the pink chip System for Staying Less Crazy (in academia)

The Backstory: on starting my new job last autumn, I took a deep breath and declared my mental health disability. Mild to moderate depression, plus not sleeping. The great thing about m-to-m is that I function apparently normally for weeks, months, years even … before finding myself with something sharp in my arm and / or a firm conviction that I should not exist. The great thing about not sleeping is – ah just kidding, there is no nice about not sleeping. Even proper sleep after not sleep makes me feel like I have the flu and look like an extra from the living dead.

Side note: lots of people have m-to-m and sleep problems, and maybe more of us should declare it. I’ve certainly found it makes a change from the elaborate subterfuge formerly practised in order to pretend that everything was FINE all the time, and devoting all my spare energy and time off to concealing its effects on my work. [NB managers need help with how to respond to declarations of mentalist disability. Another time.]

The actual point: sleep problems and depression love academics. People whose job it is to think too much. Who are achievement oriented. No fixed working hours. Fuzzy line between work and leisure. Constant feeling of guilt for (a) working to much and (b) not working enough. And so, as part of my ongoing experiment in being out and a bit mental, I present one of my newly discovered Systems for Staying Less Crazy (in academia). The PINK CHIP system, tada!

It all started when somebody left a jar of tiddly winks round my house (artists – they do that, they are so wacky). Every time I work on a weekend, or a day of booked leave, or a public holiday, I take a pink chip out of the jar and put it on top of the stereo speaker (next to the elephants of course – elephants are well known to prefer pink).

As the pink chips start to mount up, I talk sternly to myself about taking an afternoon off. Or even, gosh, a whole day. Each pink chip counts as a GUILT FREE day off. No email no reading of teaching texts no writing of proposals nuffink. Proper day off means chip goes back in jar.

There are 8 pink chips. After that, we get into RED CHIPS which means danger. It is definitely time to book off some leave and to actually leave it all alone, which is what ‘leave’ means, duh.

There are some rules to the system which is currently in beta (I don’t know what this means but doesn’t it sound robust). There is also a FAQ (furry and queer. oops wrong blog).

Q. What if I only work a little bit on Saturday? How many hours of weekend work exactly will trigger a pink chip?

A. Haven’t you internalised the work ethic thoroughly. Any work on a weekend is Weekend Work, of course. To the elephant farm with your pink chip. You could also bring in a sub-chip system. Blue, for instance is unassigned. Two blues make a pink? Go crazy. No no I didn’t mean that. We shall suspend the casual use of mental health insults.

Rule 1. Avoid the RED CHIP zone.

Rule 2. Once you have entered the RED CHIP zone, any kind of mentalist behaviour is OK. Crying, raving, extreme irritation, feelings of murder in meetings. Sleeping pills are also very OK in the red chip zone (but keep a note of the frequency and amount – hey, you could use yellow chips for that). You also have to write a plan for getting out of the red zone, and have it signed by all of your imaginary friends.

Rule 3. If all the pink chips are in the jar, that’s great! Congratulations, you are a normal person (what?) But you can still have a Guilt Free Day Off. Just decide that green is minus pink. You get it.

OK so to the games shop with you all for your tiddly winks. Any more Qs and interesting rules send them to the comments. Ta.

26 April – free public talk in London

I’m speaking about the popular reception of relativity at the Royal Society on 26 April 2013

This is a free event from 1-2pm and will subsequently be podcast

babble machine

Babble Machine is a sound installation opening at the Science Museum Lates on Weds 29 November and running until Sun 1 December. By Aleksander Kolkowski, Katy Price and Alison Hess. Inspired by the Science Museum’s 2LO exhibition which opens shortly.

Babble Machine explores the sound world of early radio in a multi-layered installation work, comprising archive recordings, text collage and hefty doses of radio interference. An array of vintage radio horns, receivers and suspended objects eerily emit sounds from the past and the present, including a live feed from the Science Museum’s ‘2LO’ exhibition. Babble Machine takes its name from the news radio-like transmitter predicted by H.G. Wells in his novel ‘The Sleeper Awakes’ (1899) and is devised by Aleks Kolkowski, the Science Museum’s sound artist-in-residence, together with 2LO researcher Alison Hess and the science writer and poet Katy Price.

This installation is being created to coincide with the Science Museum’s special exhibition centred upon the legendary BBC 2LO radio station and transmitter.

Loving Faster than Light

Forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press in November 2012

“Loving Faster than Light” focuses on the popular reception of relativity in Britain, demonstrating how abstract science came to be entangled with class politics, new media technology, changing sex relations, crime, cricket, and cinematography in the British imagination during the 1920s. Blending literary analysis with insights from the history of science, Katy Price reveals how cultural meanings for Einstein’s relativity were negotiated in newspapers with differing political agendas, popular science magazines, pulp fiction adventure and romance stories, detective plots, and esoteric love poetry.

