A must-read blog post: “Just shut up.”

A brilliant, blunt defense of the need to read critically, even if doing so “ruins” a favourite movie or book:

http://gyzym.tumblr.com/post/39004853136/just-shut-up

This post tackles a common problem in teaching literary and cultural studies: the problem of students resisting critical reading because it “ruins” a cherished favourite text by “over-analyzing” it or “taking it too seriously.”

I get that it feels like things are being ruined, like people are looking for things to hate, like people are taking things too seriously. I even get that, as much as we’d like to pretend otherwise, it can feel like a personal attack to see a piece of media we’re attached to get put through the wringer…But consuming media critically is a skill, and in an age where media is more prevalent than ever before, it’s a skill worth having.

Looking for pop culture representations of the oil sands

frame from Avatar (2009)

I’m working on a research paper about pop culture representations of the oil industry; I’m especially interested in Canadian works, and in representations of the Alberta oil sands. I have found a few great leads so far: Corb Lund’s peak oil ballad “Gettin down on the mountain”; James Cameron’s film Avatar.

If you know of pop culture texts, especially Canadian works, that refer to the oil industry – especially the oil sands – please leave a comment here (or e-mail me).

I’d be particularly grateful for references to pop music, theatre, TV, and science fiction works.

The research in progress is tentatively titled “Monster mines and pipelines: Frankenstein figures of fossil fuel technology,” and will be presented on March 4 at #AthaU’s inaugural Alberta Studies symposium, and again in June at Congress.

Conflicted about the #pdftribute

The research-sharing tribute to Aaron Swartz makes an eloquent statement, but harbours real risks.

On Friday, January 11, Internet activist and innovator Aaron Swartz committed suicide, at age 26. Swartz was behind RSS, DemandProgress, Reddit, and other initiatives and campaigns for the open Internet and Open Access. The US DOJ was pursuing a criminal case against him which the original plaintiffs, JSTOR and MIT, had earlier decided not to prosecute: in 2009, Swartz had exploited MIT systems to collect almost all of JSTOR’s digital archive, nearly 5 million articles. Swartz’s “guerrilla open access manifesto” explained his action as a radical opening of access to knowledge to the public. He was charged with fraud and theft and was facing millions of dollars in fines and up to a half-century in prison. Amidst the eulogies, obituaries, commentaries that followed this tragic turn, a grassroots academic tribute emerged: #pdftribute – a call for academics to share PDFs of their research openly online, using the twitter hashtag to aggregate them. I’ve watched and taken part in the #pdftribute; it’s part homage, part thanks, part protest. In this latter respect, it reminds me of the #TellVicEverything protest against Canadian Safety minister Vic Toews’ online surveillance bill: a protest that takes shape as oversharing.

But while, as I say, I’ve taken part in the #pdftribute, I must admit I’m also conflicted about it – as a scholar of copyright, sure, but mostly as a scholar per se. What is being protested? Who is being honoured? And what are the risks – both of protesting this way, and of not protesting this way?

What is being protested?

The #pdftribute is, in its conception, an eloquent, even poetically just recognition and extension of Swartz’s legacy. To honour the man “pursued” to his untimely death by “prosecutorial overreach” and “an exceptionally harsh array of charges” for seeking to open public access to knowledge, #pdftribute delegates the continuation of that opening-up work to academics: those whose writings had built the particular archive Swartz was prosecuted for opening. The idea is for academics to publicly share pdf articles of research that normally reside behind university libraries’ or publishers’ own paywalls.

The #pdftribute has, in a matter of mere days, put Open Access (#OA) in the public spotlight and given the movement new momentum. But because Swartz’s work, like the criminal case against him, involved so many different interests and institutions, the tribute risks losing the #OA mission, as participants and commentators in the #pdftribute Twitter feed weigh in on other matters, like DOJ procedure, bullying, copyright, abstractions like “freedom” and “truth,” not to mention meta-commentary like this on the tribute itself (as well as the regular quota of spam, of course). That said, the tribute’s complex, diversified character refracts the complex character in honour of whose diversified, progressive work it unfolds. some of these other matters are relevant and worth keeping sight of in the mix here: matters like copyright, dissent, and depression in particular, all in the context of emergent practices of criminalization: the “criminalization of people with disabilities and [the] criminalization of dissent,” as my RA shrewdly notes.

Even very early on, the #pdftribute demonstrated a disjunction between conception and execution. That is, the initial idea was for “academics” to “put their PDFs online in tribute.” Some responses have interpreted this invitation radically: one participant, acknowledging his work’s already OA, daringly suggested that “for real/risky tribute – post all PDFs you have,” meaning not just those academics have written themselves, but everything they’ve got a PDF copy of – for research, teaching, etc. But the Twitter feed shows that the majority of participants are posting links to or otherwise announcing that their work is already OA. That majority includes Yours Truly, for the moment anyway, for reasons I’ll take up below.

Who is being honoured?

I must admit that one of my first reactions to the #pdftribute – despite my own later participation in it – included a momentary rolling of the eye. An invitation to academics to publicize their research in the context of honouring such a major and widely followed Internet activist as Swartz is, inevitably, asking for an avalanche of smug self-aggrandizement, which in its milder forms we see in declarations of existing OA practice, and in its wilder forms makes grandiose or uncritically entitled-sounding claims for truth, freedom, etc.

So there is a risk, despite the recurring evocation of Swartz’s name in the Twitter feed, that Swartz himself could get lost in all the hustle and bustle? Or that related issues like depression get lost or neglected, in what at times amounts to a torrent of self-satisfied armchair slacktivism? (From which I’m not excluding myself.) Among the more extensive and reflective statements that keep Swartz and his work front and centre is Cory Doctorow’s moving and frank eulogy, which balances discussion of his radical, risky work and his personal difficulties, and which foregrounds copyright as the context for making sense of the former. Which brings me to ask:

What are the risks of participating?

As a critical scholar of copyright – but by no means a legal expert – I see a huge risk for academics here, individually and as a class. Publicly sharing publications that aren’t just copyright-protected but also – and more to the point – paywall- or password-protected incurs the real and all-too-present risk of litigation for infringement, or of counseling or being accomplice to infringement. One recent and troubling tweet I read this morning mentioned a professor suggesting that an undergrad class could “liberate” some JSTOR documents. To be frank, I don’t think that’s okay: I have since learned that this comment was made in jest. (Twitter is great for killing context and nuance, no?) Still, few enough professional academics – like the general public – have enough of a grasp on copyright to basics to make an informed decision for themselves whether to post or not – never mind suggesting (maybe even in jest) that students infringe university conduct codes and copyright law. For instance, while recent Canadian Supreme Court decisions and legislation have arguably brought Canadian copyright law’s provisions for “fair deling” much closer to US law’s provisions for “fair use,” there are significant differences in legislative language and in jurisprudence that may provide American participants here with safeguards and protections that cannot be extended to Canadian participants.

