Academic literature on the topic 'Do-It-Yourself - Masonry'

It would be fair to say that in our day to day negotiation between the personal and the public, we encounter and process cultural, material and symbolic products in all strata and sections of society. In our homes and in our workplaces, we appear to manage multiple senses of timekeeping and contrasting time-frames with fluid unconscious dexterity. In our forms of entertainment and relaxation, from print to television to cinema or from html to Mp3s to DivX, we juxtapose like and unlike metaphors/images/products/ text in a post-Frankensteinian assemblage of innovated cultural meaning – for example, The Phantom Menace and Austin Powers are commentaries on our visual eclecticism, from mixing mythological elements from feudal times in a space opera to our nostalgic enjoyment of presenting the old sixties' "style" as renewed, millennium-way;Napster is a logical extension of file-sharing which reflects a globalising trend towards the distribution of all content worldwide while meeting the specific requirements of individual taste (that is, the do-it-yourself musical cdrom drawn from thousands of international mp3 libraries). Likewise, in our trade of human utterances and syntax, multiple meanings become attached to words and sentences simultaneously in a variegated exploitation of interpretative dissonance. Oxymora abound and debates over interpretation form the contents of a great number of publications or the motivation behind short-circuiting dominant meanings. For example, in the oxymoron play with language, there exist useful combinations of opposite terms like "Original Copy", "Pretty Ugly", "Genuine Imitation", or "Microsoft Works" which have a commonsense use in daily exchanges. Or, in dialogues on the power behind mutual intelligibility, a term like 'sex', which means one thing in gender discussions, can be used in other contexts or moments to indicate the erotic. Through such language manoeuvres in the fields of meaning-application and interpretation, persons are accepted or discriminated where power differentials are predicated on difference of understanding. Where interpretative practices differ, or where intelligibility is definitely not mutual, misunderstandings and resistance breed. In this way, in our millennium of revealing society's mixture of meaning, the instrumentalities of master narratives are being unmasked in voicing these moments (and rules) of misunderstanding and resistance. What was once predominantly treated as a text or object -- sometimes exhaustively studied in isolation from various social and historical contexts, other times as cultural products facilitated by processes of production and consumption -- is now examined within or alongside different contexts and meanings. It is more contemporaneously sensitive towards our wonderfully elaborate and diverse mix of interpretative practices to situate cultural products and interpretative orders in relation to other social practices, political structures of dominance and exploitation, and cultural hierarchies like race, class, gender and cyber. The implication of this approach is that the meanings of material and symbolic products are no longer stable nor replicated in identical fashion within cultural dna. Society instead is transmitted from generation to generation with mutations, and unlike cultural artefacts conjoin in new births of meaning. The mix gene, it would appear, is widely dispersed in intricate and novel ways. The articles in this publication by M/C serve to illustrate the significance of ‘mix’ for reshaping cultural products, social ideas, even learning pedagogies, in ways that dramatically affect how we perceive and interpret the world. The interpretations of ‘mix’ by contributors were diverse, as expected by the broad uses of the word ‘mix’. Popular culture, however, remained a dominant aspect of culture for analysis, and this is reflected in the mix of articles we have chosen. These articles demonstrate that the fine lines separating genres can be smudged and shaded, and that meaning can be created from blending and swirling rather than only through linearity. Our feature article, "Digital Transformations: The Media is the Mix" by Lori Landay talks about the digital media and its hybrid form and content. This article thinks through "how digital narrative emerges from the mix of interactivity and nonlinearity" – this makes for a non-traditional narrative in both its structure and the way meaning is derived from it. The recombinations draw the spectator into the mix, where the mix is the content. Owen’s Chapman’s "Mixing with Records" follows Landay’s article in the sense that the linear format of the vinyl record, both in its constitution and the way it is played and listened to, is disrupted by the dj practice of "mixing" to create a new audio product. This new sound is created by the interaction of the dj and the choices of sounds, and how these sounds are put together in a new ‘mix’. Toby Daspit’s "The Noisy Mix of Hip Hop Pedagogies" responds to a familiar parental request — "Turn down that damned noise!!!" — in an engaging examination of educational experiences, epochal shifts and the wider implications of incorporating hip-hop aesthetics and recombinant textuality into schooling pedagogies. Daspit’s discussion over a fundamental reorientation to educational pedagogies is a timely piece which resonates well within the ‘mix’ imperative. The mixes evident through narrative are also investigated by Jody Mason, though her article on Bharati Mukherjee’s Wife looks more at thematic mixes within an