This week was a busy one. Yesterday, I presented at the Northeast Popular Culture Association Conference. The conference was held at St. Michael’s College in Colchester, Vermont. My presentation, “Like a Bird on a Wire: A Study of the Rediscovery, Preservation, and Circulation of Ephemeral Texts,” was well received, and I thoroughly enjoyed the presentations of the other panelists, who examined celebrity and fandom in connection to Nicki Minaj and Lady Gaga, respectively. Our presentations generated a lively dialogue with the audience and prompted some thought provoking questions.

In addition to presenting at the NEPCA Conference yesterday, on Thursday I ran a 400-level Sociology of Literature seminar. The topic of the seminar was love and postfeminism in the Twilight saga. Two articles were assigned for the class: Hila Shachar’s “A Post-Feminist Romance: Love, Gender and Intertextuality in Stephenie Meyer’s Saga” and “’The Urge Towards Love is an Urge Towards (un)Death’: Romance, Masochistic Desire and Postfeminism in the Twilight novels” by Anthea Taylor. This is the second time that I have run this particular seminar. The last time I held this seminar there were two students presenting on the articles, whereas this time I was in charge of introducing and contextualizing the articles and drafting discussion questions. Thus, it was probably beneficial that I have also read the entire Twilight series.

In approaching the Twilight series, both authors (Taylor and Shachar) focus on the Twilight books and/or the network of relationships among romance texts, such as Twilight. In other words, both authors only consider the postfeminist rhetoric of Twilight without examining whether or not actual readers are passively accepting or rethinking/contesting the books’ portrayals of patriarchal gender relations. This lack of attention to the act of reading reminded me of Janice Radway’s assertion in “Interpretative Communities and Variable Literacies: The Functions of Romance Reading” that it is vital to “distinguish between the book read by an individual and the act of reading itself carried on within a specific social context” (66). She continues: “by separating them analytically, one can then isolate the social and material situation surrounding the actual event of reading” (67). In this respect, I appreciate Anne Helen Petersen’s article “That Teenage Feeling: Twilight, Fantasy, and Feminist Readers,” which was not assigned as a seminar reading, but one I discovered and read in preparation for the class. In the article, Petersen sets out to discover the various pleasures feminist women derive from Twilight. Situating her analysis within a tradition of feminist ethnography, which includes Radway’s Reading the Romance, Petersen aims to “produce an ethnography that employs engaged criticism, yet resists reinterpreting or debunking readers’ own opinions, all the while attempting to situate participant responses within [the] current postfeminist cultural climate” (55). Interestingly, this study stems from Petersen’s own discomfort in obtaining pleasure from reading Twilight. In conclusion, she argues that Twilight, and similar texts, can and should be used to create dialogue and to provide opportunities to work through the contesting ideas of feminism contained both within the text and in the broader society. Here, the reader becomes confronted with the reality of both “the problems and the possibilities of the current cultural moment” (64-65). I think that Petersen’s article is important as it does not deride feminists for reading and experiencing pleasure from Twilight, but instead seeks to understand why and how we can experience this pleasure while simultaneously identifying and critiquing the problematic aspects of the series. Such an approach is beneficial for students who are fans of Twilight (as were many of the students in this seminar), as it allows them to be critical without having to reject their enjoyment of the series.

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Journalling takes us back some years to the emergence of the middle class, mercantiles documenting many of the more banal aspects of their day-to-day lives in keeping with the running of their households and businesses. Daniel Defoe elevated record-keeping to an art form with Robinson Crusoe, most of which is taken up in detailing inventories and explorations across the shipwrecked protagonist’s dessert island. At a certain point, personal archiving became the exclusive realm of those with the time and resources of a cosmopolitan upper class who knew they were already going to leave a mark on history: take for instance presidential libraries or Margaret Atwood’s meticulous preservation of everything she writes from manuscript drafts to correspondence to grocery lists. Today, everything is digital and automated, and the middle class is right back to journalling without even realizing it by way of life-hacking: we let apps and websites keep track of what we do in an effort to learn more about our own habits. Which brings me to me. Over the last few years, I’ve begun keeping track without understanding why. Earlier this year, my mother-in-law gave me a Fitbit One activity tracker that monitors my exertions, calorie intake and expenditure, and sleep quality; and since 2010 I’ve been using Shelfari to keep track of what I read (it used to be a lot of novels, and then I went back to graduate school and almost exclusively became theory and comics). But all of this is trumped by my great shame: for the past three years, I’ve been keeping a spreadsheet of all the movies I watch. And it’s a lot. (fig. 1)

