Where I’m at with the lecture course (oh, and the book is in!)

A colleague just wrote to ask where I’m at with my intro course. My friends are posting (or writing) about the technologies they are trying out, etc. Here is where I am at as of today.

I have too many readings in most places and not enough in a few.

Podcast lectures drop on Thursday. There will be listening instructions, including, “do not listen to this in front of a screen.”

Tuesday is semi-synchronous group work.  Groups will produce 3-4 short projects during the term each themed around a unit (eg, when we do ecology, they’ll do a supply-chain analysis of a media object).  Randomly assigned membership, but control for what time zone the student is in.  Peer evaluation will be part of the group grade.

I might flip Tuesday and Thursday, we will see.

A prof office hour during class time (that way everyone can make it if they are in the time zone), on the day that the groups aren’t meeting.

Some office hours sprinkled in at weird times for people in other parts of the world

1-2 readings a week (1 if it’s hard), some supplemental stuff for the keeners

Weekly surveys whose answers will inform the following week’s lecture

6 quizzes that are multiple choice, machine graded, and for which they can use any resource they want.  Lowest score is dropped.  Our software lets me randomize answer order, question order, and will automatically swap out questions (so I could have 4 different ways of asking about the same issue).  

Escape hatch for accessibility issues (I can’t even begin to predict the kinds of accommodations people will need)

There may also be a “help make the course great” section where students can illustrate my lectures or do other things that might be useful for one another.

A late work policy I haven’t yet figured out that protects the TAs and I from getting labour dumped on us at end of term but that also is less draconian than usual given what people may be dealing with

I cut my hair finally, so students will get to vote on what colour it will be in November.

There will be 4 big units if I can do it all (might cut to 3 when I see the readings laid out before me).  Economy, Ecology, Technology, Ideology.  First two weeks are intro stuff: Anatomy of AI, and Encoding-Decoding, both of which will serve as “keys” to unlock and frame the rest of the course.

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Just to square the circle on Diminished Faculties, I sent it back to Duke University Press yesterday. Reviewers need to sign off and I may need to cut a bit, but I’m happy with the work and all things considered, coming in a month behind the planned schedule is fine.

I’m taking 4 days off starting tomorrow, then will finish my fall syllabi by the 15th, then will take more time off in the 2nd half of the month. As much as possible.

Get a haircut, hippie!

So, um, the pony tail is gone. After 30 years of long hair, it is now the shortest it’s been since I was an infant. I love it. And it was time.

Me with short hair, front view.
Me with short hair, side view.

In the first photo I totally look like my dad with some genes from my mom’s side of the family. From the side I look like my brother.

I also had a beard from age 19 to age 39, which I had to shave off for radiation in 2010. I’ve loved being clean shaven ever since, and I strongly suspect that I will have no regrets about this move either. Some people change their look every couple months. Apparently when I do, it’s a Life Event.

This is not exactly a Covid cuts story, though.

Every spring, for the past few years, I would ask Carrie if it’s time to cut it, and every spring, Carrie says no. We had a deal: when it started to look bad, it would go. And it would go in spring so I could enjoy a full summer with short hair. But I think Carrie was pretty attached since she never knew me with short hair. So every spring she said “not yet,” until spring 2019, when she said “maybe next year.” But this spring, she still didn’t make the call.

In the end, the turning point for me was The Drugs. One of the side effects of Lenvima is thinning hair, and my hair has been getting thinner and finer for the last year or so. It’s not like chemo where it just falls out, but this summer has been some kind of tipping point where I really started to notice after 16 months on the drug. My pony tail no longer filled out the barrette, which meant it slipped around, which I did not find to be a pleasant feeling. Suddenly, long hair started to feel more like an annoyance than a decoration. I was ready. Plus, on Zoom calls I already look bald. You can’t see what’s in back anyway.

It being Covid time, we decided to do it at home. I asked a few male friends how they did it and what they did. I ordered a clipper a couple weeks ago. Finally, last night after dinner, we sat down on the couch with Carrie’s computer to watch hair cutting videos. After a couple more generic videos, I asked for a search for “home hair cut balding men” since I wanted some ideas for the horseshoe that would replace the pony. The third one in was “three essential tips” or something like that and we thought it was going to be hair cutting tips, but it was about Being A Confident Man and What Women Like. I joked that she was going to start getting served Jordan Peterson videos.

Finally, Carrie asked — a few times and different ways — if I was ready. I suspect I was considerably more ready than her. But then, she was the one who was going to actually cut it and look at the result all day, and despite being together for over 30 years, she has never known me without long hair. I thanked my pony tail for its service, Carrie took a final photo of the back of my head, and then we did the haircut, checking regularly in the mirror at each length to see what my ideal length would be.

last photo of my pony tail. You can see the clip sliding down.

