There were, of course, several cool things about Cs—meeting old friends and making new ones, seeing some cool panels, actually feeling surprised that people came to ours—but the following was actually the coolest…
My friend Corey and I escaped the conference for a little on Friday afternoon and went down to a village bookshop, where I found Jeff Chang’s *Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation*. As we left, I was flipping through the book and Corey tells me that the book was written by the cousin of a friend of ours. How cool?! But that’s not actually what I was getting at.
I flew out on Saturday afternoon. And after I met up with the woman who let us rent her unused east village apartment, I had some time before I had to meet my fellow cab-ride-splitters. So I walked to the park and started reading. The first section of the book is about Moses’ famed urban planning, specifically the construction of the Cross-Bronx Expressway (straight through several Bronx neighborhoods) and the way it re-divided those neighborhoods, killed local businesses, and, perhaps most importantly, posed the question: now that the Bronx has been re-divided and economically sucker-punched, what do we do with the people whose neighborhoods and businesses have been displaced? Well, apparently we build filing cabinets (surrounded by a block of park) to stack 170,000 apartments (per building!) on top of each other. Part of Chang’s project looks at how these re-divisions created slums in the south Bronx, how that led to gang culture, and how gang culture begins to find a voice in hip-hop. I’m really flattening his argument here, but immediately after reading this section of his book, I had the opportunity to actually fly directly over the Bronx on our way out of New York and get the bird’s eye view of the places he was talking about. Of course, it really makes you wonder what New York would look like if Moses’ urban planning had been a collaboration with the neighborhoods he sliced up. But I couldn't help thinking about what it would *sound* like.
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
Panels and Proposals
Well, it’s almost been a month since my last post. And let me tell you why.
I’ve been drafting the final version of my dissertation proposal (which, for those of you interested, looks at the historical and theoretical relationship between music and the Western-European rhetorical tradition in order to productively frame concerns regarding the limits of representation and the writing situation. In other words, what does writing look like when we frame it musically, and what would the writing subject be able to do with it? That's the gist of it). The proposal itself went through various incarnations before finally becoming something that my committee could make sense of. There were days during this past month when I thought to myself “I just want to talk about music and writing. Isn’t that enough?” Apparently, institutionalization requires making sense of what we want.
The good news is that it’s shaped up nicely and I’ll be “defending” it on Friday. I’m told it’s a conference, but I still feel like Mumbles under the hot light in Dick Tracy.
Now all that’s left is finishing up that pesky 4Cs paper.
Which, thank god, I’m co-writing and Scot (my partner in crime) has been keeping me on task. We’ve managed to write something that’s not only pretty damn interesting, but also something I want to talk about to boot…(which is nice). If you’re going to be at Cs, stop by our panel (“Other Rhetorics: Cookbooks, Graffiti, and Post-Rock”). We’re the “Post-Rock” paper (“Making a Scene: Spaces of Affect and the Erasure of Language in Sigur Ros”). It should be cool. We’ll play music. We’ll try to rock it out.
Avery, the fiction anthology I co-edit, also hit bookstores since my last post—this is, of course, undeniably rad. We’ve managed not only to gather 19 awesome short stories, but we also managed to get 10 color illustrations (nine black and white), produce one handsome book, and stay within budget. If you’re interested, check it out: www.averyanthology.org. It’s very exciting...
I’ve been drafting the final version of my dissertation proposal (which, for those of you interested, looks at the historical and theoretical relationship between music and the Western-European rhetorical tradition in order to productively frame concerns regarding the limits of representation and the writing situation. In other words, what does writing look like when we frame it musically, and what would the writing subject be able to do with it? That's the gist of it). The proposal itself went through various incarnations before finally becoming something that my committee could make sense of. There were days during this past month when I thought to myself “I just want to talk about music and writing. Isn’t that enough?” Apparently, institutionalization requires making sense of what we want.
The good news is that it’s shaped up nicely and I’ll be “defending” it on Friday. I’m told it’s a conference, but I still feel like Mumbles under the hot light in Dick Tracy.
Now all that’s left is finishing up that pesky 4Cs paper.
Which, thank god, I’m co-writing and Scot (my partner in crime) has been keeping me on task. We’ve managed to write something that’s not only pretty damn interesting, but also something I want to talk about to boot…(which is nice). If you’re going to be at Cs, stop by our panel (“Other Rhetorics: Cookbooks, Graffiti, and Post-Rock”). We’re the “Post-Rock” paper (“Making a Scene: Spaces of Affect and the Erasure of Language in Sigur Ros”). It should be cool. We’ll play music. We’ll try to rock it out.
Avery, the fiction anthology I co-edit, also hit bookstores since my last post—this is, of course, undeniably rad. We’ve managed not only to gather 19 awesome short stories, but we also managed to get 10 color illustrations (nine black and white), produce one handsome book, and stay within budget. If you’re interested, check it out: www.averyanthology.org. It’s very exciting...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
