Category Archives: me

A funny thing I found today…

My dissertation is available online at ProQuest, linked from a slick page in the UMass Amherst (Where I did my graduate work) library. At first I thought this was kind of cool, until I found that a) they are charging people $41 for an unbound paper copy, and b) they are using a really low quality scan of the bound version in the library! Now this pisses me off on so many levels. First, here I am constantly scrounging for travel money, and someone may be profiting from my diss. without my even knowing. Second, if they had actually asked me, I could have provided a nice digital copy. Third, and most importantly, I am really annoyed not to have been asked or notified, since I am the copyright holder.

So I am going to put the whole damned thing up on Scribd for free, though frankly I find it embarrassing to put something out I wrote so long ago and wasn’t so thrilled with even at the time. I think I will also send a sharp letter to the UMass Library which seems to be responsible for all this.

More good news

So now both of the panels I proposed to IR 9.0 have been accepted, which means that one of my book projects can really go forward–a collection of these papers and a few more I will invite from some other people I know who work on this stuff and who might be interested. Fingers crossed that I can get everything done when it need to be done!

Fun at the PCA

Well, a quick update on the conference and I’ll write more later. Before attending anything I met up with David Silver who runs the RCCS and we share coffee and what turned out to be my nearest thing to lunch.

David’s even nicer (and much taller πŸ™‚ )in person than online and it was a very pleasant chat out in the sun, in a little park near the Moscone Center. We talked a little about our projects and about the state of research on new media/ICT/Internet and Digital culture–how ever you want to call it. We agreed that work in the US is more fragmented than in Europe, and the lack of much public funding has given it a very different tone. More on that later.

Then I went to the conference where of course I trawled through the book exhibit, went to few panels than planned, drank too much coffee, and met some interesting people. As I said, details to come, but now once more into the breach!

Research Update

Let’s see…first the bad news: didn’t get the Franklin Grant. It’s really competitive and I know I did the best proposal I could, so while I wish I’d gotten it, I don’t feel so bad. I talked with some colleagues and the consensus seems to be that getting grants is really almost impossible until after you’ve published a book. I wonder if that’s really true.

Of course the grant was intended to support a book project, so now the question is how to publish a book faster without having to to travel as much. I actually have good ideas about that. One is that I am already collecting a lot of great interviews via email with some of the women I’ve met in the Netherlands, and I’m getting so much that I think I could do a book just about their experiences, which would be cool. The other, easiest (I hope) approach is an edited volume. I’m proposing two panels for the next meeting of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR), which is Internet Research 9.0: Rethinking Community, Rethinking Place. That conference will be held in Copenhagen next fall. So I already have 6 proposals that look really strong and I know of at least a few other people who might be interested in submitting papers/chapters. So I hope I can interest a publisher in that idea in the next few months.

If I can get one of these accepted, I could get one or both finished by next August and then have a much better shot at grants. Plus, I could then come up for promotion to full professor early. Maybe in just 3 or 4 years, instead of the usual five. And of course I’d still be working on my original book idea, which I could probably complete in about 2-3 years, depending on when I can get time and funding for the longer trips to the NL.

Catching up a bit

So, last term got completely crazy toward the end. In addition to the stuff I usually might have to do–teach, direct the comp. program, do a little research and writing–I also have been trying to write some grant proposals, organize a conference, and chair a search committee. Oh yeah, and I had to do a job review for myself…and the computer was stolen…so yeah, totally crazy.

But, I did the job review, kept the search under control and the conference, and the grant proposals are ok, for now at least. And, I may buy a Macbook Air in a week or two… But the main thing is that I got things wrapped enough to make another trip to Rotterdam in January. The trip went really well, but I now know that 6 days on the ground is really not enough when you have 6 hour jet-lag to get over before you can function at all.

So, what did I do this time around? Well, since you ask… I spoke at De Geuzen as part of their Living Room Lecture program, about Sequential Tart and super-heroines. That was fun; there was a live audience of six people, with more online, though I think only a few were formally signed into the chat. Anyway, the video archive of the first part is online already, and also some pictures. I was pleased that I could speak comfortably in front of people who I know and whose work I respect a lot! I mean, it’s one thing to address strangers, or students, but I actually care about my friends’ opinions. πŸ˜‰ So this was the first official event for me.

