Dial "M" for Musicology

No Diplomacy; No Regrets

I am taken to task for my harsh assessments of the jury in the Ward Churchill trial (my April 4 blog is here, and the comments follow). 

I would change nothing of what I wrote.  I have never served on a jury, but am married to and related to and friends with people who have, and their testimony is consistent that very often there are people of average intelligence—“average” perhaps being a euphemism—sitting on juries.  Attorneys like to have them there because (they assume) such people can be easily led.  “The world is run by C students,” goes the old saw; what must that mean for the great numbers of people who serve on juries?  Not all of them, certainly, but some of them?  If in the course of living on earth one has not observed even reasonably intelligent people getting browbeaten, bullied, confused, panicked, and ultimately worn down by others around them, perhaps strong personalities disposed to glibness or the persistent mau-mau, then one is simply not paying attention.   Thus my lack of confidence in the jury.  It is true that I phrased my response in somewhat disrespectful terms.  This is not the first time I have been found guilty of disrespect.

For Churchill himself, my feelings about CU’s hiring, tenuring, and tolerance of him up to that point likewise remain unchanged.  I will say, AM, that the word “inane” (defined by my American Heritage Dictionary as “lacking sense or substance”) is in no way sufficient to describe Churchill’s characterization of those incinerated on 9/11 as “little Eichmanns.”  For comparison’s sake, here’s Jerry Falwell famous take on the backstory to 9/11, courtesy of truthorfiction.com:

Falwell said, “The ACLU has got to take a lot of blame for this. And I know I'll hear from them for this, but throwing God...successfully with the help of the federal court system...throwing God out of the public square, out of the schools, the abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked and when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad...I really believe that the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who try to secularize America...I point the thing in their face and say you helped this happen.”

I see a clear parallel between Churchillian and Falwellian perspectives, here.  Like Churchill, Falwell ascribes blame (“helped make this happen”) for the events to a relatively small number of people who were NOT responsible, but whom he would like to blame because of his political views.  (One difference, of course, is that those Falwell blames weren’t incinerated.)  So, does this poison merely rate the civilized word “inane”?

Bluntness is not everyone’s cup of mead, I know.  Falwell is a preacher—a law unto himself—but Churchill was a professor, upon whom ethical and humanistic responsibilities ought to weigh heavier than on a power-mongering, thuggish loon of the Falwell or Robertson stripe.  Nonetheless, the jury was not, apparently, convinced that in addition to the varieties of academic malfeasance (misrepresentation of various kinds) and bona fide hate speech—forbidden on many campuses, and you know better than I if CU is one of them or not—is not just cause for getting tossed. 

A strident response in the face of this kind of land-of-upside-down amorality is justified.  I mean: really.

Interdisciplinarity

Geez, I should write self-hating blog posts more often. People always say the nicest things! Thanks for all the supportive comments; at least no-one wrote to say "yeah, you really do suck. Pack it in." 

Since Jonathan has apparently left for holidays after posting a response to my blog fail post the other day, it would be churlish of me to escalate this into a full-on blog fight. And in any event I appreciate the intention of the title ( all-caps COURAGE), which I take to be a kind of "buck up, soldier" kind of thing. Actually I ended up getting some kind of flu-ey bug over the weekend, which might explain some of my crankiness on Friday, though only some. In truth, these are things I've been thinking about for a while. Which isn't the same thing as saying I'm throwing in the towel, though god knows I've been tempted to, and maybe will anyway. But I'm not going to right now, because it's Christmas, and Christmas is all about giving. Self-loathing: this is my gift to you.