individual literary character’s life, rather than mixes of meaning, structure and format. Mason’s article looks at the mix of cultures and the impact of that mix upon a female character. It seems, through an analysis of Wife, that different components and subject positions don’t always mix well, if indeed at all. Cutting up narrative, and cutting up sound, mixing it up and creating something new. These two distinct media are twisted together in Jeff Rice’s article, "They Put Me in the Mix: William S Burroughs, DJs, and the New Cultural Studies". The article itself cuts and pastes three key cultural events to prepare an argument that questions the methods of cultural studies regarding new media practices. Mark Pegrum takes a theological perspective on ‘mix’ in "Pop goes the spiritual", and interrogates society’s increasing trend towards religious eclecticism via an assortment of contemporary examples of religious references made by Western pop stars. Pegrum introduces us to this relatively new phenomenon by looking at the dizzying admixture of religions to be found in the songs and words of artists and groups worldwide. Todd Holden analyses the intriguing semiotic processes within Japanese advertising in "Resignification and Cultural Re/Production in Japanese Television Commercials". Advertising in Japan is characterized less and less by attention to product. Instead, the endless stream of Greek myths, Hollywood movies, political references, pop music, scientists and novelists comprise a major corner of audio-visual space. Holden examines the place of Japanese commercials as cultural historian, entertainer, social commentator or hawker. Collectively, these articles demonstrate how dynamic meaning is intimately linked to the idea of 'mix' and is concerned with questions of meaning and value, of culture and philosophy. To rework a tired cliché, no meaning is an island to itself but is an integral part of a shifting, fluid, and unusual combination of cultural, material and symbolic products in various ‘mixes’.

Saturday, 24 July 1971, Tower Mill Hotel The man jiggles the brick, gauges its weight. His stout hand, a flash of his watch dial, the sleeve rolled back, muscles on the upper arm bundled tight. His face half-erased by the dark. There’s something going on beneath the surface that Murray can’t grasp. He thinks of the three witches in Polanski’s Macbeth, huddled together on the beach, digging a circle in the sand with bare hands, unwrapping their filthy bundle. A ritual. The brick’s in the air and it’s funny but Murray expected it to spin but it doesn’t, it holds its position, arcs forward, as though someone’s taken the sky and pulled it sideways to give the impression of movement, like those chase scenes in the Punch and Judy shows you don’t see anymore. The brick hits the cement and fractures. Red dust on cops’ shined shoes. Murray feels the same sense of shock he’d felt, sitting in the sagging canvas seat at one of his film nights, recognising the witches’ bundle, a severed human arm, hacked off just before the elbow; both times looking so intently, he had no distance or defence when the realisation came. ‘What is it?’ says Lan. Murray points to the man who threw the brick but she is looking the other way, at a cop in a white riot helmet, head like a globe, swollen up as though bitten. Lan stands on Murray’s feet to see. The pig yells through a megaphone: ‘You’re occupying too much of the road. It’s illegal. Step back. Step back.’ Lan’s back is pressed against Murray’s stomach; her bum fits snugly to his groin. He resists the urge to plant his cold hands on her warm stomach, to watch her squirm. She turns her head so her mouth is next to his ear, says, ‘Don’t move.’ She sounds winded, her voice without force. He’s pinned to the ground by her feet. Again, ‘Step back. Step back.’ Next to him, Roger begins a chant. ‘Springboks,’ he yells, the rest of the crowd picking up the chant, ‘out now!’ ‘Springboks!’ ‘Out now!’ Murray looks up, sees a hand pressed against the glass in one of the hotel’s windows, quickly withdrawn. The hand belongs to a white man, for sure. It must be one of the footballers, although the gesture is out of keeping with his image of them. Too timid. He feels tired all of a sudden. But Jacobus Johannes Fouché’s voice is in his head, these men—the Springboks—represent the South African way of life, and the thought of the bastard Bjelke inviting them here. He, Roger and Lan were there the day before when the footballers pulled up outside the Tower Mill Hotel in a black and white bus. ‘Can you believe the cheek of those bastards?’ said Roger when they saw them bounding off the bus, legs the span of Murray’s two hands. A group of five Nazis had been lined up in front of the glass doors reflecting the city, all in uniform: five sets of white shirts and thin black ties, five sets of khaki pants and storm-trooper boots, each with a red sash printed with a black and white swastika tied around their left arms, just above the elbow. The Springboks strode inside, ignoring the Nazi’s salute. The protestors were shouting. An apple splattered wetly on the sidewalk. Friday, 7 April 1972, St Lucia Lan left in broad daylight. Murray didn’t know why this upset him, except that he had a vague sense that she should’ve gone in the night time, under the cover of dark. The guilty should sneak away, with bowed heads and faces averted, not boldly, as though going for an afternoon walk. Lan had pulled down half his jumpers getting the suitcase from the top of the cupboard. She left his clothes scattered across the bedroom, victims of an explosion, an