DR. SANDRA EAGLETON, my Advanced Placement English Teacher,
my senior year at Claremont High School, who had also taught English part time
at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, in my father’s department.
JON, a long-haired, mouthy legend in his own mind.
SE:Jon, would
you like to be an English professor like your Dad?
JB:God,
no.Anything but.
SE [consternation]:Why not?
JB: I know what it’s like when I write papers for
you—beating my brains out the night before it’s due.I do NOT want to spend college like that, trying to think of
something to say.
SE [smiling knowingly]:You’d be surprised how many English majors are like that.
JB:I know,
but…
********
Dear Dr. Eagleton,
I know you’re no longer among us, having lost a long battle
to cancer some years ago, and I regret that we never reconnected after I found
my way to a somewhat different career choice, but an academic one that involved
writing papers.Perhaps you saw something
I didn’t yet know was there.What
I can say is that in most cases I’m done with my papers much further in advance
than I seem to be right now.OK,
so it’s two nights before, not the night before, but still.I do find myself smiling and thinking
of you tonight, though, and of our conversation so many years ago.Thanks for everything you provided us,
not least the challenge and attention and modeling of what teaching really
could and should be.
And yeah, I’d better get back to my impending local AMS paper now. Wishing you and all with you in the Empyrean every eternal Joy.
Stanford Music Library, probably 1989 or 1990.I asked Leonard Ratner how he was
doing.“I feel like I’m slapping
at mosquitoes.”How so? “Preparing
the final manuscript of my Romantic Music
book.” OHH.Even then, before I’d
written any books myself, I understood: verifying every last quotation, every
last citation, every last page number, every last publisher and date…oh,
gracious.Ratner is such a
thick-context, musically and historically informed thinker that doing that kind
of thing for his books must have
been a nightmare.Of course, one
has no choice.
So just guess what I’m doing now.Turns
out Ferdynand Hoesick’s multivolume biography of Chopin came out in two very
different editions.Have to make
sure I cite the right one, the one which had the FULL version of that Antoni
Szulc review of a Chopin Ballade from 1842.Turns out it took awhile to find that HarrowGate Press is
located in Perrysburg, Ohio.Better to quote hard copy publications, when possible, than electronic versions
of sources because URLs can be different, and useless—particular to a certain
service to which your institution subscribes, for example, but useless to
others.Every chapter, every
source, every comment.See, I’m
going over the copyedited manuscript which I received from the publisher,
worked over to a fare-thee-well by a superb copyeditor.(I was going to use her name, but she
may prefer anonymity.)
So I’m going mad, chasing up minutiae that I really thought
I’d taken care of already.But I have
to say how wonderful it is to have crackerjack people like those at Oxford
University Press, and those contracted with them.I admit to being exasperated—as I was with my dissertation
advisor, long ago, and to whom I owe limitless gratitude—but I know how much
the book will benefit from this process.
Back to it.(Sigh)But I feel like I’m
swatting at an infinite number of mosquitoes…
Someone (Andrew Sullivan?) wrote that George Orwell was "the first blogger," and the Orwell Prize has taken this thought in an interesting direction. Starting today, the diaries Orwell kept from 1938 to 1941 will be published as a blog, with each diary entry appearing as a blog post exactly seventy years after it was written. Today is the first, an entry Orwell wrote when he was recovering from wounds received in the Spanish Civil War. It is an entry about a snake:
Caught a large snake in the herbaceous border beside the drive. About 2’ 6” long, grey colour, black markings on belly but none on back except, on the neck, a mark resembling an arrow head all down the back. Did not care to handle it too recklessly, so only picked it up by extreme tip of tail. Held thus it could nearly turn far enough to bite my hand, but not quite. Marx [Orwell's dog] interested at first, but after smelling it was frightened & ran away. The people here normally kill all snakes. As usual, the tongue referred to as “fangs”.
