Food and Music

Posted on  SEM-L:

Hello all,
Two cooking shows on NPR affiliates this Saturday the 2nd and September 23
will feature our Ethnomusicologists’ Cookbook. The first is on WHYY in
Philadelphia: the show is called “A Chef’s Table,” hosted by Jim Coleman,
and is broadcast at noon, EST. You will be able to hear the archived version
of it after 1 pm by going to the WHYY site:
http://www.whyy.org/91FM/chef/index.html.

The second interview/discussion is on KCRW in Los Angeles: the show is
called “Good Food” and is hosted by Evan Kleiman. It will be aired on the
23rd between 11 and 12 PST. You can hear the archived version, once it’s up
and running, by going to their website: http://www.kcrw.com/show/gf.

There’s also the possibility of the cookbook being featured on Jeff
Nemcher’s “Cooking on the Radio,” and a number of positive reviews have come
out already (The Chronicles of Higher Education, for example).

Besides the fact that 40% of the royalties for the book are going to the
Society for Ethnomusicology, we now have the added benefit that several
radio people and many, many listeners are going to be hearing the word
“ethnomusicology” for the first time, and understanding something of what it
means. I hope that this is good news for all of us. [And perhaps my parents
will stop having to explain what it is that I actually do!]

Cheers, Sean Williams

France and Higher Ed

[Yet another older draft…]

Choses Vues » Blog Archive » Higher education in France

(That link now leads to a paid article. Here’s another link to the article.) Perhaps typical of NYT pieces these days, this article is rather detailed without being edifying and somewhat provocative without being thought-provoking. It’s also very ethnocentric. Too bad, though, as the issue would merit a thorough analysis. Coming from French-speaking institutions outside of France and currently connected with academic institutions in the U.S., my personal perspective is quite different. Not that the issues with the French system are at all surprising to me. But comparison with the United States doesn’t really bring the issue forward. As Paul says, Scandinavian institutions could provide more interesting models. My experience in Switzerland and Quebec is also significantly different from what is described in the article. Not that any one of those post-secondary educational systems is perfect. They all have their strengths and weaknesses. But post-secondary education is not limited to France and the United States. In fact, France and the U.S. are isolated cases in today’s educational world. What might even be surprising to many people is that those two countries are often much more similar than different. For instance, the extremely high prestige afforded a precious few institutions is a striking feature of both educational systems (Grandes écoles, Ivy League…). It might exist in other places (say, England) but, at least, it’s not characteristic of universities in Quebec. In Canada generally, most academic institutions have much of the same status, despite attempts by MacLean’s to rank universities every year (à la Princeton Review). While the rankings have some effect, they are much less restrictive than what exists in either the U.S. or France. Also, faculty members across Canada get almost exactly the same salary for the same position, irrespective of their host institution. Disparities in salaries exist at many other levels but they usually don’t distinguish one institution from the rest. Will probably post a blog entry about this pretty soon.

Média et sens critique

Bon, puisque mes commentaires sont toujours refusés… Ma réponse à un billet de cos.

Pour une raison ou une autre, quelques-uns de tes billets apparaissent dans mon Tag Surfer. Donc on doit avoir des intérêts communs.
Avec les média indépendants, espérons que les gens ne commencent pas à les prendre trop au pied de la lettre. D’après moi, ça reste important de garder un sens critique. D’ailleurs, certains lecteurs de DN parmi mes amis font un peu comme les lecteurs du NYT: ils se limitent à une source et ne cherchent pas ce qui se cache derrière cette source. Pour ceux d’entre nous dans le domaine académique, c’est une stratégie assez dangereuse en ce qu’elle encourage la pensée unique.
D’un autre côté, il y a un mouvement très sérieux (bien que très minoritaire) vers une réflexion plus poussée sur le statut de «l’information». Garder son sens critique par rapport à ce qu’on lit. Les blogues font parfois partie.de ce mouvement, mais il y a plus que ça.
Mon espoir, personnellement, c’est qu’une grande proportion des gens en viennent à penser de la façon la plus large possible. Qu’ils apprennent à comprendre comment les autres pensent.
Mais ça, c’est ma déformation professionnelle en tant qu’anthropologue.

Blogging Spree

Weeeeee!

My, oh my!

It might be the Back to School mood, or it might be something (I was advised to write more, for personal reasons) but it seems like I’m going through an intense blogging phase!

Man!

You know what? It feels gooood!

Several of my latest entries were in fact drafted a while ago.

