infobong.com

wing in the happy house

I'm up in the land of Woody Guthrie, visiting my family for the holidays. I've turned off comments since spammers like to strike over holidays and weekends, and I'll have limited opportunities to go online. I hope both of my readers has a lovely holiday season!

rushing out of frame

One of the things I've managed to avoid in Austin until now is a poetry reading. I'm meeting a friend at a downtown coffeeshop. I can't say that I'm enjoying it, but it is a little interesting to watch. It seems a little like group therapy only performed in public. I don't think there's anyone in the audience that doesn't fashion themselves a poet, and the vibe is mutually supportive. These folks are sharing personal things with each other, and everyone claps. Fortunately, I can ignore it here in the back of the coffeeshop.

not really that powerful

A cartoon about Wikipedia from Friday reminds me to post a couple of Wikipedia-related 'toons, I've been hanging onto. The open content encyclopedia figures in a "Donation Derby" comic from "Cat and Girl," and this "User Friendly" comic comments incisively on Jimbo Wales's plans to produce a print version of Wikipedia for the developing world.

intertextual gaffe

Today I was getting some lunch at Wheatsville Co-op, and a woman I know was working at the deli.

"I guess there's a big party at your house tonight."
"Yeah, are you coming by?" she asked.
"Yeah, I should stop by for a while."
We chatted a bit more, and then she reminded me her roommate was graduating from Texas State. "Hooray for Lindsey!" she said.
Reflexively, I blurted, "Well, hooray for the bulldog," quoting Citizen Kane. I realized that my audience may not be as familiar with the Orson Welles classic and assume that I was comparing Lindsey - whom I hard know - to a bulldog. I need to be more careful with my movie references.

It is funny what movies people have seen and what they haven't. In a class I TA, the professor mentioned Kiss Me Deadly. When she asked how many people had seen it, one person out a class of 30 raised their hand. I was shocked: what do they teach these kids these days? "That's a good movie," I said emphatically, "You'll like it!" After we explained how moments from Pulp Fiction and Repo Man are references to the flick, the students seemed more interested.

bacdafucup

It's the end of the semester, and I haven't been following the Internets too much in the past week. So, I'll chime in with Bruce Sterling and remind everyone to back up your files. I've had two catastrophic failures since starting grad school, and now I always back up my files at the end of the semester. I know power geeks probably back up twice a week, but, for liberal arts flakes like me, backing up at finals is an easy time to remember.

lone star

Today's "Cat and Girl" cartoon titled "Lone Star" seems particularly appropriate for this blog. It's probably good that one of holiday lessons cited is not "Good lookin' women, every time you stumble, will never catch you when you fall." Gosh durnit, how is it that the media studies program at The University of Texas at Austin never offers any classes on country music?

issues of technical competence

One of the things I'm writing about is the relatively high level of technical competence needed to contribute effectively to Wikipedia. For example, to flag an article for problems, a user needs to learn a special tag specific to Wikipedia that inserts special notice into the page. From time to time, I'll look down at the bottom of the screen and think, "I've been writing for hours and hours, and I'm still only up to eight pages! How did I get to be such a slow writer?" That is, until a few minutes ago. I just realized that what I thought was the double-space button in MS Word or OS X was, in fact, the one-and-a-half space button. I'm a lot further along than I thought I was.

Grading student papers, I often write comments like "MS Word should automatically insert an em dash here," when I see a hyphen where a dash should be. Years of proofreading and editing probably have me particularly attuned to em-dashes and en-dashes - at one point, I was tasked with measuring the size of periods with a pica ruler - but I don't really understand how these typesetting errors get into student papers. UT has site-wide licenses with Microsoft that extend to students, so they can get MS Office for a nominal cost. I'd be sensitive if a student said she only used Free Software, but, apart from that, there's really no excuse not to use the latest version of Word. But, then again, I apparently don't know how to use the darn application myself!

issues to the public eye

While I'm wasting time blogging, I'll comment on the "Pranks: Culture Jamming" course noted on bOINGbOING the other day. My first reaction to reading the story in the Contra Costa Times, was "I wish I could take a class like that!" One of my grad school profs has written about pranks, and another has certainly conducted her own. I suppose I wouldn't need this class, since I played pranks as an undergrad with no instruction, and I've helped students do pranks as a class project when I TA'ed for Sandy Stone. Perhaps students at Saint Mary's College of California need the germ of an idea or the prodding to play pranks.

Last fall, in the required "Supervised Teaching in Communication" course, the instructor assigned us to design and write a syllabus for our "dream class." "Pranks: Culture jamming as social activism" seems like Ray Beldner's dream class, but I couldn't find the syllabus online. My dream class was "Making Alternative Media," which would be a class for activists and media producers combining no-budget production with studies of the history of alternative media. We'd start by making a class 'zine and end by doing guerilla documentary production. When I taught the department's "Intro to Digital Media" course last semester, I spent a good amount of time on alternative media online, but it would be nice to someday teach a class solely about alternative media.

call the thought police

I really need get the idea that writing is easy out of my head. I know why I started thinking that way. When I started grad school, I was so intimidated and anxious I needed to reassure myself that I was capable of completing my assignments. Besides, I had been making a living as a professional writer - if I could pay the bills writing, I could get through a term paper, right?

