Category: Daily updates

Generally musings of the day, usually accompanied by a photograph

Hand editing chapter drafts in U of T libraries

To advance the aim of getting down to four 50-page chapters, I have been bringing printouts to review on campus for the last couple of days. The change of scenery has certainly been accompanied by a change in feeling and thinking, and I am starting to feel the emotional distance from the text which is necessary for effective editing.

The big tasks ongoing are to cut out or move away any sections not important for the scholarly argument in the dissertation; to split out my own normative conclusions from empirical and analytical arguments, to be moved into a chapter of their own at the end; and to cut out passages that are too theoretical or speculative, trying to stick more closely to what can be anchored and justified with reference to the campus fossil fuel divestment movement specifically.

The political opportunities, mobilizing structures, and repertoires chapters are all getting this treatment now, and it feels more like progress forward than continuing with my recent efforts to grind through micro-level changes from my own comments and those of committee members.

It may be that the long section which I wrote on counter-repertoires against divestment developed by university administrations can be pulled out and self-published soon. I did ideally want to find an academic journal for it to get it more attention, but with all the rounds of revision and editing that would require it’s probably best to get it out as a personal draft and focus on getting the actual dissertation out as soon as can be managed.

Back in libraries

To do my part in reducing the reproduction rate of COVID-19, since March 2020 I have been avoiding indoor spaces and largely only going out for grocery walking and exercise walks.

I had stepped into a few U of T libraries to pick up and return books, but tonight was the first time I have gone in and read for several hours since pre-pandemic. Three surprise nice features:

  1. Being at Gerstein and Robarts made me feel like a student again, not just an ex-student with a very long incomplete overdue assignment
  2. The legibility of books under these lights is a reminder of how dim the lighting fixtures are in my current Byq Bepuneq Ubzrf apartment in North York (along with the flimsy plumbing fixtures, cheap locks, woeful lack of insulation, and notably inefficient furnace and AC unit)
  3. Seeing people wearing masks properly and voluntarily — because it’s the rule and because it makes sense — is heartening when so many in Toronto do a terrible job (useless clear hard masks, masks around chins, and loudmouths demanding service unmasked in shops and usually getting it because nobody wants to confront them)

As part of completing 50 page drafts of my political opportunities, mobilizing structures, repertoires, and framing chapters I am going to try reviewing and prioritizing the contents of paper printouts in these libraries during the short time ahead.

British Columbia floods and mudslides

Following up on summers with severe wildfires, BC has received an ‘atmospheric river’ of rain, in some places a month’s worth in a day.

The floods and landslides have cut off all the highways connecting Vancouver and the lower mainland to the rest of BC and Canada, and the Port of Vancouver has closed down, holding back over $400 million worth of exports per day.

In the National Observer John Woodside has a piece about how these disasters are partly climate-caused, since lost roots and ground cover would have helped hold the soil in place to prevent landslides. Of course, the clearcutting uphill of these slides is both an important cause and an activity that worsens climate change.

Listening to the Abel espionage case

Because of its restrained and historically accurate storytelling, Bridge of Spies is one of my favourite films.

Looking for something a bit meatier than podcasts to listen to on my exercise walks, I am trying out an Audible account with James Donovan’s Strangers on a Bridge: The Case of Colonel Abel. It’s the perfect kind of book for someone overly preoccupied with an academic project, insofar as it is interesting and detailed enough to be mentally engaging as well as mercifully unrelated to any work I need to do.

Books in progress — October 2021

Back in the day, I would write some kind of review or response to each book I read, which was useful in several ways. It gave me something short to refer back to in order to refresh my memory, as well as to share with people who might consider reading the book (2 pages on a blog is a much faster read).

It became impossible to continue with at some point in the PhD, either because I had too many books to read or because I didn’t have time to write responses.

Just for fun, here is a list of books I have in progress and how I am generally finding them. These are in no particular order and range from books I received today (Hayhoe) to ones that have been in a pile of reading in progress for several years:

Katharine Hayhoe. Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World. 2021: Reading because Hayhoe is a prominent voice in climate education and communication, with a focus on reaching out to groups not naturally aligned to the progressive agenda which saturates most climate activist groups

Allen Dulles. The Craft of Intelligence: America’s Legendary Spy Master on the Fundamentals of Intelligence Gathering for a Free World. 2016: Mentioned/recommended in several International Spy Museum Spycast podcasts and video lectures

John Le Carré. A Most Wanted Man. 2008: I love the 2014 film directed by Anton Corbijn and starring Philip Seymour Hoffman; I think this is Le Carré’s most engaging story because of the diversity of the people involved — they aren’t all just a bunch of grey spooks

Robert L. Jaffe an Washington Taylor. The Physics of Energy. 2018: Many people writing and organizing about climate change don’t know much about energy. This MIT textbook goes too far into the math for me on many occassions, but is an excellent general introduction to how energy works in our society.

Willy Ley. Rockets, Missiles, and Men in Space. 1968: I picked this up used because a few skimmed pages looked promising – turns out to be a highly interesting account of early rocket and space flight

Daniel Kahneman. Thinking Fast and Slow. 2011: A good summary of some of the cognitive science related to environmental and climate politics, but a bit hard to get through when I have seen the main ideas summarized and repeated in so many places already.

