My first office

[imomus]

Yesterday something extraordinary happened to me. I was handed the keys to my first office. It's a glass-walled space in the Media Architecture department of the Future University, and sits at the top of a cascade of esplanades or 'work decks' within the glass hangar of the main university building. As technicians fussed around installing and networking a computer for me, a 17" G4 Powerbook, I felt an odd mixture of emotions, which I will now number for you in the form of bullet points on my new whiteboard:

Point 1. Surely there's been some mistake! I am a rocker, a poete maudit, a scurrilous rogue, a pirate, a masturbator! I do not deserve an office! Offices are for landlubbers! We poete maudit pirate types are more likely to see the inside of a prison cell than an office! What a strange thing has come to pass!

Point 2. I absolutely must not download any porn to this computer, or play with myself under the desk. I am now a responsible person, an adult, a member of society, an educator, one who must form impressionable youth and turn a blind eye to its nubile curves, its pert... no, no, stop, stop, Professor! Think of death, dentistry and taxes...

Point 3. But I absolutely deserve this office. I, if anyone, should have an office in a forward-thinking university, a university of the future! For I am brilliant, one of the great minds of my generation! Imagine if people like me were all given offices, and library passes, and a bunch of electronic equipment, and free time to brainstorm! What an amazingly playful, experimental, edgy, exciting place the world would become!

Point 4. Some extraordinary things have happened this week. I've been offered my own weekly column in a British national newspaper (can't say which until it's confirmed) and the authorship of an art book by a leading art publisher (ditto). But these are sort of freelance things, things I'll do lying on my couch in my bathrobe. They won't change me existentially. They won't really feel like promotion or give me a sense of power. Being given one's own office is quite different. It may only be for six weeks, but it feels like tenure, like mastery.

Point 5. Memories of offices. Other people's offices. My father's office at the British Council, Kolonaki Square, Athens, my father's office at Concordia University, Montreal. Taking the train downtown to visit my father, entering the big modern cube, riding to the fifth floor, greeting my father's secretary. Although I've become more famous than my father, I've never become more important than him. I've never had a secretary.

Point 6. Would I have had an office if I'd become a grad student? Does my brother have an office at Anglia Polytechnic University? I suppose he must. I wonder if he has a secretary? Probably a departmental secretary. I must ask him.

Point 7. These shelves look so bare, I must go down to the library and check out books by Gregory Bateson and people like that so that it looks as if I'm working on some really high level stuff. And maybe I could copy Lehan next door and stick suggestive phrases from Deleuze on the walls to keep me in a fertile, speculative frame of mind.

Point 8. I'll put one of the chairs from the table by the whiteboard in front of my desk so that I can say to people, fellow academics, 'You must drop by, I'm in 526, I'd like to discuss Huizinga's 'Homo Ludens' with you, I hear that's your speciality.'

Point 9. Flashback to the New Year holiday. Staying at my sister's place, watching the DVD of The Office. Am I David Brent now? Will I call people into my office, crack miscalculated jokes and play my songs to them on an acoustic guitar at great length?

Point 10. How's it going to feel when I no longer have an office? I retire from academia in March. Will I still have the stomach for the high seas, the scurrilous skull and crossbones? Or will I have left my heart in the future, in this cool transparent cube?

Comments

[emobus.livejournal.com]

Halfway through reading this series of revelations I posted a comment saying you should top it off by watching "The Office" ... then after posting I realized that "The Office" is in Point 9 ... very good.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

We really have to have a chat about your ADD, Emobus. Come and see me in my office, 4 o'clock.

[yourpony.livejournal.com]

your father was a professor at Concordia? what did he profess to know, and did you spend time in la belle ville much growing up?

[shadowblue.livejournal.com]

Congratulations.

The world may be a very strange place, but at least, in pockets, it seems to be moving in the right direction, if you've got an office now.

Next, we need to get you into government.

[martylog.livejournal.com]

When do you get your first business cards?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

My dad was head of the TEFL department. Teaching English was obviously a bit of a hot potato at the height of the Quebec separatist movement. I stayed mostly out in Beaconsfield, attending Macdonald High School, but went in on Saturdays to Concordia for art classes, or to abuse the photocopier in my dad's office.

[yourpony.livejournal.com]

Ah, Beaconsfield.
Tons of fun out in the west island. err.
hm.
I took art courses at Concordia too. People do that there.
I miss Montreal. But perhaps if I was established in a shiny glass future-office in Japan, too,
I wouldn't mind.

[cataptromancer.livejournal.com]

>"Would I have had an office if I'd become a grad student?"

Momus as a grad student is an amusing idea. Would you become disheveled and discontent?