excess of emotion. In the two days after Lan left, Murray scours the house looking for some clue to where she was, maybe a note to him, blown off the table in the wind, or put down and forgotten in the rush. Perhaps there was a letter from her parents, bankrupt, demanding she return to Vietnam. Or a relative had died. A cousin in the Viet Cong napalmed. He finds a packet of her tampons in the bathroom cupboard, tries to flush them down the toilet, but they keep floating back up. They bloat; the knotted strings make them look like some strange water-dwelling creature, paddling in the bowl. He pees in the shower for a while, but in the end he scoops the tampons back out again with the holder for the toilet brush. The house doesn’t yield anything, so he takes to the garden, circles the place, investigates its underbelly. The previous tenant had laid squares of green carpet underneath, off-cuts that met in jagged lines, patches of dirt visible. Murray had set up two sofas, mouldy with age, on the carpeted part, would invite his friends to sit with him there, booze, discuss the state of the world and the problem with America. Roger rings in the afternoon, says, ‘What gives? We were supposed to have lunch.’ Murray says, ‘Lan’s left me.’ He knows he will cry soon. ‘Oh Christ. I’m so sorry,’ says Roger. Murray inhales, snuffs up snot. Roger coughs into the receiver. ‘It was just out of the blue,’ says Murray. ‘Where’s she gone?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘She didn’t say anything?’ ‘No,’ says Murray. ‘She could be anywhere. Maybe you should call the police, put in a missing report,’ says Roger. ‘I’m not too friendly with the cops,’ says Murray, and coughs. ‘You sound a bit crook. I’ll come over,’ says Roger. ‘That’d be good,’ says Murray. Roger turns up at the house an hour later, wearing wide pants and a tight collared shirt with thick white and red stripes. He’s growing a moustache, only cuts his hair when he visits his parents. Murray says, ‘I’ll make us a cuppa.’ Roger nods, sits down at the vinyl table with his hands resting on his knees. He says, ‘Are you coming to 291 on Sunday?’ 291 St Paul’s Terrace is the Brisbane Communist Party’s headquarters. Murray says, ‘What’s on?’ ‘Billy needs someone to look after the bookshop.’ Murray gives Roger a mug of tea, sits down with his own mug between his elbows, and cradles his head in his hands so his hair falls over his wrists. After a minute, Roger says, ‘Does her family know?’ Murray makes a strange noise through his hands. ‘I don’t even know how to contact them,’ he says. ‘She wrote them letters—couldn’t afford to phone—but she’s taken everything with her. The address book. Everything.’ Murray knows nothing of the specifics of Lan’s life before she met him. She was the first Asian he’d ever spoken to. She wore wrap-around skirts that changed colour in the sun; grew her hair below the waist; sat in the front row in class and never spoke. He liked the shape of her calf as it emerged from her skirt. He saw her on the great lawn filming her reflection in a window with a Sony Portapak and knew that he wanted her more than anything. Murray seduced her by saying almost nothing and touching her as often as he could. He was worried about offending her. What reading he had done made him aware of his own ignorance, and his friend in Psych told him that when you touch a girl enough — especially around the aureole — a hormone is released that bonds them to you, makes them sad when you leave them or they leave you. In conversation, Murray would put his hand on Lan’s elbow, once on the top of her head. Lan was ready to be seduced. Murray invited her to a winter party in his backyard. They kissed next to the fire and he didn’t notice until the next morning that the rubber on the bottom of his shoe melted in the flames. She moved into his house quickly, her clothes bundled in three plastic bags. He wanted her to stay in bed with him all day, imagined he was John Lennon and she Yoko Ono. Their mattress became a soup of discarded clothes, bread crumbs, wine stains, come stains, ash and flakes of pot. He resented her when she told him that she was bored, and left him, sheets pulled aside to reveal his erection, to go to class. Lan tutored high-schoolers for a while, but they complained to their mothers that they couldn’t understand her accent. She told him her parents wanted her to come home. The next night he tidied the house, and cooked her dinner. Over the green peas and potato—Lan grated ginger over hers, mixed it with chili and soy sauce, which she travelled all the way to Chinatown on a bus to buy—Murray proposed. They were married in the botanic gardens, surrounded by Murray’s friends. The night before his father called him up and said, ‘It’s not too late to get out of it. You won’t be betraying the cause.’ Murray said, ‘You have no idea what this means to me,’ and hung up on him. Sunday, 9 April 1972, 291 St Paul’s Terrace Murray perches on the backless stool behind the counter in The People’s Bookshop. He has the sense he is on the brink of something. His body is ready for movement. When a man walks into the shop, Murray panics because Billy hadn’t shown him how to use the cash register. He says, ‘Can I help?’ anyway. ‘No,’ says the man. The man walks the length of the shelves too fast to read the titles. He stops at a display of Australiana on a tiered shelf, slides his hand down the covers on display. He pauses at Crocodile Hunt. The cover shows a drawing of a bulky crocodile, scaled body bent in an S, its jaws under the man’s thumb. He picks it up, examines it. Murray thinks it odd that he doesn’t flip it over to read the blurb. He walks around the whole room once, scanning the shelves, reaches Murray at the counter and puts the book down between them. Murray picks it up, turns it over, looking for a price. It’s stuck on the back in faded ink. He opens his mouth to tell the man how much, and finds him staring intently at the ceiling. Murray looks up too. A hairline crack runs along the surface and there are bulges in the plaster where the wooden framework’s swollen. It’s lower than Murray remembers. He thinks that if he stood on his toes he could reach it with the tips of his fingers. Murray looks down again to find the man staring at him. Caught out, Murray mutters the price, says, ‘You don’t have it in exact change, do you?’ The man nods, fumbles around in his pocket for a bit and brings out a note, which he lays at an angle along the bench top. He counts the coins in the palm of his hand. He makes a fist around the coins, brings his hand over the note and lets go. The coins fall, clinking, over the bench. One spins wildly, rolls past Murray’s arm and across the bench. Murray lets it fall. He recognises the man now; it is the act of release that triggers the memory, the fingers spread wide, the wrist bent, the black watch band. This is the man who threw the brick in the Springbok protest. Dead set. He looks up again, expecting to see the same sense of recognition in the man, but he is walking out of the shop. Murray follows him outside, leaving the door open and the money still on the counter. The man is walking right along St Paul’s Terrace. He tucks the book under his arm to cross Barry Parade, as though he might need both hands free to wave off the oncoming traffic. Murray stands on the other side of the road, unsure of what to do. When Murray came outside, he’d planned to hail the man, tell him he recognised him from the strike and was a fellow comrade. They give discounts to Communist Party members. Outside the shop, it strikes him that perhaps the man is not one of them at all. Just because he was at the march doesn’t make him a communist. Despite the unpopularity of the cause —‘It’s just fucking football,’ one of Murray’s friends had said. ‘What’s it got to do with anything?’— there had been many types there, a mixture of labour party members; unionists; people in the Radical Club and the Eureka Youth League; those not particularly attached to anyone. He remembers again the brick shattered on the ground. It hadn’t hit anyone, but was an incitement to violence. This man is dangerous. Murray is filled again with nervous energy, which leaves him both dull-witted and super-charged, as though he is a wind-up toy twisted tight and then released, unable to do anything but move in the direction he’s facing. He crosses the road about five metres behind the man, sticks to the outer edge of the pavement, head down. If he moves his eyes upwards, while still keeping his neck lowered, he can see the shoes of the man, his white socks flashing with each step. The man turns the corner into Brunswick Street. He stops at a car parked in front of the old Masonic Temple. Murray walks past fast, unsure of what to do next. The Temple’s entry is set back in the building, four steps leading up to a red door. Murray ducks inside the alcove, looks up to see the man sitting in the driver’s seat pulling out the pages of Crocodile Hunt and feeding them through the half wound-down window where they land, fanned out, on the road. When he’s finished dismembering the book, the man spreads the page-less cover across the back of the car. The crocodile, snout on the side, one eye turned outwards, stares out into the street. The man flicks the ignition and drives, the pages flying out and onto the road in his wake. Murray sits down on the steps of the guild and smokes. He isn’t exactly sure what just happened. The man must have bought the book just because he liked the picture on the front of the cover. But it’s odd though that he had bothered to spend so much just for one picture. Murray remembers how he had paced the shop and studiously examined the ceiling. He’d given the impression of someone picking out furniture for the room, working out the dimensions so some chair or table would fit. A cough. Murray looks up. The man’s standing above him, his forearm resting on the wall, elbow bent. His other arm hangs at his side, hand bunched up around a bundle of keys. ‘I wouldn’t of bothered following me, if I was you,’ the man says. ‘The police are on my side. Special branch are on my side.’ He pushes himself off the wall, stands up straight, and says, ‘Heil Hitler.’ Tuesday April 19, 1972, 291 St Paul’s Terrace Murray brings his curled fist down on the door. It opens with the force of his knock and he feels like an idiot for even bothering. The hallway’s dark. Murray runs into a filing cabinet, swears, and stands in the centre of the corridor, with his hand still on the cabinet, calling, ‘Roger! Roger!’ Murray told Roger he’d come here when he called him. Murray was walking back from uni, and on the other side of the road to his house, ready to cross, he saw there was someone standing underneath the house, looking out into the street. Murray didn’t stop. He didn’t need to. He knew it was the man from the bookshop, the Nazi. Murray kept walking until he reached the end of the street, turned the corner and then ran. Back on campus, he shut himself in a phone box and dialed Roger’s number. ‘I can’t get to my house,’ Murray said when Roger picked up. ‘Lock yourself out, did you?’ said Roger. ‘You know that Nazi? He’s back again.’ ‘I don’t get it,’ said Roger. ‘It doesn’t matter. I need to stay with you,’ said Murray. ‘You can’t. I’m going to a party meeting.’ ‘I’ll meet you there.’ ‘Ok. If you want.’ Roger hung up. Now, Roger stands framed in the doorway of the meeting room. ‘Hey Murray, shut up. I can hear you. Get in here.’ Roger switches on the hallway light and Murray walks into the meeting room. There are about seven people, sitting on hard metal chairs around a long table. Murray sits next to Roger, nods to Patsy, who has nice breasts but is married. Vince says, ‘Hi, Murray, we’re talking about the moratorium on Friday.’ ‘You should bring your pretty little Vietnamese girl,’ says Billy. ‘She’s not around anymore,’ says Roger. ‘That’s a shame,’ says Patsy. ‘Yeah,’ says Murray. ‘Helen Dashwood told me her school has banned them from wearing moratorium badges,’ says Billy. ‘Far out,’ says Patsy. ‘We should get her to speak at the rally,’ says Stella, taking notes, and then, looking up, says, ‘Can anyone smell burning?’ Murray sniffs, says ‘I’ll go look.’ They all follow him down the hall. Patsy says, behind him, ‘Is it coming from the kitchen?’ Roger says, ‘No,’ and then the windows around them shatter. Next to Murray, a filing cabinet buckles and twists like wet cardboard in the rain. A door is blown off its hinges. Murray feels a moment of great confusion, a sense that things are sliding away from him spectacularly. He’s felt this once before. He wanted Lan to sit down with him, but she said she didn’t want to be touched. He’d pulled her to him, playfully, a joke, but he was too hard and she went limp in his hands. Like she’d been expecting it. Her head hit the table in front of him with a sharp, quick crack. He didn’t understand what happened; he had never experienced violence this close. He imagined her brain as a line drawing with the different sections coloured in, like his Psych friend had once showed him, except squashed in at the bottom. She had recovered, of course, opened her eyes a second later to him gasping. He remembered saying, ‘I just want to hold you. Why do you always do this to me?’ and even to him it hadn’t made sense because he was the one doing it to her. Afterwards, Murray had felt hungry, but couldn’t think of anything that he’d wanted to eat. He sliced an apple in half, traced the star of seeds with his finger, then decided he didn’t want it. He left it, already turning brown, on the kitchen bench. Author’s Note No one was killed in the April 19 explosion, nor did the roof fall in. The bookstore, kitchen and press on the first floor of 291 took the force of the blast (Evans and Ferrier). The same night, a man called The Courier Mail (1) saying he was a member of a right wing group and had just bombed the Brisbane Communist Party Headquarters. He threatened to bomb more on Friday if members attended the anti-Vietnam war moratorium that day. He ended his conversation with ‘Heil Hitler.’ Gary Mangan, a known Nazi party member, later confessed to the bombing. He was taken to court, but the Judge ruled that the body of evidence was inadmissible, citing a legal technicality. Mangan was not charged.Ian Curr, in his article, Radical Books in Brisbane, publishes an image of the Communist party quarters in Brisbane. The image, entitled ‘After the Bomb, April 19 1972,’ shows detectives interviewing those who were in the building at the time. One man, with his back to the camera, is unidentified. I imagined this unknown man, in thongs with the long hair, to be Murray. It is in these gaps in historical knowledge that the writer of fiction is free to imagine. References “Bomb in the Valley, Then City Shots.” The Courier Mail 20 Apr. 1972: 1. Curr, Ian. Radical Books in Brisbane. 2008. 24 Jun. 2011 < http://workersbushtelegraph.com.au/2008/07/18/radical-books-in-brisbane/ >. Evans, Raymond, and Carole Ferrier. Radical Brisbane: An Unruly History. Brisbane: Vulgar Press, 2004.

Revving I’m convinced that no one actually listens to podcasts. Or maybe it’s just that no one admits it. This is partially because a podcast falls between fetish and precious. Listening to a podcast is at once intimate, someone speaking directly to you through your AirPods, and distant, since you’re likely listening by yourself. Listening to a podcast is weird enough; talking about listening to a podcast makes other people feel uncomfortable. This is why no one listens to podcasts while doing nothing else. Podcasts encourage passive listening; they compel active participation in something other than the podcast. There’s a suggested utility to listening to a podcast while doing something else—walking your cockapoo around the block, rearranging your bookshelf, prepping your meals—like you’re performing your practicality for the world. Listening to a podcast is not sufficient. When listening to a podcast, you simultaneously do something else to justify the listening. Podcasts are relatively new, as academic texts go. Yet they have been quickly taken up as technologies and artifacts of analysis (Vásquez), tools for teaching writing (Bowie), and modes of distributing scholarship (McGregor and Copeland). Podcasts are also, importantly, not simply audio versions of written essays (Detweiller), or non-visual equivalents of videos (Vásquez). Podcasts represent genres and opportunities for rhetorical choice that instructors cannot assume students already possess expected literacies for (Bourelle, Bourelle, and Jones). Paralleling much service work at institutions of higher education, women scholars and scholars of colour take on inequitable labour with podcast scholarship (Faison et al.; Shamburg). A promising new direction