The #pdftribute enables the sharing of protected documents on the tacit premise that doing so is not just technically easy and but ethically straightforward. The ease of posting protected work here derives from the illusion of community that the tribute makes such acts appear to belong to. But herein lies the risk: a Twitter feed does not a community make. There is little solidarity and less security in leveraging such an ambivalent social medium for mass copyright infringement. The #pdftribute is not a community – what it is is a massive and growing papertrail. The current political-economic climate of copyright is leading publishers’ intermediaries and some publishers themselves, to act and react in highly unpredictable ways, as Canadian academia has seen over the last two years in the example of Access Copyright. So, when it comes to a bustling and openly aggregated action like #pdftribute, I can only assume that some copyright troll out there – or a horde of such trolls – is already taking names and starting to churn out reams of cease and desist notices, or maybe even gearing up for a class action on publishers’ behalf. As copyright scholar Paul K. Saint-Amour cautions:

you can seldom criticize the law by breaking it and yet expect the law to forgive your infraction as criticism. (19-20)

In addition, my RA suggests shrewdly that this infringement risk “doesn’t seem warranted by the entire lack of benefit it’d likely produce, especially when are options like organizing colleagues or teaching students to publish OA.” That is, the #pdftribute makes an eloquent statement, but to what extent does this mass sharing actually mobilize knowledge for the public, or communicate knowledge to the public, relative to that effected in the more concerted organizing and teaching of Open Access?

A related risk might be that of harm to the relationship between academic authors and academic publishers, a relationship that is already tense at best and openly hostile at worst, a spectrum seen in the Elsevier boycott, in Canada’s “quintet” of cases between public sectors and royalty-collecting societies, in the Hathi Trust case, and so on. In the context of this fraught, changing, and contested territory of academic capital, the #pdftribute is adding fuel to the fire. By polarizing scholars against publishers, the #pdftribute risks tarring all publishers with one broad brush, when even a cursory browse of the Sherpa-RoMEO database and the Directory of Open-Access Journals soon reveals that there is a vast spectrum of positions for publishers to occupy on the issue of Open Access, and that for all the “knowledge cartels” and monopolies out there, there are many other publishers who are deeply committed to Open Access.
Let me be clear that I offer these reflections not at all as a defence or justificaiton of the status quo in academic publishing. I support and pursue Open Access publishing. But I am concerned about the cultural-economic consequences of the shape and direction taken by the #pdftribute, and moreso about its potentially serious legal implications for academics from tenured professors to undergrad students.

What about the risks of not participating?

In closing, I’ll briefly consider the flipside: the risks of not taking part in the #pdftribute. As a critical scholar of copyright I do feel morally obliged to participate, a feeling based on extensive reading in the history and transformation of copyright law and an understanding of its constraints on innovation and growth in culture and knowledge. I imagine other critical scholars of copyright, Open Access, OER, social justice, censorship, and/or academic freedom may feel similarly obliged, and perhaps rightly so. Would declining to take part in the #pdftribute amount to remaining complicit with extant and emerging threats to academic freedom and freedom of expression more generally? Could declining to take part mean the individual scholar or the whole profession misses an opportunity to affirm or even expand the principle of academic freedom? Or to transform the culture of knowledge communication and mobilization?

I don’t have answers to these speculative questions. What I do have is a profound uncertainty that the specific concrete character of the #pdftribute will in the long run represent an unequivocally positive gain for academic research and those who produce it. I offer these reflections and questions as an invitation to dialogue that can address and advance the interests of the Open Access movement, of scholars (both professional and student), and of academic publishers alike.

Works Cited

Doctorow, Cory. “RIP, Aaron Swartz.” BoingBoing 12 Jan. 2013.
Jauregui, Andres. “Academics tweet tribute to Aaron Swartz.” Huffington Post 13 Jan. 2013.
Kopstein, Joshua. “Aaron Swartz’s family releases statement, blames overreaching prosecutors for his untimely death.” The Verge 12 Jan. 2013.
McCutcheon, Mark A. #pdftribute tweets. 13-14 Jan. 2013.
Musli, Steven. “Researchers honor Swartz’s memory with PDF protest.” C|Net 13 Jan. 2013.
Payton, Laura. “‘Tell Vic Everything’ tweets protest online surveillance.” CBC 16 Feb. 2012
#pdftribute. N.d.
Richman, Jessica. “Tweet at all of the academics you know to put their PDFs online in tribute to @aaronsw. Use the hashtag #pdftribute.” Tweet 7:55 pm MT 12 Jan. 2013.
Saint-Amour, Paul K. The Copywrights: Intellectual Property and the Literary Imagination. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2003.
Sample, Mark. “You want to challenge the knowledge cartels, don’t just make your research open, make your research about power. #pdftribute.” Tweet 9:25 am MT 13 Jan. 2013.
“World Peace.” “Had Aaron Swartz not been born, our Internet would be censored, truth would be an unknown word. RIP Aaron. The bullies will lose #pdftribute.” Tweet 9:56 am MT 14 Jan. 2013.

Good riddance to the cassette mixtape: on the ironies of aura in mechanical reproduction

In a recent Forbes article, Michele Catalano waxes nostalgic – or should that be rewinds nostalgic? – for “the lost art of the mixtape.”

The art – and make no mistake about it, it is an art – of making a mix tape is one lost on a generation that only has to drag and drop to complete a mix. There’s no love or passion involved in moving digital songs from one folder to another. Those “mixes” are just playlists held prison inside a device. There’s no blood, sweat and tears involved in making them.

I come not to praise mixtapes, but to bury them.

Where to start a critique of such nostalgia for days of storage media yore? A statement like this, in the first place, is simply ironic: arguing that one recording medium is more authentic or immediate than another is more than a little absurd (although not without precedent: it’s part of what Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin call “remediation,” or how new media are understood relative to old). A statement like this antagonizes both new media and its users – “kids these days” – in a manner that is at once as current as claims that the Internet rots your brain and as ancient as Plato’s criticism of writing itself (which, given in writing, was also ironic). Lastly, in a manner reminiscent of the dangers in writing of which Plato warned, a statement like this forgets as much about the “art” of the mixtape as it claims to recollect. Like, for instance, how crappy cassette technology was.