So I appreciate what Jonathan wrote and (as usual) don't actually disagree all that much, but I want to follow up with a few more thoughts of my own on that much-abused notion, interdisciplinarity. I don't think we should be "looking over our shoulder" at other humanities disciplines just for its own sake, like they're the cool kids and we're the geeky bespectacled plaid-clad orthodontia-sporting outcasts who desperately want to be like them. (The internalized voice of Mom: So what if the MLA likes to smoke out by the dumpsters, you think that's a reason to start smoking too? If the MLA went and jumped off a cliff, would you follow them?) And in the 1990s, when musicologists started trying to incorporate various lit crit approaches in their work, it did sometimes seem forced, a manifestation of lit-crit envy. Some, like my own advisor Michael Cherlin, who had been reading Harold Bloom for years and working Bloomian insights deep into his own way of thinking, did it for real. For others (self included), the appropriations were more superficial ("Lee press-on theory," as I like to call it). Still, if talking to other disciplines is not a sovereign good in itself, neither is complacent isolation. Maybe "they" should read us, but they don't, and we all know it. Everyone* knows musicology exists in a state of disciplinary isolation, including and especially our own parent organization, the American Musicological Society, which has publicly called for new ways to address that isolation. This blog was started for the usual reasons (narcissism) but also in response to that call. And my point in my last post was that this call still goes mostly unheeded. 

I really don't know what to say to people who acknowledge this state of affairs only to dismiss it by blaming everyone but themselves. There is this stupid habit (NOT a habit of Jonathan's, I hasten to add -- I speak more generally) of dismissing concern about our place at the outer edges of humanities discourse by saying "well, we're not TRENDY or anything, just good humble music-analyzing musikwissenschaftlers." As if the only reason people are reading other stuff -- cultural criticism or social history or whatever -- is that they're "trendy." And as if we're keepin' it real by embracing our isolation. I hate that entire way of thinking. It is the mentality of a defeated people, of people who stop liking their favorite band when it gets too popular, people who cherish resentment against those big city folk who think they're better than us, people who burnish a tribal memory of historic defeats to keep the edge of their resentments honed . . . I just hate that whole psychology. 

Actually, I take back what I wrote earlier: talking to those outside our tent IS a sovereign good, if only because we're in the ideas business, which means the business of communicating ideas, freely and without prior restraint. The more people you talk to, the better it is for business. Perhaps outsiders will have a hard time understanding what we write about? Figure it out how to explain it to them -- it'll do you good.

What interdisciplinarity means, if it means anything, is not the forced kloodging-together of unrelated notions, but the investigation of things that cannot properly be investigated within the boundaries of a single established discipline. Right now I'm reading Peter Gay's study of Victorian sexuality, Education of the Senses. Here the entity to come to terms with is Victorian sexuality, which is a big, rather shapeless thing that can be carved up lots of ways. Although Gay is one of those genius people who can survey the whole field, you don't have to: you could write a book on music and Victorian sexuality, or Victorian sexuality and the visual arts, or Victorian sexuality and literature (etc.). But the point is of the exercise, the thing to be investigated and understood, is still Victorian sexuality. What's the right way to proceed? It seems to me that even if you want to remain rooted in a single discipline (and for practical as well as intellectual reasons I think you generally have to) you still have to map the whole shapeless terrain, read as widely as you can from all across it, accept that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in RILM. You hold in mind the tension between your own area of specialty and the wider area of your relative ignorance, so that when you write about your specialty it takes on the shape of the whole. What we shouldn't do, I think, is start off by asking "but is this really musicology?" Because then you amputate your subject from the get-go, limiting yourself to only those aspects of (say) Victorian sexuality that pertain to music, policing what things are "really" musical (works, genres, composers) and what things seem too distant (diaries, paintings, advertisements). The tension between the part (music) and the whole (Victorian sexuality) collapses, and what you are left with is chunk of an idea crudely cut out from the whole, its limits arbitrarily set by the fear of not talking enough about music. This is one way to write bad interdisciplinary scholarship, but it is easier just to stay with the "purely musical" and not even try. 

