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Mar 25, ’04 3:23 AM

Just came across a photo I took after my last big brainstorming session with my advisor Ron about my dissertation (click it for a larger version):

Essentially, I’ve written a several-hundred page version of what’s on that blackboard. To be frank, it’s quite possible that I could have made the argument more straightforwardly and succinctly on the blackboard than in several hundred pages, but I can’t very well walk into a defense with a blackboard and say “Here you go.”

Though it would be quite fun to see what would happen if I did…

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The business of writing…

Mar 23, ’04 6:53 PM

Outstanding post by Kevin over on Where There’s Smoke :

Your readers– past, present and future–are busy people with families, careers and lives. They have a zillion forms of entertainment to choose from other than your book. You wanna get to the top of their reading pile? Why not put a little godamn effort into getting out there and promoting yourself? Musicians go on tour. Actors do junkets for their shows, artists drink crappy wine and make small talk at galleries. It is hight of arrogance that writers think they somehow get a bye from all of this because it either makes them uncomfortable or because their art is practiced in solitude.

Read the whole thing – on one hand, it’s a great reaction to a Salon article that criticizes the state of modern publishing without offering any constructive ideas on how an author can improve his or her situation.

On a deeper level, however, many of Kevin’s suggestions point to a concept I was flogging a while back (and which I’m meaning, once I have time to write something not about the video industry between 1975 and 1990, to start flogging once again): the shift in media consumption from buying a product to paying an artist (see my posts on Buying vs. Tipping). Many of these suggestions, from a mailing list to public speaking, aren’t just about marketing a given book, but are fundamentally about marketing yourself as a writer. Kev gets this on a deep level, and his Virtual Book Tour is an example of such promotion in practice, leveraging new technology to introduce the writer to a broader audience of readers.

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Invisible Adjunct adjuncts (and blogs) no more…

Mar 23, ’04 6:34 PM

I’m surprised by how much this post saddens me:

A few months ago, I made a vow to myself that this would be my last semester as an invisible adjunct. Since I’ve failed to secure a full-time position in my final attempt at the academic job market, what this means, of course, is that I made a vow to leave the academy. Six more weeks of teaching, and I head for the nearest exit.

Though I must inevitably feel a sense of loss and sadness, it’s thanks to this blog and its readers that I don’t feel the kind of life-twisting bitterness that I might otherwise have experienced. I’ll take with me, among other things, a knowledge of XHTML (which I never thought I could learn!), an undiminished passion for the Scottish Enlightenment, and a heightened sense of life’s possibilities.

In the meantime, I’ve decided to give up the blog.

If you’re not familiar with her site, Invisible Adjunct has created the single best resource for graduate students and young scholars concerned with the pragmatics of the academic job market, and a remarkable community has taken shape in her comments. Hers was one of the first blogs that I read regularly, and while I’m glad that she’s moving on from the limbo of the adjunct-track, hers is a voice that wil be missed.

In the comments of the post, Jeremy Hunsinger asks:

are you going to archive invisibleadjunct somewhere orther than archive.org? it would be a shame to lose this bit of history to netrot.

I’d actually go a step further, and encourage IA to pass the torch to another anonymous blogger, in essence transforming the “Invisible Adjunct” brand into something larger than one person. I don’t mean to say that IA herself is replaceable, but that someone else in the academic trenches might be able to pick up her themes and run with them in his or her own way. If it’s good enough for Gizmodo or Gawker, it might be worthwhile for this far more important site…

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Nothing to see here…

Mar 18, ’04 5:25 PM

Quite literally, in fact. It’s not so much that I have no time to blog, it’s more that my brain simply can’t take the thought of spending more time typing words on a screen when I’ve just spent hours upon hours wrestling with my dissertation.

I’m eagerly looking forward about three weeks to when I can write smart things here again – in the meantime, please just watch the magic numbers on the right-hand sidebar roll steadily upwards…

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Jay-Z and Videogames…

Mar 15, ’04 2:06 AM

filed under “Things on which to follow up once I’ve finished my dissertation”:

Dangermouse, the Jay-Z Construction Set and the Videogame Content Creation Model

I would hope that, in the near future, artists and publishers will see the value of releasing not only polished works, but the bits and parts used to create a work, including those parts that were rejected.

