Super Bon!

What a tough year. And I had it easy! All I had to do was not catch the virus. I succeeded on that front. But like lots of others, I was also tired a lot of the time and sometimes stressed out, and didn’t get to spend time with people I wanted to spent time with.

My new book “came out” if by “come out” you mean “have a publication date in” but its actual release has been delayed by the global paper shortage. Perfect for a book on impairments!

For some unexplained reason, I exploded with writing in May after the end of classes. I have a forthcoming piece with Mehak Sawhney on AI, voice, and the will to datify, and a few others things came out of that as well. I made my first “real” video. 2022 will see at least one, maybe more, essay(s) on sound and AI, again coauthored. I might also make some progress on my book with Mara.

I spent the better part of fall quite sick from my medication, and dealing with some related dental adventures. My TAs had to quietly bail me out a couple times with things around the big class. At the same time, teaching was mostly great, graded on a Zoom curve. I was lucky to be able to teach online, so at least I didn’t have to risk my life to do my job. I lost too many work days to illness or pain in fall term, but I did ok enough. I also managed to present my work in remote corners of the world via Zoom, which was not as fun as going places, but good enough for now. I attended a few Zoom talks but really all the Zooming for teaching and meetings was too much and my desire to attend talks waned, though I made sure to show up to a few events at conferences where I was speaking, to have at least a vague feel of participating.

I work with a lot of grad students and postdocs right now, and it has been loads of fun. I learned a lot this year from them in an incredible range of areas and read–and heard–some really wonderful work that should be coming your way in a few years.

The combination of the pandemic and disability motivated me to do some activist work around Covid and disability, and there’s more to be done for sure, but it was very worthwhile. I also joined a group of Jewish faculty who are against definitions of anti-Semitism that preclude criticism of the Israeli state (how convoluted is that?). At my own university I did what I could to educate administrators about McGill’s shameful attitudes toward disabled faculty and those faculty who are around people with disabilities. I did a lot of other service as well, some of it quite meaningful, like serving on the federal SSHRC committee in my area, and working on two hiring committees.

After vaccination and the loosening of some restrictions, I was actually able to see some people from time to time and to play music with bands that included people other than Carrie. Up until then, I’d been playing with Carrie in a 2-piece we invented with her on drums and vocals and me on touch guitar. We now have a name, Ex-Minnesotan, and a nearly-finished EP (some more vocals need to be tracked). There are also two Hard Red Spring EPs waiting in the wings. I got better at touch guitar, taking lessons every couple weeks–give or take–and even tried my hand at reading music in treble clef. Markus, my teacher, said I would be able to move around the 12-24 frets more intuitively by the end of the year, and he was right.

The loosening of restrictions was hard, though. People really got lax with masks, which made going out in public potentially more dangerous for me. I walked into stores–more than once–where people were not wearing masks.

Like most of the rest of bourgeois Montreal, we discovered the joys of vacationing in rural Quebec.

I learned to cook a bunch of vegan stuff, include vegan pizzas that are not based around vegan cheese. I have a standard sambar recipe now as well. Carrie now requests a couple of them on a regular basis. We upped our vegan Sichuan game (I know that’s not a real thing but whatever).

I’m not good with year-end lists, but I read a bunch of books and articles I liked, I listened to a bunch of good music, and I used a lot of fun music technology. I also had a lot of good conversations with people, online, and off.

Finally, in the sea of death, I want to note two cherished colleagues who passed–Trevor Pinch, who has an entry below this one, and Lauren Berlant, whom I discussed on Facebook:

Like so many others in my feed, I’m gutted by the passing of Lauren Berlant. It’s a huge loss to a whole constellation of interleaving scholarly communities. We had many great conversations over the years. Here is a story: the second time I met Lauren Berlant, I was a grad student at the University of Illinois, in the mid 1990s. They had come to give a talk a year or two before and we had a brief conversation. The second time we met, they remembered who I was and what I said. And I was just a nobody grad student. Although I can be terrible with names and faces, I have tried to emulate those two qualities: treating people as people rather than holders of status (still too rare in the university system), and really listening to what people had to say. In recent years, we had an on and off conversation going about cancer from nuts and bolts stuff like food and gloves to much more profound talk about how to think about academic aspirations and limits while living with uncertainty. The last two times we met were both spontaneous: me joining at a dinner after a talk with Katie Stewart at Concordia (I wasn’t planning to go because I was so fatigued, but Carrie talked me into it and it was worth a moment of “self-overcoming” to use a Lauren phrase), and then later the same year running into them at a restaurant in Minneapolis. What’s important about my stories is that they are utterly ordinary–I wasn’t special, just another person in their orbit: Lauren touched so many people’s lives in so many different ways.