A while ago I wrote about going through phases of imitating the various writers I was most taken with, mentioning Adorno and Orwell in particular. This might seem surprising, since the two can be (and have been) thought to be opposites. James Miller an essay in the Lingua Franca collection Quick Studies called "Is Bad Writing Necessary?" that argues that each man represents a model of Left social engagement. (In short: Adorno believed that a too-ready assimilation of the world to concepts is the great modern enabler of tyranny and so booby-trapped his writing against easy understanding; Orwell believed that calculated verbal obscurity is the great modern enabler of tyranny and so made his writing unmistakeably clear. Discuss. Though I don't see why we have to choose -- Adorno was a fine writer in his way.) But when one Christmas I was given the Penguin four-volume paperback edition of Orwell's collected journalism, letters, and essays, it deeply affected me. I read these volumes constantly for the next couple of years and tried to understand what Orwell was doing that made even the least of his writings -- the little "As I Please" columns he wrote for years in the Tribune, for example -- so valuable. For a while I did imitate (semi-consciously) his forthright style, with predictable results, but in time I realized that Orwell works best as a more general kind of model, a model for how to think and see -- clear writing flows from clear perception. Honest perception, too—what was perhaps most impressive to me was how Orwell remained so vigilant against letting some received opinion, some cant borne of enthusiasm or righteousness, carry him away from the truth. Of course, there are those on the Left who have never forgiven Orwell for being (as they see it) a traitor, and there is at least one academic study that argues that Orwell was a kind of literary Bob Dylan, a political lightweight whose great accomplishment was to craft a rhetoric of authenticity, an artifice that gives the illusion of political substance. So there are doubtless those who are reading this and rolling their eyes at yet another tribute to Orwell's honesty. (Didn't Orwell say something about avoiding cliches?) And it is true that, whatever Orwell's own commitment to a particular truth, his writings have lent themselves to remarkably elastic interpretations. Christopher Hitchens thinks Orwell would have approved of the Iraq war, Norman Podhoretz thought that he would have approved of nuclear proliferation, etc. Orwell was never himself very consistent, and he's dead anyway, so he won't give anyone the lie. What is left is this literary image of plain humble rightness, easily exploited by hustlers of every political persuasion.
So maybe there's a good reason for the hatery.* But a lot of Orwell's best writing isn't even political. This despite what he said somewhere about how everything he wrote was political because in a politicized age there's no keeping out of politics. Orwell, like Adorno, was much given to gloomy totalizing remarks of this kind, but he wrote wonderful pages about the simple pleasures of plants and the weather and beer in old-fashioned pink china cups, things that he treasured because the pleasure they offered was still free, which is to say, as yet uncolonized by ideology. In a broad way, his enshrining these pleasures in writing was a political act, in a negative sense. "All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia," he wrote. Against the Communist left he asserted that politics was a disease, not a cure; the Communist enthusiasm for suborning every little corner of life to politics was not a liberation, he believed, but slavery, and in writing about little things he was at least hoping to put off the final subjugation a little longer. And, coming at the end of the GWBush presidency -- an era whose thuggish, brutal politicization of science, religion, sex, entertainment, etc. has given it a strange flavor of inverted Communism -- this is more attractive than ever.
*Though my god, what a stupid, malicious, mendacious article this is -- academic resentment writ small.
Phil’s Bad Writing Blog is a virtuoso example of the medium, from the wonderful self-mocking weirdness of the Freaks clip, to the thought-provoking Ira Glass clip, to the sheer machismo of putting one’s old writing (the equivalent of juvenalia, though it’s from graduate school) up for public view and submitting it to his own scorn and contempt. If you haven’t read it, read it now. Read it again. And a confidential to Jack, the second commenter: I completely understand. I’m movin’ on, too. These are allergies, by the way; I haven’t been weeping. My eyes look this way because of allergies. Really.
My first thought on reading this delectable blog was GET OUT OF MY BRAIN! I really thought I was the only person whose self-loathing reaches this level of hysteria during the writing and revision process. I’m doing final rewrites on my Ballade book right now, so I’m pretty much through that. Truth to tell, though, during the countdown to submission this past winter, when I was going through chapters again and again, I was constantly flagellating myself: Jerk! This is incoherent! Do you even know what you think? Ever consider writing a paragraph without using the em-dash parenthetical trick more than three times? What about trying an appropriate transition—maybe just one or two, for a change? Can you really expect the reader to divine what’s in your closed and crabbed mind throughout an entire chapter? Pretentious fool! Pedant! Loon! Blowhard!