Now, you might ask, what if I don't want to write about Victorian sexuality? Or anything else remotely like it? What if I'm interested in tuning and temperament in 1540s Zurich? Hey, different strokes and all that. We all have our things we're into, and I wouldn't presume to lowrate anyone else's particular enthusiasm. Even if I don't want to write about tuning and temperament in 1540s Zurich, I'm glad you do. Where it matters is in those zero-sum places -- in academic journals, job searches, AMS paper sessions, and the like -- where one man's meat may be another man's poison, but someone has to choose: chicken or steak? Victorian sexuality or tuning and temperament? I've said before that this was always one of the best reasons for academic blogs: the blogosphere is never zero-sum. But then no-one seems to be starting any musicology blogs, so oh well.

Camille Paglia may be kind of crazy, but she made some good points back in the day, and this is one of them:

The humanities are dismembered and scattered, with music, art, and literature residing far afield. Literature is chopped into national fiefdoms. English departments are split by recruitment "slots," a triumph of the minim, producing such atrocities as ads for "Opening in nondramatic literature, 1660-1740." What kind of scholar, what kind of teacher could satisfy this sad little mouse-view of culture? American universities are organized on the principle of the nuclear rather than the extended family. Graduate students are grimly trained to be technicians rather than connoisseurs. The old nineteenth-century German style of universal scholarship is gone.**

This passage has a hint of Paglia's usual crackpot messianism (19th-century universal scholarship is gone . . . but its time will come again! The sixties people will return, bearing with them calfskin-bound folio volumes of Walter Pater and the Marquis de Sade! And I shall lead them!), but it's worth thinking about.

*This even came up in casual conversation at my kids' bus stop the other day. And yes, I live in the kind of neighborhood where this kind of thing actually does come up in casual conversation. 

**Paglia, Sex, Art, and American Culture, 120.

COURAGE

This in response to Phi’s Blog Fail.  I really ought to take more time with this, but I leave tomorrow for California for a few days, and wanted to respond.  I understand—deeply—end-of-the-semester fatigue, the suspicion that one’s blogs haven’t measured up, haven’t hit their mark, and haven’t produced the kind of intellectual reaction desired, and so on.  Sure; who doesn’t think this? 

However, some shots were taken at our discipline, and I’m fine with that as long as they’re fair, and don’t think they were.  The number of blogs in—ah—Latin and whatever are all very nice, but unless you’ve read them and they have more to offer than other academic blogs—Dial M, say—don’t give ‘em a thought.  How many blogs are more blogger insecurity than anything else?  Are all those Latin blogs really intellectually thriving, or are they a bunch of Latin geeks talking to each other?  Unless you have their usage stats, there’s no evaluation to be made of the extent to which they thrive—and, basically, the list of wikis means not more than a list of listservs.  So what, in other words?  Unless one has gone through all the blogs to ascertain quality, frequency of postings, and readership…

And as far as those vaunted “other disciplines,” which I’ve been hearing about since grad school:  we should not be looking over our shoulder at them, no matter how the insecure among us think we should.  They should be learning from us, because we are a polyglot discipline facing problems shared by philology, linguistics, history, symbolic languages, music theory, morphology, art history, literature, God knows what—not to mention the linguistic competences that are expected.  Oral musical traditions, written musical traditions (difference between them), traditional historiographic issues, all jumble and combine in a way that make musicology perhaps the most complex arts discipline there is.  Which other disciplines have this many methodologies and strains of thought in which they have to function?  It’s true that we see a lot of lame musicology, but much of that happens when we stick too closely to one particular methodology or philosophical orientation: Cultural Criticism or (as you say) Philately or a very narrow kind of analysis or whatever. 

Summary: it is when we try to fit the models of other disiplines, “breaking down barriers” and trying to fit in and pass and all that, that we become less than what we should be.  Let the other disciplines come sit at our feet—the dullest musicologist has to master three languages: mother-tongue, oral music, written music.  Other European etc. languages etc. are on top of that.

Prescription for each of us: food and drink, home and hearth.  There are many reasons why we’re not a really populous discipline, logistical and otherwise, but I see no reason to say the discipline has failed in any way.  We’re slugging it out, still; yeah.  As I say, though, tell me what the other disciplines are bringing to the table that even begins to compare.

