And Another Overdue Mention...

Last spring, I co-edited an anthology on the cinematic representation of my hometown (and current home) with the inimitable Steve Gravestock, TIFF's Associate Director of Canadian Programming.

Toronto on Film was published by TIFF and distributed by Wilfrid Laurier University Press (by Indiana University Press outside of Canada). Click here for a link to the WLUP site.

You can read a review of the anthology in the Spring 2010 volume of Cineaste.

It was my first scholarly editing stab, both trial by fire and incredibly rewarding. The collection features essays by critic Geoff Pevere and scholars including Brenda Longfellow, Wyndham Wise and Justin D. Edwards, as well as contributions by TIFF's in-house experts Steve Gravestock, Piers Handling and Matthew Hays, tracing the evolution of the industry here, the eventual obsession with/necessity for role-playing as other cities (license-plating, as Geoffrey Nowell-Smith once referred to it) and, as of late, it's return to some semblance of... itself.

The Incomplete Age

Clearly, "completion" as a concept has been a challenge for me lately, as I have tried to make great strides with my dissertation while on a leave of absence from work. Every moment I am not typing great and meaningful things is laden with guilt. Even when I have been writing away at chapters, I've allowed a drought of posts here on my poor, infant blog to cause me no end of remorse and bad feeling.

So, wrapping these emotions up with the novel that I have recently begun to read, The Book of Dave, by Will Self, I found myself puzzling over a web-era phenomenon this morning: that is, all the languished, obsolete blogs that have been started then abandoned by well-intentioned folks across the past decade. The picture below is a screen-grab of the first blog I ever started, which was born - and died - in May of 2005. It only ever had one post, in which I referenced all the things I'd write about: film, travel, politics on either side of the border, life between Toronto and Los Angeles, etc. Poor Exorbitant City might have met a similar fate were it not for today's flurry of inspiration. (Of course, it likely will yet.)


The descriptor given atop the page on my first blog informed my non-existent readership that this blog was to be "the only solution to a peripatetic, transnational, time-sapped existence in which i am never everywhere at once." The chosen design was garishly pink. Somehow, I recall sorting out the code to give the website a custom icon to appear in the navigation bar... that's still the way it appears in my Mozilla bookmarks list, though I guess the uploaded image has died a natural death, since it does not seem to load that way any more. The few scraps of writing to be found on the page are over-wrought, if sincere and, well, well intended.

I cannot make this blog disappear from the web. The email account to which it was tied is dead, so I cannot find the way to access "the dashboard" for the corresponding user and delete it. So out there it stays, floating on the net waiting for nothing in particular except my periodic checks to see if it is still there.

Or, perhaps, waiting for some future researcher to come along and sweep it into a net with thousands of other samples from The Incomplete Age. This is where The Book of Dave is no doubt taking over my thinking. The novel is, in part, about the radical attempts at interpretation (and the resulting misinterpretation) of a London cabbie's notebooks -- written during our epoch -- by a post-apocalyptic English society centuries after. His histrionic rantings are taken as nothing short of scripture and tremendous social consequences follow from that.

But think about it for a moment: all the detritus out on the web now... those very personal, well-intended blogs started to commemorate a group or a university seminar, to help keep people in touch over long distances, to document a love of experimenting with different recipes involving stout ale, and what-have-you, that got off the ground and then fell into neglect. Are these the cave drawings that anthropologists of some future era will sift through trying to understand that cryptic period in which the web exploded into life? What will they deduce? That we were a society with great promise and a tremendous affinity for beginnings, but with very , very poor follow-through? That we didn't clean up the virtual mess we made any better than the environmental one? That some of us misunderstood the word peripatetic? Will we be labeled "The Incomplete Age," laughed at beside the Stone, Industrial or even early Electronic ages for our megalomania and lassitude? All because I can't delete that old blog or may, one day, let this one die?

Fears

Here are the things that are scaring me right now, besides my dissertation and my horrible struggle for a better work-life balance:

1. Costs
2. Falling Objects and the People Who Shoot at Them
3. Titanic Excess
4. And whatever the heck this is supposed to be: I get that it makes sense, but, I mean, really, who's gonna put one on?

I know I told a lie in my (fantastically underappreciated) previous post, but, I promise, the next post will include that update on That Thing I Did the Other Day.

So I Did this Thing Today...

... that probably made no sense. I sent an email, out of the blue, to a highly distinguished professor in UCLA's department of Urban Planning. I have been considering a critical/theoretical construction of his for some time now and recently decided it could be the missing dynamic that subtends questions of periodization, methodology and intent in my Introduction and... by extension... the entirety of my dissertation.

Emailing him resulted from my following one of those random impulses that I have to try to take the "virtuality" out of my current academic situation. (I've been corresponding with some of my committee by email and phone and just yesterday emailed our remarkable Student Affairs Office in the FTVDM department to ask him to please print and deliver a letter to another committee member who apparently does not email, ever.) After all, if I were still in the environs of UCLA, I could have found out this professor's office hours and just turned up, all inquisitive and such.

Though, in fact, randomly meeting him face-to-face would probably have made me dreadfully nervous and all the smart, informed questions I had about his work would likely have turned into a lot of "hi smart mister... I think you are smart... can I use your smart words in my book?"

So, a thoughtful email was probably the way to go. It may lead to a fruitful exchange of ideas between two people interested in notions of community, progressive scholarship and urbanism, or, it may have ruined my academic career permanently. Or, he may never write back and the result will be fantastically nil. I'll update if anything comes of it.

ABD ("Always Be Doing [something]")... Easier Said...?

The watery disaster that has befallen our home (and this past week's sundry ironically related disasters, such as repeated water-outages) have run amok with my writing momentum. Yesterday was an abysmal day in that regard; today is slightly better, so far. I had set this past Friday as a chapter deadline... I have to re-schedule that deadline for this Thursday and try and try and try.

I did, however, find myself organizing my thoughts in a chart today... its completion sent me into paroxysms of quietly self-deriding laughter over my sheer delight at the false sense of accomplishment it brought. I wonder if I ought not to have chosen a career as a statistician?

In other news, I had a tremendously lovely dinner at a friend and colleague's home last night... where I got my first-ever glimpse of his ludicrously lovely home office, and the simply astonishing library of books on film culture, history and theory that he has meticulously organized there. It made me more jealous than was rational. Having been fairly recently separated from the bulk of a formerly shared film library, I have to decide whether to try to build up a personal reference library from scratch, or whether to adopt the philosophy that owning less and borrowing more is the way to live (at least until I have a professor's salary and on-campus office). For now, just about as many books as will fit on the shelf of my desk seems to be my plight/state/fate.

Now if only my desk had an actual floor underneath it still, as opposed to raw, crumbly, stained, recently flood-saturated concrete...

Good Reasons for an Academic to Blog?

Anne at Purse Lip Square Jaw posted an incredibly insightful piece today - citing work by Melissa Gregg - regarding the motives behind the proliferation of graduate-student and junior-faculty blogs. It knew more about why I started this blog than I did, I think. A very worthwhile post to check out, and I look forward to following up with more of Gregg's research... but maybe after I file.