springtime

wow. so it’s the end of another academic year (almost)

as the academic year ends, i’m trying to keep up with all of the end of term work but also think about the coming summer. this year, something on the horizon is an upcoming residence at the cepo art center in fongbin township. it’s an art center in an old police station just above gangkou village beside the siugulan river. during the summer, i will be at cepo and sometimes in ‘atolan writing but also engaged in a large-scale soundscape documentation project, in which i will document soundscapes of the siugulan river, a work that i consider research on “mediating spaces”–spaces that come to mediate relationships among groups but also through their role as conduits also mediate history. it will be an addition to my ongoing work on the ethics of locality, but the first time i will be trying something quite so large and systematic in sound. so it’s a cool step

of course, it might require me to develop yet another domain name and website. well, maybe not–it could be a subheading of taiwan soundscapes or live here, i suppose

this past semester, i’ve also been further pulled into a kind of ironic experience around teaching. trying not to blame my students, i really wonder: what is the role of a teacher if students no longer read and if they are constantly distracted? on the one hand, i’m too committed to academic life to leave the university. and yet, i’m not sure that anything i know of how to teach or what it means to teach still applies. ok, maybe i am blaming my students–or at least the surrounding culture and probably their intellectually lazy parents and high school teachers. the entire society, really. how are we to intervene, if we still think that the life of the mind is valuable?

perhaps it’s best to set these questions aside to move forward as i think of the summer