And, yes, I am the author of A Short Guide to Writing about Music, now in its second edition. Where did I get off writing the thing, you ask politely? To be honest, I constantly wonder the same thing, and I have often wondered if William Zinsser ever felt the same way. In an earlier edition of his classic On Writing Well, he reproduced an excerpt from an eighth draft (or something), which was nonetheless covered with emendations and cross-outs. Cross-outs?? This is William Zinsser we’re talking about!
Why was I allowed to write the book? Because I pitched it, hard; other than having an English Professor for a father I’ve no credentials beyond being a bookworm as a kid, writing a lot, and having an abiding belief that much writing about music should be better than it is, especially in the scholarly arena. The circumstances were these, in my first or second year here at the University of Northern Colorado: one Assistant Professor’s salary, wife and baby son, house. WAIT! says the genius. I’LL WRITE A TEXTBOOK! I’LL MAKE ALL KINDS OF MONEY! The very afternoon I got the idea I called HarperCollinsCollegePublishers, my old publisher. No reflection, no time for cold feet. So I wrote the textbook, over the course of some centuries: two drafts for the proposal, two drafts for the book itself, myriad revisions from outside readers, certain of whom violently disagreed with key issues, which I somehow had to explain to the office personnel in charge of making me finish the book on time. (Authors know what I’m talking about: you get the form letter saying “Please explain to us the revisions to intend to make in response to the reviewer’s concerns,” but you’re never given his identity and so can’t say “Look, he’s a moron, but I didn’t choose him.”) And, no, I didn’t make all kinds of money. Incidentally, I was tormented throughout the entire process—or so it seemed at the time (see? Em-dashes!)—by the editor of the series, Sylvan Barnet. I remember getting back a page of manuscript with his recasting of one of my sentences and the following comment: “Your version is eighteen words in length; mine is seven. Are you really prepared to make the argument that your version has eleven words’ more meaning than mine?” Ouch. Up to that point, I had made the mistake of believing people’s compliments about my writing. No longer.
Of course, Sylvan did me a tremendous service. I won’t call him a diplomat, but he went through my drafts with a fine-toothed comb, a cold and clear eye, and a complete lack of concern for my poor little feelings—because the Short Guides Series was his baby. My long-suffering DMA Final Project advisor, George Barth, had done this kind of draft-after-draft service years earlier, with both promptness and diplomacy. From satisfying the two of them, I learned to be as harsh with myself as…Phil was with himself in the other blog. Except Phil was much more antic about it. Comedy may be hard, but I was laughing aloud.
So let me end with a challenge: Phil mentioned his youthful writing phases, such as the Adorno phase, plus others too embarrassing to mention. Who? The mind positively races with possibilitites: Carl Dahlhaus? Richard Brautigan? George Sand? Norman Mailer? Rigoberta Menchu? Paul Gallico? I’m dying to know. Of course, I should talk; in childhood I—completely inexplicably—used to try to affect a folksy, Americana-like style in my own writing, à la Will Rogers. (Rogers died c. 1935, so why I should latch onto this in the mid-1960s puzzles me also.) It is also not clear why I thought a science project involving watching mold grow on bread and pumpkin might be a good opportunity to use such a style. (“Well, first we soaked the bread in water, so’s we could…”) You can imagine how utterly mystified my third-grade teacher was. “Jonathan—ahh—we don’t write like this in a report.” Lots of loving support from my father the English professor, too: “Oh, Jonathan, Jesus Christ, y’know?”
So why bother writing at all? Well, if not us, who?
Happily, Andy H-D at The Black Torrent Guard is beginning to post again, and has apparently gone to Iowa to do a graduate degree in musicology.* Earlier this month he posted a clip of Ira Glass, host of This American Life and nephew of Philip Glass, talking about the challenges of writing for radio or TV.
Andy titles the post "Working Through the Suck" (such a good post title . . . wish I'd thought of it) and writes that "it encapsulates why I started writing this blog, why I stopped writing for several months, and a larger malaise that seems to affect the 'academic blog' community." I'm assuming that the malaise he's writing about is the tendency of so many academic blogs written by graduate students (the majority, since grad students tend to understand the medium more intuitively) to peter out after a while. Part of it obviously is that we're all busy and blogging is low on our list of priorities. But maybe it's also because of what Glass is talking about here: you have good taste and high standards, and what you're writing is not up to them, so you stop.
