a la recherche du silence perdu

Every morning I wake up to the sound of fuzzy buzzing – it isn’t the supposedly fuzzy feeling we’re told we feel when something good happens. It is the clinical sound of a layer of digital cellophilm radiating through and settling in my skull – I live in a place without wi-fi or a landline phone connection. There’s just enough background wi-fi, mobile-signal, digital-TV, satellite scanning radiation to make it through my thin roof.

You know the sound of the back of the fridge – it’s close to that but more invasive, more cerebral and far less obvious. The closest fridge to where I sleep is 10 metres away.

You wake up to it too, you’re just not aware of it anymore.

That’s not to say that you ever were entirely aware of it but that your mind registered it and switched it off as soon as it realised it would have to deal with it for the rest of time.

Every morning I wake to the digital-cellophilm of the city and I think, ‘What’s this radiation doing to the way my mind works?’

Filed under: Academic Work, Offcuts, city, digital, French conjugation, In Search of Lost Time, London, Marcel Proust, McGill University, mind matters, Pennsylvania State Athletic Conference, physiology, Public Service Alliance of Canada, Quebec, Research assistant, tech

The line in the sand

“Reviewing’s a tough business, and reading reviews of your own work is even tougher. But the traditional line in the sand between a print reviewer and an author – which necessitates taking time to sit down and pen a response, time during which the author will generally come to their senses and decide to take the criticism on the chin – have been wiped out by the internet’s immediacy.”

From The Guardian Books Blog

Filed under: Academic Work, Arts, Author, internet network writing research, Kuwait, literature, Los Angeles, Mexico, Reviews and Criticism, Sand