Suboptimist
I’m not quite a pessimist. I’m more of a suboptimist.

I’m going to piss off some people tonight. So, basically, it’s like any other night.

The other day, I came to an important conclusion about my personal musical tastes. I’ve decided that I hate all this music the kids are listening to. This “chill indie music.” Unfortunately, though, since “indie” is such a generic term, I can’t say I hate the crap college sophomores in skinny jeans listen to while drinking PBR without also saying I hate really excellent music, like Beirut. This problem aside, I’ll try my best to explain why I’ve come to loathe this music recently.

· All the indie music I’ve heard sounds the same. I actually think this is what triggered me to resent the genre initially. I’ve heard too many CDs and inquired, “Who’s CD is this?” only to be answered by, “It’s a mix.” I swear to God, I would never have known. It’s as if I could have randomly chosen a member of each band on the mix and put them together, and they would have produced the exact same thing.

· Too much lo-fi recording. As much as I like low fidelity recording techniques, they have their time and place, and should only be used for a reason,e.g. The Black Keys to illustrate their delta blues influences. Lo-fi does not transform generic music into high art.

· There is no depth or passion present in the music. The performers come across as either apathetic or insincerely upbeat, neither of which is good. I’m not saying the music has to be depressing or contain left-of-center lyrical themes, but please, please show us you give a damn about something.

Try something like this:

I’ve got a whole bunch of incoming links that I’m not linking too myself. I really need to fix that…and…fixed.

I’m at that point in my M.A. program where I have to put together my committee and decide on a thesis topic. This part kinda sucks. The two people I actually need on my committee, a sociolinguist and a phonetician (sort of), sort of…hate each other. Welcome to the world of academia!

My graduate coursework up to this point has been kind of silly. Having done my undergraduate work in the same department, there are so few classes that I can actually take in my specialty that will be of any use to me. Take this semester, for example. Only one of my classes is actually being offered through linguistics. I’ve had to go the Speech Pathology department to take an acoustics class (I’m sure I’ll have all kinds of hilarious stories about this), and I had to go the Middle East Center to take a historical linguisticky course.

To this point, all of my most interesting work has been outside of the classroom as a research assistant at the Center for American Indian Languages. Here I’ve actually been able to do leading edge (though perhaps not bleeding edge) work in sociophonetics. Basically, I’m excited for not having to deal with coursework anymore.

I’ve kicked around a few ideas for a thesis topic. It will inevitably be related to some phonetic feature in Utah English. Whether it will be a perceptual or acoustic study is up for debate, but I have cool ideas for both. Oh, wait…I’ve actually never written a paper longer than 25 pages. Okay, actually, I’m f****d.

I’d like to talk about a hot topic in Utah recently: the BCS and its fairness/legality. Our Attorney General, Mark Shurtleff, has been considering a probe of the BCS system to determine whether it violates anti-trust laws or something (link). I’m not sure if it’s because I really don’t care what happens in college football beyond the Utes being successful, or if the entire idea of investigating the BCS when our economy is tanking is just a stupid idea.

In a bizarre twist of events, a reasonable letter was printed in the Salt Lake Deseret Morning Tribune News opinion section yesterday. I know, I’m scared too:

Let’s get our priorities in order. I am a huge Ute football fan. And the BCS is the wrong format for determining the championship team, but there are other more important and higher priority items for our attorney general to look into. Being the No. 1 law enforcement officer in the state, he should focus his efforts toward crime and consumer rip-offs. For example, look into the college text-book racket. Someone is making a killing on text books. There are some real crimes to investigate.

Richard Turnbow

Kaysville

Even if we choose to limit ourselves to potentially criminal activity in academics, there are much bigger fish to fry. While I was lucky enough to have a useless major where books rarely costed more than 60-dollars each, the students who are actually studying things that are, well, practical are getting screwed having to buy 4 200-dollar books each semester. I’d go on and elaborate how ignoring this problem and focusing on the BCS is an example of the dumbing down of American higher education or even of increased militarism in American society, but honestly, I really don’t care. My school pays my tuition these days.

Sorry undergrads.

EDIT: Since I’m committing to reinvigorate this blog, I’ve updated my bio page and added a current CV, if you’re interested.

I returned from the LSA conference this last week. I generally like conferences. I liked this one, too. I saw some good talks, did some good networking, got some good deals on books, had some good food, etc. I also saw a couple rather bizarre talks.

For example, there was a workshop on sociophonetics. What’s interesting, is that there was only one sociophonetician on the panel, the rest were a bunch of LabPhon people and, for some reason, an Optimality Theorist. Some of the points were as follows:

· Phonetic convergence is primarily a social phenomena, but that doesn’t necessarily preclude it from being automatic. I agree with this conclusion, and incidentally, it was also the only talk given by a bona fide sociophonetician.

· Listeners have different “phonetic expectations” for talkers of different presumed ethnic groups. This is kind of where the sociolinguists in the audience (like myself) and the more traditional phoneticians in the audience split. Penny Eckert mentioned to the speaker that often there are other implicit presumptions listeners carry with them that correlate with ethnicity that can explain the experimental results as well. This is why sociophonetics needs *needs* the “socio” part.

· Listeners utilize different phonetic spaces when addressing different genders. In this experiment, they tested how men and women talk to males and females, which is a very simplistic view of gender, but hey, who’s counting?

· Edward Flemming (the OT guy) got up and talked about linguistic constraints on sociolinguistic behavior. That’s bassackwards. Multivariate analyses consistently show that linguistic variables are never independent variables.

I started classes this semester. I feel slightly ripped off that I didn’t get much of a break at all, but it’s nice to have something different to do, I guess. I’m signed up for Ugaritic, Acoustics of Speech and Hearing, and Research Seminar in Sociolinguistics. I’ll let you know how they go.