Goodbye, Hello

I don't think anyone is really still reading this. But if you are, I invite you to join me over at my new blog.

Mabelicious Mayhem

Okay, the wheels are in motion. My valiant web administrator--my father--is making it so I can host a blog on my own domain name. I still need a title, though, people. I've received many good suggestions, some of which are going to be used for other things, but I still haven't found the perfect name for my own personal blog. So keep them coming.

By way of update, here are some bullet points of what I have been up to since last I posted:

• My partner and I found a beautiful apartment, on the ground floor of a bright pink Victorian duplex in West Philly. Our stuff is sitting in the living room while the landlord finishes fixing up the bathroom. We move in Saturday.
  
• A lovely family reunion was had down in North Carolina, outside of Asheville.
  
• We planned our wedding. We've been meaning to get married off and on for like the last seven years, and slightly more seriously the last year or so, but finally found a nice little Episcopal church in DC that is both queer-friendly and would marry an unbaptized heathen like me. So that's on now.
  
• A brief but very pleasant trip up to the ancestral encampment in the Adirondacks. I really wish I could blog more about what it is like up there, but, as they say, that wouldn't do. Suffice to say, I socialized with the new president of the New York Stock Exchange (very pleasant man), and then also with one of the main funders behind the Swift Boat Veterans For Truth (deceptively pleasant as well).
  
• My partner's grandmother passed away early Monday morning, suddenly but peacefully. She was a lovely woman. People always describe elderly women who have a bare pulse as "feisty," but she really was feisty in the best sense of the word. Her death was not unexpected, but of course that does not make it any less sad.
  
• But most happily, Mary and I have a new family member. Her name is Mabel, and those are her ears flapping in the Adirondack breeze at the top. She's about one and a half years old, and the only identifiable breed the DNA testing at the shelter found was Daschund. Mind you, she's sixty pounds, and looks to be mainly a mixture of Doberman and a Black and Tan Coonhound. With the small, but unfortunate, exception of trying to eat my grandmother's dog for lunch once, she is incredibly sweet and affectionate. I would show you her face, but I shall leave it as a teaser--once I have my new blog all set up and going, you'll have to go there to see her adorable front!
  

The Great Blog Naming Competition

When your parents start inquiring if you are alive, that is when it is time to update your blog. Mary and I are safely in Philadelphia. My sister is out of town, so we are staying in her apartment while we search for our own. Everything we own between the two of us is in a sixteen foot Penske truck, parked in the suburban driveway of friends. We have the truck until Friday, on the off chance that we will find a place into which we can move immediately; otherwise, it'll go into storage.

We've been moving for almost exactly a month now, first out of London, and then out of Los Angeles. This makes me cranky, because I am a bit of a slug, and enjoy having time to zone out in front of a television or the internets. Such time has not been forthcoming.

But more importantly, I am very out of touch with both my own blog and the blog world more generally. There has been an interesting dialogue over at Dial M for Musicology about the intersection of blogging and academic careers, sparked by a post by Drew over at amusicology. Bloggers of course worry about this stuff all the time, and I guess now that there is the small spark of a musicology blogging community, it is time for us to go through our ritual career worries.

I certainly have them myself. I started this blog two years ago, when I was spending the summer in England and wanted to let my friends and family know what I was up to. I originally signed my posts with my real name, but then adopted a very mild anonymity. Anyone who reads this and knows me in real life will instantly know it is me, and anyone who doesn't know me could figure out my name in about five seconds of googling. The one barrier I hoped to maintain was the Google barrier: I hoped that when someone googled my real name, this blog would not appear. I think that is mostly still true.

But I've decided it's time to start a new blog, and shut down good ol' Barnet Bound. There are two reasons. One is that I am no longer bound to Barnet. Mary graduated from vet school, and we are now living together in the US. There is no longer anything intercontinental about us.

But more importantly, I am going on the academic job market for the first time this fall. (Which reminds me: if you love the blog, you'll love the junior faculty member!) And not only has this blog been a little too personal for my own taste--it's probably not a great idea to advertise one's anxieties about teaching and dissertating when searching for a job--I also envy the more public forum for writing some others have. In other words, I'd like to attach my own name to my own writing. So, down with Barnet Bound, up with a new blog under my real name.