[museumfreak.livejournal.com]

Re point 2: Future University strikes me as pretty, but rather Foucaultian, or even Orwellian. It's like "Oh, look, here's the Future for you: but oh, look, it's a prison, it's a panopticon, but you won't care because it's pretty and there are nice computers."

Of course that could broadly be said of a lot of technology these days, couldn't it?

[azzy23.livejournal.com]

Good lord, pirate in a box.

I have an office, but it isn't nearly as shiny as yours. Also, it's the "scrubbers" office. Not really an office at all. It's an equipment room. I'm merely another piece of equipment. I'm so jealous.

I used to have a window... but they took it away.

Don't throw any rocks, no matter how tempting, no matter how the pretty sound of breaking glass taunts you. It's bad.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Reviews of my records often sneer about how I make music 'for the grad student set'. I'm not even sure quite what being a grad student entails. It's when you graduate, but don't leave, right?

[kineticfactory.livejournal.com]

I see that university departments that deal in the interplay of art and technology all look fairly similar, down to the multilevel concrete/steel/glass panel design, open spaces and conspicuous Apple computers. Your office reminds me of the building at Monash University where the First Iteration conference (http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~iterate/FI/index.html) was held in 1999, and various academics, artists and electronic musicians presented papers on various topics.

In a past life, I was an Associate Lecturer, and before that, a Senior Tutor; in both cases, I got an office of my own. It's one of those givens of academic life. My offices were considerably smaller and less impressive looking, though.

[yanatonage.livejournal.com]

You've become domesticated...our little sound collagist and cultural critic is all grown up!

[cataptromancer.livejournal.com]

In the u.s, at least, 'grad student' refers to anyone continuing with academia after getting a B.A. from a four year college: Ph.D. and M.A. candidates in the arts and sciences (although not medical or legal programs). There's a whole mythology/stereotype-set about grad students being harried, snide, flappable, and full of useless information. I'm living the stereotype myself.

point 11.

[wrighter.livejournal.com]

point eleven. you must break all those rules. download porn. play with yourself underneath the desk. and have something write about in the new column. after all, would a "forward-thinking" university of the future not understanding progressive behavior?

congratulations. well earned. and a beautiful one it is.

[yanatonage.livejournal.com]

Now that you mention that, NYU's Interactive Telecommunications department, home of Douglas Rushkoff and Clay Shirky and others, looks very similar, glass walls and all.

[kojapan.livejournal.com]

Point 9 made me laugh.

[emobus.livejournal.com]

Anyone could come and see you in that office... it's made of glass.

Tweed?

[eduard-green.livejournal.com]

Is this really your first office or just your first interesting one?

So what is this job- what is future university? Universe City!

Must google all terms I don't know.

Do you wear tweed?

[rciaodree.livejournal.com]

Homo Ludens is a fabulous book. I'm so happy to see another reference to it.

[emobus.livejournal.com]

My roommate is a "grad student." She finished one degree at McGill and is now studying at SFU because she didn't know what to do after graduating and thought, "I'll just keep going to school!"

At my university, and probably a lot of other N. American ones, grad students take classes and also act as teacher's aides in their respective fields.

[eduard-green.livejournal.com]

This is an excellent plan.

Maybe a secret society needs to be formed that steers interesting people to positions of influence...

[I would like to point out I'm not a nutter, just dreaming].

[fufurasu.livejournal.com]

The office and the Mac, beautiful though they may be, are sterile, clean, and tidy, which are not adjectives that would describe your sound project as I imagined it. You must remain the pirate and make yourself at home in the new office. Suggestions:

1) Rearrange the two tables into a squarish block, and have your visitors seating next to you, rather than you and them being separated by a desk (with you in the position of authority).

2) Wrap the strip lights in sheets of colourful film. I know you like fluorescence, but it will instantly make your cell in the white grid stand out.

3) Shun the whiteboard, buy boxes of oil crayons, and use your glass wall for diagrams, drawings, notes, and lists. Encourage your visitors to draw and sign on the glass.

4) Cover the floor with the output of the university's document shredders. Allow footsteps to make sounds.

Leave your chair and the 17" PB alone. They're cool.

Re: Tweed?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I wore tweed in the video for 'Marquis of Sadness' (see the Man of Letters (http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?tab=1&type=product&id=1341936&skuId=6177745&productCategoryId=cat02081) DVD), a song in which I play a corrupt writer in residence who'll 'get along quite nicely in this university, in my little office with its sofa and its key, they'll call on me at all hours for gin and sympathy, bringing bad but intimate poetry'. But here in Hakodate I'm closer to the character in another song written around the same time, who sings about 'this purity as cold as spring snow in the wind on the island of Hokkaido'.

[darthhellokitty.livejournal.com]

That's why he mustn't masturbate in it!