Today’s mediascape is so supersaturated with so many different and competing apparatuses, techniques, and systems that it has become not just plausible but commonplace to argue that some media are more authentic – less technological, and more “live,” if you will – than others. The German cultural theorist Walter Benjamin coined the term aura to describe the effects of reverence and awe that accompany the traditional, unique work of art – the painting, the chamber music performance – and yet these effects only make sense after the advent of recording technologies for mass copying art, as you will know if you’ve ever lined up at the Louvre to see the original Mona Lisa. The performance scholar Philip Auslander has coined a related term: “liveness.” The very idea of liveness, he argues, does not precede but can only be defined in contrast to recording. Reversing conventional wisdom, Auslander argues rock & roll is a genre the live performance of which always strives to sound as much as it can like its prior studio recording; he also shows how entrenched the value of liveness is in popular culture, with reference for instance to the case of dance act Milli Vanilli, disgraced for having their Grammy revoked on the grounds they had lip-synched their work.

Arguments for “liveness” and against mediation are in some ways a reprise of the ancient hostility to new media as media, which is to say hostility to techne – to art – as mythologized by Plato’s Phaedrus (circa 370 BCE), which recounts the encounter between the Egyptian king Thamus and the god Theuth, inventor of writing: a technology that Thamus argues does not aid memory, as Theuth claims, but rather destroys it.

this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them.

In the context of music, the hostility to media has been modulated by a Romantic ideology of creativity as spontaneous, individual expression and by musicians’ organized campaigns against recording media. Ironically, since the 1980s, the DJ sector itself has been reproducing this tradition, in campaigns against the CD, campaigns to “keep vinyl alive.” Last summer, Toronto producer and DJ Deadmau5 reignited the “liveness” debate in the domain of DJing specifically by claiming >many top dance DJs like himself just “hit play” (instead of mixing and beatmatching tracks). His comments drew fierce and defensive criticism from other top DJs, who went on to justify their work and the outrageous sums that overcompensate it in terms of romanticized “blood, sweat and tears.” As though some ways to press play are less technological, or more work, than others.

Catalano’s article, then, is a very recent variation on a very ancient theme. It is invested in Romanticism, in authenticity, in the notion that making a mixtape is work that can’t be matched by whatever it is the kids today are doing with their phones (clicking and dragging, shuffling, sodcasting, and so on). Unlike sorting mp3s, making a mixtape is an “art,” Catalano insists, repeatedly, perhaps protesting too much. Moreover, it’s an “art” that is driven by “love and passion” and that demands “blood, sweat and tears” – it demands real work, that is, unlike pointing, clicking, and dragging. Which are also apparently acts devoid of love and passion.

These claims – about old media being better quality, or more authentic, or more engaging, and – conversely – about new media being lower quality, or artificial and superficial, or dissociative and antisocial – will not stand. They rehearse assumptions about culture and technology that are not only ancient but pernicious and regressive: they’re the same kinds of assumptions that Big Content exploits to pursue its copyright maximalist agenda, thwarting cultural innovation and growth (but that’s another story). They valorize kinds of DIY cultural labour as though they havedisappeared, rather than transformed. And these claims are also more than a little ironic, for appearing in blog form.

Let me be clear: I too made my fair share of analogue cassette mixtapes when I was young. I still own, and even play, several of these pause-button productions, soundtracks to youthful desire and mystery. But would I trade the mobile device I can pocket for a double-deck boom box, a shoe box full of cassettes, a milk crate full of vinyl, and an antennae-borne FM signal? Hell no.

Let me also be clear that I’m not refuting the idea that making a mixtape is a creative practice. (I wouldn’t call it an “art,” actually, but that’s a different argument to make elsewhere.) Making a music mix – whether as “live” set, mixtape, mashup, playlist, or podcast – is an eminently, critically creative practice. What I am refuting is the idea that this art depends on a specific medium – and in this case a rightly dead one that nobody should feel like they miss, or missed out on. I’m not even refuting the idea that a cassette mixtape takes a lot of work – I’m just saying it’s work not worth missing, and that goes on anyway, in different forms.

So let me count the ways I don’t miss the mixtape, and bid it good riddance.

1) Sound quality: analogue cassettes start degrading as soon as you play them, and the more you play one back, the faster it goes. (As a kid I even bought commercially made tapes, before a school friend pointed out I should buy vinyl and blank tapes instead, a more robust solution.) Depending on the tape and the recording-playback unit, a tape could all too often end up sounding warbly. To fix that, you’d have to do it again, or risk a new tape. In contrast, the fix for a warbly-sounding mp3 is simply finding or forking out for a high-quality one instead. I sure don’t miss warbly-sounding tapes – whether they got dubbed that way or just inevitably got that way with repeated play.
Then there were levels, too: tape decks had better and worse EQs for sound-checking a mix, and EQing this detail, making sure the levels just touched the reds from song to song, could get hugely time-consuming. It’s work I don’t miss. (Not that iTunes does anything like an ideal job with its own sound check, but it’s an improvement.)

2) Research: finding music new or old, sourcing the right songs for a certain mix, trying to decide what gear to buy, what records, what kinds of blank tapes (what quality, how long) … the sourcing and selecting of music did take a lot of work before the Internet, and it’s work I don’t miss for a second. Then, as now, to not only find the right music but to develop your own distinctive tastes, you relied on your friends, social circles, and your own idiosyncratic navigation of the social fabric and cultural media of the day.
The Internet increasingly allows you to source and select songs from more and more of the whole history of recorded sound (as long as the copyright lobbies don’t ultimately get their way – by using the same romantic rhetoric on display in articles like that under discussion). Would I, as a teen, have had access to Edison’s recordings? Wouldn’t even occur to me to have tried.
As the Internet has magnified the opportunities for developing musical taste – allowing for both global diversification and micro-genre specialization equally – so do digital playback apps and systems enhance possibilities for honing the craft of the perfect mix. If you made a mixtape and, after repeated playback, one or more songs started to seem out of place, you’d have to put a fair bit of work into redoing or perfecting it. Not so with digital playback. And what’s more, digital playback allows for what I consider a welcome element of chance: the shuffle function often yields sequences and juxtapositions that have an uncanny serendipity about them, like a ghost in the machine. Such chance combinations have a valuable role to play in the conscious composition of a playlist or mix.

3) Sharing: You know what was maybe kind of special about mixtapes? Not being invited or pressured to share them with the world. Or being auto-prompted to check out similar music “you might like.” Privacy is a scarce resource these days. And I will concede that the surveillance mechanisms and privacy policies those algorithms represent are deeply spooky, even dystopian.
And you know what is kind of special about digital mixes? BEING INVITED TO SHARE THEM WITH THE WORLD. Similarly, being advised by algorithms to check out music you might like is certainly creepy, but we are living some science fiction shit when robots can suggest what music we might sample.
In addition, the aura of a given mixtape – its uniqueness – reflects its fragility, its vulnerability to vicissitudes of sharing and distribution. Lend a tape and there’d be no telling what shape you’d get it back in. You could make a backup, but that too was time-consuming and costly (and risked the warbly issue I mentioned above, too).