All I can say is, I couldn't agree with Glass more. You have to work through the suck, power through the feelings of inadequacy, because there is simply no other way to get better. Writing is an immensely complicated thing, and it takes years of doing it to get better. Of course you have to read and read and read, but that's only half of it. I went through my faux-Adorno phase and my faux-Orwell phase and some other phases I'm too embarrassed even to mention, and the stuff I wrote when I was imitating these various writers' voices was TERRIBLE. For example, there's this godawful analysis of Rachmaninoff's C minor piano concerto I did for James Hepokoski's 1995 sonata deformations seminar:
Theodore Adorno once wrote (with considerable scorn) that Rachmaninoff's early C-sharp minor Prelude is an exploitation of the semiotic germ inherent in the cadence -- "that is the way it is." Adorno's observation, applied in a neutral spirit, is germane to the concerto, which expresses itself through a kind of massive cadential overkill.
"Germane," huh? My writing at this time had a certain thesaurus quality to it. Note the clumsiness with which cultural theory is being applied here. The syllogism is (A) Adorno complains about cadential overkill in Rachmaninoff's C-sharp minor prelude, (B) this other piece by Rachmaninoff contains cadences, so (C) Adorno can be applied to this other piece by Rachmaninoff. This is an example of what I call "Lee Press-On Theory," after Lee Press-On Nails of fond memory.
The development, which has been overtaken by motive b. (above), cumulates in the recapitulation, in which the P theme is now lashed to the piano's fortissimo repetitions of motive b. (mm.241-257).
"Cumulates"? Also, your bar numbers are off, fool.
The fourth scale degree of the motive is now not sharpened, and we may now recognize the opening four-note motive that wrenched the introduction out of its delusional off-tonic opening. This is simultaneously the telos of the development and a moment of desperate recognition; the goal demanded in the opening was to escape or redeem C-minor, but in the recapitulation, the piano shouts its recognition of the truth present from the opening: there is no escape, there is no redemption. The disillusioning gesture with which the piece has opened has been elevated to a place of ultimate importance, and that gesture's content of meaning is likewise revealed as the ultimate truth: that is the way it is.
Wrenched! Delusional! There's a telos! Which shouts! There's a moment of desperate recognition! There's no redemption! There's C minor in the recapitulation! Wait, don't you always come back to the tonic in the recapitulation? What I'm trying to do in this paper is make up for the fact that I really don't have much to say by narrating a pretty ordinary formal event in a wildly melodramatic way. Also, notice how I can't get to the end of a sentence without tossing in a colon or semicolon. I was a serial semicolon abuser in those days. I'm still bad about that sometimes -- it's like I'm embarrassed to come to the end of a sentence too soon. Here colons are used in a ridiculously self-serious way. It's a feeble imitation of Adorno, who often liked to end a complex dialectical thought with something compact and epigrammatic. It's not a bad trick, actually, but not for every sentence. Plus, if your punctuation says "insert devastating insight here," it helps to have devastating insights.
The recapitulation is really an anti-recapitulation, which, like anti-matter, destroys whatever it touches. Its occurrence "breaks" the frame of the music, so that nothing after can be the same; far from achieving the goal of redemption implicitly demanded in the exposition, the sonata has been destroyed, its aspirations smashed. Thus the psychology of the remainder of the movement is unusual; it exists to chart the wreckage left by the anti-recapitulation's cruel realization rather than to defer that realization to the end.
I don't know what I even meant by "anti-recapitulation." The semicolon abuse continues. I was very into "redemption" in those days -- Adorno, again.
This is itself a deformation of the usual pattern of sonata teleology, in which the denouement is deferred to the recapitulation S or the coda, for the obvious reason that when placed any earlier it only "gives the game away," leaving little hermeneutic reason for the remaining part of the sonata. In this case, the denouement arrives early for precisely this reason; it allows the extended contemplation of crushed subjectivity, of the life without hope.
Oh god, this is so horrible. Where to start? Mostly, it's the pathetic attempt at borrowing someone else's gravitas. "Extended contemplation of crushed subjectivity" indeed. This coming from a 20-something Canadian graduate student whose biggest problem in those days was not having air conditioning.