(figure 1: a random sample of my movie watching habits. I could tell you a hundred things about how these records relate to each other)

Before I explain how this spreadsheet works, full disclosure: in the past 1,027 days (January 1st, 2011 to today), I’ve watched 951 movies. That’s not too embarrassing: it averages out to 1.079 movies a day 7.559 movies a week. Respectable, if only it was actually one movie a day and seven and a half movies a week. Instead, it ends up being zero movies some weeks and more than 20 other weeks. But I’m getting ahead of myself. The spreadsheet is simple: column A is the date I view a film, column B is the title and release year of the film, and column C is the film’s running time. A bold entry indicates if it was my first time seeing the film in question. In 2012, I start keeping a fourth column, D, that I mark if I saw the movie in theatres (in 2012 I saw 312 movies, only 12 of which were in theatres, and I didn’t start using Netflix until this summer, so I’m a dirty pirate). This chart alone is interesting to me, in that I can observe a thought process running throughout it: one actor or director leads to another, or seeing a particular genre film will remind of something along the same lines I haven’t seen in years. It’s a bit like Moretti’s flow of novel genre: some subtypes subtend toward others, which eventually supplant them. 

It wasn’t until a few days ago that I realized I should be writing my boot camp exercise about my own movie-watching habits, so I scrambled to learn enough about Excel to turn this spreadsheet into a histogram (fig. 2):

(figure 2: My movies per week for over 140 weeks. For a larger image click this: Kalervo’s Movie Watching)

It’s amazing what this chart tells me. I can connect huge spikes to times when I was doing a lot of writing or non-lit review research tasks (I like the background noise and must have ground through half of Hitchcock’s library writing a draft of my MA project in March of 2012), and I can connect drops to times in my life where I was otherwise occupied (the two biggest gaps are in late April of 2012, right after I finished my Master’s degree, and July/August of 2013, the month I got married). I can actually track major events, turning points, and trials in my life, just from the amount of movies I watched.

This was not easy. If the main point of these exercises is learn to do new forms of research, then the process of creating this histogram tells me a lot about how I should be doing things different in keeping my records, making my spreadsheet. For starters, Excel did not like the date format I was using. Getting around that took some time, and the first time I tried to put everything into a chart it came out a horrid mess (fig. 3):

(figure 3: my first attempt at a chart. Note the date range: 1904-3136. What?)

Secondly, bolding entries for new movies is useless in creating a visualization: Excel doesn’t recognize bold. I should have had things separated out a whole lot more: One column for title, another for year, another for if it was my first viewing of the title. If I had had just two extra columns, virtually no extra effort in the moment I create the record (as I was already adding year and newness, just not in different columns), I could have known a host of new things, from the time of year (if any) I tend to see new movies to what release years my viewing habits tend to favour. I can go back now and do that, but what would have been cake at the time is extremely tedious to do all at once now. And if I’d been more diligent in recording running times, I could have visualized total minutes spent watching movies as well (though frankly I’m relieved not to be able to show you that). It also wouldn’t hurt me to jazz the infographic up a bit. I’m far from Nicholas Felton’s annual Feltron reports in my aesthetic (see featured image), and while up until now I’d always appreciated him as a graphic designer, I imagine he must have quite a bit of programming know-how too in order to predict the kind of things his programs would expect from him in terms of valid input. The demystification of the process is also remystifying: while I know now bolding entries was not helpful, I’m not sure the ideal value to put into my new column for newness.

In any event, I’m actually extremely impressed by how useful this record can be about telling you about me. In quantifying myself and my habits, I also quantify a corpus of texts according to my own biography. And while I hold no illusions that I’ll be interesting for future generations of scholars, it gives an organizing principle to my every action. Everything we do when we journal and archive ourselves is imbued with extra meaning. How that meaning values for others is less important than the intrinsic value we can see for ourselves in our own lives lived.