4) Democratized mixing, DJing and sound engineering: It’s true that the whole genre of hip hop started with pause-button boombox tape edits and vinyl hackers like Herc and Flash rebuilding the relation between needle and groove from the ground up. But it’s also true that today’s digital milieu has even more dramatically further democratized music mixing and music-making. For one thing, digital files are much more portable and manipulable. For another, audio tools for doing so are available in abundance and relatively easy to learn – Audacity is a great example of free, high-quality, and easily learned sound editing and podcasting software for anyone who wants a mix to be more than an iTunes playlist. Not that theres anything wrong with an iTunes playlist. Similarly, streaming music services engage listeners more interactively in selecting and customizing the sound stream.

5) Footprint: See what I said above, about the double-deck boom box, shoe box full of cassettes, and milk crate full of vinyl. That’s a lot of mass, for one thing. On this front, at least, I feel like the science fiction future I was promised as a youth (in part by the new wave and Afro-Futurist sounds of my ’80s mixtapes) has come to pass: the shit that used to fill my bedroom now fits IN MY POCKET. I do not miss packing for trips or moving house that involved hauling so much bulky tech luggage.
That said, it isn’t at all clear or straightforward that today’s pocket jukebox puts down a smaller environmental footprint than yesterday’s shelves full of boxes did, especially when we consider: offshore manufacture environment policies and shipping; the “planned obsolescence” business model for consumer technology, which yields a new crop of flat glass rectangles every fall; electronic waste; the “rare earth” that goes into microprocessing and, arguably, some geopolitical coflicts.

Like I said, I agree that making a mixtape is a creative practice, and that, in their day, mixtapes held momentous cultural importance: they helped to found hip hop, and they helped to build rave scenes, for instance. And for those who still have and can play them, they remain important cultural-historical artifacts. But I disagree with claims that making mixtapes is more creative than manipulating iTunes, that dead media are inherently of more value or better quality than current media, or that mixing music is anything like a “lost art.” If anything, it’s booming now more than ever. As numerous music critics, historians, and DJs themselves point out, the art of the mix is – at its aesthetic core – the art of selecting and sequencing. Composition is compilation. And this is a creative process that long predates cassette tapes, and has thrived in their wake.

I also like to think that the automation of one creative process makes possible new kinds of hands-on creative opportunities;for instance, automated beat-matching frees up more time for thoughtful selecting, or for effects and EQing. We also see this transformation of creative work in the wider proliferation of not just new mechanisms for consuming music but also new modes of producing it – some of which themselves mix and match, in the ever-changing realm of consumption-as-production, or “prosumption.”

In closing, it’s interesting to note that Catalano’s article is itself something of a mix of the kinds of deep-seated premises I’ve outlined, a mix that resonates strongly with more recent and specific statements on the cassette mixtape in particular. Carl Wilson wrote a similar column in 2005, when iPods first burst into the consumer tech sector. His “Ode to the yearning, churning mixtape” was composed as an annotated playlist – the article is “a mix tape in memory of mix tapes,” organized as reflections on twenty selections from Billie Holiday to Sonic Youth (and for further recursivity, some of the tracks are themselves musical odes to mixtapes). Here’s a sample entry:

19. Mixtape=Love (Viva Voce, 2004): The mix CD may permit laziness, but it doesn’t require it. I spent as many hours on a mix for my wife while she was away this winter as I ever have, sifting hundreds of tracks for strands on separation and return, on time’s conveyances. Her response was as tender as to any cassette. (But handwrite the track listing: Modernity has its limits.)

So I’m tempted (perhaps unfairly) to suggest there’s no blood, sweat and tears involved in the Forbes article. In its unexamined, problematic assumptions, nostalgic affectation, and played-out tropes, this article suggests that the art of lamenting the lost art of the mixtape is itself in danger of being lost on a generation of writers that can so easily pastiche premises and arguments from the whole history of writing on media – premises and arguments that demand critical scrutiny. Such arguments short-change and dismiss the diverse and vital practices of music sharing and music-making practiced by kids today – who are still alright, as The Who sang, and whom you can’t fool, as Peter Tosh did. Maybe download those two to start your next playlist.

Works Cited

Auslander, Philip. “Liveness, Mediatization, and Intermedial Performance.” Degrés: Revue de synthèse à orientation sémiologique 101 (2000). http://lmc.gatech.edu/~auslander/publications/liveness.pdf

Benjamin, Walter. “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction” (1936). Rpt. in Marxists Archive.

Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.

Carr, Nicholas. The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. New York: WW Norton, 2010.

Catalano, Michele. “The lost art of the mixtape.” Forbes 23 Dec. 2012.

Deadmau5 [Joel Zimmerman]. “we all hit play.” United We Fail 23 Jun. 2012.

Plato. Phaedrus. Plato in Twelve Volumes. Vol. 9. Trans. Harold N. Fowler. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1925. Rpt. in “The first critique of writing: Plato’s Phaedrus.” U of Illinois.

Tosh, Peter. “Can’t blame the youth.” Intel-Diplo, 1973.

The Who. “The kids are alright.” My Generation. Brunswick, 1965.

Wilson, Carl. “Ode to the yearning, churning mix tape.” Globe and Mail 4 Jun. 2005: R6.

How you know you’ve arrived as a popular culture scholar

When a reader likens your work to porn. (Favourably.)

It's got McLuhan, Grant Mazzy, AND Brian O'Blivion, so this is basically porn to me: bit.ly/RIUAot (thanks @sonicfiction!)—
Andrew Snowdon (@snobiwan) November 17, 2012

The work in question is my chapter in the new collection Selves and Subjectivities: Reflections on Canadian Arts and Culture, edited by Manijeh Mannani and Veronica Thompson, out now from AU Press – in purchasable print and free, Open Access e-book formats.

“By examining how writers and performers have conceptualized and negotiated issues of personal identity in their work, the essays collected in Selves and Subjectivities investigate emerging representations of self and other in contemporary Canadian arts and culture.”

Flash fiction, science fiction, and the shape of things to come

I’m pleased to see that one of my flash fiction tweets for the CBC “Tweets from 2112” contest made the adjudicators’ all-stars list in the Environment category.

Hunters have moved on. Kids sleeping, despite heat. Power low: one last crowdbeg for #food or #meds, pls DM if u can share. #canadawrites—
Mark A. McCutcheon (@sonicfiction) October 24, 2012

I don’t have anywhere near the time I’d like to devote to writing fiction and poetry, so I’m not above hyping either flash fiction generally (see Jeff Noon for an exemplar of the form) or this particular honourable mention, especially since the event was run by Canadian SF luminary Robert J. Sawyer, with adjudicators from SF Canada.