But the thing is, if I have made any gains as a writer in the 13-odd years since, it's because of horrors like this one. What's lousy about it —the imposture and fakery of it -- is what allowed me to write less lousy stuff later. You try on other people's writing styles until you develop a stylistic vocabulary; you keep trying out ideas until the ideas you have are your own. But the thing is, there is no shortcut. You can't become a half-decent writer without constant practice. This is one thing I like about blogging: it's like exercise. Back in the late 1990s, when I was taking a few years away from graduate school, what really helped me was writing music-appreciation textbook materials for high-school students, where Adornian narratives of redemption are not greatly in demand.
*ONE OF US! ONE OF US! ONE OF US! (explanation here)
To this late point, my summer (leaving out the trip-to-California, week-of-frenetic-activities-here-with-wonderful-visiting-nephews, and napping-in-the-heat episodes) has consisted of reading and writing. I read the wonderful recent books by Kenneth Hamilton and Halina Goldberg and wrote reviews of them for journals (by no means a quick and cursory business), read a book manuscript for a publisher (yes! publish it! right now!), and a book proposal for another one. Smallish, low-glory projects; I should have been working on a major article, while my own book manuscript is being read for my publisher (and, presumably, revisions recommended). For whatever reason, I haven’t had the focus; instead I’ve been pushing ideas around for my next book (a reception history of musical exoticism and critique of where this subdiscipline has recently gone) and for the new school year. I’ve also been practicing. But I really do need to get back to that Chopin article.
“The waiting is the hardest part,” sang Tom Petty. All auguries in this case are positive, and the people at my publisher tell me I shouldn’t worry, but still… This book—Chopin’s Polish Ballade, a contextual study of his Second Ballade, Op. 38, in its wider musical and cultural contexts—goes off in a sufficient number of unexpected directions that I can’t shake the feeling that the manuscript reader will come back with one line: “Bellman, are you kidding?” A research book is a substantial bit of work and emotional investment, and particularly when one is waiting for a reaction it is hard not to get a bit apprehensive. Will it be persuasive? Will this new assemblage of my bizarritudes make any sense, or will people just shrug and look sympathetic? The fact remains that if one thinks too long about almost anything, one begins to hallucinate connections that seem like brilliant ideas. I suspect that most conspiracy theories start this way, and the point of no return is when you sit bolt upright in the middle of the night, thinking “See? It All Makes Sense!” The paranoiac then sets about stockpiling guns and ammo and scribbling up manifestoes, while the academic happily begins assembling a book proposal and collecting citations. That’s me, out to pasture, swishing my tail at flies.
The points of similarity between research books in the humanities and grand-design conspiracy theories probably constitutes a subject I should avoid, for my own emotional well-being.
I’m also waiting for Randy Newman’s latest, which I seem to be the last person not to have heard already, whether via pirated copy or advance release. Signs and portents are that this one is superb, at least to judge by the chat on the Randy-list. So at the moment it is the Universal Upbeat, to borrow an idea from Edward T. Cone. I just need to make sure I’m ready when the music begins (is one ever really ready?). And when it gets crazy, I’ll doubtless wish for this fermata-like pause again.
Update: Timing being everything, I did just hear some news, and it’s good. I can set myself to revisions now, and stop with the neurotic self-doubt. (Any more of that and Debbie will whup me; she’s bone-tired of hearing about it.) I feel like I’m being cleared for takeoff.
Someone (Germaine Greer, maybe?) said that writers don't like writing, they like having written. True enough. I've been driving hard to finish an article ahead of the August 1 deadline and have just done so. I feel a certain gratification, even pleasure in having had a complicated idea and succeeded in getting most of it on the page. But mostly I just feel relief. There's a Sherlock Holmes story ("The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans") that shows Holmes working through a particularly tough problem, which even he gets slightly wrong (although he does win out in the end). It's always stuck in my mind as a model for what it's like to write anything of any length and complexity: you move in stages, fighting your way clear of one obstruction only to find that it had only hidden the next one, and on and on, solving one problem after another until the whole thing has been worked out. But while you're writing the end isn't in view. You're like Holmes, moving from clue to clue towards a solution, not merely executing a plan that's been in your mind all along. Although now that I think of it, there are a few Holmes stories like that, and a few simpler pieces I've written where I basically knew what the whole thing looked like ahead of time, and it was just a matter of writing it all down. But not larger things, like the article I just completed (weighing in at 12,000 words, including notes). "I am not aware that in all our joint researches we have ever had a
case which was more difficult to get at. Every fresh advance which we
make only reveals a fresh ridge beyond. And yet we have surely made
some appreciable progress." So says Sherlock at some point in his investigations, and I feel like that many times during the writing of this article. I've never been able to figure out how to outline drafts—I have a basic idea of where I'm going, of course, but exactly how to get there, how all the details fit together, what structure will hold them all together -- I only ever discover that in writing. Which means that writing can be a little stressful, a daily wrestling with the anxiety that perhaps all the pieces won't fit together after all. But I kind of do like writing, actually, if only for the diffuse satisfaction of feeling my capacities for imagination and reason fully exercised, kneading a hard and intransigent substance into shape, hewing form out of formlessness.