challenges the raced and gendered stereotypes of the genre and mode, highlighting podcasts as an anti-racist and anti-disinformation tool (Vrikki) and a way to engage reluctant students in critical race discourse (Harris). And, with so many podcasts accessible on virtually any topic imaginable, podcasts have more recently emerged as reliable secondary sources for academic research, a usage accelerated by the availability of audio versions of scholarly publications and professional academics composing podcasts to distribute and conduct their research. When we incorporate podcasts into our academic work, new connections become recognisable: connections between ourselves and other humans, ourselves and other things, and things and other things—including the connections between audio and work. Podcasts maintain their histories as a passive medium. A student can listen to a podcast for class while making dinner and keeping an eye on their family. A professional academic might more dutifully pay attention to the content of the podcast, but they’ll also attune to how the physical experience of doing research that way affects their work, their findings, and themself. When considered as academic work, as in this piece, podcasts persuade us to pay attention to methods, materiality, networks, and embodiment. Methods I listen to podcasts in the car, most often while driving to and from work. Listening to podcasts while commuting is common. Yet listening beyond content immersion or distraction, listening as part of an intentional methodology—formulating a plan, rhetorically listening, taking audio notes, annotating and building on those notes later—maybe less so. This intentional, rhetorical approach to listening while driving attunes the researcher to the embodied, physical aspects of each of these activities: research, driving, and listening. As a result, the research experience provides different kinds of opportunities for invention and reflection. My process is as follows: first, I curate a playlist based around a specific research question or agenda. This playlist will include selected episodes from podcasts that I have evaluated as reliable on a given topic. This evaluation is usually based on a combination of factors, mainly my familiarity with the podcast, the professional credentials (academic or otherwise) of the podcast hosts and guests, and recommendations from other researchers or podcasters. I also consider the structure of the podcast and the quality of the audio recording, because if I can’t hear the content, or if I must spend more time skipping ads than actively listening, then the podcast isn’t very usable for this stage of my research process. I will sometimes include single episodes of podcasts I’m less familiar with, usually because I noticed them pitched on one of my social media feeds and as a trial to see if I want to subscribe to the podcast. The playlist is arranged in what I hope will be a coherent order based on the episode descriptions. For example, sequencing episodes of Have You Heard (Berkshire and Schneider), Talking Race, Africa and People (Tiluk and Hope), and Is This Democracy (Mason and Zimmer) with the titles, "Digging Deep into the Education Wars”, “They Stole WOKE”, and “‘Cancel Culture’: How a Moral Panic Is Capturing America and the World” places these sources in conversation with each other, juxtaposes the arguments, and allows me to synthesise my own comprehensive response. Second, I listen. Ratcliffe positioned rhetorical listening as a performative “trope for interpretive invention” and a method for “facilitating cross-cultural dialogues” within composition studies (196). Listening is a thing we do in order to do something else. Under this framework, the listener/researcher approaches their task with goals of understanding and responsibility to themselves and others, which then affords opportunities to identify commonalities and differences within claims and cultural logics (204). In other words, by paying closer attention to who we are and who we’re listening to, and by listening in good faith, we can better understand what and why people are saying and doing what they are, and when we understand those better, we are better equipped for future action. Listening rhetorically can be an anchor when researching with podcasts, a modality notoriously coded and memed as white, male, and upper middle class (Locke; Morgan; “A Group of White Men Is Called a Podcast”). The technologies I use during this research afford and constrain, which leads to the third aspect: notetaking. I can’t write while driving. I tend to forget important bits. But the act of listening opens me up to things I might otherwise have missed. Sound, Detweiler shows, “affords different modes of composing, listening, thinking, and responding”. To facilitate my listening as invention, I added myself to my contacts list so that I can talk-to-text myself with questions about what I’m listening to, names and key terms that I need to look up later, and starter drafts of my own writing. While driving, I can “favourite” an episode while on the go, a marker to myself to re-listen and inspect the episode transcript. Later, at my work desk, I decipher whatever it is my phone’s text messaging app thought I said. “Anna Genesis Evolution from one species to another.” “Ben sick something at the bottom of the sea.” “Dinosaurs and dragons make each other plausible.” (Pretty sure my phone got that last one right.) There, my workflow is mediated by expected reading research technologies (word processing application, PDF viewer, boutique file organisation and