“Tweets from 2112” was organized as a contest, but took shape as an absorbing (=distracting) literary experiment in collective speculative fiction. I submitted several flash fiction tweets to it, but the one chosen for the all-stars list is the one I’m happiest with as a self-contained narrative…and as a flash back from the kind of future I can’t help imagining as most plausible.

Here are the others I wrote, reports from possible futures all contingent on the particular present (as Frederic Jameson theorizes what SF does).

MT @HarperCanFoxNews Emperor Cryo-Harper III dismisses class action against the Dynasty by the Federation of Freshwater Bodies #canadawrites—
Mark A. McCutcheon (@sonicfiction) October 24, 2012

Twitter and Stuxnet cross-breed, activate launch codes.
This is the way the world ends: not with a bang but with a twitter.
#canadawrites—
Mark A. McCutcheon (@sonicfiction) October 24, 2012

Canada finally extracts itself from #FIPA…as China's SOEs finally extract last oil & water from Canada. #canadawrites leadnow.ca/canada-not-for…—
Mark A. McCutcheon (@sonicfiction) October 24, 2012

These other submissions are maybe more satirical than science-fictional; as the contest developed, I couldn’t resist leveraging the contest tag, once it was trending, to do some consciousness-raising too, in this case about the urgent issue of #FIPA, the secretive, $64 billion, 31-year trade deal between Canada and China, which stands to get Royal Assent anytime now without so much as a single minute of debate in Parliament – despite the repeated questions of opposition MPs and several citizen petitions, the biggest of which now has over 70,000 signatures. FIPA is basically a trade treaty that commits Canada to exporting more climate change in the coming decades. As David Suzuki explains it:

Why would anyone want to sell out our interests, democratic processes and future like this? And why would we put up with it? On the first question, Gus Van Harten, an international investment law professor at Osgoode Hall Law School [and an outspoken critic of FIPA], told Desmog Blog we must consider the possibility that government and industry know that changes in attitudes about fossil fuel extraction “may lead to new regulations on the oil patch, in that, climate can’t just be wished away forever, and that governments might take steps to regulate the oil patch in ways that investors wouldn’t like.” He continues, “If you bring in a lot of Chinese investments, and you sign the Canada investment deal, you kind of get the Chinese investors to do your dirty work for you.”
In other words, as the world recognizes the already extreme and increasing consequences of global warming and shifts from wastefully burning fossil fuels to conservation and renewable energy, tar sands bitumen may soon become uneconomical. The goal is to dig it up, sell it and burn it as quickly as possible while there’s still money to be made. It’s cynical and suicidal, but it’s the kind of thinking that is increasingly common among those who see the economy as the highest priority — over human health and the air, water, soil and biodiverse ecosystems that keep us alive.

FIPA thus points to a compromised, colonized future for Canada’s energy industry, a dire, costly future for the nation’s democracy and resource sovereignty, and a further diminishment of Canada’s standing in the international community. It is not the Canada I would leave to the next generation, whose survival, never mind prosperity, deals like FIPA squander and endanger.

Which is why I find it hard to imagine a world in 2112 that isn’t fundamentally post-apocalyptic, finally laid waste by corporate greed that now seems bent on its own ultimate collapse, on the cannibalizing of its own institutions, before we can collectively imagine a different future, another world. These are dangerous, precipitous days, on the cusp or arguably even already past the tipping point of globalized climate catastrophe. In this context, science fiction has important consciousness-raising work to do, in ringing the alarm now sounded far and wide by the genre’s present preoccupations with (zombie) apocalypse and post-apocalypse.

Which brings me to a short hypothesis about science fiction’s projecting power. Setting aside, for the moment, the critical consensus (following Jameson) that science fiction is best understood as a literature of commentary on the present, not the future, what nevertheless can we see of the genre’s power to project if not predict the shape of things to come?

Take “cyberpunk” for example. As the most popular science fiction of thirty years ago, this subgenre might reasonably be said to have projected an accurate image of today’s globalized, corporate-ruled, digitally networked, and simulacrum-haunted world.

Now take “post-apocalypse” for another example: it’s arguably, at present, the most popular subgenre of science fiction today. What might post-apocalypse, the most popular science fiction of today, project about our world thirty years from now?

We need to heed these reports from our possible futures, lest we find ourselves doomed to produce them.

Work Cited
Suzuki, David. “China deal and budget sacrifice democracy to short-term goals.” David Suzuki Foundation 25 Oct. 2012.

“Political correctness”: decoding a vicious, pernicious code word

I always cringe when I hear the phrase “political correctness” being used. It’s a deeply coded phrase, and what it encodes is a stubborn, neoconservative cultural politics, a politics of entitlement and disrespect. And yet that politics is so deeply coded that one encounters the phrase being used by people who should know better; and maybe they will learn to avoid the phrase, if they take the time to get caught up on its context and complexity. If I never see it being taken out and waved around in public discourse again, it will be too soon.

In the late 1980s and ’90s, North American academia – and the Humanities and social sciences sector more specifically – found itself in a war of words and policies not only among its own stakeholders, but also with policymakers, and with corporate news media – which, let’s remember, held far more cultural and discursive sway then, before the popularization of the Internet in the mid-’90s. This encounter became known as the “Culture Wars.” In his critical retrospective, Lunar Perspectives: Field Notes from the Culture Wars, U of Guelph Professor Emeritus Michael Keefer describes the Culture Wars as “a widespread perception of crisis in North American higher education, a perception stemming largely from the outcries over ‘political correctness’ in American and Canadian universities that began in the late 1980s” and continued until the mid-1990s (Keefer vi). Understood in retrospect as a “moral panic” created and fueled by neoconservative ideologues (e.g. Rush Limbaugh, George F. Will, Allan Bloom) to justify the defunding and privatizing of the Humanities and social sciences, the “PC furore” revolved around the coded buzzword “political correctness.”

“Political correctness” remains in use today, usually as a pejorative term that neoconservatives use to ridicule or criticize progressive or left-leaning events or persons, to conjure moral panic over freedom of speech, or to otherwise vilify criticism of inappropriate or untenable claims. Take this Maclean’s article from last year, for instance, which uses the phrase to dismiss the UN’s quite legitimate critique of Canada’s policy language of “visible minorities.”