I had decided I wanted some hair, rather than the full shaved head look, so we had to figure out a plausible length. I like the result. I am surprised at how little grey there is outside the temples. I’m sure that will change with time (and I absolutely do not mind) but I was expecting more.

When we were done I handed her my barrette and said, “I bequeath this to you”–along with most of my other hair care supplies. Right now, her hair is longer than I’ve ever seen it, so she’s already been swiping my barrettes. (It started out as just “drummer hair” and then kept going.)

There’s only one issue. I somehow look more like a dude now. The pony femmed me up a little, which it an important part of my self-presentation and frankly my self concept (to say I have an ambivalent relationship to cis-heterosexual-masculinity would be an understatement). Happily, gender nonconformity has come a long way in the last 30 years, so I’ve got lots of options to experiment with. For now, I am digging the nail polish, which also has the functional advantage of protecting the fingernails on my right hand for strumming.

My fingernails, painted pink. I need to work on avoiding my cuticles with the brush.

Oh, and when I put on a shirt, I have a reflex to pull my hair out of the collar. That’ll go away on its own….

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I started growing my hair out in high school, and apart from one unfortunate cut right before graduation, where the barber took off a lot more than I asked him to, it has grown out ever since. There were occasional trims and shapes at Curl Up & Dye in Minneapolis, and later Carrie would occasionally just trim off the ends with a hair scissor.

I am not sure the original motivation, though it was a thing among some of my friends, and I watched many male musicians with long hair so it seemed normal. It just became part of “my look.” And it was the one part of my look that consistently drew compliments from strangers, which is not a small thing for a fat person in our culture.

Still, in my 20s I was more than once heard to remark that “I don’t want to be a 40-something professor with hair down to my ass.” In the end, only reason that didn’t happen is male pattern baldness.

On finishing(s)

While searching for snarky sports commentary at bedtime two nights ago, I stumbled across an interesting Twitter thread on finishing a manuscript (because I was tagged in it).

I am a big believer in the old Walter Benjamin line about how manuscripts aren’t finished, they are abandoned. But the key here is the verb abandon.

In finishing, you abandon the manuscript over and over: to get it under review, to get it back under review after revision; to deal with copyedits; to deal with page proofs. And that’s in the best of possible circumstances. There are even more little abandonments along the way. Today I “finished” a chapter I have been fighting with (on fatigue, draw your own conclusions) since mid March. It was also the least developed chapter of the first version of the ms that went to the press last year. Yeah, I know a lot is going on and most people aren’t writing. I am not saying that you should be writing. But I am absolutely driven to write. At least this book because I know why I am writing it and for whom (one of the people for whom I am writing is me).

Even so I ran away from this chapter a couple times to work on other chapters because I just couldn’t figure out how I wanted to make the argument work and how it should be presented. But at the end of last week I was finally ready to do what needed to be done. Now it’s on Carrie’s desk (aka in-house peer review) to see if I can cut even more before showing it to people. She will find the parts that don’t make sense, or that should be brought out and also tell me whether I should cut a 15-page section on medical models of fatigue down to 2-3.* Then I’ll edit again next week for half a day and send it to some people (and others will get it as part of the revised manuscript when I send in the whole thing).

All this is to say finishing is not a definite act. It is many many small acts.

I think it’s Robert Boice in Professors as Writers who says to “write before you are ready,” but regardless of who said it (if he said it, he wasn’t first), the same is true about finishing. When I send the MS back to Duke at the end of the month (fingers crossed), I will still have lots of prose editing to fix to make it more beautiful, and that’s assuming the readers don’t ask for more changes (they could). I will have all my image permissions (because I planned ahead) but there will be design issues to work out. It doesn’t matter. It’ll be finished when it goes back, and when any additional changes requested reviewers go back, when the copyedits go back, when the proofs go back, when it appaears in the catalogue, and only much later, when I hold an object in my hands.

*I am really trying to have shorter chapters this time. I’m at 55 pages/17,000 words. Not bad for, not great in terms of my targets.

Congratulations to Chemicals; Censure to People

It’s time to congratulate some pills and some part or another of my biochemistry. All I did was take 3 pills every night (plus a bunch of others for side effects).

It’s only been a couple weeks since my last update but I switched some drugs around so I had to be checked up on. The good news: my tumour marker is down to .4. That is very low–the lowest I’ve been in years and. the best my oncologist has seen. I’ve got a scan on August 4th, so that’s the next thing, which means an oncology appointment on my 50th birthday. Not normally what you want but I’ll take it since the scan should reflect the good news we are seeing in the bloods.