There's something funny that always happened to me when I was a piano student.I had a concert coming up and I would set about a rigorous training regimen, marshaling all my energy, coiling up for that one hour of intense mental, physical, and emotion exertion. And then my mind, body, and spirit would uncoil with alarming speed and I would always get sick the day after. (And I know I'm not the only one: a lot of my friends have had this experience.) What's funny is that this happened to me today. Now that I'm done with this article I'm just lolling around on the sofa, feeling tired and coldy and dull, but sort of pleasantly. There's a book I bought (Edmund Wilson's The American Earthquake) at the beloved Caveat Emptor that I've been saving up for when I finished my article. While I'm reading it, my daughter is playing her violin and composing a song she calls "Argentina." She's written it in a kind of tablature of violin fingerings and decorated the music with a drawing of a living room:
It's hot and sunny out and I should mow the lawn -- I tend to let a lot of stuff go when I'm making the big final push on a project, and I have a bit of tidying to do this week. For today I'm happy enough on the couch, though.
I was recently requesting permission from various museums and music publishers for illustrations and musical examples that I am including in my forthcoming book Musical Exoticism: Images and Reflections.
One of the questions I was asked brought me up short: size of the print run. I contacted the publisher of my book, Cambridge University Press. Answer: 600 copies, at least for the first printing.
My only previous monograph (in 1986), which was based on my dissertation, was published in an edition of 2000 copies (500 hardcover, 1500 paperback). It's still available for purchase. A book that I co-edited (in 1997) printed 1000 copies, sold out within perhaps four years, was (I believe) unavailable for a few years, but can now be read in electronic form by anybody who wishes to log on (no need for a subscription or password) at:
Does University of California Press get money every year from CDLib.org for renting them this book? How does CDLib cover its operating costs if it makes its wares available for free?
The gradual emergence of online publication surely explains why Cambridge University Press now thinks that 600 copies might be a safe bet for the initial print-run of my forthcoming book. A colleague pointed out to me that a number of recent musicological books have come out in hard and electronic form, either simultaneously or in very quick succession. Two examples: Elizabeth LeGuin's book on Boccherini (UCalifornia Press) and Michael Pisani's on how Native America has been evoked in Western music (parlor song, Dvorak's Ninth, film music, etc.--Yale University Press).
But, getting back to permissions: the exchange I remember most vividly occurred back in the mid-90s, when I was trying to talk a permissions-giver (i.e., a recent college grad at a desk) into lowering a permission fee for a few measures of music to include in an article in a scholarly journal. I pointed out that I was not going to earn anything for publishing the article.
"Then why did you write it?" the young employee asked--not in an unkind way, just truly puzzled.
It's a question I suppose we all think about at times: Why do we do research at all, and why sweat bullets trying to write it up effectively? Should we make the argument elaborate and nuanced (for the few who care about all the details and evidence)? Should we keep it streamlined (so as to hold the attention of the non-specialist)? What different kinds of readers are likely to be consulting the book or article?...
In this regard, I just noticed an interesting personal statement on From Beyond the Stave, the music-book blog (of publisher Boydell and Brewer) that I mentioned in a post about Elgar's incomplete Third Symphony and the supposed New Musicology. The post is by Martin Anderson, the publisher of Toccata Books (whose wares are now distributed by Boydell--something I hadn't realized). He's writing here as a publisher, not an author, but he gives a good sense of what drives him to make high-level writing available on (in the case of Toccata Books) important composers who are not generally considered first-rank.