One of the usual suspects

The phrase also gets an annual dusting-off during the holiday season in neoconservative news media reports of a purported “war on Christmas.” The phrase has nothing like the traction it had in the early 1990s – when you couldn’t swing a black and smoking Christmas tree without hitting some old white fart brandishing a new book denouncing the censorious menace of “PC” – but it has persisted, viciously and perniciously, in everyday speech, popular culture, and public discourse. “Political correctness” is still a card quickly played by conservative or otherwise privileged voices who complain of being “censored” – not just the usual rightwing media suspects, but also a curious and tenacious class of strident yet paranoid academics whose definitions of political correctness – as some kind of discursive “tyranny,” or liberal conspiracy, or “threat” to academic freedom – have helped establish the phrase as a rhetorical stick with which to beat progressive intellectuals. Or intellectuals generally, for that matter. I’m not linking to any such definitions or diatribes. Google “political correctness” if you want, and then take in the lunacy of even just the first page of results. But I will stoop to briefly administer some undeserved oxygen of publicity to a recent example in peer-reviewed scholarship – on account of its windy bombast, and its startling success in finding refereed publication some twenty years after this party more or less ended:

One of the abominations of our day, and there are many, is the beast of political correctness that has been turned loose on the world. Born of genuine humanitarian impulses, it now threatens to devour much of what is greatest in our literature and forever separate the children of our culture from what is essential to their humanity. (272)

Whoa, this opener makes PC sound like a Monsanto product. Actually, in this particular article, this chimerical “beast” threatens to suggest that Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is a racist text, instead of just a “beautifully written” one that “should still be read” (278) – as though analyzing the book’s racism somehow means we shouldn’t, or haven’t.

But – its purported “beastliness” and “tyranny” aside – what does the phrase actually mean, as a phrase so cherished and widespread in neoconservative usage? “For the sake of reporters and columnists who might want to come clean and openly mock the virtues that would otherwise remain hidden by the PC label,” Keefer directs our attention to Wayne Booth’s “list of synonyms for political correctness”:

(1) decency; (2) legality; (3) moral or ethical standards; (4) justice, fairness, equality of opportunity; (5) tact, courtesy, concern about hurting people’s feelings unnecessarily; (6) generosity; (7) kindness; (8) courage in defending the underdog; (9) anti-bigotry; (10) anti-racism; (11) anti-anti-Semitism; (12) anti-fascism; (13) anti-sexism; (14) refusal to kneel to mammon; (15) sympathetic support for the jobless, the homeless, the impoverished, or the abused; (16) preservation of an environment in which human life might survive; (17) openness to the possibility that certain popular right-wing dogmas just might be erroneous. (qtd. in Keefer 11)

More plain-spoken versions of this definition appear as ripostes to a diatribe against political correctness that was published (unsurprisingly enough) on the Richard Dawkins Foundation website:

“Political Correctness” – Buzzword used to express the absurd notion that the majority is being dominated by the minorities. (foundationist)

Political correctness is formalised good manners. It has been a benefit to society. Before it became influential it was common to see overt racism, sexism, homophobia, jokes about the disabled and so on. Fortunately a culture of respect for diversity developed and with it a culture of disrespect for rudeness – political correctness. … The term ‘political correctness’ can be used as a verbal weapon by those who want to do extreme things, things which would attack equality and human rights. When others complain, the response ‘that’s just political correctness’ is supposed to be a conversation stopper, because political correctness is supposed to be wrong. Complaining about political correctness is as absurd as complaining about good manners. The response ‘that’s just political correctness’ usually translates as ‘that’s just being polite’. (Zara)

In other words, “political correctness” is a nasty way to describe talking nicely, as though talking nicely is nasty. This rhetorical duplicity, coupled with the privileged, dominant positions from which pronouncements on political correctness typically come, has made the phrase “political correctness” slippery, robust, and insidious. The phrase thus provides a present-day example of “political speech and writing” as “the defense of the indefensible,” as criticized by George Orwell, in his 1946 essay “Politics and the English language.” The phrase “political correctness” is a perfect example of a phrase whose cryptic complexity lets it smuggle into one’s speech or writing a formidable freight of covert (and perhaps, sometimes, unintended) meanings that can detract from or even derail the point of a statement in which it’s used, when it’s not being openly used to justify oppression.

Amidst the flame wars, troll rampages, and other hostilities that attend a digital mediascape much more populous and interactive than it was in the mid-1990s, it is a tragedy of English vocabulary and public discourse that one of the main progressive take-away points from the “political correctness” furore – that we be courteous, thoughtful, sensitive, inclusive, and above all respectful in our language – has been lost, body-snatched by a sneaky and vicious code word for the privileged, entitled, and bigoted to claim not only license but even moral high ground for their vituperative sound and fury.

Works cited

Booth, Wayne. “A politically correct letter to the newspaper.” Democratic Culture 3.1 (1994): 2.

Curtler, Hugh Mercer. “Political correctness and the attack on great literature.” Modern Age 51.3-4 (2009): 272-79.

Derry, Alex. “Political correctness gone mad?” Maclean’s 10 Aug. 2011

foundationist. Comment 2 re: “A challenge to the politically correct.” Richard Dawkins Foundation. 20 Apr. 2011

Keefer, Michael. Lunar Perspectives: Field Notes from the Culture Wars. Toronto: Anansi, 1996. Print.

Orwell, George. “Politics and the English Language.” Horizon Apr. 1946. Rpt. in Stanford U. Web.

Zara, Steve. Comment 4 re: “A challenge to the politically correct.” Richard Dawkins Foundation. 20 Apr. 2011

Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Research as a Public Good

Buffy and her friends spend a lot of time reading. This is uncharacteristic enough for a Hollywood prime-time serial drama (it’s practically un-American). But more specifically, they spend a lot of time doing research: finding the most authoritative sources on a subject, reading up, and discussing what they read. And it’s rare that the research doesn’t pay off, in one way or another; most often, it pays off in critical discoveries and insights, knowledge of the situations, events, and adversaries they face, of the histories that have produced them, and sometimes even of vital knowledge of self. That knowledge reliably then helps Buffy to kick serious demonic ass. Buffy the Vampire Slayer routinely dramatizes research in action as a public good.

Rupert Giles, “watcher” and librarian-turned-entrepreneur

One of the main protagonists, the “watcher” Giles – Buffy’s supervisor and paternal sort of mentor – is a librarian, who runs the high school library. For all the predictable tweedy jokes, the character is an essential part of the team, as readily looked to as leader as the slayer herself. Giles demonstrates research best practices by cultivating an important specialist collection (although its place in a public secondary school is curious, and sometimes challenged by parents and other authority characters), by identifying the best sources on certain subjects, and by putting in the time and effort that research needs to take if it is to prove valuable.

In an early, character-establishing first-season episode, Buffy’s friend Willow asks Giles:

–How is it you always know this stuff? You always know whats going on. I never know whats going on.
–You werent here from midnight till six researching it.

This is a teachable moment: in subsequent episodes, the whole team is often shown in marathon, wee-hours research tableaus and montages. Here are still frames from one such typical montage, in season three’s episode 10 (“Amends”).