Sorry to overstep the 24-hour rule, but I’m out the door early in the morning.  Cheers, everyone.

Blog fail

It's almost Christmas -- the traditional time for anxiety and recriminations, so let's start here, on this blog. I want to look back over the last semester -- hell, the last two-plus years -- and talk about failure. Namely mine, and to some extent yours.

On the plus side: I've written some things I'm proud of, and I know that people read them. At AMS this year I lost count of how many times people told me they read Dial M every week (sometimes every day) and how much they appreciate what Jonathan and I write. It made me feel good, and I returned to Bloomington with a renewed feeling of commitment and enthusiasm for blogging . . . which then quickly dissipated. Don't get me wrong, it matters that you read. A number of people told me that my dispatches-from-academic-life posts, like the one about waiting for schools to call you back for an interview or not getting any work done before the election, gave them some comfort, made them feel as if they weren't alone in what they were going through. And I write those things for pretty much the same reason: I want to write down something I'm feeling to see if anyone else is feeling it too. (This is one reason why blogs have comments sections.) And as I say, I've written things I'm proud of. I'm glad I had a chance to write about my Dad. I'm proud of a memorial post for a guy I didn't know and didn't agree with but whose horrifying and lonely death deserved some kind of meditation. I think that the cross-blogger debates we've had here on touchy subjects like torture and religion have been some of Dial M's finest moments. I've gone all meta and blogged about blogging. (I guess now I'm taking another step on the endless spiral staircase of blogging self-reflexivity and am blogging about blogging about blogging.) I've even occasionally written about my actual research.

But there's an awful lot of stuff in my head that never gets written because whatever anyone says, blogging isn't about keepin' it real -- it's about the meticulous preparation and presentation of an artful rhetoric of keepin' it real. At one point in Nashville I ran in Jim Hepokoski, who expressed surprise that I would confide so much about myself to a bunch of perfect strangers. I replied that I wasn't confiding anything; whatever I write about myself is exactly what suits me for people to know about me. I don't lie or mislead; nothing I say about myself is false. But whatever I disclose is selective and calculated. This isn't the "real me" here, it's a version of the real me packaged for blog consumption. Come to think of it, is there a real me anywhere? Probably not. We all do the same thing, making strategic self-disclosures to manage the perceptions that our friends, family, colleagues, and students have of us. As Rameau's nephew pointed out, even the King poses for God and his mistress. And it's one of my Professor's Ten Commandments (with an assist from Biggie) to self-own in what you write:

Number two: Never let ‘em know your next move/Don’t you know bad boys move in silence or violence. Or, as MF Doom says, never let your so-called mans know your plans. This applies especially to bloggers. Seriously, bloggers, always assume that everyone you know, and everyone you might want to know, will read your blog. It’s easy to get suckered into the illusion that you’re confiding your innermost thoughts with an anonymous Them you’ll never actually meet. Nope, and when you confide stuff about yourself that you wouldn’t announce from the lectern of a plenary session of the American Musicological Society, you could end up like Youngblood Priest from Superfly, who accidentally kills his best friend when he drops the name of his connection in a nightclub.
As Curtis Mayfield comments in the title song: “But a weakness was shown, ‘cause his hustle was wrong/His mind was his own, but the man lived alone.”
Or, to put it in less poetically, if you want your mind to be you own, or if you want to be master of your own destiny, you need to live alone, metaphorically speaking; don’t confide, or a weakness will be shown, and your hustle will be wrong.  