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In a week today, I will be driving down to the outskirts of Burlington, Vermont to present a paper at the Northeast Popular Culture Association Conference. In preparation, this week I have been working on finalizing my presentation, which is based on a larger paper “It’s History; or Why Now? How Rediscovered Rockumentary Footage Structures the Past and Reveals the Present.” In this larger study, I focus my attention on lost rockumentary projects, including Tony Palmer’s 1972 documentary of Leonard Cohen’s European tour (of the same year), Bird on a Wire. To supplement my analysis, I explore two additional rockumentaries released thirty and fifty years after they were first filmed. Festival Express features Janis Joplin, The Grateful Dead, The Band, and Buddy Guy on a cross-Canada train tour in 1970. It had a theatrical run in 2003 and was released on DVD in 2004. Charlie is My Darling documents the Rolling Stones on tour in Ireland in 1965. In November 2012, it was concurrently released in select theaters and on DVD and Blu-Ray.

For those unfamiliar with the story of Bird on a Wire, this is how the story goes. In spring 1972, Tony Palmer accompanied Leonard Cohen on his European tour, filming his onstage performances and backstage antics. When Palmer finished editing the documentary−entitled Bird on a Wire−he showed it to Cohen, who, unhappy with the final product, hired his own editors to complete the film. This second version premiered in London on July 5, 1974 and then vanished. Palmer mourned the loss of his original version of the film, but felt piecing the celluloid back together was virtually impossible; moreover, he was unsure where the footage might be located. In the late 2000s, 290 rusted canisters of film containing pieces of the original footage were discovered in a Los Angeles warehouse. When Palmer found his original soundtrack, he knew he could restore the film. In 2010, Palmer’s original film, now containing 3000 fragments sutured back together, was screened in public for the first time.

In my study of Bird on a Wire, two main questions structure my analysis. First, how does the film highlight issues of historicity? That is, how does our viewing of a film reconstructed thirty years after it was first shot challenge a positivistic view of documentary film as historically authentic and demand a reading of it against the grain? Turning to my subsequent question, which forms the main focus of my presentation at the NEPCA conference, “Like a Bird on a Wire: A Study of the Rediscovery, Preservation, and Circulation of Ephemeral Texts,” how does the ephemeral nature of this film allow us to capture the dynamism of culture and cultural value? Here, I examine how the shifting value of Bird on a Wire illuminates cultural change, analyzing its value in the midst of Cohen’s resurgence in 2010 and in 1974, when the film was allowed to vanish. Using accounts from interviews, biographies, newspaper articles, and official websites, I examine the reasons given for the original neglect of these rockumentary projects. More importantly, I ponder why now; what is unique about this cultural moment that encourages the restoration of lost and forgotten projects? To address this question, I present some of the conditions that lay the foundations for Bird on a Wire, and similar lost footage films, to gain secondary value. In doing so, I consider the symbolic value of these films for fan communities, establishing connections between the genre of rockumentary and fandom and celebrity culture, and their renewed economic value within the context of DVD culture. Through studying Bird on a Wire, I aim to demonstrate the role of value, affect, and celebrity and fandom culture in the rediscovery, preservation, and circulation of ephemeral texts.