Which brings me to the Great Blog Naming Competition. I liked the alliteration and obtuseness of Barnet Bound, but that title was arrived at more or less accidentally. Now that I have a chance to choose a new title for my blog...what should it be? Anyone would provides the winning title will be treated to a free drink at the next musicological conference or family reunion, as the case may be.

Wandering

When last we spoke, I was in London, cheerfully finishing Harry Potter. Since that time, I have moved Mary out of her London apartment, flown back to Los Angeles, gone to Disneyland, packed up my apartment (with the help of a dozen beautiful, beautiful friends), loaded all of my belongings on a truck, attached my little car to a dolly behind said truck, and driven to Flagstaff, Arizona. This is not our final destination; it was simply as far as we could make it yesterday, which wasn't very. Exhaustion does not begin to describe our state of being.

We aim to arrive in Philadelphia by Monday, whereupon we will camp out in my sister's apartment, and try to find one for ourselves. Then a week after that, it is off to a family reunion down in North Carolina.

My dissertation misses me. I miss it.

Writing Through Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

For for the first time. A mesostic of sounds from the chapter "Battle of Hogwarts," with apologies to John Cage.

                  too huge
                  screaming with blood
                blundering
  high, cold, and clear
                      yells and shouts

                thin, piteous human
         silence swallowed
                distant      
      surprisingly soft
                   screams
                smattering of applause

----
Interestingly, Rowland uses very few sounds in her writing. This makes it much more difficult to go through, as Cage did with Finnegan's Wake, and draw out sound-words and phonemes. The above mesostic was drawn from only 26 or so such sound descriptions I found in the chapter. Considering that most of the chapter is describing a battle, and Harry's escape from a gigantic fire-monster-thing, you would think there would be more sounds.

Incidentally, the book? Loved it. Don't get me wrong, I loved the Sopranos ending, but I equally loved Rowland's approach to ending a complicated, character-driven epic.

All Things Bright and British

Mary's graduation went swimmingly on Wednesday. It was not, unfortunately, in the London Guild Hall where it usually is, but rather in a somewhat dreary University of London student center. But there were lots of fun academic robes and maces, and everything was presided over by the Most Honorable 7th Marquess of Salisbury. Who, it later turned out, is a fairly annoying right-wing Tory in the House of Lords, but still, he's a Marquess, and we don't have those in the land of the free.

After the ceremony Mary's mother took us out for sushi, and then for dinner we drove with her father up to Essex for dinner and Morris dancing in a pub. We were met there by a crusty old English veterinarian Mary used to work for, and who was, I suspect, James Herriot incarnate.

And then, if things weren't English enough, there was a black tie graduation ball at Hatfield House. I was sort of expecting Hatfield House to be the local community center, but it turned out to be the home of aforementioned Marquess of Salisbury. And his home is a Tudor/Jacobean mansion, owned most notably by Henry the VIII. Queens Elizabeth and Mary grew up there, and supposedly Elizabeth was sitting underneath an oak tree in the courtyard when she found out that Mary had died, and she was now queen. The dinner and dancing were in the oldest part of the grounds, the original 15th century Great Hall. It felt a little odd to be doing the Macarena underneath the antlers of a deer shot by Henry VIII, but we Americans, we adapt.

Satiation

Courtesy of Mary's father, I tonight ate the following:

1. Wild Mushroom and Bergamot Soup

2. Roast Saddle of Wiltshire Rabbit with Foie Gras and Summer Truffle Risotto ("Game may contain lead shot.")

3. Chocolate Pudding with Spearmint and Pistachio Ice Cream

This all at Rules, supposedly the oldest private restaurant in London.

Barnet Bound

Very occasionally, the title of this blog makes sense. In a few hours I am off to the airport. Eleven very cramped hours after that, I'll be in Barnet for two weeks. Incidentally, I missed the exact date, but this summer marks the two year anniversary of this humble blog. I began it initially when I was in England for the summer of 2005, so that I didn't have to write the same repetitive little travelogue email to all of my friends and family.

Apologies to the many, many people I owe things to at the moment. They are coming.

Will somebody please come kill my cats so that they will stop playing in my suitcase? Thanks.

Four Pondering Questions

Mary thanks everyone for their kind comments. It has been a whirlwind for her! I leave Tuesday for her graduation.