“Loving Faster than Light is a very well-written, insightful examination of one of the essential problems of the history of science—how does elite, esoteric knowledge get read, used, modified, and owned by those outside the professional scientific community? Katy Price focuses on one of the defining scientific ideas of the twentieth century—relativity—and skillfully demonstrates the many genres and styles through which it was adopted and changed. An excellent book that brings together a number of disciplinary approaches.” (Matthew Stanley)

 “In this witty and often lyrical book, Katy Price recaptures the heady moment when the public first learned of Einstein’s revolutionary vision of the cosmos. She shows how ordinary people made sense of the theory of relativity by thinking through its implications for their own concerns—about social status, money, gender, romance, and more. Price’s literary sophistication offers historians an innovative model for reading popular science.” (Deborah R. Coen)

 “‘The latest craze is Mr. Einstein’s Relativity Theory,’ D. H. Lawrence remarked in 1923; ‘everybody catches fire at the word Relativity.’ Katy Price reveals just how far and how fast—and how strangely—that fire spread through the 1920s and beyond.” (Randall Stevenson)

polymerase

This week I went to the School of Biosciences at Kent for the Chain Reaction event where artists go to a lab for a day. We learned about the polymerase chain reaction and made one ourselves, then saw the results.

Despite growing up among scientists and medics, and reading lots of popular science, I have never before had a moment where I thought ‘this is amazing’: reproduction of life code happens in organisms, and people have found out how it works, and we can do it ourselves in a lab. It was the combination of being in the working environment, having really patient and passionate explainers, and having a chance to play with pipettes (a bit more fancy than the ones at school).

The next step is to turn this into text that can be displayed in a gallery. As a devotee of the cut-up method for making poems, I’m looking at the list of ingredients for PCR and thinking what their equivalents might be in the cut-up process: how to create a textual PCR machine.

Here are my ingredients, nestling in a box of crushed ice (not for cocktails!):

• ddH20: double distilled water – gives a total volume, and a known, precise concentration for each component
• 10x buffer: stabilises the reaction, giving the enzyme an environment in which it can be effective (salts, magnesium and stuff)
• dNTPs: the As, Gs, Ts and Cs – spare letters to make new DNA code from
• T7 / BGHR primer: bits of joined up letters ready to get the copying started
• Taq polymerase: the enzyme that drives the synthesis – what builds letters into strips
• template DNA: what you are copying and amplifying, in order to find out what’s in it, or do some further analysis on it

Initial thoughts: water as medium and scale (eg how many sheets of paper and how big); buffer as formal features – eg lineation and stanzas or sections, the cells of writing; dNTPs – letters

For my template DNA I’ll use a scientific paper, maybe something on the HIV virus where PCR has brought new understandings. The cut-up method shows you what is hidden inside a text, amplifies or subverts its values and brings its resources out for thinking about the topic in other ways than the authors intend. Cutting up a paper can give a new perspective on its message, as William Burroughs did in his poem ‘Cancer Men‘.

Primer and polymerase are the really clever bits of the reaction: what enables copying to get started, and drives it. My primer could be key phrases from the cut up paper, and polymerase might come from a cut-up of a mixer text – an adjacent article to a newspaper story about HIV research, for instance.

So much for the idea: but these things never work out the way they are planned. I’m sure the method will have to be adjusted or abandoned before I have something worth displaying.

What I’m aiming for is an engagement with lab process that is deeper than a poem that simply makes connections between DNA copying and some theme in human emotional experience, but not as deep as Christian Bök’s Xenotext poem which is actually coded into an organism. He spent years learning biochemistry and I only have a few months to produce something for the November workshop!

S A L V A G E

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hard to imagine batteries whole
clear thick square jars
A C I D L E V E L

filled with flowers
fairylights, blue sand
online treasure.

Hard to imagine a crate slipping
the paperwork
the swearing

underwater nurturing
of wood and screws
and packaging.

Hard to imagine the sound of glass
and gravel dropped
on rocks at night

laundering of weed and shards
in green formation
up the beach.

Hard to guess how many collisions
made the edges
almost safe

with mud between each memory
pick letters out
keep walking.

Beyond emptiness

An interview with Tom Ellis.

For me the issue is how to create art in what I see as a context of all-embracing nihilsm. I draw my imagery from imagination and direct perception, from mass media and the history of art, and then use it to ask what, if anything, might constitute valid artistic expression. In a world overflowing with images, nothing and everything is a worthwhile subject. I believe this loss of absolute value reflects a wider loss of cultural meaning and value in society as a whole. Perhaps we are living in an age of emptiness or perhaps we are beginning to live beyond an age of emptiness.

Phonographies

Woohoo! Aleksander Kolkowski’s phonographies project is now live.

You can listen to all kinds of artists and performers recorded onto wax cylinders. Suitably spooky sounds for the season.

My Kippered (Edison) Herring recreates a struggle to be heard – between Edison inventor of the phonograph, and Charles Cros who sorta got there first but was distracted by other interests such as alien contact.

I recommend listening especially to the electronic music section of the archive, where purely electronic come across like the scratchings and pipings of things with physical bodies. I would love somebody to draw these creatures.

The archive will be broadcast on Resonance on Wednesday nights at 7:30pm beginning on November 2nd  2011.

Collective Brightness

My poem ‘Singing in Tongues’ is now published in the anthology Collective Brightness: LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion and Spirituality.

It’s a sonnet describing the experience, aged around 13 years, of being in an enormous church when all the worshippers (except for me) were moved by the Holy Spirit. I wrote this after a workshop at New Writing Worlds in Norwich 2006.

There will be a UK launch for the anthology at the London Buddhist Centre in Bethnal Green, on Friday 21 October at 7.30pm – everyone is welcome! All the UK poets in the anthology will be reading and the editor Kevin Simmonds will be there.

Triggered : photos