===== "I started Toccata Press way back in 1981, basically because I got fed
up waiting for other publishers to bring out the books I wanted to
read: there was nothing published in English on Enescu, nothing on Franz Schmidt or Pfitzner or a host of other important composers." =====
What a startling way to phrase it!: Write the book or article (or, in Martin Anderson's case, publish the book) that you wish you could read on the subject.
Is that why we write (or should write) about music, musical life, etc.?
I suppose there are all kinds of reasons for writing seriously about music. But Martin Anderson's reason seems so simple and obvious that I wonder why it never occurred to me in quite this way before.
Would we musicologists find it stimulating (refreshing, challenging) to think more about what we ourselves find engaging and informative on the page?
Might this question help a musicologist decide what to explore next in his or her research . . . and how to write it up for the readers "out there," whether they hold our prose in their hands or click their way through it on their computer screen?
One of the students in my graduate seminar did a research paper on 1980s hair metal, which is a pretty cool topic, but which is not the point of this post, except insofar as it gives me an excuse to post this clip of Michael Angelo Batio playing the "quad guitar":
Ha, you missed one.
Anyway, my student said at one point that the challenge for her was going to be resisting the temptation to shoehorn a lot of quirky, funny, interesting-in-themselves details into an argument to which they were irrelevant. I know the feeling. Research (especially archival research) leads you to all kinds of odd little finds, small details that fill out your picture of the general subject you're researching and are really neat in themselves but which, let's face it, don't quite fit in the thing you're writing. One is always tempted to abuse writerly principles of economy and coherence and find some way to use them anyway. One is not always successful at resisting the temptation. And by "one" I mean "me." I'm pretty good at connecting distantly related points anyway, so I can usually gin up some semi-sorta-plausible rationale for stuffing one more amusing quote or peculiar historical detail into an argument. The thing is, you can always throw a couple of things that like into an article without hurting its structure too much, but past a certain point you run the risk of letting the details overwhelm the whole, of submerging the hard clean outlines of your conceptual structure in garlands of arabesque. And then you might find yourself playing the metaphorical quad guitar, captivated by the bright shiny gimmick but losing sight of the rock. (See what I did there, connecting the distantly related points?)
When I write, much of my revision process involves cutting back on the things I like but don't really need. But it hurts, HURTS, to leave those little gems on the cutting-room floor. I was looking through one of my morgue files this morning and found this little thing, a letter to the editor of Good Times (formerly the Express Times), a Bay area "undeground" (i.e., hippie) newspaper from the late 1960s. Some background: I had found (in the Hoover Institution archive of New Left/counterculture materials) an article by Greil Marcus that I'm using in my upcoming exotica article.* Marcus wrote it when he was quite young, either in or recently out of graduate school, and I've never seen it reprinted anywhere else, although it's an interesting piece and adumbrates some of the notions he would develop in The Old Weird America. But anyway, I also found a letter to the editor about it (titled "Intellectual Bullshit") in the next issue:
I really dig your paper, especially the good guy/bad guy slant, BUT please don’t print any more of that intellectual bullshit by what’s his name. You’re supposed to be hip, right? Well, just take the first sentence: "When we return to America remember there was no real innocence after Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Endicott, the severest of Puritans destroyed Hawthorne’s Merry Mount, erasing the orgies and childish bachanale in favor of a darker religion." Now what the fuck does all that mean? Can you tell me—in English? I mean, I know you can’t since this is a letter, but don’t print any more college papers. What did he get on it, anyway—a B-plus?” Joe Usetit, letter to the editors, Good Times 2, no. 14 (April 9 1969), 12.
Given that "Joe Usetit" looks like a pseudonym, I can't discount the possibility that Marcus wrote this letter himself, but assuming it's not a prank, this is actually quite an interesting letter -- not so much the letter itself as what it says about the incongruous appearance of Marcus's writing in a grubby obscure underground paper, and, more generally, the uneasy place of intellectualism in the 1960s counterculture.** It's not that intellectuals had no place in underground newspapers, rock mags, etc.; it's that the job of the "intellectual" had been redefined while leaving its fundamental identity in place.*** (And as this happened it created new difficulties and opportunities for intellectuals like Marcus.) But really, that's not what my article is about, and exiling the whole thing to an endnote is really no solution, because then what's the note doing there? You sometimes see articles by academics where the average page has about ten lines of above-the-line main text and two-thirds of the page is taken up by kitchen-sink footnotes. It's usually a bad sign when your writing starts to look like that. So that letter from "Joe Usetit" got expunged, though I at least have the consolation of being able to put it up on my blog.
