Time to return to schedules and calendars

Less than two weeks are left before my first class meeting of the fall. As always, I find that I cannot quite account for all the unstructured time of the middle of summer.

Although more than most years, I think I have reason to find that whole period problematic in 2009, it is still hard to know what to think about how six weeks can slip away without leaving any traces. But of course, there are traces, all kinds.

I am compulsive about calendaring things, so I do have a variety of marked dates to serve as prompts. My iCal pages for June-July are packed, in all the colors I use to separate my life into threads (although the pink of teaching is most subdued) so obviously I didn't simply fall asleep waiting for something to break the spell in my summer castle.

But the iCal pages for July and August feel different than the calendar I am rapidly filling in as people send notices of meetings for the upcoming year, and as I enter class sessions for fall and spring. Concretely, the structures of the calendar I am building going forward require different actions: I can set most of these as "repeat" meetings, and then simply find the exceptions and delete them.

Summer is in this sense anti-structure. Everything on the schedule for the last weeks is an event, unique, each had to be entered on its own, even if the person I was meeting was someone I saw every so often.

I like the every-so-often-ness of summer. I used to feel that living that way was wasteful, or-- my old favorite term-- "self-indulgent". Which of course it literally is: in summer I can indulge my self, in the sense of realizing something that during the routinization of the rest of the year, all-too-easily gets buried.

So it turns out that it isn't really that I feel as if nothing happened this summer. Instead, all the things that happen stand out as individual events or self-contained sequences, and I can remember each of them but cannot subsume them in the kind of measured pattern that will inevitably take up the remaining days of the year once term begins.

Which leads me to realize one of the reasons I am so susceptible to invitations to go away during the academic term-- anywhere. I am happy to come and talk to any group about anything anytime. Because those are events, and cutting into the pattern of the academic year, they help me realize myself. They are intense bursts of experience and I treasure every one. I actually tell real time this way: it was before I went to Binghamton, it was while I was coming back from New Orleans, it was while I was in Barcelona...

All of the above was sparked by something quite different: along with calendaring, the other discipline that says I am on a transition to term-time is answering emails that are not from friends or related to existing academic commitments. Like most people, I get too much email to read. I figured it out one week and that was literal: I had over 200 messages in one day, so that if all I did for eight hours straight was read email, I would have been able to spend a whole two and a half minutes each and do nothing else.

But in this caesura of the year, I rapidly reply to some of the unsolicited email I feel no responsibility about. Today, that included pointing someone to podcasts of lectures from a course I teach every year.

The podcast experiment was forced on me in 2007 by a zealous graduate assistant (who was right, I know!). I usually say she persuaded me, or shamed me, into it. I have not found it necessary since then to try it again; we post the weblink for the 2007 lectures and students do listen to them, and I remain amused by the idea that me today may well be contradicting me then-- and I am not sure which of me a student now finds more convincing.

What interested me then, and what I was reminded of again when I checked that the resource still existed, was that the podcasters for the university could not actually accommodate what I do in a classroom.

(Hence the need to be persuaded: most of my class time is interactive discussion. I do what are called minilectures, but they tend to break out as if spontaneous, although I have the ideas all racked up like billiard balls waiting for my chance to break. Sometimes, as in pool, someone else runs out the table and I never get my chance. Which, unlike pool, is a good outcome; it means the students had enough to say that we filled up a class by dialogue.)

Anyway, the first day we used the "automatic" podcast production system, when my grad assistant went to listen to it, there was... nothing. Silence. Many minutes of it.

Turns out the system was not waiting for an audio signal, but simply turned on at the start of class and "recorded" the sound of silence, picked up by a microphone we left turned off while we discussed things for the first 60 minutes.

So my stubborn grad assistant changed the system, manually uploading lectures captured on her ipod. We still ran into problems because the webcast posting system assumed a lecture per class session, and we had many sessions without them. So the material trace of the spring 2007 course is a wonderful illustration of the failure of structured time in the face of the unique performative event.

On the webcast site, each podcast has a title, which we had to provide in advance to the webcast production staff. God knows whether the titles track with the actual content. I know when I teach naturally that as often as not, I say something like "you seem to actually be interested in something else, so I am going to set aside what I was planning to talk about...". I am intrigued, knowing how historical research works, at the notion that someone might think the course I taught was somehow delimited by these named podcasts. The real thing was something else. But because these artifacts exist and form an archive available for others, they can become the "record" used by others as if it were what I taught.

(You can find the podcasts here but don't blame me for them-- I just said the words, I never listened to them. Well, I suppose technically while I was saying them, but still, that is the linear production of speech where as we hear our own words we adjust what comes next in the hope of steering our ideas on to a conclusion. Not listening as such.)