Working as a professional writer also fostered this idea in another way. I would write several articles in a week, and I'd routinely crank out 1500 words in less than an hour with a reasonable degree of quality. When I started school, I could still write this fast, given I had already done the research and had my ideas mapped out. Over the course of three years of grad school, I don't seem to be able to hyper-focus and produce like I once could. I peck away at the word processor, waiting to get hot, but now it seems l plod through papers, struggling over each sentence. Part of the reason I'm always writing cold, I'm sure, is the return of critical voices inside my head that stifle production, and part of it is that academic writing requires a degree of analysis and precision not required by descriptive journalistic writing.

I've grown to really dread writing. I can sit down and lose myself writing a blog entry. I've come to see blogging as "junk writing" - a waste of time - so I've curtailed my blogging substantially. But writing my papers seems like such a chore: the fun part of research is over, and now I just have to organize and write up my results. I wonder how I can make school writing fun again.

flues, chimneys or tailpipes

Tonight, I bought groceries at my neighborhood Fiesta Mart. At the register, I pulled out my ATM card to pay, and the Latina cashier chuckled and nodded at my duct-tape wallet, saying "Everybody's got those these days. It's like the style."
"Oh, a duct tape wallet. I've been using them for quite a while, but I just made a new one."
"All these people keep coming in here with them." Wondering about who all these Fiesta shoppers are with their duct-tape wallets, I asked, "Is it white kids like me, or it it really everyone?"
I was a little worried that my question would come off as a way of asserting white privilege, but she understood what I was asking.
"It's the white folks," she said, laughing, "Only the white folks."

urban meyer hot mother

A late night blog search revealed another blog devoted to an impossibly parochial topic. Darren Rovell's Gatorade Blog is a blog about Gatorade. I've only looked at a few posts, but it seems that the blog is only about Gatorade, ignoring the larger domain of sports drinks. Rovell is apparently a business reporter who has recently published a book about Gatorade and uses the blog to promote his product.

One post does make sense to me. When I lived in Philadelphia, I got in the habit of drinking Gatorade. I often thought that lemon-lime Gatorade would taste good with gin. Because you can only buy liquor from state-owned stores in Pennsylvania, liquor is quite expensive in Philly, so I never tested the idea. This post informs me that the concoction is known by the delightful name of "green crap." I think I'll stick with Mike's Hard Lemonade for when I want my booze with some citrus-flavored sugar water.

Steev says that Riot Porn demonstrates "There's a blog for everything." I actually find Riot Porn kind of interesting, so Darren Rovell's Gatorade Blog is a better example of a very targeted blog.

powerful pulsing concoction

A new issue of Perfect Sound Forever is out. This iteration of the online music 'zine features an interview with Dan Snaith of Caribou, who talks about favorite bands, his creative process, and most interestingly music downloads.

The interview also links to a less-than-informative page about a new Caribou DVD. After seeing Caribou live, I wished I could buy a DVD of the videos projected on stage, and it seems my wish has come true.

The new issue also has a feature about Jandek, including a guide to the artist's vast output. I particularly enjoyed the reviewer's rating system, which ranges from "mulch" to "masterpiece" and his use of the Kurt Cobain quote, "Jandek's not pretentious, but only pretentious people like his music." I think I may have seen this quote before, but reading it today it seemed particularly apt.

asphyxiate on its own vomit

Nigel mentioned this yesterday, and a story in the campus paper confirms that my coffeehouse of choice, Mojo's Daily Grind, is closing at the end of December.

I'm pretty disappointed about this, since Mojo's has long been a part of my routine. Mojo's has its problems for sure - the bathrooms are filthy and the coffee is sub-par, but I find Mojo's a good place to get work done. Little City, which is across the street from the College of Communications, has excellent coffee, but it often feels like an extension of the RTF department. During the day, I can count on running into a faculty member or fellow grad student. It's a good place to take a break, but not a good place to work. When the weather is nice, I'll often go to Spiderhouse, which has a huge funky garden, but its indoor seating is very limited, so if it's cold or rainy, I can't expect to find a table. Mojo's is the only coffeehouse with enough seating and enough space to be a reliable place to work, and now it is gone.

Nigel remarks that "the Drag really isn't the Drag anymore," and I have to agree. What was once a funky collection of shops is dominated by the University Co-op's clothing shops and corporate chains like Einstein's Bagels. For me, the closing of Sound Exchange marked the end of the Drag as a site of bohemian culture, but Mojo's closing puts the nail in the coffin.