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This week I feel that I have no choice but to continue my discussion of cultural prizes. Not only have I spent the week with my nose buried deep in the pages of James English’s The Economy of Prestige, but yesterday Alice Munro was announced as the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature – the first “Canada-based writer” and one of thirteen woman to ever win this award. Although Quebec-born Saul Bellow won the prize in 1976, most news articles have dismissed his Canadian birth in view of his American residency in order to celebrate Munro’s win as the first “real” win for a “real” Canadian author (Bellow moved to the US as a child). (See also Adam Sternbergh’s article “Why Alice Munro Is Canada’s First Nobel Prize Winner for Literature (With an Asterisk).”) Upon hearing the news that she won the award, Munro emphasized the importance of her win to Canadians and Canadian literature, stating: “I’m particularly glad that winning this award will please so many Canadians. I’m happy, too, that this will bring more attention to Canadian writing.” Correspondingly, an article by Mark Medley in the National Post quotes various individuals who highlight the importance of Munro’s win for Canada, including Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the artistic director of the International Festival of Authors, Geoffrey Taylor, who compared Munro’s win to a win by the Canadian national hockey team at the Olympics. Similarly, but perhaps more tongue-in-cheek, a picture accompanying Adam Sternbergh’s article in The New York Times features a group of Canadians celebrating an Olympic gold metal win in hockey in 2002; the caption reads: “No doubt the streets of Canada look similar today” (Sternbergh). Yet, maybe this comparison to the Olympics is not so far fetched. In the third part of his book, English explicates how the Olympics and the Nobel Prizes emerged during the same period, with the Nobel Prize sometimes referred to as the “cultural Olympics” in the press (255). Further, as Gillian Roberts points out in Prizing Literature, in addition to symbolic and economic capital, “there is a kind of national capital that functions in Canadian literary prizes and in Canadian responses to externational prizes that anoint Canadian literature” (20). In this respect, perhaps the reactions of Canadians to the two cultural events are comparable in their employment of the rhetoric of nationalism and reliance on symbolic, economic, and national capital. While English argues that “the recent frenzy of prizes and awards” has contributed to a “deterritorialization of prestige,” what is unique about Canada that this may not necessarily be the case (282)?

In 1968, Leonard Cohen turned down the Governor General’s Award for Poetry for Selected Poems, 1956-1968. Sending a telegram to decline the award, Cohen wrote: “May I respectfully request that my name be withdrawn from the list of recipients of the Governor General’s Award for 1968. I do sincerely thank all those concerned for their generous intention. Much in me strives for this honour, but the poems themselves forbid it absolutely” (qtd. in Nadel, Various Positions 173). Cohen was the second person to refuse the award (within two months), the first being Quebecois separatist and author Hubert Aquin. In The Economy of Prestige, English observes that up until the early 1970s refusals of awards and prizes could translate into symbolic profit, “if the artist declining the award was sufficiently admired by others in the field” (220). However, this is no longer the case, as refusing an award no longer automatically contributes to artistic legitimacy (221). Alternatively, English points out how “the scandal of refusal has become a recognized device for raising visibility and leveraging success” for both artist and prize (222). For English, the refusal of a prize has now become a “recognized move” in the game of cultural prizes and thus “the refusal of a prize can no longer register as a refusal to play” (222). English’s point is elucidated when we consider that Cohen did accept a Governor General’s Performing Arts Award for his music in 1993. In other words, it was not that Cohen initially refused to play the game, but he chose different strategies, styles of play, or ways to play the game in various moments in his careers as poet and musician.

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Over the past few months my proposed research has not only been shaped by what I have been reading, but has become much stronger by talking about new ideas as well as by writing, editing, and rearticulating my program of study for grant applications. The refining of my proposed research, I believe, has become increasingly evident in my weekly blog posts. One of the most intriguing new aspects of my research is the recent decision to consider the celebrity phenomenon of Céline Dion, which I contemplated in this post. As part of my analysis of the ephemeral, journalistic, archival, and biographical materials and discourses that compose the phenomenon of Leonard Cohen, I now plan to utilize secondary sources on Céline Dion (Grenier; Hurley; Wilson; Young) in order to elicit comparisons between the two Québec celebrities. For example, how have both celebrities been framed within particular discourses and in relation to certain issues (e.g., nationalism)? In this manner, the Dion phenomenon can be used as a lens to examine the Cohen phenomenon, a tool to further engage discourses of celebrity in Canada and Québec, and a way to highlight the gendering of celebrity.

