This is a slightly blurred screenshot of my actual calendar, for this week, Monday through Friday, from 8 am to 9.30 pm. This is only scheduled events, and doesn’t take into account stuff like getting ready for class, or driving to and from appointments. Or eating, where there isn’t a meeting involved. Or sleep.
And I woke up this morning with the sore throat of the potentially impending cold of doom.
Thanksgiving was lovely, if much too fast. I spent a fair percentage of it just clearing my head and attempting to improve my attitude.
And I’ve been moderately successful. Though I’ve had my moments of extreme grouchitude of late, I’m not quite dumb enough not to recognize all the ways that things remain pretty good. Amazing friends. Supportive family (for the most part, and always when it counts). Fantastic students.
But alongside my recognition of all this fabulousness, I’ve got some regrets. Mostly about my low energy. Or what feels like my low energy, at any rate. Or the ways that that energy has been severely attenuated. Of course, there’s only so much you can stretch a piece of metal before it’s worthlessly thin. And when I get stretched in too many directions, the first thing to go is either exercise or writing, and the second is whichever I managed to hold onto a little while longer. But if that’s still not enough, if I still don’t have enough hours in the day to get everything done, the next thing to go is my teaching.
It’s probably not as bad as I make it sound. But I feel like I’ve been forced to shortchange my classes this semester, in ways that I’m not happy with. This was the semester I really wanted to reconnect with myself as a teacher, to get super-invested in what was happening in the classroom, to attempt to turn what I still think are two exciting course designs into something really dynamic, something that can continue to develop into the future.
There’s tons of evidence to suggest that something’s working this semester, but I worry that it’s in spite of me, rather than because of me. I prepare for my classes as much as I can, but I’m having to improvise way too often, and I worry that I’m not making—or facilitating the making of—all the connections that I could.
And that’s the down side of the gifts that I really have been given here—no matter how much I’ve managed to do, I always feel like I should have done more.
So I’m trying to give myself a bit of a pep talk this evening. There are two full weeks of classes left, and five weeks until December 31, after which point some of this should begin to improve. And in the meantime, I need to teach myself, at long last, that there are real limits to what I can do, limits to how much time and energy I can expend on things in the office. And that there are other things that deserve prioritizing, things that, in the long run, will produce far greater rewards.
(crossposted from making MediaCommons: )
Via Jeremy Butler and the SCMS-TV list comes news that the U.S. Copyright Office announced Wednesday six new exemptions to copyright restrictions. Numbered among these exemptions is one of particular interest:
The exemption granted to film professors authorizes the breaking of the CSS copy-protection technology found in most DVDs. Programs to do so circulate widely on the Internet, though it has been illegal to use or distribute them.
The professors said they need the ability to create compilations of DVD snippets to teach their classes — for example, taking portions of old and new cartoons to study how animation has evolved. Such compilations are generally permitted under “fair use” provisions of copyright law, but breaking the locks to make the compilations has been illegal.
Hollywood studios have argued that educators could turn to videotapes and other versions without the copy protections, but the professors argued that DVDs are of higher quality and may preserve the original colors or dimensions that videotapes lack.
“The record did not reveal any alternative means to meet the pedagogical needs of the professors,” Billington wrote.
This is a significant change, allowing for legal circumvention of DRM technologies for pedagogical purposes. If those pedagogical purposes can be extended beyond the classroom to include the texts written by professors, a significant milestone in the protection of fair use will have been reached.
Today’s going to be filled with nuttiness. And this time tomorrow, I’m going to be over halfway to Houston, on my way to BTR for Thanksgiving. I’m having one of those moments where I’m just not sure how everything that needs to be done between now and then will actually get done.
From “Agony”:
Even critical theory, which once took its distance from damaged life, becomes another game. Apply to top ranked schools. Find a good coach. Pick a rising subfield. Prove your abilities. Get yourself published. Get some grants. Get a job. Get another job offer to establish your level and bargain with your current employer. Keep your nose clean and get tenure. You won! Now you can play! Now you can do what you wanted, secretly, all those years ago. Only now you can’t remember. You became a win-win Situationist. Your critical theory became hypocritical theory. It is against everything in the whole wide world except the gamespace that made it possible. But gamespace is now the very form of the world, and this world eluded your thought even as it brought home the glittering prizes. It’s gamespace that won. The hypocritical theorist, while dreaming, meets the ghost of Guy Debord, and proudly cites a list of achievements: Ivy League job, book deals, grants, promotion, tenure, recognition within the highest ranks of the disciplinary guild. The ghost of Debord sighs: “So little ambition in one so young.”
There is very little in the world like waking up on Friday and realizing you’ve survived the week, and that it was not even half as bad as you expected.
I’ve got a pretty ridiculous amount of reading that needs to get done this weekend, but… it’s reading! And I might learn something from it!
Also, it’s insanely sunny outside.
Clearly things are looking up.
The Helsinki Complaints Choir:
I’ve discovered something today: either I was a whole lot braver eight years ago, or a whole lot dumber. I’m giving a talk in our faculty lecture series in about an hour. The last time I did this was during my first year here at the college. And I don’t remember being half so terrified as this.
The talk is entitled “Scholarly Publishing in the Age of the Internet,” and is a distillation of a bunch of the polemics and manifestoes I’ve written about and around MediaCommons over the last year, laying out some of the causes of the crisis in humanities publishing today and suggesting, by looking at examples including arXiv, the Nature open peer review trial, and, of course, MediaCommons, to suggest some possible futures.
One of these days, I’m planning to take the slides of the bajillion talks I’ve given this semester and turn them, with voiceover of the talks themselves, into downloadable movies. Perhaps we could publish them on MediaCommons?
CUPERTINO, California—November 14, 2006—Apple® today announced it is teaming up with Air France, Continental, Delta, Emirates, KLM and United to deliver the first seamless integration between iPod® and in-flight entertainment systems. These six airlines will begin offering their passengers iPod seat connections which power and charge their iPods during flight and allow the video content on their iPods to be viewed on the their seat back displays.
Wow. This will be a fabulous thing for international flights. I’m very enthusiastic about this development, enough that I’m able to squelch my queasiness with the fact that the announcement later refers to “the iPod ecosystem,” and in an approving tone, at that.
making MediaCommons is up and rolling, but we really need your help. One of our major benefactors is watching the planning site carefully, using it as a metric to gauge potential future interest and involvement in MediaCommons proper; for that reason, we want to demonstrate a robust level of participation now, as the site is coming into being.
There are several ways that you can get involved, ways that will not only benefit MediaCommons’s future funding, but also help shape the network itself, helping to make it into the most useful, productive platform possible:
– Join in discussions on the blog. We’re attempting to use these discussions as a means of measuring interest in particular issues with respect to the future of scholarly publishing in media studies. Disagree with us. Stake out positions we’ve overlooked. Steer us toward the questions that you want us to be asking.
– Submit proposals via our call for “papers.” And once proposals from other scholars are posted, review and discuss them. These “papers” will be the first projects developed and published by MediaCommons; we want your projects, and we want your input into the kinds of projects we should be taking on.
– Curate a video for In Media Res, and discuss the videos that others have curated. Once a week, a media scholar posts a video clip and a brief commentary on it, hoping to spark discussion of media texts that takes place almost as quickly as those texts appear. We’re hoping to develop, gradually, an archive of such clips that will remain available for scholarly use, and so we want this to remain a feature of MediaCommons once the full network is established.
We’ll also be looking for volunteers to join us as area editors, as more features come online. But for now—what kinds of features would you like to have available? What would be most useful to you as a scholar, as an instructor, as someone who cares about media? Please go to making MediaCommons and let us know.