Need some books

Need more books, and a whiteboard

Sunnydale High: ahead of the trend in allowing food in the library

For the first three seasons, then, the school library is a regular setting for scenes in the series, scenes of research, and of modeling how to do research. The library setting also thus comments on the anti-intellectual ideology that’s more common and prevalent in popular culture. Except for the main protagonists, the school library is usually deserted. When student character extras enter, the protagonists meet them with surprise and bewilderment. That the library has an extensive specialized collection of rare and ancient texts on withcraft and demonology goes largely unnoticed by other characters, except in one third-season episode (“Gingerbread’) in which Buffy’s mother spearheads a moral panic and literal witch hunt, leading to the police confiscation of Giles’ specialist archive, and culminating in a witch- and book-burning denouement.

Just some light weekend reading for Willow

The series script regularly has characters recognizing a need for and then conducting research, often in montage scenes to suggest the significant time and effort that goes into the research process. There are plenty of jokes about how research is tiring, isn’t fun, and so on, but the protagonists still commit to it – and it usually brings results. Their research regularly results in knowledge that helps and often saves individuals, groups, the town, the world. The series reinforces its valuation of research too by dramatizing inattention and lack of rigour as research practice errors that make bad situations worse. For instance, in the third-season episode in which an imported face mask begins producing zombies, an early scene shows Giles absentmindedly turning pages in a book, ostensibly researching, but flipping past the page that illustrates and describes the mask. The show makes it imperative not only that one does one’s homework, but that one does it well: using the best sources and reading them diligently.

Researching in Giles’ home library

As the series progresses, the fact that Buffy and her team graduate from high school and go to college doesn’t change their need to do research, but changes the dramatic sites in which research is done. Interestingly, in the fourth season, as Buffy and Willow begin college, the first episode briefly shows the college library as a serious research library that dwarfs the school’s; however, the protagonists are never shown doing research there. That they refrain from researching in the university library suggests that library – unlike the school’s – does actually get used by other students, and doesn’t house the specialized archive they need. So instead, the library moves, becomes portable – and, interestingly, more privatized. In the fourth season, most of the research is done at Giles’ own home.

As Buffy and Xander read up, Giles climbs up to his shop’s not-for-sale book section

In the fifth season, when he buys the town magic shop, this retail store becomes the repository for Giles’ collection and the primary site in which the team carries out its researches.

The series thus both promotes the value of research as a public good, and – ironically if not downright paradoxically – performs the privatization of research resources, in the migration of the team’s library from the high school, to the librarian’s home, to a retail store. Buffy the Vampire rewards rewatching today with a critical eye to its representations of research, given significant developments in research and its regulation. At the global level, the various policies and trade deals that purport to strengthen copyright law, taken together, represent a multilateral, globalized campaign not only to protect Big Content businesses but even to control the Internet, to regulate and curb its demonstrated potential to subvert modern forms of state governance. At the regional level, the overdeveloped Anglophone world (e.g. the USA, the UK, Canada) privileges private corporate interests whose client governments are carrying out a systematic program of what political science professor Janine Brodie calls “manufactured ignorance”: the active destruction – through “austerity” and other policy measures – of citizens’ “social literacy,” that is, a people’s knowledge of self and history as a people. Canada, for example, has recently witnessed deep budget cuts to libraries, archives, and public broadcasting, as well as the active government muzzling of climate change researchers. To retrieve, today, a popular cultural product, from the not-so-distant past, that prominently promotes research as the first step of effective social action – a vital contribution to the public good – is a most welcome research result. It’s a lesson in history, as conceptualized by Walter Benjamin: history is the critical image that flashes before you at a moment of danger. And so, I might add, is research.

Works Cited

Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Writ. Joss Whedon. Warner Bros./Paramount, 1997-2003.

Brodie, Janine. “Manufacturing ignorance: Harper, the census, social inequality.” Canada Watch Spring 2011. 30-31. http://robarts.info.yorku.ca/files/2012/03/CW_Spring2011.pdf

—. “On courage, social justice, and policymaking.” Rabble.ca 16 Sept. 2012. http://rabble.ca/news/2011/09/courage-social-justice-and-policy-making

Screen frames from Buffy the Vampire Slayer used under fair dealing provisions of Canadian copyright law.

Introduction to a Buffy Crash Course

In the wee hours before turning in, on these crisp early autumn nights, I’ve taken to bingeing on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (I’m now starting season five. No spoilers, please.) I never watched Buffy when it was broadcast, writing it off mostly for the same reasons I never watched Star Trek TNG, The X Files, and similar “genre” shows: reasons like low-budget special effects (e.g. lots of rubbery face makeup) and artificial, formulaic scripting (e.g. no swearing; plotting that caters to US culture’s social conservatism).

But as an academic with one foot squarely in Cultural Studies, I have known for some time that Buffy draws strong scholarly interest. It wasn’t until I read this Slate article – “Which pop culture property do academics study the most?” – that I started to appreciate the scope of that interest.

The article sets out to determine “which pop culture property do academics study the most?” Not designed as a formal research project, the authors’ informal survey method shows some significant limitations: they take “pop culture properties” unproblematically to mean “film and TV” productions (thus excluding literary works that are arguably just as popular, if not moreso), and more specifically US productions (thus excluding the rest of the world, though the USA’s formidable leadership as pop culture exporter sort of justifies the assumption). The authors consult similarly US-centric data sources: Berkeley’s media resource centre, university library databases like JStor and Proquest, and Google Scholar, looking for theses, dissertations, refereed articles, and books on pop culture productions. Nevertheless, from these problematic premises and methods, the authors make a suggestive observation. Comparing scholarship search results for major franchises like Alien, The Matrix, and The Simpsons, the authors quickly arrived at the conclusion that the most studied pop culture text is “Buffy … by a mile.”

More than twice as many papers, essays, and books have been devoted to the vampire drama than any of our other choices — so many that we stopped counting when we hit 200. Buffy even has its own journal: Slayage, a publication of the Whedon Studies Association. (¶4)

Putting this information together with a recently subscribed Netflix account, I thought I should finally get caught up on what is evidently now a touchstone, a canonical text for Cultural Studies. For the chronically time-constrained (I normally watch maybe a half-hour of TV on any given day), the prospect of tackling a seven-season TV series is a lot like the prospect of cracking a Victorian three-decker novel (the kind Dickens deliberately stretched out in periodical instalments to maximize profit) – which is to say, it’s a substantial time investment. Thankfully, that investment has already begun to show returns for my research interests in adaptation studies and Romanticism, and in Frankenstein adaptations especially.

In season 2, Buffy battles a reanimated football star bent on Frankensteinian wedded bliss

So as of this writing, I’m starting season five (did I mention I won’t take kindly to spoilers here?), but I am ready to report some preliminary reflections on the franchise, which I’ll be doing here, intermittently, in a series of posts: the Buffy Crash Course.