A few weeks ago I met and enjoyed a lively discussion with Dr. Line Grenier, a professor at the Université de Montréal who has undertaken research on the phenomenon of Céline Dion. One of the greatest benefits/outcomes of our conversation was that it encouraged me to re-evaluate my conceptual focus on celebrity persona versus celebrity phenomenon. In our conversation, Dr. Grenier helped to elucidate the difference between the two concepts and in turn allowed me to become more critical about my conceptual focus. She explained how the concept of persona implies an assumed stability, a concrete sense of an individual that becomes taken for granted. Further, the notion of persona places the individual celebrity as the centre of focus, rather than as one part of a much larger phenomenon constructed by various agents, circulated through multiple media formats, and existing under the brand name of the celebrity. Since a celebrity persona is just one part of a larger phenomenon, the composition of which includes elements external to the individual, I began to realize that my focus on persona would limit my analysis of aspects of the Cohen phenomenon that extend beyond him as an individual. In the case of the Céline Dion phenomenon, this would include among things her perfume line, Nickels, and her chocolates, which form part of her commercial empire (see Grenier “Global Pop on the Move”). Additionally, for Dr. Grenier, focusing on phenomenon rather than persona allows her to talk about “it” versus “she” when discussing Dion. This concentration on “it” (the phenomenon) bypasses conversations about the agency of a celebrity, which I mentioned before has become a main concern in analyses of literary celebrity, leading to my own frustration with discussions of celebrity agency.

Overall, my conversation with Dr. Grenier pushed me to rethink the concepts I have been using to describe my research focus and methodology, which in turn has helped to clarify and strengthen my proposal. Our conversation could not have come at a better time, as it is high season for doctoral grant applications.

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Last week i successfully defended my Master’s Thesis in the Communication and Culture Program at York & Ryerson Universities.  Titled, “Abandonware, Commercial Expatriation and Post-Commodity Fan Practice: a Study of the Sega Dreamcast”, the work is a bit of an “intervention” (as noted by one of my examiners) in the burgeoning field of platform studies. Founded by Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost, platform studies itself was meant to be an intervention into humanities based investigations of digital technologies.  The primary premise of the field was based on the fact that so many scholars discussing digital devices and software (specifically, games) without true understandings of the underlying operations of the technology, and how that influenced the works being created.  Montfort and Bogost’s contention was that a deeper understanding of how digital platforms enable or constrain creative computation, influence the kinds of works made for/ on that platform. Platform studies was meant to be a discussion of how these device became situated in culture, by investigating the specific technological properties of platform, and how these influenced cultural production/ reception.

The authors developed the platform studies’ methodology as an approach that they describe as ‘bottom-up’, starting with the specific inner operations of the platform, then onto code (software), interface, form/ function and finally reception/operation. The premise here is that each layer influences the subsequent layers, which ascribes a great deal of agency to the underlying configuration of the platform in any works created for it.  When i discovered platform studies, I had thought that I had found a cure-all method which could speak to my preoccupations with creative works made by artists for specific pieces of hardware. However, after reading the literature in the field, I realized that the field had a pretty significant blind spot (to date), that I needed to address.

The books in the platform studies series, Racing the Beam, Codename Revolution and The Future Was Here, each examine the origins and operations of a specific digital platform (The Atari VCS, The Nintendo Wii and the Commodore Amiga). While its important to understand how these devices were developed, and the technological constraints, platform studies thus far had been focusing its attention on industrial/ commercial development. By privileging this specific mode of creative production, the underlying thesis of the field was that platforms were fixed objects, whose history ended the moment the devices were discontinued and expatriated from the consumer market (marking the end of commercial development for these platforms). However platforms live beyond their retail shelf life, and are appropriated by artists and fan communities who continue to develop work on/ for these platforms.

This is where my thesis focuses its attention. I wanted to use the my thesis to show digital platforms shift over time, from consumer objects, to digital toolkits for fan/ artist/ hacker/ enthusiast creative production. Where platform studies typically has focused on commercial development, my thesis focuses on post-consumer development. I wanted to move beyond discussions of commercial production and look at how these creative practitioners change their relationships to formerly closed, proprietary devices, and how they crack open these devices, reverse engineer their operations, and then create new creative works. I’d like to think that I did so.

Now that the project is behind me, I’ve been thinking about how I would have improved it. I realized that my contribution privileges a different mode of creative production than the other literature, and that were I too revisit it, and expand its scope, I would have made this project an examination of the multiples states that the Dreamcast has inhabited, from commercial development, through to its abandoned state. And this is what I’m hoping we can see in future works within the field, one which can investigate the entire spectrum of production on a platform. It seems like a hefty undertaking, but I think that then we’d had a richer, more nuanced understanding of our relationships to digital technologies and how these relationships change over time.