What would it look like if I were really keeping it real? It would look like this:

Chappelle's Show

Keeping It Real - Vernon Franklin

Charlie Murphy Clips
Buy Chappelle's Show DVDs

Black Comedy
True Hollywood Stories

Just like Vernon I have deep-buried rage which, if I started letting it out, would probably land me in a job at a gas station too. Which is one of the reasons why my contributions to this blog have been getting shorter, lamer, and less frequent. It's not that the only things I want to write about are the things that piss me off; it's that I'm constantly aware of all those things that piss me off and which I won't let myself write about. It makes what I *do* write about feel like trivial, self-serving happy talk, an unwitting confirmation of the image of academics in general (and musicologists in particular) as a pack of timid bores. Frank Zappa's jeer at academic composers always plays in my mind when I sit down to write something at Dial M these days:

Hey, buddy, when was the last time you thwarted a norm? Can't risk it, eh? Too much at stake over at the old Alma Mater? Nowhere else to go? Unqualified for 'janitorial deployment'? Look out! Here they come again! It's that bunch of guys who live in the old joke: it's YOU and two billion of your closest friends standing in shit to your chins, chanting, 'DON'T MAKE A WAVE!'*

When a blog post becomes just another occasion to contemplate one's failure, at a certain point it just becomes easier to say "screw it" and not write anything at all. Which brings me to the part I promised in the first sentence of this post, where I said I'd talk about your failures as well. And by "you" I mean the discipline of musicology, or more generally music scholarship. (There's enough fail to go around: music theory and ethnomusicology can each take a forkful.) I started this blog thinking that the strange absence of music-scholarly blogs was a temporary condition, and that musicologists, once they had learned about academic blogging by example and could see what could be done in the medium, would start writing their own blogs and a hundred musicoloblogospheric flowers would bloom. Well, that didn't happen. Look at the academic blog wiki list of music-scholarly blogs. Now look at the one for history. Or linguistics and philosophy. Or even Classics and Ancient Languages, for Chrissake. We're getting our asses kicked by Latin. 

I can't help but think that this is a cultural thing. Just as different parts of the orchestra each have their own micro-cultures, different disciplines within the humanities do too, and the culture of musicology is marked by its almost insane degree of caution and self-limitation. Sorry to be so blunt, but there it is: the other humanities, when they think of us at all (which isn't very often) tend to think of musicologists as something like stamp collectors, fanatically collecting and sorting and classifying stamps without caring about what they're attached to. We wouldn't want to start opening those letters! Just throw the letter away and keep the stamp. It's got pretty colors. This one from Zambia has a bird on it! Hey, it looks like this other one with a bird on it. Do I put it in the "birds" part of the album or the "Zambia" part? Hm . . . 

I usually dismiss this characterization, because it doesn't describe the musicologists whose work I admire. But I don't know. The point and challenge of blogging is to make connections with other parts of the intellectual world, and inasmuch as that challenge has hardly been taken up in the two-and-a-half years since I started this blog, I have to ask if we as a discipline are not actually just happier staying in our corner, playing with our stamps.

*Frank Zappa and Peter Occiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book, 193.

 

A Short Guide to My Blogs

So there are times when one wonders if one is only capable of three or four discrete ideas, and the rest of one’s life is spent riffing on them.  When I’m feeling uninspired about blogging—yes, dear friends, it does happen from time to time—I take a hard look at my own stuff.  Frankly, I sometimes suspect I've got about six or seven licks and that's it.

To wit:

1)  An aspect of the interesting, poorly understood past that captivates my weird imagination.

2)  Take Courage!  Finish the dissertation and get the job!  Life's great!

3)  New musical discovery; not sure what I think so I'll cobble together a couple of sentences and leave it to you.  Actually I’m sure what I think but don’t want to come off the two-dimensional opinionated jerk I’m more than capable of being.

4)  I shore dew like the piano!

5)  Damn, I'm busy writing.  [Cue: “Cry Me A River,” by Joe Cocker.]

6)  Sometimes students piss me off too, but it's not as bad as you think.  [I don’t know if it’s because I lead a protected existence, or because I have calluses.]

7)  I like Randy Newman, Mark Knopfler, Bruce Springsteen, and select others.  I will sing their praises, yea verily nigh unto apotheosis.