annotation software), agents (desk, chair, and lighting selected by my employer to improve my productivity), and processes (coding transcripts, annotating secondary sources, writing, and revising). Materiality My methodology is an auditory variation of McNely’s visual fieldwork, which “attempts to render visible the environs, objects, sensations, and affects of inquiry” ("Lures" 216). Podcasts are expressions of physicality that bring together a confluence of networked actors, technologies, and spaces. Moreover, a podcast is itself a material artifact in the most literal sense: sound is a physical phenomenon, emitting and reverberating waves stimulating effects in our body and affecting physio-emotional responses. Inside my car, there is little impeding the sound waves emitting from the speakers and into my ears. Diffraction is minimal; the sound fills the interior of my vehicle so quickly that I can’t perceive that it is moving. I’m surrounded by the sound of the podcast, but not in the sense that is usually meant by “surround sound”. I’m also inundated by other sounds, the noises of driving that the twenty-first-century commuter has been conditioned to render ambient: the buzz of other vehicles passing me, the hum of my tyres on asphalt, the squeak of brakes and crunch of slowly turning tyres. Listening to a podcast in the car is like sitting in on a conversation that you can’t participate in. Slate magazine’s sports podcast “Hang Up and Listen” plays with this expectation, taking its name for the clichéd valediction that callers to local sports radio shows would say to indicate that they are done asking their question, signifying to the host that it’s their turn again. It’s a shibboleth through which the caller acknowledges and performs the participatory role of the listener as an actor within the network of the show. McNely writes that when he walks, “there are sounds in me, around me, passing through me. When I walk, I feel wind, mist, sleet. When I walk, I feel bass, treble, empathy. When I walk, I feel arguments, metaphors, dialogues—in my gut, in my chest” (Engaging 184). His attunement to all of these elicits physical sensations and emotional responses, and the sounds of the podcast cause similar responses for me. I jostle in my seat. I tense up, grip the steering wheel, and grind my teeth. I sigh, guffaw, roll my eyes, and yell. I pause—both my movement and the podcast app—to let a potential response roll about in my head. I’m in the car, but podcasts attempt to place me somewhere else through ambient worldbuilding: the clinking of cups and spoons to let me know the conversation is taking place in a coffee shop, the chirps of frogs and bugs to make me feel like I’m with the guest interviewee at the Amazonian research site, the clamour of a teacher calling their third-grade class to attention as a lead in for a discussion of public school funding. The arrangement and design of the podcast takes the listener to the world within the podcast, and it reminds me how the podcast, and myself, my car, and the listening are connected to everything else. Networks I am employed at an institution with a “distributed campus”, with multiple sites spread across the local region and online, without an officially designated central campus. Faculty and students attend these different places based on appointment, proximity, and preference. I teach classes in person on two of the campuses, sometimes at both simultaneously connected via videoconference. So where is the location of my class? It’s the physical campuses, certainly. It’s also the online space where the class meets, the locations where users join from (home, a dorm room, their workplace, etc.), and the Internet connecting those people and spaces. The class is transnational, as many of our students live in the neighbouring country. The class is also in between and in transit, with students using the shuttle bus Wi-Fi to complete work or join meetings. As with the research methodology detailed above, the class is moving between the static places, too, as the instructor and students alike travel to teach or attend class or book it home to join via videoconference in time. The institution’s networks enact Detweiller’s characterisation of podcasts as enacting both rhetorical distribution and circulation. Taken together, “distribution is not a strictly one-to-many phenomenon”. Yes, it’s “a conception of rhetoric that challenges but does not erase the role of human agency in rhetorical causes and effects”, but it’s also the physical networks and “supply chains” that move things. In both cases, the decentralisation draws attention away from individual nodes and to the network and the interconnections between various actors. Consider the routes the podcast takes. I start the episode as I leave my driveway. By the time I reach the highway, the podcast has made it through its preamble and first ad read. The episode travels with me in the car along my route, the sound of a single word literally takes up physical space on the highway. Ideas stretch for miles. I make the entire trip in a single episode. I then assign that episode to my students, who take the podcast with them. It moves at different speeds but also at the same speed (unless a particular listener sets their playback at a faster pace). In some ways, it’s the same sound, yet in other ways—time, space, distribution, audience—the same episode makes a different sound. Meanwhile, the podcast hosts remain in their recording booth, simultaneously locked into and moving through spacetime. Further, by analysing the various texts surrounding my listening to