For now, though I continue to think about how we can employ platform studies methodology in similar investigations, ones which break open the proprietary nature of digital technologies and democratize them.

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In The Economy of Prestige, James English argues that scandal is the lifeblood of cultural prizes, contributing to its effectiveness as “an instrument of the cultural economy” (208). Pointing to the Booker Prize as an example, he highlights how its success is “bound up with the annual flurry of scandal that attends it in the dailies and in the literary press” (198). This perspective on the rhetoric of scandal and its role in discourses of cultural prizes opens up a new way of interpreting the announcement I discussed last week that the Booker Prize is now open to American authors. While some critics saw this change in eligibility requirements as signaling the end of the Booker Prize, English’s argument would suggest that this “scandal” surrounding the prize is only going to contribute to its success.

In Prizing Literature, Gillian Roberts builds on English’s work, asserting that when an award is associated with the government, such as the Governor General’s Award, scandal takes on a new meaning as journalists and readers “double as aggrieved citizens and taxpayers” (22). In contrast to such awards, which inhabit a sometimes uncomfortable proximity to the state and its ideological notions of the nation and national culture, prizes such as the Giller Prize present themselves as embodying a “greater purity of aesthetic judgment” (English 60). Roberts points out how the Giller positions itself in opposition to the Governor General’s Award by establishing excellence as its main criteria. However, Roberts reasons, “to claim that ‘excellence’ occupies a neutral position, carrying no further implications, effaces the role of literary prize in relation to the national literature, regardless of any one prize’s attempt to claim to judge its winners ‘on merit alone’” (29).

This brings me to the Polaris Prize and the scandal surrounding the announcement of the 2013 winner this week. While reading Robert’s discussion of the Giller, I was constantly reminded of the Polaris Prize, a Canadian music prize that is similarly based only on artistic merit. Its mission statement reads:

“The Polaris Music Prize is a not-for-profit organization that annually honours, celebrates and rewards creativity and diversity in Canadian recorded music by recognizing, then marketing the albums of the highest artistic integrity, without regard to musical genre, professional affiliation, or sales history, as judged by a panel of selected music critics” (About Polaris).

Yet, a few distinctions between the two prizes must be made. Most obviously, the Polaris is a music prize rather than a literary prize, and in that respect an argument could be made that music occupies a different (less central?) place in the construction of Canadian national culture. Second, while there is a submission process for the Giller, the nominees of the Polaris prize are recommended and then voted on by the jury. Thus, the criteria is much more subjective. Third, whereas the Giller is often viewed as celebrating the household names of Canadian literature, the Polaris nominees range from well-known musical stars to lesser-known, emerging artists.

This week Godspeed You! Black Emperor won the Polaris Prize for their album Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend! The band did not attend the prize gala and released a statement on their label’s website, criticizing the award, the gala, and its corporate sponsorship, while simultaneously accepting the award and purportedly using it to supply musical instruments to Quebec prisoners (GY!BE). Their statement has created mixed reactions. While some people have dismissed the band outright as “first-world anarchists,” interpreting the band’s statement as “it’s stupid to give music awards when the polar ice caps are melting” (personal conversation), others have seen merit in the band’s critique of the commercial aspects of Canadian music (Caplan). My friend, music journalist and Polaris jury member, Jen Zoratti, argues that although the idea of awarding prizes might seem uncomfortable, there is a plethora of reasons of why it is important to celebrate Canadian music. Yet, she embraces the criticism, underlining how it “makes jurors (like me) work harder and listen to more music from more places in more genres which will (one hopes) result in more representative long and short lists” (Zoratti).

What I want to add to this discussion is how the reaction of Godspeed You! Black Emperor and the scandal it created do not exist outside of the system and culture of prizes. Cultural prizes not only allow for this rhetoric of scandal, but feed off of it. In one sense, as Zoratti points out, criticism only strengthens the award, the jury, and its procedures, but in another way the scandal also increases the symbolic and cultural value of the award. As English notes, through the rhetoric of scandal, “the prize can continue to occupy, discursively, the place of the illegitimate, the embarrassing, the scandalously middling institution of culture – a place with which no ‘serious’ critic or artist wants to be too firmly associated – while securing in fact an even greater symbolic efficacy not only among the mass consumers of art but among the most specialized producers, the serious (academic) critics and artists themselves” (“Winning the Culture Game: Prizes, Awards, and the Rules of Art” 113).