I have been whirling around myself. I decided that the best way to get all of my tasks done before leaving town would be to go for a preemptive two-day vacation to San Francisco. Friday morning I took a Southwest shuttle up, Saturday I drove down. There were two occasions for this. The sad one is that a friend of mine's mother just died up there, and I was able to meet him for breakfast and a walk in a park. The happy reason was that my little sister, who is an opera singer, was performing in the city. My parents were driving down from Oregon, and since I don't see them or my sister enough, it seemed like a good time to go up. The concert was great, needless to say. And it made me horribly, horribly homesick for the Bay Area. I grew up in the east bay, but am rarely able to visit. Especially now that my parents have moved away, I have few ties, and this makes me sad. I love Los Angeles, and many other places, but there is no other place in which I feel happier than the Bay Area. Especially since I was introduced to the La Farine morning bun, which had somehow eluded my childhood.

Anyways, a friend and I drove down yesterday, which was surprisingly pleasant--Interstate 5 is a miserable drive, but good conversation made it fly by. And although I am exhausted by the traveling, I am nevertheless motivated to answer Tenured Radical's tag for the "Eight Things I wonder about" meme, started over here. I'm not a big meme person, but the whiny formlessness of this one appeals to me in my current state of mind. Except I'm tired, so my version is going to be four things I am pondering.

Four Things I Am Pondering

1. When I was at the beach for the Fourth of July, celebrating our victorious march on terrorism at home and abroad, I noticed an increase in the number of tummy tattoos. Men with big gothic script letters arching across, or women with little chains of thorns or whatever around their bellybutton. My question: are they (a) supremely overconfident in their ability to stay in shape the rest of their lives, or (b) stupid?

2. Will I survive this summer? Seriously. It's not looking good.

3. Los Angeles: there are not many people who love this city. But there are some. I think I am one. But some of those who love this city defend it in terms that suggest that those who do not like Los Angeles are lacking in critical faculty. As in, if you don't like Los Angeles, it is because of romantic attachment to old-fashioned ideals. Los Angeles complicates binaries, the reasoning goes, and forces you to confront prejudices you didn't know you had. For instance, one might argue, Los Angeles is actually not about superficiality. In fact, quite the opposite. In east coast cities, you know you are in a fancy neighborhood if there are brick sidewalks and nice old houses. In Los Angeles, outward appearances will give you no guide to what is inside. This fancy restaurant down the street from me looks like a double-wide trailer home. Isn't that how things should be? Hmmm.

4. Why is it so impossible for me to get work done at home? These days, I only work at coffeeshops. Objectively, this is odd, as at home I have a very comfortable chair, a desk, plentiful food and beverage, and internet. At coffeeshops, I have a rickety table, expensive food, sometimes no internet, and lots of distraction. Will this all change someday, when I am living in a situation that allows my bed and desk to be in different rooms? What about if I have a campus office, will I be able to work there? Would air conditioning help? Is solitude the problem, do I need to have bustle around me? Is it the fueling fire of a professionally-made cappuccino?

Since I am only pondering four things, I am only going to tag four others: Sushi Pajamas, Miscellaneous Mayhem, Violet Vixen, Jewel Dakini? Have at it! Ponder away!

Lock up your horses

Many little girls want to be veterinarians. Some boys too, but many, many little girls. Some of those girls go on to college. A few of them stay on the pre-vet track, even while rowing varsity for crew all four years. Fewer do well enough that they get into veterinary school. Fewer still make it through four years of vet school. Even fewer go to a vet school in Europe that requires an extra year of training, and which despite being eight time zones away from her boyfriend is one of the best places in the world to study furry things.

But last week my partner took her very final exams, having already passed the American boards. A week's worth of testing, plus scores averaged in from previous practical exams, a research paper, rotation evaluations, and so on.

And this morning, she found out she passed! I can now present to you, at the tender age of 26, Dr. Mary, DVM MRCVS.


You can't tell, but this is the picture of the official parking spot for the veterinarian at the Royal Mews.

Swimming Safely

Like lots of Los Angeles apartment buildings, mine has a pool. Unlike many pools in LA, ours is not doing so well. It always looks a little cloudy, but this summer the residents of my building have been cheerfully gamboling about in it. This is unusual; back when my building was largely senior citizens, nobody ever went in. But in the last year, more and more young people have moved in, and for a few weeks this summer the pool was becoming quite a party spot. Many of the new residents are twenty-something power lesbians, and they all seem to like the pool. They'd frolic around drinking cheap beer all night long.