The thing is, even a demon improviser has set licks, yes, but he also expands his repertoire, develops, changes etc. In some ways I don’t feel as if I’ve caught up since my senior recital. 

Will endeavor to have an actual thought or two for next time.  If I catch up, get back to the piano, finish what I’m writing, discover a new discovery…

Hello, Goodbye

Dear all,

My summer stay here at Dial M now comes to a close as our regular MCs Jonathan and Phil will be back full-time shortly.

Writing here has been fun. Summer is strange--so much free time, yet never as much accomplished as I'd like. For many other reasons, this summer has been stranger for me than most. Some of those details kept me away from Dial M over the last week and for that I apologize. However, in return, I have furnished a going away present for Dial M: behold the new banner at the top of the page!

If you'd like to keep up with my own blog, please visit me at musikwissenbloggenschaft, where I will resume posting soon. Expect a fun continuation of this post there soon.

Thanks all!

Summertime

Yeah, what Jonathan said. I'm done for a while. But I'll be back in a few weeks. In the meantime, Ralph Locke and Brent Reidy (the latter of Musikwissenbloggenschaft) will be holding it down. Welcome them! I might poke my head up from time to time, but for the next few weeks I'm on vacation in Canada and will try to be thinking about things other that music, musicology, and related matters. It's summertime!

INTERMISSION!!

…which is the very apposite final word of the first act of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. In the interest of getting my mental lines blown out, my book manuscript finished and sent, and to take a family trip to look at Californian universities (relevant to A Certain Young Man) and after Californian family, I'm going to be checking out for a while—as currently planned, until after July 4 or so. Highly competent and trained professional guest bloggers will be here in my absence.

Catch you all on the flip side!

Why I Blog

The current self-examination and comments engendered make for a good thing for Dial M, I think. I’d like to amplify the comments to acknowledge not only that we do have a faithful readership, they tend to be an appreciative readership, which is much appreciated by me. Phil and I blog differently, which is part of the reason Dial M has worked thus far; we can do simultaneity, we can do counterpoint, and we can do antiphony. We can also do Dada. What I meant by “powdered,” by the way, was “ground into powder,” a phrase learned from my Angeleno brother, and which seems to be an accurate ongoing description of my existence.

I blog for a couple of reasons. The first of these is that I got sick of the recurrent self-flagellation bursts on the AMS list—bad us, we haven’t done enough to educate the populace, it’s our fault, we must reach out more, everyone is so ignorant about music. I still post there occasionally, but the fact is that you’re writing for the same relatively small group of friends, colleagues, and specialists; if you want to reach beyond that community you’ve got to do something else. When the opportunity to participate in this blog came up, therefore, I jumped at it, even with trepidation about what it would do to my other activities. My responsibility it to try to write comprehensibly, and to write about what I care about in such a way that others will care about it too.

And to steel our joint resolve: good newspaper columnists produce what amounts to a blog every week, every couple of days, whatever. They have restrictions on length, they do it for years on end, and the columns can approach poetry—I remember wonderful stuff from the Los Angeles Times’s Al Martinez (anthologized in Dancing Under the Moon), and from the San Francisco’s Jon Carroll. Why would I shoot for anything less? I’m sure columnists have flat periods, too, and they push through ’em.

I also try to use this to improve a kind of essayistic tone. Too often, musicological research, no matter how important, reads in an unfortunate way: jargon-laden, syntactically byzantine, insular and self-referential. True scholarly objectivity being nonsense, a well-reasoned, persuasive tone and approach will obviously serve whatever subject I’m writing about, so it seems to me that regular labor in that vineyard is both discipline and reward. An added benefit is that I get to write about musical and academic matters not directly pertinent to my research and other writing assignments.

For me, this is like good, solid, regular piano practice (which I wish I did more of). I appreciate—deeply—that people read and like our blog, and I continue to think that we have something important to contribute to the wider musical and academic discourse. We’re entitled to rest (which we probably will, and some point soon), after some solid work, but I hope that we come back tanned, rested, and ready.