*Greil Marcus, “American Classical Music,” San Francisco Express Times 2, no. 12 (25 March 1969), 5.
**All due apologies for using such a blunt and inadequate term for such a complicated and multifaceted entity, but you have to call it something, and anyway you know what I mean when I say "counterculture," right? Close enough for rock and roll, as they say, or at least for a blog.
***It's probably worth quoting Stuart Hampshire's definition of the intellectual again:
First, an intellectual is someone who takes it for granted that a
strenuously developed and articulate intelligence constitutes a claim
to be recognized, and an independent status in society, even apart from
any solid achievements in science or scholarship or literature. . .
Second, an intellectual is someone who refuses to be confined to one
specialized, or professional, application of his power; he will be
ready to inquire into almost anything that is formulated in
sufficiently strict intellectual terms, and will find delight in the
process of inquiry, quite independently of the results. . . . Third, an
intellectual is someone who never lowers his voice in piety, and who is
not prepared to be solemn and restrained, in deference to anything
other than the internal standards of the intellect and the imagination.
A 2004 cartoon from James Kochalka's wonderful sketchbook diary American Elf:
Kochalka is a cartoonist, rock musician, astronaut, and race car driver.* So he's in the business of having ideas, which he can execute in a number of different media. And re-reading the second anthology of American Elf this morning with my coffee, I happened upon this cartoon and, not for the first time, felt a certain connection with Mr. Kochalka, despite the differences in our chosen media. We all need our big ideas, of course, but it's a mistake to think that they always come to us at full size. As J.R.R. Tolkien once said of The Lord of the Rings, sometimes the little tales grow in the telling.
I'm now at a point where I'm advising doctoral students in their dissertations, and I seem to keep coming back to this point. You start with a presentment of some large idea that will turn into a dissertation, but in a sense you don't totally know what the idea is until it's written down. (I don't think you ever really know what you think about something until you've given it some verbal shape, either written or spoken.) But then how do you start writing it down if you don't exactly know what it is? It's a conundrum sort of like the old hermeneutic circle thing: you can't understand the parts without a sense of the whole, but you can't grasp the whole without knowing its parts. I've always told myself a version of my Mom's line about thrift: watch the pennies and the dollars look after themselves. Start writing little ideas down and let the larger connections between them, the architecture of the Big Idea you're chasing, develop organically from the accumulation of details. And, first of all, have a place to write them down. I have a number of daybooks on my computer because I'm most comfortable sketching things in a word processor program, but everyone is different. There are still a lot of longhand diehards out there. (I suspect that there's some connection between thinking and the physical act of writing. I just like the feel of typing.) For that matter, one of the reasons I like blogging is that it gives me a low-hassle way of firing off little ideas, some of which become surprisingly valuable to me. And the funny thing is, I never have any way of telling whether a blog post will be valuable when I start writing it down. (This is why outlines never work for me, though I imagine I'm in the minority on this.)
Of course, there's a downside to the start-small-and-work-your-way-up strategy of dissertation writing, which is that you might end up with a bunch of short pieces on different sub-topics which add up to a shambling incoherent Frankenstein's Monster dissertation. And this, I will admit, is exactly what happened to my dissertation, which I now hate and wish would just disappear off the face of the planet. There are some decent ideas in it, and indeed a few ideas I've been tinkering with since I graduated, but while at the time I could see ways all these ideas connected into some larger totality, I didn't have enough of a grasp of the whole to find a good structure for those connections. As a result the thing reads like a huge desperate improvisation, which is basically what it was. At the time, though, I wasn't smart enough to figure out what to do about it.
*OK, no, only the first two, but it's always seemed to me so improbably cool that anyone could be both a rock star and a cartoonist that it seems as if he might also be a few more cool things as well. Those of you unfamiliar with Kochalka's music should immediately head on over to the Youtube and watch "Britney's Silver Can," a Hey-Jude-like anthem to Britney's one true love. The Sabbath-like rawk of "Wash Your Ass" is also an awe-inspiring thing to behold.