But then, like the careers of elected officials in my fair city, things went downhill. The water started to get cloudier and cloudier. It started to turn a peculiar green. There seemed to be an interesting amount of hair floating about, and then a few cigarette butts. As if to confirm the obvious, an official-looking sign suddenly went up: "Pool Closed by Order of the Department of Health and Safety." And now it is supposed to hit triple-digit temperatures, and we have no pool.

In other news, I want to recommend two great blog posts:

• Tenured Radical, with whom my partner used to row but from whom I stupidly never took any classes, has a great post about the Sherley tenure case at MIT. That post, and a related one from February, make beautiful arguments about the reality of evaulative processes in academia for people of color, women, and queers. Especially people of color. She says all the things I wish I could think to say when people grouse about how hard it is for white people to get academic jobs. And I say that as a white guy who is scared stiff about getting a job next year.
  
  
• The indomitable Susie Bright is always wonderful. She had a great post awhile back about the annoying tag "NSFW", or, "Not Safe for Work." Today she has a neat post about safety in general. The notion of "safety" is so fascinating. It was something that came up for me in college a lot; if this blog weren't mildly anonymous, I would link to an editorial I once wrote that made very similar points.
  

Rodents I Have Loved

Three words for you:

Ratatouille is awesome.

Admittedly, I love rodents. I had two rats as a kid. I can't remember the first one's name, as I was in second grade or so. As I recall, he was a classroom pet who needed a home for Christmas, and ended up living with me permanently. My second rat, much loved, was named Bubba. I think he might have also been an adopted classroom rat. Bubba was wonderful, and lived a very long happy life. When he developed a tumor, we took to the vet to be put to sleep, and I bawled my little eyes out even though I was really too old for that sort of thing. I put him in a box to take to the vet, and gave him a slice of chocolate cake since I figured it didn't matter anymore. The vet very kindly took him to a back room to the deed, and wow, was I ever sad.

We also had many mice in our house--mine was named Perot, on account of his large ears. Unfortunately, one morning I awoke to find that one of his ears was missing. Not sure where it went. The vet presumed that he just scratched or gnawed it off or something. Not much to be done except daub neosporin on the stump daily, he said, which I did faithfully. He also lived a long and happy life, despite being occasionally tormented by the cat, who would sit on top of his cage staring down at the poor little guy, and would occasionally manage to fish him out and bat him around. Never did serious harm, so we figured it was all in good fun. Keeps the reflexes sharp.

We also had a rabbit, but he was rather mean. He was a hand-me-down from a neighbor who moved away, who had themselves inherited him from another neighbor. We tried hard to love Friskie, but he repaid our love with rabbit squeals and biting. I tell you though, he lived a very long time for a rabbit. He even made it through an evacuation--when the Oakland Hills Fire came close to us in 1991, we had to bundle all the pets in the car to flee. (Except the goldfish. My mother convinced me they would be fine in their water.) The dog roamed free in the minivan, the cat had his carrier, and the mouse was oblivious to the world in his little box, but the poor rabbit had to be stuffed into whatever we had available, which ended up being Bubba's old rat cage. He fit, but he was not a happy rabbit.

Incidentally, is Mitt Romney not supremely creepy? Who straps their dog on top of a car?

Anyways, the movie Ratatouille is wonderful. I can vouch that the animators really did a wonderful job in capturing the rodent spirit. They got their cute little hands just right, and the sound guys did an excellent job of recreating the sound of scampering rat. It made me want to have another pet rat.

Not to mention the food. Man. I've never been so hungry from watching an animated movie about rats.

LAs I will miss

It's still hot, and I know it will be like this all summer long. Going outside becomes an ordeal, just like winter in a snow climate--you've got to slather on sunblock an all exposed surfaces. You've got to put your contacts in so you can wear sunglasses. You've got to make sure you're taking your own car, which has air conditioning, and not the friend's car that has vinyl seats and no AC. Movie theaters are good. The beach is good. Apartments are bad.

But I'm not going to complain about the heat anymore. Today is July 1, so I have exactly one more month in Los Angeles. After reading the horror stories about UHaul, I have reserved a Penske truck for August 1 to schlep my stuff to an as-of-yet-undetermined location on the other side of the country. And I'm going to miss this godforsaken city! So, I want to blog about things I will miss about LA. Consider this a first installment.