Side effects are about the same. I’ve got a blister/callous assemblage on my right big toe that doesn’t look like much but is keeping me from going on regular walks which is a bit of a bummer. Digestion is relatively well behaved, considering. Blood pressures are decent with the suite of drugs I’m on.

So, censure. Yesterday I went to get my blood drawn at 3pm which meant I was one of the last people for the phlebotomy room in the cancer centre. The nurse on duty told me a bunch people had been really rude to her that day (she’s black and obviously an immigrant from her accent so there’s that too). It boggles the mind — being a regular I get to know the staff, I’ve seen her go out of her way to get things right and she’s actually funny. The Gazette ran a story about people being real nasty to staff at restaurants. I’m not going to a restaurant any time soon but I guarantee you when I do, it will be a cause for celebration. What’s going on with people? Why are they being such, well, dicks?

Resources for Teaching Online

My department (Art History and Communication Studies, McGill University), got together and did a little skillshare on teaching online. Or rather, we broke into groups, people did homework, and then reported back. The resulting document is our best attempt to produce something useful for ourselves. It still leaves open questions about office hours and other things, but it’s a start.

Extra credit to my colleague Darin Barney, who took the lead in organizing the whole thing.

Download it here and feel free to share widely.

Cancer, Covid, Masks, Risks, News

Another week another doctor visit. This time I actually wound up seeing my oncologist in person. First, the good news: my tumour marker remains very low, so low that he told me it’s the lowest he’s ever seen with someone in lung mets. I am a very lucky person. I’m trying a new blood pressure drug.

Also, it has been over three weeks since I had diarrhea. I think I got lucky and got into a rhythm with eating, excreting, and Imodium, and now if I take 2 Imodium at the right time, I can get through the day without discomfort. I’ve had a couple bad days with cramps and all the rest, but at least I’m not getting super dehydrated on top of it.

So it turns out that my in-person doctor meeting was sort of by accident because the College of Physicians issued confusing instructions this week. But we are sort of in that phase. Quebec numbers are down, hospitals aren’t overrun with Covid cases, and restrictions are loosening…a bit.

And yet, I can’t help resenting people who are not wearing masks indoors or not wearing them well. Almost everybody at the Jewish had one on (certainly all the professionals) but a surprising number of people pulled out their noses, wearing them “feedbag style,” to borrow a phrase. There’s still a pandemic on. Everyone’s waiting for a magic bullet, but this is one thing we can do that reduces transmission (along with staying apart). The New York Times had a typically moralistic headline this morning, “Not Wearing a Mask is Like Driving Drunk.” I couldn’t bear to read the piece, but I understand the sentiment. I look at someone indoors without a mask and it feels like they are telling me, personally, to fuck off. It feels like an act of aggression, or at least coercive. Are they asserting their rights to public space over mine? Are they daring me to say something?

But of course it’s not about me at all, which is part of the problem. It’s people thinking about themselves, and doing so in the most ideological way possible: “I am an exception”; “the rules don’t apply to me;” “I am willing to accept this risk for myself and it’s an individual decision.”

The doctor and I also had a long conversation about various activities and risk, with me asking him about various scenarios. We can expand our socializing a bit from what we are doing now without worrying too much. At the same time, it’s going to involve frank conversations with people. Carrie and I were joking that it’s going to turn our social life into a parody of S&M, complete with boundaries and safe words–“I’m comfortable doing this, but not this.”

But, alas, no indoor singing with people not in our household, at least not yet….

Diminished Faculties Work Update

I said that I would get the revised manuscript done by July 1st. July 1st is next week.

That is not going happen. Let’s say August 1st.

I am behind. The reasons are not interesting; everybody is behind and I’m less behind than lots of others. I don’t actually care that I’m behind other than wanting the satisfaction that comes with sending it back out.

Here’s some stuff that has happened since my April post:

Two chapters have split like amoebae. So they are now four, which will make them more readable.

Wormholes have been thoroughly explored regarding Levinas, earplugs, sublimity, and a few other topics.

My desk is a hideous mess and needs to be cleaned.

I got stuck in fatigue, but after temporarily abandoning it, I think I am ready to return to it this week and see if I can get it where it needs to be.

Two other chapters require some rewriting but the rethinking has happened. I am excited to get into those.

I have mapped out the requested conclusion in the form of a user’s manual for impairment theory, complete with legal disclaimers and instructions for disposal. I am essentially writing it as a mad lib.

So August 1st. My 50th birthday is a few days later so the timing would be ideal.