Back at Last

I have been swamped for the last month with first work that had to be done absent my home computer, and then with travels and research. But Now I am catching up with it all, and with the blog. I’ll post a real entry later tonight and more still this week. Look for discussion of my most recent trip to Rotterdam, my current research and grant efforts, and my uncontrollable lust for….a Macbook Air. πŸ˜‰

In a sort of mourning

Sadly I report the theft of my laptop–a 2005 powerbook pro. πŸ™ I had just about all of the data backed up, but now I can’t really work at home and more than anything else, I miss my slim, silver mac. I hadn’t realized the extent to which I was really sort of living in that machine. I guess I really have become post-human. Score for Katherine Hayles.

The most tiresome additional irritant is that I need a laptop for my next Rotterdam trip in early January. Since we have renter’s insurance, I could replace it, but I’ve heard Apple will release a cool, new little 13″ aluminum-cased notebook with a flash drive instead of optical, at the MacWorld Expo in mid-January. This is exactly what I’ve been wanting–a smaller, lighter Mac. So I don’t want to buy something now, I want to wait.

If only I could find a Mac rental joint in Rotterdam.

European Science fiction meet-up

Ok, so my going to SFRA 08 is not looking so good, unless I get major grant money. But we’ll see. I and my partner in crime have had several discussions about investing in our own research, so maybe… In any case, I’ve been talking a bit to Sandor Klapcsik (who doesn’t seem to have a webpage anywhere) about how to increase European participation and the sort of vicious circle that can occur because if you don’t have a European event, it’s hard to get people involved, but if a lot of people aren’t already involved, it’s hard to have an event. Because I already think that meeting in person is crucial, I am going to try organizing some kind of meeting next summer, probably in early July, so it won’t conflict with SFRA. While we may have some scholarly discussion, my main hope is that people connect sufficiently that we are inspired to collaborate and more people get involved with SFRA. Maybe I’ll do something like the Barcamp held recently in Rotterdam. In fact, that might be just the thing, only for two days. Maybe Worm would even be a good space, if Hajo were willing. Hmmmn. The question would be finding inexpensive housing for everyone. Rotterdam is less expensive, but hotels anywhere…ideally I’d find university dorm rooms or something like that.

Before deciding though I will talk to PaweΕ‚ and see what he thinks, since he seems the resident authority on the European SF scene. –And I’ll just gloat for a minute that now another scholar has joined Facebook at my instigation. Mwahahahah. How long can I resist having my vampire bite him… πŸ˜‰

Well, I’ll post updates here, as plans solidify.

Favorite foods and identity

During my visit to Portland (Maine) I enjoyed the chance to eat many of the foods that are hard to find in my little Central Valley city. I had sushi, Indian food, organic pizza and of course lobster, plus lots of different microbrew beers. Of course, Portland isn’t as diverse as some cities; it’s relatively small and for a long time has been rather homogenous, though that is changing. This got me thinking about my own collection of favorites foods; those associated with places I’ve lived or visited, and those that I’ve loved so well that I search them out or learn to make them wherever I go.

Food is one of the most popular identity markers; it can identify very easily and precisely an ethnic and/or geographic affiliation, but it’s generally “harmless” and unlikely to draw fire the way physical description or linguistic characteristics often do. I think this is because even though it often signals a certain background, it’s also a matter of taste. Anyone could develop a taste for durian (at least theoretically) or haggis, or salty licorice; or more readily perhaps, for mooncakes, dolma, pierogies… well I could go on and on and on.

And this is where (one place) identity becomes interesting. Because you can run right into the fact that on some level, people believe in the biology, even if intellectually they know race is a construct. On the one hand, people will proffer food preferences as evidence of belonging to a certain group and agree that it is some kind of evidence, but try saying that someone blonde and blue-eyed is Chinese because he/she love duck’s tongue, speak both Shanghahua and Putonghua (Mandarin) and even was raised in China. Then forget it.

