Reading and Listening Again - Portishead and Crip Times for Liz Crow's Figures project

I haven't been keeping at it, but the original reason for this blog was to find a permanent place for posts I used to make on Facebook about strange juxtapositions between books and music that came to me while I was simultaneously reading and listening to music. Since then, it's become mostly a place to blog about reading challenges and readathons, though I try to give my posts some musical accompaniment.

Today, I'm reading Robert McRuer's intellectually stimulating and politically motivating book, Crip Times: Disability, Globalization and Resistance for one of the categories in the 2018 academic reading challenge. On p. 208, he makes the connection between the band Portishead and their namesake, Portishead in North Somerset where Liz Crow completed sculpture/performance project, Figures in 2015. For the project, Crow spent 11 days at the river, using the mud to make small clay figures. She then toured with the figures for five days, along with stories of 650 disabled people affected by austerity policies. On the project's final day, she burned the figures in a cairn, and then crushed them into dust, while reading the stories of individuals aloud, a process that lasted six hours. Finally, she scattered the ashes off the coast of Portishead.

McRuer argues that the first lines of Portishead's song "Cowboys" could be a comment on the Blaire/Cameron (Blameron) govt. policies of austerity against which Crow's art was a protest:

Did you feel us tales of deceit
Conceal the tongues who need to speak
Subtle lies and a soiled coin
The truth is told, the deal is done. 

I could add, after reading just a few of the the devastating stories that make up Crow's Figures series, that they also resonate strongly with Portishead's song "Roads" which was playing on my computer when I began reading these narratives of lives "at the sharp end of austerity"

How can it feel this wrong?

This is just one of the stories behind the figures:

48-year old Paul was part of a wave of young Scottish authors who rose to international prominence in the 1990s. After he killed himself, his publisher wrote to Chancellor George Osborne, “I thought I would let you know that Paul took his own life. He didn’t leave a note but he laid out two letters on his table. One was notifying him that his Housing Benefit had been stopped. The other was notifying him that his Incapacity Benefit had been stopped. The reason I’m writing is just so you know the human cost of attacking those on benefits.

the Fifth Annual Academic Reading Challenge Starts Jan 1, 2019

Welcome reading friends!

Read below to find out the categories for next year's challenge. 

What it is and who it is for: 

This is a challenge for academics who feel that their reading has become over-specialized and possibly joyless, who want to read more literature for pleasure, who want to broaden the way they approach their own research and teaching, who like to talk about reading with each other, who are interested in interdisciplinary reading, and who want to support their friends and colleagues by reading their books. You don’t have to be a professor to do the challenge. Maybe you graduated from school but you miss reading academic books.  The challenge runs for a year and emphasizes reading across academic disciplines. If you are a professional academic or public intellectual outside the university, this challenge is meant to give you a structure for reading outside your area of specialization - including reading literature - and to provide a space to talk with others about the experience. If you are a general reader who likes reading serious works of non-fiction, this challenge is also for you. It's a structure that you can use to read works of the type that you might not have encountered since you were a student. 

    This is the fifth year I've organized this challenge, and you can read about it in an essay I wrote “Read Another Book, Repeat When Necessary” that’s included in the new essay collection, Reversing the Cult of Speed in Higher Education  edited by Jonathan Lee Chambers and Stephanie Gearhart. The challenge categories are crowd-sourced by the challenge participants in November of the year before the challenge starts.  

 

You can 

Like us on facebook

  There's also a facebook group you can join by permission.

follow the challenge on twitter

use hashtag #AcademicReadingChallenge to share your own updates on the challenge

Rules

The challenge starts on January 1, 2019 at midnight and goes till Dec. 31, 2019. There are a total of 15 regular categories in the challenge with three “extra credit” categories for over-achievers.  There are also double-points available in a few categories.

 The academic books must be at least 175 pages long

Novels must be at least 200 pages long

Books of poetry or special issues of journals must be at least 100 pp. long

One book can be a children's or YA book.

To decide whether a book is academic, look for something published by a university press.

Any book on the list, except where specified otherwise, can be a novel or a complete journal issue as long as it fits the general category

Books can only count for one category, but you can switch them from one category to the other before you’re done if you like.  (In other words, you can't count a book by your friend who wrote about fascism for both the fascism and "by a friend" categories.)

Only one book can be something you’ve read before

Audiobooks are fine as long as they are unabridged and the print edition is at least 200 pages long.

Books must be started no earlier than midnight 1/1/19 and finished no later midnight 12/31/2019

Points: This isn't a competition, but if you're counting…

Total possible points for 1-15 without "double-point bonuses" - 200. 

If you do all the double-point bonuses and do extra-credit categories, you can get a maximum of 240 points.

And NOW….the Categories

1) Book by a friend or colleague 10 points
2) Book about music 10 points
3) Book about fascism  10  points
4) Book written before 1900 20  points
5) Book about a commodity 10 points
6) Book by a living poet 20 points
7) Historical novel 10 points
8)  Book of critical university studies 20 points
9)  Book about a country you don't normally read about 10 points
10) Book originally written in a non-European language 20 points
11) Book you first heard about on a podcast, radio, or social media 10 points
12) Book about a profession you'll never have, but always wish you did  20 points

13) Book that won an award in your field (any time period) 10 points

14) Book you'd forgotten you own (double points if you bought it twice) 10 points

15) A book about aging or with a protagonist over 60 10 points

Extra Credit:
16)  Extra Credit: The Struggle Continues! (you define the struggle) 10 points
17) Extra Extra credit: Book related to your teaching or research but a different discipline from yours 10 points
18) Super Duper Extra Credit: A book you discovered in the footnotes of another book 10 points