It’s quiet here but noisy in my head. I’ve eviscerated one chapter of my manuscript, which then collapsed under its own weight. And I’m trying to make the intro the best it can be. Intense. I have temporarily suspended my sabbatical “work no more than 40 hours in a week” rule to write a bit on weekends, but I’ll make it up with fun stuff in April.
Also, it’s really good that it took us until March to discover a really good ice cream place in town.
Several years ago I visited a large public university to give a talk. At the time my host (who will remain anonymous but some of my readers may guess who it is — I’m not telling) was serving as graduate program director and going through admissions decisions — which are always difficult. I ask him how his day is going and he says “Killing . . . killing. […pauses to reflect or perhaps just for dramatic effect…] Where’s the tenderness?”
This is how I feel about The Sound Studies Reader, whose Table of Contents I just returned to my editor at Routledge. As usual, this round of work is the result of my producing excessively long documents to start with. My original proposed reader was about 1000 pages (or so we estimated) with 67 individual entries, plus two introductory essays by me. Now we’re down to one introductory essay by me, 52 essays and I’ve surgically cut about 425 pages in order to preserve a lot of diversity. It may still be too much in terms of permissions and logistics, but we shall see. But every cut to me feels like a little heartbreak, since I like all the material so much. (And lots of the stuff that didn’t make it in.) No public ToC is possible until we settle on our end and then they get quotes on permissions, but I will certainly post more about it when I can.
Now back to wrapping up the mp3 book revisions. By the end of the week I should have cut about 5000 words off that. Maybe more if I’m clever.
If I ask where the tenderness is, you know why.
I’ve now been shaving for 10 months, which means I have the skills of a 14-year-old or thereabouts. I’m still learning this whole thing. So I’m at the gym last week and shave after my shower. It was my first shave at the gym. I had my rig all set up, and a minute or two into the enterprise, two other guys walk in, plop down their shaving kits, and go to it. They finished well before I did and walked away. While I’m not normally a “compare yourself to other men at the gym” kind of guy, I somehow found this episode slightly humiliating. So I decided to try and shave faster.
You can guess what happened. Last evening as some friends arrived to go out to dinner, I hadn’t quite finished bleeding profusely from a giant gash in my chin.
At least now I know how it is that men come to have giant nicks in their chins from time to time.
To add insult to injury, I felt compelled to explain to them (none of whom had ever seen me with a beard) that I had only been clean shaven for a few months and was still figuring it all out.
The SSRC just released a report on media piracy in emerging economies. I haven’t read it yet, so I can’t comment on the findings, but if you click the link, you’ll find an interesting discussion of the pricing structure as itself a demonstration of the arguments in the book. As an added part of that theater, I will simply add that I first heard of the report via the daily e-mail digest of a certain unnamed organization dedicated to the piracy of academic texts. I got the official email announcement through several more “legit” email channels today.
Also, ironically, it’s available for free in Canada because of granting agency rules about supporting this kind of work, but in the US it’s $8 through official channels (though free through unofficial channels). I paid the $8 off a grant, mostly because I want to support the project and I feel like that’s what grant money is for.
I’ve been thinking a lot about various forms of unauthorized copying and redistribution lately. They were part of the subject of my talk at EMP, and also are discussed at length in the last full chapter of the mp3 book, which I just finished revising (the chapter — there’s 10 more days on the book and I’m on pause right now to read up on geophysics and signal processing for an interview Thursday). At the EMP talk, Nancy Baym criticized my use of the term “piracy” as effectively reflecting the recording industry’s definition of legitimate copying. And she was right that despite thinking a lot about intellectual property, I hadn’t really though through my terminology. So I got home and did some reading, both of critiques of the word and going back through some histories. In the end, I kept the word as an analytic for the range of unauthorized practices, but for the most part restricted the use of pirate to abstractions or where it’s actually used by the people (as in “pirate bay” or “pirate radio”). If I’m talking about specific practices file-sharing or CD-burning, I use those words. Of course, the problem with revising a long book is that I may not catch every instance — even with find-replace. We shall see. This is how clever readers in seminars get to accuse authors of being inconsistent with themselves later on. But if that happens, I’ll just be happy that someone is reading me that closely.
