My Last Day As an Academic: What An Academic Departure Leaves Behind

Note: Not unrelated to the transition covered below, I now blog at Blownhorizonz.com.  It's much prettier to look at, and more focused on fun stuff like weird fiction, extreme music, and awesome art.  Also check out my Tumblr at blownhorizonz.tumblr.com.

Today is my last day at USF, and I'm doing the final cleanout of my office, while simultaneously finishing final revisions on a journal article.  Yesterday, I finished submitting my academic book proposal.  I've engineered a pretty perfectly punctuated departure, I must say.

In the course of cleaning out my office, I've found I have a weird relationship to paper and information.  I guess it's not just me . . . we were all very excited when it looked like we might be moving into a post-paper world, but that didn't quite work out, did it?  I have stacks and stacks and stacks of paper, mostly printed out from the digital versions of books that I couldn't find physical copies of.  Some of the material I've got sitting around is simply ridiculous.  For example, I have a copy of Michael J. Raine's 2002 dissertation Youth, Body, and Subjectivity in the Japanese Cinema, 1955-1960.  It was given to me by John Peters, who just happened to have a printed copy of it sitting around his office, and knew I was writing and thinking about Japan.  It's about 400 pages long and weighs about ten pounds.  Apparently I brought it with me from Iowa, put it in storage in my parents' house for a year while I was in Japan, then loaded it into a moving truck to bring to Florida.  I never read it.

(Incidentally, a Google search provides no evidence that anyone named Michael J. Raine is currently working in academia, though I did find a corporate lawyer by that name on Linkedin.  Hmm.).

I also have stacks of journal articles, mostly related to one project or another, mostly carried all the way from Iowa, and each either readily available online, or, even more embarrassing, actually saved on my hard drive.  I'm in the process of either archiving .pdf copies of all of them from the usage-restricted archives I'm about to lose access to, or scanning them - printouts of .pdfs - back into .pdf form.

I know this is insane, but at least getting rid of the paper versions of these things is incredibly liberating.  Leaving academia is, so far, incredibly liberating.  The weight being lifted off my shoulders isn't just metaphorical (who knows if I'll ever write that academic book, and who cares), it's physical.  Like, hundreds of pounds worth of weight.

Wheee!

Three Essential Works on Sound and Territory

After a conversation I've now forgotten, with a person I can no longer remember, I still managed to write down three amazing tips on books I need to follow up on for my work-in-progress on car audio and territorialization.

Julian Henriques, Sonic Bodies

Steve Goodman, Sonic Warfare

Peter Doyle, Echo and Reverb

Why You SHOULD Go to Graduate School

Hey, so a couple of years after writing this, I'm out of academia!  Temporarily! Maybe!  Check out my new blog, focused on my interests in weird fiction, experimental music, and generally all things so post-academic that they're not academic at all, over at Blownhorizonz.com.

I spent a good chunk of last night strolling through the excellent blog, 100 Reasons NOT to Go to Grad School.  I'm reading it from a particular perspective - about a year and a half after finishing grad school, now with a couple of years of good employment under my belt and a slow, tentative sense that everything might actually work out okay.  I think the blog is great because much of what it highlights is simply facts about graduate school that, apparently, people don't necessarily enter into it fully aware of - the amount of work, the need to be truly fanatical about your intellectual interests, the difficulty of writing a dissertation.  But particularly in reading the comments, it strikes me that as factual as it may be, it's obviously set up to emphasize negative possibilities, and encourages a tendency of certain people to generalize their own experience to an entire institution.  So I just want to take a second to say one thing:

I spent six years getting my PhD, and it was the best decision I possibly could have made.  Therefore, GRADUATE SCHOOL IS OBJECTIVELY AWESOME and everyone should do it.

I'll show you the life of the mind.

Okay, kidding aside. I had a great time in grad school, and I knew many other people who did as well.  There's no denying there are a larger number of people who have a negative, or just a more complicated, experience - but I think it's just as important to attract the right people as it is to warn off the wrong people. Maybe if I present where I came from to have such a positive experience (and what I'm beginning to suspect might become a good career, but who the hell knows) it'll help people make the right decision at least as much as having a list of warnings about potential negatives.

