creativity/machine

These two paragraphs are completely unrelated. I admit it.

Bit 1
I keep forgetting to help spread the word about Phil Agre’s advice piece Networking on the Network, which is specifically aimed at graduate students (it’s almost long enough to be a PhD itself in fact). It isn’t just for academic types, though. It’s full of straightforward and insightful advice that is applicable to people working in, or aspiring to enter, any creative or intellectual profession. It does get a bit prescriptive (”don’t drink coffee” at conferences? good luck!) but the substance of the piece will at least make you take stock of the way you manage your professional relationships.

Bit 2
I know many of you have already seen the last of the Lord of the Rings movies - personally, I am bursting to announce that I saw The Return of the King yesterday and gladly surrendered to the gorgeousness, wonderment, and awe…[sigh]

Anyhow, all you friends of middle earth are invited to participate in the largest audience study ever by completing this questionnaire about your experiences and opinions of the movies. The questionnaire is hosted at the University of Aberystwyth but the study includes researchers working in universities in 20 countries across the world.

To call Tinderbox “a personal content management assistant”, as its developer eastgate does, is a bit modest I reckon. From what I gather, it is elegant, powerful, and totally modular - the most exciting thing for me is the ability to make mindmaps (something I do all the time) that are expandable and connectable (something the scribbling in my diary method is woefully inadequate for). Thanks to Adrian Miles for the link.

I haven’t actually had a chance to try it out myself because, unfortunately, the (cough) Windows release is still some time away. As I have now outed myself as that antithesis of cool, the Windows Dork (as opposed to Mac Geek), I will retreat into the sweltering heat and wish everyone a Nice Break, if you’re getting one.

Looky, a directory of PhD weblogs.

There have been times in years past when my own house made me so bored and restless that I spent whole Saturdays doing the rounds of my friends, dropping in for cups of tea and a chat. My behaviour in the blogosphere lately has been exactly like that - for some reason everybody else’s blog has been more interesting to read and write at than my own. So this is where I’ve been for the last couple of days…

At Junk for Code, I’ve been engaged with Gary’s posts (one, two and especially three) about the idea of Australian identity and cinema. We’ve had some productive and enjoyable discussions about all this and as always I’ve been especially concerned with the (im)possibility of presenting a “cosmopolitan” Australia to the rest of the world. The problem as I see it is that it is not yet possible to imagine a “cultured’ Australia in any terms other than those of European modernism. In a postcolonial (or “settler”) culture this is obviously not good enough on its own. In fact, uncultured multiculturalism might be a better way to think of it - uncultured meaning not owned, managed, and maintained by a white, middleclass, urban elite. I also took issue with Gary’s use of the term “lowest common denominator” in talking about mass culture in this post.

Another of my daily reads is Anne Galloway, who has been thinking about Nietsche, machine memory, and the idea of the Forgetting Machine, which I’ve found absolutely fascinating. In the comments section of her post she has drawn in a bunch of people thinking about various kinds of remembering and forgetting (nostalgia, dementia, and hope for example). And I had my own intense stab of nostalgia on coming across this post at antipopper about 90s indie-swoon-pop band The Clouds.

So if I were to synthesise these two areas of concern, it might be to start thinking about the cinematic imagination as a powerful nostalgia engine, especially when it tries to imagine “Australianness”. The cinema remembers selectively, intensely, and affectively, and forgets far more than it remembers. Case in point: while reading Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang I also watched the recent movie Ned Kelly on video. Despite starring cute boys (Heath Ledger, Orlando Bloom), it was a wimpy, romanticized whitewash of what is already a dangerously white and masculinist tale. The direct comparison with the written, but still fictionalised version, made the limitations (rather than the evocative power) of cinema glaringly obvious.

I really like this flash presentation all about the rhetoric of cool - by Jeff Rice

This find at UFO Breakfast Recipients has had me splurting coffee, snorting, and generally falling off my chair with laughter all day.

Advisor haiku

I read your comments
The red ink was a nice touch
You can just bite me

I have no money
You have a lot of money
You can just bite me

I just read your book
Five hundred and ten pages
Boy can you bite me

I hasten to add that in my opinion, my supervisor is both good at being a supervisor and very nice, and furthermore does not use red pen. Not that I have any money, mind you.

But wait, there’s more…

Herbert A. Millington

Chair - Search Committee

412A Clarkson Hall

Whitson University

College Hill, MA 34109

Dear Professor Millington,

Thank you for your letter of March 16. After careful consideration, I regret to inform you that I am unable to accept your refusal to offer me an assistant professor position in your department.

This year I have been particularly fortunate in receiving an unusually large number of rejection letters. With such a varied and promising field of candidates it is impossible for me to accept all refusals.

Despite Whitson’s outstanding qualifications and previous experience in rejecting applicants, I find that your rejection does not meet my needs at this time. Therefore, I will assume the position of assistant professor in your department this August. I look forward to seeing you then.

Best of luck in rejecting future applicants.

Sincerely,
Turbulent P. Velvet

I can only hope that if academic life ever seems that grim to me, I can be at least that funny about it.

Found via invisible adjunct.

Video footage of the recent Digital Music Symposium, featuring Fred Von Lohmann of the EFF is now available online.

Common Content is “an open catalog of Creative Commons licensed content”. Handy.

London Bloggers is a directory of weblogs written by people who live or work in london, organised by the rather iconic London Tube map. Wish I lived in a place populous enough to need such a thing. via cityofsound

The next grid blogging topic is Ritual, set to go off on Jan 15. I’m really excited about this one, and I expect to see some new blogs come out of the woodwork for it.

[grid::brand] was a good start, and there were some really interesting posts. But I did find that I was jumping from one blog I already read to another, and that the topics were a little confined to the obvious - the brand as “symbolic” of global capitalism, the debate over whether branding was a Good Thing or a Bad Thing (but this debate, however wrongheaded, is at least better than the straight-faced assumption that Brands are Evil). I’d have liked to have seen more people reflecting on their *own* “susceptibility” to branding, the uses of brands, or even actively branding something and talking about the process. In this vein, I really liked freegorifero’s reflections on whether grid blogging was a brand in itself. And I should of course mention that I was unforgivably slack about the whole thing.

With “ritual” though, we might see more religious bloggers, anthropologists, sociologists, ethnomusicologists, sub/clubculturalists, communication theorists, and Occult Investigators. Even better, we should see some contributions from all those literary and photographic types who are so adept at turning the little rituals of everyday life into poetry, or revealing the poetry in everyday life, take your pick. And what could be more ritualistic than the daily practice of blogging? Not to mention all the other rituals of digital and analog communication we engage in every day.

I won’t pre-empt things by getting too carried away, but I am really looking forward to this. And I will get to talk about the rituals of musicking, which, as I am (still) Writing Up My Thesis, is just about all I know anything about at the moment.