As Nancy pointed out to me, it is ridiculous that we use the same word to describe people who make mix CDs and people who kidnap people off the coast of the former Somalia.
Last weekend I went to my first ever Experience Music Project conference. EMP has been hosting conferences for 10 years and this one was their first outside Seattle. There are plenty of twitter feeds for those interested in a blow-by-blow (including me coming out with a good 1-liner in the Q&A and then realizing that I’d better not take credit for it since it’s not mine). So let me note some things that seem to set this conference apart:
1. Like the Dickens Universe, an opera studies conference and some ethnomusicology events I’ve been to, this conference is populated by people who are not embarrassed to admit to liking what they study. I always find this refreshing in the humanities –versus a certain critical theoryish and avant-gardist distrust of pleasure more sometimes found at conferences. I feel this way even though I prefer to stay a step or two away from my own enjoyment in my work. (I’m the child of social scientists and despite not believing in objectivity, some of that “distance from your material” thing has evidently rubbed off.)
2. Most of the popular music conferences I’ve heard about that had journalists and academics together involved some kind of fight between journalists and academics about predictable things over which academics and journalists would argue. EMP seems to have somehow totally* overcome that unfortunate tendency–probably because of how it’s pitched. People argued, but about substantive matters.
3. The overall vibe was welcoming and positive. Although there is a star system in place there (and I admit to enjoying meeting famous people and people who I’d read — but I also really enjoyed meeting some people I’d never heard of who had some pretty brilliant talks), people seemed generally humble and friendly and interested in other people. As a non-music scholar, Carrie* had very little to do with the conference but showed up to a couple things and people were nice to her, which is a great test since some of the people I met had read me ahead of time.
4. The standards for presentation quality are much, much higher than the regular academic conference. I’m not saying every presentation was amazing, but that the average and mean were much higher in terms of sheer interestingness, performance quality, integration of music examples, wittiness, etc. I don’t think scholarship needs to be entertainment, but I also don’t think there’s any great virtue in reading out unrevised and unpracticed written text from a page. As with every conference, there were panels where I learned a ton and papers where I couldn’t exactly tell you what I learned. But even on those, the material was usually at least fun and engaging. Anyway, this was particularly inspiring and well-timed for me. I’ve given a few long form talks this year and it’s still quite physically difficult. My voice sounds like my old voice but isn’t–one working vocal cord is a whole new thing. So the multimedia angle is particularly enticing to me. I would actually recommend the conference to people outside the field who simply want to see what good presentations can look and sound like.
As for EMP next year, I am going to have to think about raising my game a little bit.
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* UPDATE: someone pointed out to me that Robert Christgau took a cheap shot at a grad student’s paper title in his blog. Not the organizers’ responsibility–I’m still giving them credit for a great vibe–but I just lost some respect for Christgau.
**Since we share our work all the time, Carrie has developed a certain expertise in sound studies and popular music over the years just reading my work, as I’ve developed some knowledge about victim politics and political theory from reading hers. This means that she can sit in a music studies panel and tell if the paper is new or good or not, even though she has no direct engagement with the field. It’s not the same kind of expertise as actually being the one doing the work, but still.
A little mp3 book tidbit. Thanks to Tricia Soto, CASBS librarian, I finally got my hands on a dusty 1911 text I’ve been after (I originally found this pic on Wikipedia, but it’s now gone and the text that goes with it turns out to be priceless).
After they took out the trache, they left an emergency trache kit in my room. I was happy not to need it, and I wonder if it was even the right size. On the last couple trache-free nights it sat there, ready. I was happy to walk out of the room, the floor (the staff said nice goodbyes and “please don’t come back”) and the hospital into the daylight. <a href=”http://superbon.net/?p=1087″ target=”_blank”>Well, sort of.</a> Even though the radiation was really unpleasant, I much preferred it as an outpatient experience. In terms of the actual experience, the 16.5 days in Montreal General–through no fault of theirs–was probably the longest single stretch of time in my life.
Posted inAcademe, Ideas
Left Behind