Aisha Ahmad. Jihad & Co: Black Markets and Islamist Power. 2017: A great example of scholarly writing well-written and concise enough to be accessible to an interested amateur audience – rich with personal experiences, and providing a very different perspective on what gives rise to Islamist theocratic governments

Herman Melville. Moby Dick. 1851: Recommended as a friend’s favourite — much easier to read than its fearsome reputation as a difficult book made me expect

Andrew Darby. Harpoon: Into the Heart of Whaling. 2008: Informative and well-written, but too depressing to finish. People really are awful

Simon Garfield. On the Map: A Mind-Expanding Exploration of the Way the World Looks. 2013: Not much new information for someone who has already read a bit on the subject, but well-grounded in images and descriptions of real maps

Oliver Morton. The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World. 2015: I loved Eating the Sun, but this one is too depressing to finish

Shi-Ling Hsu. The Case for a Carbon Tax: Getting P{ast Our Hang-Ups to Effective Climate Policy. 2011: Recommended at some point in my PhD research, but covers little new ground for someone who has followed the topic of carbon pricing closely

David Keith. A Case for Climate Engineering. 2013. Reading it to engage with the question of whether geoengineering is sensible to pursue — tiny but too depressing to finish

Diane Vaughan. The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA. 1996: Relevant for my Space Shuttle screenplay and also a fascinating analysis of organizational culture — applicable to everyone working on something hard and dangerous

William Perry and Tom Collina. The Button: The New Nuclear Arms Race and Presidential Power from Truman to Trump. 2020: Speaks to my long-term interest in avoiding accidental or unauthorized nuclear weapon use

Seth Klein. A Good War: Mobilizing Canada for the Climate Emergency. 2020: Widely discussed in activist circles, but frustrates me with two persistent types of superficial analysis, basically assuming that because WWII and climate change were big important challenges the effort against the latter can be helpfully modelled on the former, and accepting cost-free notional answers from people who want to come across as good to pollsters as strong evidence for a desire for radical political change

E.H. Carr. What is History? 1961: Read partly to wrestle with questions of disciplinary boundaries and methodological orientation in political science

James R. Hansen. First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong. 2005: I loved the film when I saw it with Holly, and astronaut biographies and autobiographies are one of the best parts of my screenplay research

Those are the ones that I am at least partway into and which I can find readily around the room. I should probably apply more discipline and self-control to not obtaining additional books while these are all still pending.

Workload, timelines, advisors, funding, pressure

A very good blog post on what to expect from a PhD program (and especially what the university itself won’t tell you): So You Want To Go To Grad School (in the Academic Humanities)?

Two paragraphs which are especially informative for people who don’t have recent personal experience in a PhD program:

The most important person in the process is your advisor, who is generally a senior member of the faculty in your department who shares your specialization. I struggle to find words to communicate how important this person will be during your graduate experience.. Graduate study at this level is effectively an apprenticeship system; the advisor is the master and the graduate student is the apprentice and so in theory at least the advisor is going to help guide the student through each stage of this process. To give a sense of the importance of this relationship, it is fairly common to talk about other academics’ advisors as forming a sort of ‘family tree’ (sometimes over multiple ‘generations’). Indeed, the German term for an advisor is a doktorvater, your ‘doctor-father’ (or doktormutter, of course) and this is in common use among English-language academics as well and the notion it suggests, that your advisor is a sort of third parent, isn’t so far from the truth.

If you are considering graduate school with an eye towards continuing in academia who you choose as your advisor will be very important: academia is a snooty, prestige conscious place and your advisor’s name and prestige will travel with you. But there’s more than that: your advisor, because they need to check off on every step of your journey and you will need their effusive letter of recommendation to pursue any kind of academic job has tremendous power over you as a graduate student. You, by contrast, have functionally no power in that relationship; you are reliant on the good graces of your advisor.

Related:

Into the fall

My friend Richard’s visit has provided opportunities, at this turning point of seasons, to bring friends together and enjoy multi-person conversations in contexts like distanced outdoor walks. It has been a great reminder of the world beyond the specialized niche of the PhD program, not to mention the sort of pre-pandemic social interactions which we all must value more highly now that we’ve felt and adapted to their absence.

My main task remains the same: finish the PhD and find something worthwhile to do after.

I’m grateful that I have such friends to enrich my life while I’m working.

Crazy heat out west

In the Pacific northwest of the US and Canada’s western provinces and territories a severe heat wave is breaking all-time temperature records.

The region generally benefits from moderate year-round temperatures, both because the nearby and massive Pacific ocean takes in heat in the summer and releases it in the winter and because prevailing winds from the west come from the ocean rather than over land. As a result, homes, infrastructure, wardrobes, and lifestyles are not suited to extreme temperatures.

Related:

Moving from Markham

At the end of July I am moving out of the room on Markham Street which I have been renting since December 2015.

Like the most recent flatmate who moved out of this three bedroom place, I am being pushed out by the landlady’s refusal to meet her basic legal obligations. I feel a bit conflicted about effectively rewarding misconduct by giving in to the renoviction that she has been pushing for, but this has also become a place of enormous stress and little joy since 2019.

The neighbourhood where I am moving in August is near Glencairn Station, so it will certainly be a change of scenery. I’m a bit sad that I will be farther from campus and the amenities of downtown, but that place seems set to be temporary precarious housing too, somewhere to live as I get through the final PhD stages of committee review and defence and while moving on to whatever will occupy my time after the doctorate.