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This week in my textual analysis class I had to read an old piece by Will Straw about communities and scenes in pop music (“Systems of Articulation, Logics of Change: Communities and Scenes in Popular Music”). Though I had a bit of trouble at times following the trajectory of the argument, I think I caught onto at least one important aspect of the piece: it seems that historically, music studies have prized the idea of music coming out of various geographical cultural communities, but from Straw’s perspective it appears that the methods of circulation are just as meaningful and telling as the geographically circumscribed communities from which the music emerges. Even in the early 90s, the centre was disappearing from the way that musical styles coalesce, with stylistic changes beginning to appear to be more the result of individual rather than cultural efforts. One interesting element coming out of this reading of pop music culture is the after-the-fact creation of points of reference—at one point Will makes mention of ‘moves’ in dance-music culture being constructed as historical trajectories only after the successes floated to the top, producing ‘little rationality beyond the retrospective sense of appropriateness produced by their success.’ (374)

In challenging these tropes, the piece is clearly tied in with a postmodernist end of history, leading me to wonder: do the changes in the generative tools of history that have occurred in the more than 20 years since this was written–data tracking, observable circulation strategies, and other metrics–also challenge the idea that history is constructed after the fact? On the other hand, certainly the creation of ‘scenes’ still relies on a constructed sense of history, of ‘I was there first.’ It seems to me that we construct our musical cultural capital less from saying ‘I saw them when they played at this place‘ than from saying ‘I saw them before they were big’—tying the capital less to geography than circulatory articulation (learning of a band through word-of-mouth over learning of a band from mass media outlets like TV or the radio).

Anyways, it’s an interesting question. Coming up this week, I’ve got plenty of writing to do on the Cambridge draft and we’re having our second IMMERSe meeting. No idea yet what kind of weeknote’ll come out of such a harried handful of days.

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For the first time in a while, this week I went into a Chapters Indigo bookstore. On this occasion, my experience was altered by the literature I have been reading recently, and thus my experience became highly mediated by my thoughts on literary prizes. As I walked into the store, the first thing I noticed was a display of large tables covered in strategically placed books with their covers facing outwards, instead of their usual concealment, hidden away, spine out, in large bookcases. Each table had a sign that announced why these particular books were special, singling out (and separating) the award nominees, the award winners, and the staff’s own nominees for their favourite books. As Owen Percy points out in his dissertation Prize Possession: Literary Awards, the GGs, and the CanLit Nation, “it has become the policy of major chain book stores to promote newly-stickered award-winning works as such in the high-traffic areas of stores and websites” (18).

Yesterday I was listening to the CBC, as I do most mornings. Kevin Sylvester, a broadcaster and children’s author, was filling in for host Jian Ghomeshi on Q. To start the program, Sylvester’s opening monologue discussed literary awards for Children’s Literature, lamenting the lack of awards and attention devoted to Children’s Literature in Canada. According to Sylvester, compared to the U.K., where Children’s Literature is not cordoned off into its own section within libraries and bookstores and is celebrated with prestigious awards, Canada is falling behind. Comparing “Kiddie Litter” to comic books and graphic novels, which were also once relegated to the margins of literature, he shared his own hope for the future recognition of Children’s Literature.

As a child, the books that I read more often than not had a picture of the Newbury metal on their covers or announced themselves as winners of similar awards. Wanting us to read the best books, my mother always made sure that the books my brother and I read were award winners or nominees. For her, these awards verified the quality of the book’s content and writing. My mother also sent me to library camp, where I too won some sort of award and received a hardcover edition of The Wizard of Oz from the Mayor of Winnipeg at the time, William Norrie. Needless to say, my mother was horrified when my brother and I would choose to read Archie comics and R. L. Stine books during the summer months instead of selecting the award winners that she had purchased for us.