For now, I’ll just register my initial surprise at how closely the series speaks to my interest in Frankenstein adaptations. I was prepared to find some thematic and formal connections to Frankenstein, but expected them to take shape more according to the long-standing cultural associations between vampire narratives and the Frankenstein story, associations that go back to the earliest stage adaptations, even to the ghost story contest among Mary Shelley and her friends that inspired her to write Frankenstein – and John Polidori to write The Vampyre. That is, I was prepared to find resonances with Frankenstein in Buffy on the assumption that Buffy is all about vampires exclusively. Wasn’t the movie? I don’t clearly recall. But the TV show isn’t – it’s more of what one character (in an apt bit of recursive dialogue) calls a “creature feature,” and so takes part in Hollywood’s long tradition of monster-movie cross-overs. (For instance, see 1948′s monster mash Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein … actually, on second thought, don’t.) The point is that there’s a lot more directly intertextual linkage in Buffy not just to Dracula but also to Frankenstein and virtually the whole modern western tradition of Gothic horror and weird fiction, with occasional infusions of science fiction too.

“The important thing is we’re all right and we can work this out like two reasonable … frontiersmen.” One of the funniest line so far (from season 3 episode 13), in a show I wasn’t expecting comedy gold from either.

So on that count this project of TV overindulgence as research is already paying off; I’m understanding, according to my own lights, a little more about the show’s interest for scholarly research. In the next instalment, I’ll turn from the show’s relationship with research, to how the show itself represents research.

Works Cited

Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Writ. Joss Whedon. Warner Bros./Paramount, 1997-2003.
Lametti, Daniel, et al. “Which pop culture property do academics study the most?” Slate 11 Jun. 2012.

Screen frames from Buffy the Vampire Slayer used under fair dealing provisions of Canadian copyright law.

For Operation Black March: 31 entertainment ideas without Big Content

Operation Black March is Anonymous’ campaign to boycott Big Content, as punishment for the entertainment lobby’s unrelenting sponsorship of new “copyright” bills and deals that censor the Internet and kill civil liberties. Hence #OpBlackMarch: no buying – or downloading – movies, TV, music, or games, during March 2012.

Boycotting Big Content for a month poses a quintessential #FirstWorldProblem: it seems absurd that you couldn’t easily go without entertainment products for a month; but could you actually go without them for a month? If it seems like a challenge, then it’s also an opportunity: to rediscover the diversity of leisure; to redefine “entertainment”; and maybe to reassess how we, in the overdeveloped first world, spend our downtime. We’ll get through this. And if enough of us commit, we’ll let Big Content know they’re not the last word in entertainment, so quit it with the endless torrent of digital doomsday plans.

Here you go, then: in no particular order, thirty-one entertainments that don’t profit Big Content. Something to occupy a free hour (or two or three), every day in March. If you’ve got another good idea, leave a comment below. These ones weren’t hard to come up with, and they’re all pretty low-effort, low-impact (no home reno projects, no GTD). The point is basically to use your imagination – I know you’ve got one. Imagine the message we could send by boycotting Big Content for just a month…or maybe longer…

#3. The mild winter makes for good walking, even if you're not in Stanley Park.

1. Read this post and plan your month.
2. Bake cookies.
3. Go for a walk. Yes, outside.
4. Read a book you’ve been meaning to start – or to finish.
5. Make a home video and post it to Youtube. (Come on, you know this project could take a few nights, if you put in some effort.)
6. Make the business! (You know what I mean. This could also take a few nights, if you put in some effort.)
7. The public library is your friend: sign out a new book, or a not-so-new book, or an old movie, or a foreign movie.
8. Open Culture is your friend, too. Check out this site’s extensive curation of open-access and public-domain movies, music, and more.
9. Call your mother.

#10. Culture jamming for beginners.

10. Get out there and culture jam! If you’re a beginner, see the picture at left. Advanced culture jammers might consider upping the ante. For instance:

“At Lake Worth they got a traffic ticket for using the horn and Gnossos took up an hour collecting as many stubs as he could find on the windshields of other cars. He mailed them all to the local fuzz, in a large manila envelope with no return address.” ¹

11. Yoga. No, really.
12. Make a mix CD – okay, an iPod playlist – for a special occasion – or a special person. Presto, you’re fifteen again! Or an amateur DJ! Woo!
13. Play a board game or a card game.
14. “Would you like to own at once the smallest and most disturbing book in the world? Have the stamps from your love letters bound up and weep – in spite of everything, there is good reason to do so.”²
15. Go to a local cafe or bar, for some random peoplewatching. Or try this: “What a wonderful pursuit: go into a cafe and ask for sugar, again for sugar, three or four times for sugar, continue with great concentration constructing a mountain of sugar, center of the table, while indignation swells along the counters and beneath the white aprons, and then spit, softly, right in the middle of the mountain, and watch the descent of the small glacier of saliva, hear the roar of broken rocks which accompanies it, arising from the contracted throats of five local customers and the boss, an honest man when he feels like it.”³

#16. I'z not nappin I'z transcendentralizin

16. Meditate.
17. Go out dancing.
18. Walk or drive out to where you can see the stars, and make up some new constellations.
19. Get fit: sign out an exercise video from the library (it’s your friend, remember) or search up a Youtube exercise video, and try working out instead of vegging out.
20. If you have a social app account, browse through past posts to catch up on links or videos you meant to check out but didn’t have time for at the time. If you don’t have a social app account, try one out – see who’s out there.
21. Pyjama dance party!
22. Re-read a book you only read once, and not recently. You’ll be amazed.
23. KARAOKE. You can’t even say it without agreeing to it: OK!
24. Go to the theatre. Whenever you mention this, be sure to pronounce it “thea-TAH.”
25. Origami: it can be frustrating at first, but then it gets really contemplative. (FYI, it may get frustrating again if you actually try to make a thousand cranes.)

#25. Origami (not for beginners).

26. Somewhere nearby, someone is bound to be playing music for no cover charge. Go find them and dig on that scene.
27. Youtube party!
28. With a partner and/or friends, read a classic play or story, each of you taking on a certain character’s role and voice. (I know somebody whose family does this with Dickens’ Christmas Carol over the holidays. I can only assume copious amounts of heavily spiked eggnog are involved.)
29. Fancy supper party: candlelight, wine, vaguely porny background music; you know the drill.
30. Find a really old album or forgotten mixtape that you haven’t listened to in years. Play it start to finish, perhaps with a drink in hand.
31. Invite friends over and talk about how you’ve spent your month. You 1, Big Content 0.

Notes
1. Fariña, Richard. Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me (1966). New York: Penguin, 1996. 279-80
2. Breton, André and Paul Éluard. “The Original Judgement.” The Immaculate Conception (1930). Trans. Jon Graham. London: Atlas P, 1990. 118.
3. Cortázar, Julio. Cronopios and Famas (1962). Trans. Paul Blackburn. New York: New Directions, 1999. 59