Or, by contrast, European countries. I could learn a language, love the food, and adopt the appropriate name and I’d blend right in, at least in many places. Apart from the legal definitions, how many years until I can call myself Dutch or Italian or Polish or whatever? Some people might say now amount of time is enough to erase the difference. Then of course you have the US and Canada (not sure about Australia or the UK) Where theoretically anyone can become Canadian (if you don’t mind a process that takes years) and at least officially no one can say they aren’t real Americans or Canadians no matter what they look like, like to eat or language they are able to speak. So where does that leave definitions based on physical characteristics or geographical background?

I got into this tangle with students at MIT once where they were talking about the assumption that most students there are Asian. This led to the following exchange:

I asked “Asian, or Asian American?”
“Well, not American. I mean, look at this class, there are actually only a few Asians. Most are American”
“But Derek is from California, not Asia. And Alex, George, Maria, and Christian are all from from Europe. How are you defining American? Do you mean white?”

And here we would have had an uncomfortable silence except the European students were insulted that they had been mistaken for Americans and were only too happy to clear that up. πŸ™‚

So what does it really mean to be from a culture or country? How many years does it take and which ones? At MLA a few years ago, everyone was arguing over who got to claim Ang Lee; Taiwan, China, Hong Kong, or the US. On a more serious note, what about Israel? What definition of that state will really hold up? What definition of any state is more than an arbitrary legal code, these days?

And here I thought I was just going to write about how settlement patterns are reflected in food and how I missed the Northeast and the wide variety of European food available there. (and Asian, but that being absent here hasn’t as much to do with settlement patterns as with class, I think). But I think academics often end up in the position of not feeling really firmly bound to any single locale or identity, because we go where the graduate program or the fellowship or the job takes us. And we go to conferences all over as well. I at least have ended up with a hodgepodge accent and a similarly disparate taste in food.

–I also was quite spoiled as a grad student in Amherst, Ma. Within a 5 mile radius (all covered by bus routes) I could eat decent, and often really good, Korean, Thai, Malaysian, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Italian, Mexican, Moroccan, Indian, German, Greek, Polish… I think I most miss the Moroccan and Polish food because I’ve had less luck finding it elsewhere than the other cuisines. Sigh. In Ma. I could get freshly made pierogies any time and now I can’t even find them frozen!

Well this post is going nowhere, but I guess it had to go somewhere so I could stop thinking about it. –Assuming that writing it here acts as a form of exorcism! πŸ˜‰

I don’t know if this bothers other academics(or others who move a lot) but I’ve always kind of liked it. I’ve never minded, and now might even say I enjoy being a little (or a lot) alien.

Finally news on my blogging chapter, and identity projects more genrally

Quick burst of good news: finally I’ve heard from the editor of International Blogging; it’s coming out from Peter Lang in 2008 and my chapter will be the conclusion. πŸ™‚ A draft of the intro is here.

It’s weird; I wrote this so long ago and now that it’s appearing, my work has moved on in another direction, focusing much more on participation, subversive cultures, and on the institutionalization of discourse around new media. I still work on identity, just not so much national identity by itself. I look at it in other contexts, like in comics, or genre fiction, or video games. Just recently I was searching for articles on this, and found some entries in Henry Jenkins’ blog that discuss comics and games and national identity in Poland, which he visited in 2006.

He goes on in later entries to also talk about Russia, Japan, and globalization, but I haven’t gotten to those yet. But anyway, he mentions a series generally referred to as the “Witcher” books that sound like I might like them, but they don’t seem to be out in English or maybe just not in the US. I’d really like to see what reviewers mean about the stories incorporating national characteristics. The author, Andrzej Sapkowski, seems cool; he even has links to fanfiction–one of the few words I could decipher, since the site is in Polish. But here’s another page with some info in English.

Where was I? Oh yeah, identity in genre fiction. Right, so I think I will have to take that up pretty soon.