28 June 2021

The cats, meanwhile, have had a very good year. Lots of attention.

On December 16th, my friend and colleague Trevor Pinch passed away. Plenty of people knew Trevor better than I did. But Trevor helped me to understand what it means to be a person in the academic world.

The most important thing I learned from Trevor is gratitude. I don’t mean the platitudinous “practicing gratitude” thing that goes around every so often. Trevor had this “I can’t believe I get to do this!” affect about him. He just lived it; if he worked at it, it produced the kind of effortlessness one finds in a master musician. He understood what an immense privilege it is to be a tenured academic. This is something that is all too often forgotten. And it’s really hard to see right now, as Covid makes everyone’s job immeasurably worse and more stressful. But it is still true. We are paid to talk about ideas, and not only books, but books we find really interesting, often with people we find really interesting. We are also paid to read them and write about them.

It is hard to express how rare and special and profound Trevor’s simple acknowledgment of this fact–“it is amazing we get paid to do this”–is in my world. Part of it is the break between the reasons people get into academia and where they find themselves in it. People get in for those intellectual reasons, but soon things start to cloud and crowd and push us away from those things and towards overwork, the stress of precarity, or if we’re the lucky few tenured, an absolutely obscene amount of middle-management box checking, paper pushing, and occasionally being forced into positions that contradict our own values. All of that sucks, but the fact that we get to spend some of our time doing meaningful work–work we believe in–is a privilege. Most people don’t, and for the last two years, some of them have also had to risk their lives to do it.

Trevor was also a great example of a successful academic: he listened as much as he talked, was always curious about others’ work, kept reading and showing interest in the work of new scholars and actively promoted it, and mentored generations of students. He took his turns at service; he helped build at least two fields as spaces for others to do work. I say at least two because I only know of the two we share, Science & Technology Studies, and Sound Studies.

He was also opinionated but aware of his own opinions and limits. Several times we had a conversation about politics and scholarship, where he asked me about something he didn’t “get.” We’re not going to be good at everything, and Trevor never pretended to be.

Although he was the wrong generation for it, he also had a bit of a punk rock attitude to what he studied. Sure, he could talk about physics, or epistemology, but I am certain his best selling book was his coauthored history of the Moog synthesizer. Even in supposedly critical fields scholars too easily confuse the quality or sophistication of the scholarship with the intellectual prestige of the object of study and its conformity to the bourgeois value systems of academics. I have occasionally seen it first hand in our two shared fields. In our conversations, anyway, Trevor just. did. not. care. Of course, I met him late career, and he followed the standard path of establish yourself with a high prestige object and then branch out to stuff that your advisors wouldn’t have wanted you to study. So he could! But that kind of work has also made space for many other people.

Later on, Trevor also became one of my cancer friends. I have two kinds: there are the friends who really went out of their way to look after me when I am going through shit; and there are people who are also going through shit, with whom I can talk about going through shit. Trevor started as the first kind and became the second kind. I just pulled up an email from February 22, 2010. I was in a 2-week hospital stay that I refer to as “the longest period of my life.” I could not talk (well, maybe by then I was talking again) so I was reading and writing a lot over email from the hospital. Trevor wrote me about his travels, an exciting conference he’d been to, some books he was reading, and some music tech stuff he knew I would find interesting. He also talked about the beauty of the desert. It was an utterly banal email, but also discursive, caring, and detailed enough to stimulate my imagination.

Sadly, later on, I would be able to return the favour. But then: we got to the kind of talking the other sort of cancer friends do. The conversations were more personal, as you might imagine, but still with Trevor’s somehow effortless gratitude for the opportunities he had, even when it was just about being close to his daughter.

There’s so much else I could say, like all the great things I actually learned from Trevor about my own fields. And about being a scholar and a musician. But this is what I will say for now.