Baby’s First Skype Lecture

I am sitting at home writing this when I’m supposed to be in New York City. I had two flights cancelled today and after 5 hours in the airport was sent home, which was too bad since I was scheduled to give a talk at NYU this evening. Instead of giving up, we used Skype, which was incredibly easy. Apparently there was a giant image of me on the screen — good thing I left the dress clothes on (I resisted the temptation to do the talk in sweats) and I got to see an outstanding talk by my co-panelist, Steve Wurtzler, and take some really great questions from the audience. It’s amazing to think that even when I got to McGill in 2004 they were still talking about sending oodles of money on outfitting rooms for “teleconferencing.” Now all you need is an internet connection, a laptop, a projector and some speakers. Also I hear there’s a new technology where you can carry a bunch of music around.

For all my grumbling about the metaphysics of presence, I would have preferred to be there, but it went surprisingly well. Let’s just hope administrators don’t decide that’s the future of the invited talk.

I am hoping to catch a flight out tomorrow so I can still enjoy the Columbia conference.

A New Twist on My 2-0 Career Record

for working in historical landmarks. As a professor, I have never worked in a building that is not designated as an historical landmark. First the University of Pittsburgh’s Cathedral of Learning. Now, McGill’s Arts Building.

So today I head over for my morning surf and what do I discover but that Salon.com has listed the Cathedral of Learning among the “Greatest Achievements of American Socialism.” It’s #5 in the slideshow. I wonder if they know about the elevators that stop at every other floor or the fact that there’s very little natural light in the public areas on the main floor because when they built it, Pittsburgh was sometimes dark at noon from all the smoke. Why bother with lots of windows? They’d just get dirty.

I did love it though.

On Spreading It Around

I took a grad seminar in Sociological Theory and the prof wanted to make a point about prestige and academic journals. He asked students if they could name the scholar who in the current generation is the most published in the American Journal of Sociology. Names of famous sociologists flew around the room. The prof smiled and gave us the name of the man who currently held the honor. Nobody in the room had heard of him, and (thus, obviously) nobody could think of a single intellectual contribution he’d made to the field.

How to Write a Book

Last week, I stumbled across a link to this article on how to write a book. Being part of the boing boing technogeek culture, it’s no surprise that there’s a heavy focus on tools. But I have to say that my eyes almost popped out of my head when I saw how many times Johnson switched software for writing. Now, as a musician I can be a bit of a gearhead. (well, more than a bit — “can you hear that slight decaying buzz on the top of that distortion, right between bee and buzzsaw? yes, that’s exactly what I’m after but with more low end”) But as a writer I want my tools to be absolutely absent. And actually, I also want that in my music too. I like a certain effortlessness with my instrument (bass, MS Word) so I can focus on other aspects of the creative process as it unfolds. A student recently brought me a chapter in progress to discuss and was using Scrivener to organize it. I thought I was in love–a virtual corkboard with index cards linked to piece of text–how cool! So one day when I needed to organize a chapter, I fired it up. Unfortunately, I got too impatient. I wanted to organize, not learn an interface. I went back to the old post-it method, which I didn’t mention but you can see pictured in the second image in the linked post. It worked just fine until I actually got the chapter to flow from beginning to end.

So what do I think about when writing a book these days? How about:

–>Blocking off Mondays for writing instead of Fridays. I’m not beat from the week’s events and I’ve had a couple good nights’ sleep to get into the zone. I’ve also probably stolen a few hours over the weekend in anticipation of my Monday. I know, not totally cool and not practical for people with kids, but it works great. In exchange, Friday is an admin day, since the staff and I are both at school but there are fewer profs and students around. A good day to get my desk clean (figuratively only)

–>Alternating between big-idea brainstorming and typing out massive unsupportable claims with “data entry” days where I am simply filling in blanks, trying to get historical sequences rendered correctly in the text and tracking down those elusive citations for things I know are somewhere in my files.

–>Following the advice of Robert Boice, I write before I’m ready. Always write before I am ready. I can never get into a chapter if I have too solid of an outline. It starts its life as modules that are eventually connected. As an experiment I have been writing the MP3 book with no section headings whatsoever (there are chapter titles, of course) to see if the writing can manage the transitions all on its own. I’m not sure if I succeed, but I like it as an approach. When I have something that flows from beginning to end, I know I have won. I’m not sure what I win, but it feels like victory.

–>I am trying to leave stuff for revision instead of getting it all right in the first draft. You never nail it in the first draft anyway, even if the first draft anyone ever sees is the second draft. I mean that draft too.

Yes, the Conservatives are Still Conservative

There’s been a lot of talk in the press since Harper unveiled the Conservative budget and Ingatieff rolled over for him that the Conservatives are no longer conservatives because of their proposed lavish spending and deficits that will disappear through imaginary forces in just a few years. But the reality is that when it comes to the country’s intellectual and academic life, the conservatives remain conservative. Genome Canada is left with no money at all, and the major federal granting agencies–SSHRC, CIHR and NSERC–are all getting their budgets cut one way or another. SSHRC, unsurprisingly, does a little worse than the rest and it’s worth noting that all the new initiatives in the humanities and social sciences seem tied to business goals. Combine that with Harper’s “ordinary people don’t care about the arts” rhetoric and his accompanying cuts there, and I see a clear ideology.

You can read more in a Bulletin on the Federal Budget from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences. Although it’s cautiously nonpartisan, the Bulletin offers a good justification for why academics in Canada should oppose the conservative party in the next election and call their MPs to object to the current budget.