podcasts, we can see a multimodal genre ecology of signs, roadways, mapped and unmapped routes, turn-by-turn navigation apps, as well as other markers of location and direction, like billboards, water towers in the distance, the setting sun, and that one tree in a field that doesn’t belong there but lets me know I’ve passed the midpoint of my commute. Visual cues are perhaps more easily felt, but Rickert reminds us that “we consciously and unconsciously depend on sound to orient, situate, and wed ourselves to the places we inhabit” (152). The three-note dinging of a railroad crossing halts drivers even without visual confirmation of an oncoming train. The brutal springtime crosswind announces its presence on my passenger window, giving me a split second to steady the wheel. The lowering pitch of the pavement as I take the exit towards my house. The network of audio extends beyond the situations of the researcher and draws attention to what Barad referred to as “entangled material agencies” resulting in “networks or assemblages of humans and nonhumans” (1118, 1131). The network of my podcast listening accounts for the mobile device that we use to access content, the digital networks that I download episodes over, as well as the physical infrastructures that enable those networks, the hosting services and recording technologies and funding mechanisms used by the podcasters, the distribution of campuses, the roads I travel on, the tonnage of steel and plastic that I manipulate while researching, and that’s even before we get to everything else that impacts on my listening, like weather, traffic, the pathways all these material items took to get where they are, the head cold impacting on my hearing, my personal history of hearing different sounds, and on and on. Embodiment I listen to podcasts in the car while commuting to work. A more accurate way of putting that would be to say that commuting is work, which I mean twice over. First, a commute is likely a requisite component of your job. This is not to assign full culpability to one actor or another; the length of your commute likely owes to various factors—availability of affordable housing, proximity of worksite relative to your home, competing duties of family care, etc.—but a commute is and should be considered part of the work. Even if you’re not getting paid for it, even if the neoliberal economic system that overarches your life has convinced you that you are actively choosing to commute as part of the mutually and equally entered-into contract with your employer, you’re on the clock when commuting because you’re doing that action because of the work. If your response to this is, “then what about people who work from home? Should their personal devices and monthly Internet costs be considered work expenses? Or what about the time it takes to get up early to put makeup on or prepare lunches for their kids? Does all that count as work?” Yes. Yes, it does. The farmer’s day doesn’t start when they milk the cow, it starts as soon as they wake up. It starts before then, even. We are entangled with our work selves. Lately, I’ve begun logging these listening commutes on my weekly timesheet. It’s not an official record: salaried employees at my institution are not required to keep track of their work hours. Instead, it’s a routine and technical document I developed to help me get things done, an artifact of procedural rhetoric and the broader genre ecology of my work. Second, commuting is a physical act. It is work. We walk to bus and train stops and stand around waiting. We power our bicycles. We drive our vehicles, manoeuvring through streets and turns and other drivers. The deleterious effects of sitting down for prolonged periods for work, including while commuting, are well documented (Ding et al.). Driving itself is an act that places the human—the driver, passengers, and pedestrians—in greater physical danger than flying, or riding a train, or swimming with sharks. Research in this way presents a different kind of epistemic risk. Arriving So, the question I’m left to codify is what does this commuting audio research methodology offer for researchers that other, more traditional approaches, might not? Rickert analysed an electric car as “inherently suasive”, as it “participates in the conflicted discourses about that built environment and showcases some fundamental preconceptions rooted into our everyday ways of being together” (263). I’m alone in the car, but every sound reminds me of how I am connected to someone or something else. Of course, neither commuting nor listening to podcasts are exclusively solo endeavours: people carpool to work, and fans attend live recordings of their favourite shows. Perhaps listening while driving causes me to pay closer attention to what’s being said, the way you seem to learn the words of a song better when listening and singing along in the car. There are different kinds of distractions when driving versus sitting at one’s desk to read or listen (although it’s fair to say that the podcast itself is the distraction from what I should be paying the most attention to when driving). Anyone who has taken a long road trip alone can tell you about the opportunities it provides to sit with one’s thoughts, to spend uninterrupted time and miles turning over an idea in your mind, to reflect at length on a single topic, to rant to the noise of the road. Maybe that’s what a commuting podcast methodology affords: isolated moments surrounded by sound, away from the overtly audio, and connected to the rest of the world. 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