And this one is a collection of short entries that could have been expanded entries.
Late August Quickies

So, all of these aren’t new entries. But publishing them helps me in many ways. As silly as it may sound, these drafted entries were starting to become a burden on me. So, publishing them feels like lifting that burden. This feeling is behind many people’s “to do” lists. My mother talks about that feeling you get when you cross out an item in your “to do” list. It’s hard to describe but it’s easy to understand if you’ve ever felt it. In my family, “to do” lists are called “vélo (faire du),” an example of our oikolect. It comes from the French “bike (to do).” My older brother noticed that item on one of my mother’s “to do” lists lying around and found it pretty funny. It stuck. My family also has a term for the opposite of procrastination, “fullfur” (/fUlfyr/ in IPA). It comes from English “full,” which has been used by young French-speakers in Eastern Quebec to mean pretty much the same thing as “totally” as used by U.S. youths, and “au fur et à mesure” in French, which means pretty much the same thing as English “as you go.” Both of these terms go well with my family’s ideas about time-management. Not that we all follow these ideas. But I have been enculturated into these ideas.

Anyhoo (!), back to blogging sprees.

They’re quite therapeutic. Maybe because they stimulate da buh-rain.

And I notice a number of things about writing and blogging strategies. Seems like blogging really works best if it’s kept spontaneous. But going back to previous entries can be pretty satisfying too.

There’s pretty much no reason to wait before posting an entry. RERO!

As I expected, writing a lot without too much self-censorship really helps to develop writing abilities. Not I’m necessarily that proud of my writing but I do write a lot and some people have complimented me for my writing style. Especially as a non-native speaker of N-guh-lish.

Editing can be easy and fun if enough time has passed since the last revision. It can be a b*tch when it’s done right away.

The entries I’m most proud of (yes, there are some) don’t tend to be the most read ones or the ones garnering comments. But they feel really good to write. In a way, the fact that they’re not read so much encourages me to stay humble, which is helpful to any writer.

Linking is fun. So is playing with categories/labels/tags. Actually, it’s quite likely that nobody notices my use of categories as counterpoint to my entries, but I do it for fun anyway.

My growing obsession with getting more comments might die out pretty soon. And as soon as it does, I will be getting so many comments that I’ll have to moderate my blogs!

There’s a chain reaction or domino effect to blogging. You write about one thing which makes you want to blog about another thing, etc.  So you go on a blogging spree during which you want to post 25 entries a day. Eventually, your blogging fervor peters out and you only blog a few times a month. It’s quite likely that getting comments has a large influence on whether you’re on a blogging spree or not.

Given the way blog entries are read, it doesn’t seem to matter much if an entry’s structure is tidy or “chevelue.” Good thing too as my thoughts tend to be pretty scattered. (Yes, really!)

Erm, and, it’s actually hard to press that publish button, sometimes.

Oikolect!

Got it! The term for a family’s linguistic idiosyncrasies is oikolect:

oikolect@Everything2.com

Don’t you love it when you find the Right Term(tm)?
The reason I’m excited is that I found it in a neat way. Went to Babelfish to find the Greek prefix for family. Though I can’t read Greek, the prefix looked like “oiko” so I did a search for “oikolect” (using the logic behind “idiolect“) and it just so happen that the word has in fact been used in exactly the sense I was thinking about.

Man are those Internets great!

Will eventually need to look into published research about oikolect. Come to think of it, the term might have been mentioned in one of my course in linguistic anthropology. So I should probably feel bad about not remembering it. But one of my most recent resolutions is to not feel too bad about my limits. And it’s working!

Memes and Brights

[Drafted this a while ago. Seems like The Brights are becoming quite active these days.]

A critique of the “meme coining” centred on the negative connotations of the “bright” adjective:

Brights: Not Too “Bright” (Doubt and About)

A few scattered thoughts.

Continue reading Memes and Brights

Papa's Got a Brand New Blog

Switched to this here WordPress.com blog from Blogger. Mostly because of categories. And because my academic blog is on WordPress (but hosted on a university server). The beta version of Blogger does have labels, which work better than WordPress categories. And my Blogger account has recently been allowed to switch to the beta version. So, new blog:
Disparate 2

Not sure about switching to Blogger again. It’ll depend on the possibility to integrate other Google products. One major advantage of Blogger over WordPress.com is that templates are fully customizable. At this point, the main thing for me is that Javascript can be embedded so that Technorati can be integrated directly in the template. This has been possible in the previous version of Blogger but the new version makes it really simple.

Advantages of WordPress.com, at this point include a more complete blogroll mechanism (with OPML import, categories…), more post options, pages (though GooglePages makes this point moot), Akismet, more comment moderation features, and a few more sidebar widgets. But Blogger has better penetration (which is a benefit when using a Blogger account to post comments elsewhere), the interface is less cluttered, and the whole blogging system seems more like a complete system (while WordPress.com is more of a “lite” version of WordPress). If my new blog gets more comments than this one, the switch will make a lot of sense.

We’ll see.

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A bilingual blog on disparate subjects. / Un blogue disparate bilingue.