Powdered!

Jonathan writes that we both feel "powdered" (I'm assuming in the Colorado-centric sense of crashing into a big pile of snow). Never has a truer thing been blogged. Sorry to resort to the Teachout Method once again, but this post will consist largely of bitching about not having time to post.

I think it's the usual end-of-year frenzy, though, because it's not just Dial M that's been phoning it in. Phil at 2'23" asks "is it just me, or has the world of musicology blogs lately been a bit...well, humdrum? I certainly haven't been helping matters myself, but what's going on? Are we all bored with blogging all of a sudden? Is all of the energy of technically-adept musicologists going into maintaining the job wiki?"

No, it's not just you. After making certain biggity claims for the blogosphere as a new model of scholarly enterprise, I've been more and more aware of the limitations of academic blogging. It really does suck that the best stuff you write gets ignored and the stupid novelty isn't-this-weird stuff is all anyone seems to care about. I've been cynically keeping Dial M on life support by posting tons of Youtube things, and it's worked. Our numbers are basically as good as they ever are. So does this mean that I never have to take any trouble with anything I write -- just trawl through the internet looking for weird and funny stuff and we'll get hits? Probably. This doesn't say anything good about academic blogging, though. I've written that I hold a weak technological-determinist view of blogging -- you can resolve to write anything you want, but the exigencies of the medium tend to knock the edges off your resolve. And this is a case in point. Youtube, lolcats, and whatnot are easy fixes -- the spackle of blogging. If you don't have time to write something real, you can find something cool or funny in no time and fill a hole in your writing schedule.

And, further, I just haven't been feeling it. I was just at the Experience Music Project pop conference this weekend, and saw some amazing things. Joshua Clover's paper "Terrorflu, or Where in the World is M.I.A.?" was perhaps the best presentation at an academic conference I've ever seen. The panel on the Iraq war was a revelation. Finally, after a number of false starts, I think we're seeing the emergence of a strong music-scholarly discourse on the post-9/11 cultural scene. (That is, a discourse minus the bullshit affectation and condescension usual to academic work on current political issues, or at least relatively free of it.) Although all the papers on that panel were good, I'd have to single out J. Martin Daughtry's paper as something that's finally synched into the undercurrent of dread that's been missing from scholarly discourse on the Bush years. For a conference about pop and politics, there was surprisingly little grandstanding -- just a lot of dread, a lot of ambivalence, and a lot of doubt. But that's all I'm really going to say about it, because, as I said, I'm not feeling it. I don't want to write about it; it was enough to be there.

It's the time of year. I'm ready for the semester to be over, and so is everyone else. One of the melancholy jobs I have to perform every now and then is to weed out the "music academics" blogroll. Peter at Loose Poodle has stopped posting, which makes me sad, though I understand why he's stopping. Blogs, if you do them right (and Peter's was one of the best) take a lot of headspace, which might be better devoted to writing other things -- things like a dissertation, for example. Posting on People Listen To It has slowed to a crawl; The Black Torrent Guard is apparently inactive; Byronotes hasn't updated since October; etc. I'm not criticizing anyone here, because blogging can be a brain-sucking monster and it's not as if we don't all have other things we need to do. The thing is, I've been able to do this blog because it's helped loosen me up. I figure that, even with the time it takes me to write this stuff, I still come out ahead with the other writing I have to do, because blog writing keeps the pot on the boil. It's like playing scales or something -- it keeps you in shape even when you don't have a lot of time to practice. But when you have so many things going on it's a strain and a pain.

The blogosphere is littered with "goodbye cruel world" posts -- people who have kept a blog going for years and then just up and quit. Often they write about how they're sick of wasting their time, how they now realize that blogging doesn't do anything useful, etc., but I don't feel that way. I still think blogging's great. But I can see how you can suddenly find yourself waking up and saying, y'know, I don't feel like doing this anymore. But I haven't hit that point. Yet. I think.