In reading the literature on prize culture and literary awards, I have been drawn to the connections between prizes, awards, and grants. Most obvious is the fact that the Canada Council for the Arts, which provides grants, also runs the Governor General’s Award. But I am also thinking about the connections between prize culture and the grant applications that I am currently working on to fund my doctoral research on celebrity culture in Canada. While my overall interest in cultural prizes relates to their role within the apparatus of celebrity (Mole), I cannot help but consider how some of the findings of this literature also apply to academia. For example, in Producing Canadian Literature, Kit Dobson and Smaro Kamboureli examine how the culture of literary awards in Canada impacts the production of literature, interviewing various Canadian authors. Yet, the same question could be asked about academic research; how does the culture of funding within academia impact the process of research?

Postscript:

As I was about to post this weeknote, it came to my attention (again via CBC Radio One) that the Man Booker Prize has announced a major change to its eligibility requirements. The Booker Prize is now open to novels written in English and published in the U.K., whereas in years previous (including its 2013 competition) the nationality of the author was a key factor of eligibility and was only open to Commonwealth authors. This move to include the U.S., which was previously excluded, has created quite a stir among critics who fear that American authors will now dominate the competition. As  Philip Hensher argues, there is no lack of American literary awards, no need to bolster the status of American authors who are already celebrated, so why open up the Booker? For some, this change does not make the prize more inclusive, but will reduce the authority and cultural prestige of the Booker, signaling the end of the Booker Prize as we know it. Just as the Booker eliminates its nationality requirement, the relationship between author and nation has never appeared so important.

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So this past Friday marked the first meeting of our IMMERSe research project team. IMMERSe, if you’re not familiar with it, stands for the Interactive and Multi-Modal Experience Research Syndicate. As the website will tell you, it’s a SSHRC-funded project (research network, really) that aims to uncover new knowledge about the production, circulation, and use of games, taking in a number of interdisciplinary perspectives. The network is doing all sorts of cool stuff, but the specific area we’re taking on at the Concordia branch is narrative and dialogue in games. Amongst other questions, we’re going to look into the narrative affordances unique to games, the process of writing for games, and the trajectory of transmedia narrative as it enters or leaves games. The whole thing is pretty exciting, and it’s been a while getting it organized. The Friday meeting was mostly to discuss our first project under the auspices of the IMMERSe umbrella–the kind of successful brainstorming session that goes on for several hours and still manages to get focused at the end. Our team consists of Darren, Bart Simon, Stephen Yeager, Carolyn Jong, Rob Gallagher, and myself.

So what is this project going to be? Without giving too much away, we’re going to start by putting an eye on (primarily) narrative mods in Bethesda‘s aRPG Skyrim. You remember, it was like a crazy big release a few Decembers ago:

We kind of already had it in our heads that we were going to do some research on Skyrim mods before we sat down: Carolyn has done some really cool work on the subject already, so we figured we’d huddle around that and see what we could make happen. The idea is to start off with a low-level problem or research question (by which I mean general, not unimportant), spend a few months researching the hell out of it, refine and distill our aim into a few more research questions, and then pound out a couple of papers. We want to find out what mods do, to the gaming experience, the narrative, performance, culture…we covered a lot of ground in the meeting, but some of the highlights include the notion of modders as scribes (thank goodness I took that course on archives and manuscripts with Stephen a few years back), modding as a form of prosumption or overconsumption (the Deleuzian difference in desire between taking a product and trying to build something with it and building something with a product because your need to consume it goes so far beyond what’s provided), and the idea that the magnitude of a fictional world might be provocative of the kinds of modding performed.

As I said, it’s exciting. We don’t know just what the project will be yet, but I’m utterly stimulated by the beginning of something that will last and develop through at least the next year of my life. The last time I started something like that, it was the comics piracy research project, and I didn’t really have any sense of how far down the rabbit hole that endeavour would take me (when Darren had me start collecting data in January of last year, I figured we’d be writing by March and finished by June). It’s a good team, and we’ve started off by setting some low pressure, manageable goals based around some of our discussion. It’s adding a lot of extra work to my term, but I think it’s just enough that I can handle it. As the project manager (yeah, I was surprised too), quite a few of my weeknotes in the upcoming months may take on the look of project blog updates–my way of killing two birds with one stone.

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