Favorite Books (Not) of 2010

When it comes to music, there’s something that makes me want to keep up to the minute.  As far as books?  Not nearly so much.  I’m an utterly voracious reader, but as one of the books on this list stresses, the day-to-day, or even year-to-year, surges of novelty and innovation can be a serious distraction from paying attention to the deeper questions.  Moreover, I’m a haunter of bookstores (mostly of the used variety), and much of what I end up reading is dictated by what I stumble across that looks interesting.  So, with that in mind, here are the books that found me this year:

David Mitchell – Cloud Atlas

Absolutely riveting, profound, transporting – and not subject to accurate summarization.  Don’t be put off by the misplaced idea that it’s somehow ‘experimental’ – ultimately, it’s a ripping sci-fi/historical adventure made only more engrossing by some technical wizardry.

China Mieville – The City and the City

I’ve progressively lost interest in Mieville since the Marxist post-racial fantasmagoria of Perdido Street Station, but this one sent the ticker back up at least momentarily.  Mieville isn’t much of a stylist, so it’s all about the ideas and plot.  In this case, the idea is what makes it worthwhile – two cities that share the same physical space but are separated through elaborate social codes, enforced by a mysterious higher power.  A great metaphor for so many things about city life.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb – Fooled By Randomness; Malcolm Gladwell – Blink; Leonard Mladinow – The Drunkard’s Walk

Probably one of the most fascinating intellectual trends of the past ten to twenty years (though I’m not really sure about that timeframe?) has been the advance of the idea that after all, humans are not rational beings, and that we need to confront our own irrationality and learn ways to deal with it.  This idea has often been most accepted when presented in terms of neuroscience and mathematics, but I’m invested because this is essentially the point made by Freud a century ago.  I don’t think anyone has made that connection in a really public way yet (and I’ll have more to say in particular about Taleb’s dismissal of “theory”) but these books may ultimately promise redemption for recently set-upon psychoanalysis.

Ian Buruma – Inventing Japan

Short, sweet, and profound summary of how Japan got to where it is now, with a particular focus on identity and discourse.  Probably the single book I would recommend for non-specialists.

Gaston Bachelard – The Poetics of Space; Jane Jacobs – The Death and Life of Great American Cities; Henry Lefebvre – The Production of Space

This year, particularly since starting my fellowship, has been all about kicking free of my focus on any strict theoretical framework.  I’m swimming in ideas – and these books have been the most important for my trip through the territories of critical geography.

The Infinite Tragedy of Awesome Bookstores

Going into a really good bookstore makes me strangely sad.  I was recently at San Francisco's Green Apple Books, and all I could think about was the fact that I could never hope to read all the great books that were laid out tantalizingly before me.  Thank god, then, that my Japanese reading is as poor as it is - Tokyo is full of bookstores of such size to bring on body-wracking sobs of desperation.  On top of that, they're cheap enough that the temptation to add just one more ridiculously cheap book to the pile can be overwhelming.

Today's haul was from the Book-Off in Akihabara, which has a small but cheap and, as you can see, occasionally spectacular English section.  All of the English books were Y200 each, except for the Alex Garland, which was Y105.  The Kobo Abe is a book I desperately needed, very specifically, for my current work.  The brown one you can't see is Natsume Soseki's Botchan, a classic of the transition from traditional to modern Japan - and both of those, again, Y200 each! The two Japanese hardcovers - by Ryu Murakami (top) and Haruki Murakami (bottom) were also Y105 each.  remix is an excellent, thoughtful hip hop and electronica magazine. Or, more properly, it was - it was recently bought and remade into a more commercial outlet.  I'm buying up all the back-issues I can get my hands on, particularly those featuring interviews with Japanese hip hop acts.  The issues here have interviews with Scha Dara Parr, Big Joe, Mic Jack Productions, and Muro (from 1999!).  The most expensive thing in the whole stack is at the very bottom, a remix featuring an interview with Sapporo's The Blue Herb.  And this was all just in an hour!  It's enough to drive you to drink - or at least that's my excuse.