This is good not only for fanboy obsessives, but could serve to train people’s musical ears, helping them hear the difference between different mixes of music. It would obviously be a boon to unexperienced musicians who could learn much from the choices other musicians and producers make. DJs would certainly have more opportunity to creatively add to the originals with this sort of access. And, likely, such efforts would help identify new talent.

Combine this with a system that permits “recipe” mixes as I’ve written about before (A History Palette for Music and The Grey Album – No Copying Necessary) and there is no danger of the artists and producers losing money. Indeed, such a model has already been quite successful in another media – videogames…

[via Anne Galloway]

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Just made my first-ever iTunes purchase…

Mar 10, ’04 10:32 PM

…Verve Remixed 2, the follow-up to one of my favorite CDs. The iTunes thing is crazy easy, a little disturbingly so, to be entirely honest – the act of consumption was pretty much frictionless, and I’m wrapping my mind around the fact that I didn’t actually purchase anything physical. It’s an interesting moment of reconstructing my previous technological frame, and feeling very conscious of it.

Meanwhile, I’m listening to my new music and simultaneously burning a CD to listen to in the car on my way to NYC tomorrow…if anything, I’m a little concerned with how easily I could get used to this!

[On iTunes: Nina Simone & Felix Da Housecat, "Sinnerman (Felix Da Housecat's Heavenly House Mix)"]

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Michael Bull on the iPod

Mar 10, ’04 12:06 PM

Sociologist Michael Bull wrote a great book called Sounding out the City on the ways that individuals use personal audio devices (mainly Walkmen) to transform their experience of urban space, and now it looks like he’s turning his attention to the iPod. Doesn’t seem like he’s reached many conclusions yet, but something to keep an eye on..

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Talk about your targeted job ads…

Mar 7, ’04 4:53 PM

Via the Chronicle of Higher Ed:

Chronicle Careers: Assistant Professor, History of Science and Technology/Modern France (3/5/2004)

Mississippi State University’s Department of History invites applications for a tenure-track appointment at the assistant professor level in the History of Science and Technology. The successful candidate must also have a field in modern French history and be prepared to teach Quantitative Methods.

It’s the last one that really throws me…

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New Infrastructure

Mar 6, ’04 2:04 PM

Just downloaded a new RSS reader (FeedDemon) as well as a Movable Type publishing tool (Zempt). We’ll see if these tools are an actual improvement over my old everything-through-the-browser routine…

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Things I’m not blogging about these days…

Feb 27, ’04 3:02 AM

So, I find it interesting that I’ve felt like I’ve had almost nothing to write about here for the past few weeks (give or take a sporadic post or two here and there).

When I used to keep a journal, I found that I could chart how generally content I was as an inverse relationship with how much I was writing. That doesn’t seem to be what’s at play here, however (though I am relatively content these days, with the exception of a gnawing panic about how I’ll be paying rent come June)…I actually have an urge to write here, and even have a sense of the kinds of things I’d like to write about, but I simply haven’t had the time.

Instead, a whole lot of other things are crowding out my free-thinking “blogging time”:

1) My dissertation, which I’m not blogging about because I already spend a big chunk of my day writing the damn thing to begin with. Plus, you can just check the sidebar to see how that’s going, anyways.
2) My class, which I’m not blogging about because my students might read what I write, and no real good can come of that. There’s all sorts of fun stuff going on on the course blog, but I won’t link to it from here (though Google seems to have already found the course website anyways).
3) Books I’m reviewing for Publishers’ Weekly, which I’m not blogging about because they’re paying me for my reviews, and I’ve never quite figured out how to negotiate the anonymity of those reviews.
4) Job search progress/angst, which I’m not blogging about because verious potential employers might be reading, and the market is bad enough without me whining about it in public (or showing my hand to anybody who might still be deciding on my application).
5) Thoughts about potential travel plans with Jenny once we both graduate, which I’m not blogging about simply because we haven’t made firm plans.

The five things above seem to take up virtually all of my time that I’m not spending sleeping, and since it doesn’t seem wise/worth it to write about any of them, my blog lies fallow.

On the bright side, I’m very much looking forward to reinventing this space once I finish the dissertation (argh – I’ve become one of those people who says “the” dissertation” rather than “my” dissertation!)…I found that hearing Jay Rosen talk about blogs inspired me to think of what I could do, that I haven’t been, and I look forward to having the time to explore again.

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