Tasty + Concrete

Sometimes it takes world news to learn about something cool on your own campus:

A group of profs and students in the School of Architecture, along with a couple NGOs, took a 1000 square foot piece of concrete (there are lots of awful concrete plazas around) and <a href=”http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7482670.stm” target=”_blank”>turned it into a container garden to produce food for those who need it.</a>

Also check out the <a href=”http://www.mcgill.ca/mchg/projects/ediblecampus/” target=”_blank”>Edible Campus webpage</a>, and especially, scroll down and <a href=”http://www.mcgill.ca/files/mchg/MakingtheEdibleCampus.pdf” target=”_blank”>download their .pdf brochure</a>, which is fascinating.

Missed Birthdays and Anniversaries

As I’ve been squirreled away at home writing a bunch of holidays have been going on: St. Jean Baptiste, which has become a nationalist holiday for Quebec, and July 1st and 4, the nationalist holidays for Canada and the U.S.  Quebec City also had its 400th anniversary.  A couple years back I noted the slight weirdness of July 4th <a href=”http://superbon.net/?p=380″ target=”_blank”>not being a holiday anymore</a>, though that was easy for me to get used to.  

This year I stayed away from any big celebrations or events and took advantage of the time to write afforded by quiet at the office.  Which is still going pretty well even though the office is no longer quiet, thanks for asking.  But we did walk around the neighborhood on moving day (aka Canada Day) and give thanks we weren’t moving.  

One of the things that happens on Canada Day is the announcement of new inductees to the Order of Canada.  The Order is “Canada’s highest civilian honor and recognizes a lifetime of outstanding achievement.”  I think it’s like knighting or something, except it’s controlled on our side of the Atlantic.  I don’t really know its origins.  Anyway, among the people named this year was a Montreal doctor named Dr. Henry Morgentaler, <a href=”http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/capress/order_of_cda_morgentaler” target=”_blank”>who has spent his life doing everything he can to insure women the right to safe abortion.</a>

To me, this is a no brainer, but it has of course led to lots of outrage from pro-lifers, as well as equally foolish columnists who say that they’re not against abortion, but that since he’s controversial [1], he shouldn’t be given the award, since the Order brings us all together.  Others who have contributed far less to Canada are complaining that they have been overlooked for their politics.  Which as far as I can tell is a pile of nonsense.  People who do important things, really important things, will often have opposition.  It’s easy to get behind Terry Fox, but it’s hard to stand up for a woman’s right to choose.  As with same-sex marriage, I think this is a case of the losing side giving a particularly loud howl before its final gasp.  In other words, I think there is much less controversy about abortion in Canada than the last week of newspaper coverage would lead one to believe.

But anti-abortion forces are still pretty effective, even if they are a minority: there are parts of the country where it is still difficult to find someone to perform the procedure, even though it is completely legal, and there is a particularly insipid bill before parliament that is clearly designed as a front for future anti-abortion legislation (it would render the murder of a pregnant women a double murder, including the fetus).  The problem with such a law is that it actually does nothing to help deterrence or law enforcement or promote public safety.  It simply changes the law to set a legal precedent.

All this is to say that Morgentaler’s work was clearly important and that it’s not finished.  Although I’m still figuring out what I think about rituals like the Order of Canada (this country seems to have a very large number of prizes and honors) I am proud and pleased that it would select Morgentaler over someone blander, less controversial, and who has done less to improve the lives of Canadian women.  If this is a partisan act by the Order (I think it is objectively the case that women’s lives are better when the state doesn’t treat them like baby machines), sobeit.  It would be just as partisan — only much more pathetic — to not award him the honor out of fear of controversy.

For the 4th of July <a href=”http://www.sivacracy.net/2008/07/whatever_happened_i_apologize.html” target=”_blank”>Siva Vaidhyanathan</a> wrote about his family’s immigration to the US and how important it was to be American, and I think there is something about being an immigrant that allows one to see what is special about one’s adopted country that the natives miss (no doubt I take many things for granted about my U.S. citizenship that Siva does not about his, given that his family still has its immigration in recent memory).   I’m not quite ready for something as misty about my adopted home, but but I will say that it is wonderful to live in a country where controversy about abortion (or the death penalty, or Iraq, or socialized medicine, or public funding for higher education) is the exception, rather than the rule.  

 

—–

1.  Someday I will write something that articulates how insipid I find centrism as a political ideology.  Whatever the possible positions on an issue, the idea that they can be lumped into two and the position “inbetween” is automatically more “reasonable” and “not controversial” is one of the great ideological hoodwinks of our time.  

Campus Politics

For some time now, a digest called “IN THE NEWS” appears in my mailbox each morning with news items of interest to people working at McGill (plus, naturally, all the “expert citings” since the university keeps track of that sort of thing).  

In today’s digest, two apparently unrelated stories appeared.

–A <a href=”http://www.latimes.com/features/books/la-et-stuff4-2008jul04,0,983101.story” target=”_blank>profile</a> of the author of the blog <a href=”http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/” target=”_blank”>”Stuff White People Like”</a>, who is a McGill grad and

–A <a href=”http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/03/arts/03camp.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&th&emc=th” target=”_blank”>New York Times article</a> about the possibility of a generational shift among professors.