Largo is a small club in my neighborhood. It's mostly sit-down tables, with a small bar area, and a small stage with an excellent sound system. The owner is this annoying Irish guy who just had a baby. The bartender is a lovely woman who is a photographer in her real life. Generations of musicologists have trekked to Largo to hear music. I have spent hours and hours sitting at the bar with friends, sipping my Harp and enjoying the strict no-cellphone-policy quiet. The deal with Largo is that you can reserve a table for dinner, but it sells out way in advance usually. But if you get there early, you can wait in line outside, and the first dozen people or so get seats at the bar. So if it is a popular performer, like Jon Brion's regular Friday night residency, you get there at like 7 pm, and hunker down on the sidewalk for several hours, then spend another hour or so drinking at the bar while people eat there dinner. Finally, Jon or whoever will come on at like 10 pm, and play until midnight.

The hours of waiting get old after awhile, and the quality of the music can be uneven. It's actually been almost a year and a half since I've last been. But last Thursday I went with friends to see the alternative bluegrass group Nickelcreek. They are a pair of siblings, the Watkins family, about my age I guess, who are always playing at Largo. I gather they are actually kind of big now, but I always think of them as the slightly dorky but adorable kids who get dragged up on stage by Jon Brion all the time.

But anyways, this show was just lovely, and reminds me how much I love Largo sometimes. Beautiful tunes, impeccably played. People wandered on stage constantly to play a song or two. One of those people was Fiona Apple, who seems to live permanently at Largo--Mary has run into her in the women's restroom more than once. She looked, as she always does, both beautiful and traumatized, and sang through a handful of lovely bluegrass and original tunes with the group. Then it was the opening act's birthday, so cupcakes were passed around and everyone sang.

I apologize

But it's too damn hot to blog.

Here is how my life may be summarized:

1. Mary finished her final exams for vet school. She finds out next week if she passed or not.
2. I have a lot to get done before I leave for her graduation. And not enough time to do it in. Perhaps seeing lots of movies and drinking too much will help me accomplish my goals.

Saturday Night with a Robot

Against the responsible advice of my mother, girlfriend, and several in the blogosphere, I bought Delicious Library and have been having a cheerful time scanning in my books. It goes very quickly, I promise I couldn't have written a dissertation chapter in the time it will take to do them all! In the last forty minutes I just scanned three shelves, or 129 books. I estimate I have about 1100 more to go. It's kind of fun to go through all of my books one by one, remembering all the courses I bought textbooks for and the fun used bookstores in which I found gems.

The best part is that when the software recognizes your book, a robotic women's voice reads the title. That's fine when it's something like "Leo Tolstoy, war-and-peace," but my queer theory books almost killed her: "Judith Butler, excitable-Speech-a-politics-of-the-performative...Judith Butler, gender-trouble-feminism-and-the-subersion-of-identity...Judith Butler, bodies-that-matter-on-the-discursive-limits-of-sex."

Then, however, I got to my philosophy shelf. Plato, fine, Derrida, fine, Berkeley, fine. But Descartes?

"Rene Descartes, Meditations-on-First-Philosophy-In-Which-the-Existence-of-God-and-the-Distinction-of-the-Soul-from-the-Body-Are-Demonstrated."

It's a wild Saturday night here in Los Angeles.

Public Lives

I am very fond of my undergraduate institution, Wesleyan University. It's a great school, with an amazing intellectual culture that produces more than its fair share of interesting academics, activists, and artists. The incoming president, Michael Roth, is a fairly young alumnus who is an academic himself, the former president of an art school, and seems like a cool guy. (Unlike the previous president, who was an anti-intellectual jerk who made no secret of his general dislike for the student body.) I'm excited about the school's future, and will be a happy (small) donor some day when I have more money.

However, I just noticed something. We got this press release that Robert and Elena Allbritton, young but apparently wealthy alumni, gave $5 million to the school to create a "Center for the Study of Public Life."

The Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life is a response to significant changes across the social sciences, which include the creation of new interdisciplinary ventures, the use of multiple methodologies in research, and the rethinking of the idea of the public in a variety of intellectual and social movements. The Allbritton Center will build on evolving relationships between scholarly research and both the political process and the greater public. It will host courses taught by people who have had distinguished careers in public service, including law, business, government, the non-profit sector, and media. It also will house a Quantitative Analysis Center to educate students in the analysis and interpretation of large bodies of data

Sounded laudable enough to me. The press release goes on to point out that Robert Allbritton founded Politico, a political web site with a Republican slant I find generally annoying, but whatever, it's all good. We left wing types are open-minded about who we associate with.