Book Review: Daniel Pipes, "Conspiracy"

I just happened to see this on the library shelf the other day, and I thought I'd give it the rundown. For people with an interest in conspiracy (and/or the related social phenomena of New Age thinking, self-help, and racism), this book provides a solid and critical intellectual history, giving you the names you need to know if you're trying to understand where all these crazy ideas come from. Pipes also makes some contributions to the social analysis of the conspiracy phenomena, though he falls quite short as a philosopher. Specifically, his epistemology is hazy at best, so he has some difficulty drawing meaningful lines between "conspiracy theory" and real, if complex and sometimes overzealous, attempts by intellectuals and laymen to understand the broader forces that impact society. The most egregious of these slips is his characterization of perceptions of anti-black racism and misogyny in the West as paranoia, characterizations that are both deeply offensive and demonstrably wrong – institutional racism and sexism are about as real and widespread as it gets. Similarly, Pipes harries a false distinction by claiming that the proven, documented involvement of CIA operatives in the crack trade in Los Angeles in the 1980's is not the same as a conspiracy, and that therefore Black anti-government sentiments are unfounded. Such statements are simply ludicrous.

More generally, Pipes often blurs the distinctions between conspiracy theories that place immense power in the hands of a few individuals, and known "conspiracies" that take place across the globe because of how the economy, government, or culture are structured. So, for example, he will describe people's fears of the Rosicrucians and the Jewish conspiracy in the same terms, and apply the same explanations to them, as he does people's fear of Western imperialism. This looks particularly bad reading it ten years after the fact, as documents are increasingly readily available showing that many of the economic attacks that Pipes characterizes as conspiracy theories have actually taken place – for example, the fully intentional roles of the WTO and World Bank in destabilizing developing countries.

But despite the seeming tenuousness of Pipes characterization of, for example, Noam Chomsky as the equal of Lyndon LaRouche, he did succeed in getting me to ask some hard questions about the intellectual style of the left. It is undoubtedly true that, as Pipes points out, leftist Afrocentrism is far more institutionally accepted than right-wing Farrakhanism, even though each are based on tenuous concepts. Ultimately, how much responsibility do theorists such as Chomsky have to be rigorous in their diagnoses of wider political or social situations? Pipes provocatively quotes Susan Faludi's statement that misogyny is an ideology that has moved through "the culture's secret chambers" – and while clearly Faludi is speaking metaphorically, I think Pipes is fair in pointing out the parallels in style. Left-wing intellectuals do have a tendency to cast a very wide net in searching for causes of the problems they seek to diagnose, as well as attributing observable effects to causes both subtle and widespread – invisible, mysterious and often malevolent forces such as racism or exploitation. Sometimes this style of thinking can verge dangerously close to conspiracism; it is not enough that a system or statement be true in essence, it must be true in fact.

While he may be a lummox on more recent events, the benefit of hindsight makes Pipes a very good resource, as he recounts the history of conspiracism in high style. This is a shockingly long history, but measurable, with anti-Semitism and anti-Masonism having their starting points roughly in the 11th and then 14th centuries. The passage of these originary ideas forward in time is easily where the book is most useful and least controversial, as Pipes explains quite clearly and convincingly how the anti-Semitism of the Crusaders traveled through time to fuel the Nazis and, ultimately, over the sea to Japan (the popularity of anti-Semitism in Japan makes perfect sense if you've had much exposure to that culture).

Pipes also does a very creditable job of presenting some ideas as to why people chose Jews and Masons as the overwhelming targets of their suspicions, saying that these two groups represent the Modern – they are generally sophisticated and often powerful, thus fomenting resentment among people less likely to be dedicated to intellectual rigor. The only real problem with this thesis is that it is inconsistent with Pipes' millennia-long history of anti-Semitism – Jews were not always the successful, "model minority" they are now. They could hardly have been hated for their modernism, social advancement, or financial prowess in the 12th century, when most were living in segregated ghettos and were penniless.

The most important unanswered question, though, remains that of epistemology. How do we determine where "conspiracy" theories sit on the spectrum from concrete knowledge to broader, "spiritual" truth - is there a spot available somewhere between religion and science? Ultimately, how do we determine what is a 'conspiracy theory' and what is potentially valid speculation? It is because he fails to address such questions beforehand that Pipes occasionally stumbles in his classification of specific cases. But it is also what leads him to the very interesting choice to include left-wing theorists in the 'conspiracy' category, a move which I think is manifestly incorrect, but nonetheless sends a powerful message of warning to the most extreme indulgers in left-wing rhetoric that, if you're not careful, you might be mistaken for an Antimason.