The two are both obliquely about politics on campus.  If you haven’t checked out Stuff White People Like, it is often hilarious because it so nicely captures the tastes of a certain segment of the upper middle class.  I certainly belong, since I own New Balance shoes (hey, they fit wide feet) and enjoy dinner parties and support Barack Obama (critically, of course).  Its mode of humor is also ironic and self-deprecating (in a self-aggrandizing way).  The author includes himself and say that most of the things on the blog are stuff he actually likes, but I’m fond in particular of this quote:

<blockquote>”If you want to say I was planning that far ahead, that’s great,” said [McGill grad] Christian Lander, resident white person behind the ridiculously popular blog “Stuff White People Like,”, a snarky bit of grass-roots anthropology that recently transmuted into a rumoured $300,000 book deal. The million and a half hits his blog has generated are taken as a sign of extreme popularity – a fact not long overlooked by New York literary agents. As far as conducting field research, then, Lander didn’t need to so much as lift a Google. “It’s a weird thing where you just know,” he said. “I’d think about my friends from McGill and grad school. Would they like this? If the answer is yes, in it goes.”</blockquote>

Yes, McGill has a certain unavoidable, well, whiteness to it.  The faculty is not particularly diverse.  The student body is somewhat moreso though I certainly can tell the difference when I go to an event at Concordia (or maybe it’s just the events I go to).  

Meanwhile, apparently faculty are less liberal than they used to be.  I’m not so sure about that.  I wasn’t there in the 70s, but I think a lot of this is a boomer fantasy about who they were.  And there is way too much anecdotal evidence in that article.  It was very difficult to do feminist work, for instance, in that golden age of campus radicalism.  That said, there is no doubt that faculty coming up or faculty who have recently “come up” are more professionalized and more attuned to professional issues than people who came up in the 70s.  We simply have to be–the universities demand it.  In that sense, even those of us who hold radical views may be less likely to strike a pose to impress, or trot out our political credentials.  

Why I hate WebCT, Part III

This is part of an <a href=”http://superbon.net/?p=599″>ongoing</a> <a href=”http://superbon.net/?p=612″>series</a>.  

Coursepacks are due at the bookstore in mid July, and so I thought I’d get my big course together on time for a change, since I only require a few changes.  So I started plotting out my calendar for the year.  I go into WebCT and there’s my old course for 2007.  I move it to 2008.  Good.  Then I attempt to move the calendar dates from 2007 to 2008.  Nothing happens.  This is a problem, as I use the calendar to tell students when readings are due, and each entry has a link to reading questions, the reading itself, or other materials.  The dates won’t move, and all the links are broken.  I click on “help” and I get “an unexpected system exception has occurred.”  I already had to re-enter all of this data when I taught the course last fall.  If I have to do it again, I will seriously consider abandoning WebCT except for the gradebook.

More on the Writing Process

Today’s a slow writing day, which is to be expected since I’m not technically in the middle of something. I “finished” a draft of chapter 2, except that what I thought was going to fit into chapter 2 has now split into chapters 2 and 3. Chapter 3 is a bit tough because I have to move between sound culture stuff and more institutional history stuff and do so fluidly and in a way that makes sense. To blow off some steam, I am writing this blog entry. (There are pics here, but I guess it’s only me who has the rss issue with images at this point).

As I progress on a writing project, my desk gets ever messier. So this morning, I cleaned off the desk, reshelved the stack of books that had been accumulating in piles as I pulled out quotes and cites, put some stuff away, and took other stuff out of my file drawer, arranging it in piles on the floor thus:

Moving clockwise from the upper right, there is a small stack of articles I think I am done with but may not be. At 6:00 is the piece of paper with the original outline for chapter 3 before I split it into two, and it’s sitting on Ken Pohlmann’s reference book on digital audio. Above that is a 1978 state of the art review of hearing science, with three excellent chapters on psychoacoustics that are relevant to the material I will be writing about next. Next to that is a pile of actual copies of the test reports from MPEG in 1990-1. Tasty.

Meanwhile, on the desk:

I have been playing with post-it notes. I broke down the chapter into modules or “discussions” I need to have in place, and keep moving them around until I find a satisfactory order. Then I talk to Carrie about it and change them. On the left corner of the desk is a printout of the draft of the new chapter 3 (formerly the second half of chapter 2) which is a mess, but has a bunch of material for editing and revision. And at least 10 pages that I can just cut now that I have the actual MPEG tests. Next to that is the blue “ginormous binder” assembled for me by an undergrad RA who wishes to be known as Agent 99 (this was a couple years back where it was still respectably square to make a Get Smart reference). Below that is the actual text of the MPEG audio standards, a pile of documents pertaining to the history of MPEG, and the text of talks that I’ve given since April, scribbled all over (and there are notes all over the file folder in which I store them as well.

On the left monitor screen is my “to do list” for the book, which is a running tab of things that need to be done in chapters other than the one I’m working on. On the right, the book document is open, and underneath is the powerpoint for a 2005 talk on podcasting from which I had to borrow back an image I can no longer find, the ever-expanding folder for the mp3 book is also visible. Many of my “primary source” documents for this chapter are in .pdf form. Beneath the left monitor screen is another pile of reports from research assistants and two CD cases for DVDs of dub and electronica.

Tomorrow’s a big day at the office. I will get back to writing around noon on Thursday for 4 or 5 days.

Oh, and the dual monitor setup is amazing for writing. Now that so many of my documents are in electronic form, I can have the source open on the left screen and the document I’m writing on the right screen. Or I can flip back and forth between Endnote and Word, or a document and Endnote, or just look at a grain elevator outside Saskatoon.