Parti Québécois by 15, back and forth until the liberal candidate took a firm lead late in the game. But Quebec Solidaire, the left party, actually gave the PQ a run for their money, coming in third, but a close third.
By the time Pauline Marois was making her victory speech, I was done and watching, and yes we saw the SQ cops suddenly remove her from the stage and the insanity that followed. The whole thing was very, well, American.
The next night I got home and got on Facebook and was blown away by the sniping back and forth. I can’t believe people are blaming either her or Anglos for a crazy person with a gun, but I guess that’s a version of reductio ad hitlerium on the internet.
Yes the PQ won and yes they are, among other things, an ethnic nationalist party, and it’s not my ethnicity. Yes, they are separatist, and yes some of their proposals sounded pretty bad. But others are quite good. So I’m keeping an open mind for now.
Perhaps it’s my privilege of not having grown up Anglo Canadian and not having children in the English-language school system. I also don’t have the emotional attachment to the separatism issue. I realize it defines Quebec politics–and it’s a shame, since I think most people care a whole lot more about things like healthcare, education, and jobs. At the same time, nationalism and language politics are much more complex questions than simply another referendum. I’ve benefitted some from Bill 101 in the sense of the whole city being like flash cards. I’ve learned a lot more French than I might have otherwise, and I didn’t know how much I knew until I went to Paris and found it relatively easy to get by (except for all my idiomatic expressions, which were many and useless). And there are still legacies of Anglo entitlement here and elsewhere in Canada that have to be hard to take. I don’t look forward to constitutional battles or another referendum (where I would certainly vote against Quebec becoming an independent country).
But I also haven’t appreciated the shrill tone of the mainstream English-language press, which is every bit as much “us vs. them” as they claim the PQ to be, and sometimes moreso. They are just as much the problem as the people at whom they point their fingers. I joked that as an American voting for the first time as a Canadian, I had lots of practice holding my nose at the ballot box, and in the end, I did as there was no perfect choice. But that’s organized politics. For my part, I just hope that the election did not fully co-opt the student movement, and that perhaps other vital social goods like healthcare will be added to the agenda of things for which Quebeckers take a stand in the coming weeks, months and years.
Oops . . . while we were away
I can see I’m going to have to up my game. Since my last post, I’ve had a small bevy of media appearances, which I have dutifully Tweeted and Facebooked, but between travel and too many deadlines, I’ve not posted them here. I can now see the advantage of that whole Tumblr integrate your online universe thing.
So, some catch-up of where else I’ve been on the internet this month:
Pitchfork Interview (and Wall Street Journal blog post)
Times Higher Education Supplement Review
and, in case you’re in town:
Montreal Book Launch: 12 September 12, 19.00-21.0-0 at Librairie Drawn & Quarterly
I hope I didn’t miss anything.
More news here as it happens.
Feature or Bug? Ebooks roll out later
Authors–especially academic authors–should always be happy when people want to read their work, and flattered by desire for access. And so please consider me flattered: thanks for reading and thanks for caring enough to tweet about it.
But since Steven Shaviro’s comment mirrored my own confusion about a month ago (and has been making the rounds), and since there’s a more interesting and profound truth to Steven’s post that I can’t get out in 140 characters, I’m taking the time to blog a reply.
Duke University Press originally told me that MP3 would be out in ebook as well as paperback, but as the release date approached, I couldn’t find any evidence of it on kindle or ibooks. I emailed Laura Sell at DukeUP, and she assured me they were coming. It’s just that it takes longer for e-books to come out.
Let that sink in. If you are of the Nicholas Negroponte persuasion–“digital books never go out of print, they are always there” — this makes no sense: analog books are atoms, digital books are bits. Negroponte’s argument perfectly fits my own mindset as a consumer of digital content. Why can’t I have all my digital stuff instantaneously and on exactly my own terms? I remember years ago when Joel Schalit put out a new record on iTunes and I couldn’t get it in Canada because of international licensing agreements. Totally a drag. Let’s not even speak of the new season of Damages. Though of course there are workarounds.
So as a reader, listener–and in this case as an author–I want to believe the promises of ubiquity and instantaneity. Basically, I want Being Digital to be true.
But as an intellectual, I know it’s not.
As an intellectual, I’m not at all of the Negoponte persuasion.* When it comes to content, I’m more of the Tarleton Gillespie persuasion, that digital book services want to cast themselves as platforms, who at once attempt to provide content, shape the user experience, define the market and affect policy. In other words, they work more or less like old media, just with slightly different ingredients in the salad (to mix a metaphor).
So from this perspective, it’s no surprise that the e-books are coming out later than the paper copy. But they should arrive within a month or so.
In fact the whole release date thing is slippery. Amazon said “August 6th,” which was conveniently my birthday. At first I thought someone at Duke had a sense of humour. Then I realized it was random. Then I realized it was meaningless when Patrik Svensson wrote in mid-July to tell me the book showed up in Sweden.
In the meantime, the intro to MP3 is available online, and of course, there’s always the wax cylinder, about which I will have more to say in the coming days.
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*For the record, I’m also of the Matt Kirschenbaum persuasion that bits are atoms.