But do you know what else Robert Allbritton has done in his short career? Well, he was President and CEO of Riggs Bank, a local financial institution in Washington, DC, owned by the Allbritton family. And why does the Allbritton name sound vaguely familiar? Well, in March he resigned as president in disgrace. Why? Let's ask the Washington Post!

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which has closely monitored Riggs since early last year and must approve any senior executive appointments, was informed of Allbritton's replacements, the company said. Riggs was fined a record $25 million by the OCC last spring for failing to comply with anti-money-laundering laws, and in January the bank pleaded guilty and paid a $16 million fine for failing to prevent possible money laundering by former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and officials of the West African nation of Equatorial Guinea.

That's right. It's turn out that the Allbritton family is widely believed to have personally assisted Certified Evil Dictator Augusto Pinochet in hiding his assets from the various courts that are trying to seize them. Want more? Read another Post article. Robert's father Joe seems to have been the major culprit--although some random low-level employees took the legal fall--but it's hard to believe my illustrious brother in Wesleyan alumdom was not part of some very bad things.

And this guy wants to start a "Center for the Study of Public Life"? Well, I suppose it is true that Pinochet did pioneer a certain "rethinking of the idea of the public in a variety of intellectual and social movements," in that, you know, he had most of his public secretly executed.

I guess whatever, Wesleyan can use the Allbritton money. But I respectfully suggest that it might make a fitting tribute to the institutions of democracy if it were renamed the Salvador Allende Memorial Center for the Study of Public Life. After all, 2008 marks the centennial of Allende's birth, and if Robert Allbritton is really looking for a way to assuage some guilt with his gift, he might as well go all the way.

How To Be a Grad Student

Summer "vacation" is seemingly awfully busy. Yuck. But I wanted to leave everyone with a quick link to a compendium of blog posts about graduate student life put together by Horace over at To Delight and Instruct. Check it out!

Okay, fine.

I might be an Obama supporter, I might dislike the Clinton family individually and as a unit, but...I have to admit, the new Hillary campaign video is brilliant.


That said, her official campaign song is a sappy French-Canadian ballad? Clearly somebody did not, as all campaigns should, hire an in-house musicologist.

How To Do Things With Teaching

My favorite teacher as an undergraduate was a professor who had been denied tenure at the beginning of his career. There were a lot of reasons for it--institutional homophobia for one--but he was also very upfront with that he hadn't published very much early on. He hadn't, he once told me, because it took him almost ten years of teaching before he learned "how to teach." It worked out fine for him; he had been denied tenure in the history department, and unusually, the more liberal English department offered him a position. Twenty-five years later, he's a world-famous scholar and one of the most popular teachers at the university.

I've always been struck by his comment though, especially as I've become an academic myself and experienced what he was talking about. I finished grading the final papers for the class I have been a teaching assistant for. There's some paperwork left to, but basically, this was hopefully my last day ever as a TA. I'm not going to miss it. Once you've had the taste of leading your own class, with your own syllabus, your own standards, your own personality, it's hard to go back to the status of minion. I have enjoyed TAing this year more than most; I've had the same thirty students, all majors finishing up the history sequence, all year now, and it has been wonderful to actually get to know some undergraduates in the bureaucratic morass that is my university. I get to lead my own discussion section once a week, and do occasional guest lectures, and that has been very fulfilling.

But best of all, I do feel like this year I finally figured out how to teach. I've always felt like a bit of a fraud as a teacher. Not in terms of subject matter, but in terms of pedagogical authority in the classroom. I have often felt that I rely too much upon my own subject position: essentially, I am a tall white guy, and therefore my students automatically listen to me more than they do to others. I've seen the proof of this year after year. My very first experience teaching in a college-level situation was when I was a TA as an undergraduate, for a bunch of frosh taking a Mozart course. My co-TA and I lead Friday listening sessions; she was a short white woman, and I was, well, me. 6'2" and WASPy as all hell. And I most definitely do not have an aggressive personality, or even a very loud voice, and as a junior in college I sure didn't know what I was talking about. Nevertheless, the students were visibly more respectful of me than my counterpart.

So as I was saying, I feel like my first couple years teaching as a graduate student, I kind of coasted on my subject position. I didn't have to worry about what I wore, I didn't have to be concerned that I would be viewed as "bitchy" if I asserted myself. I could talk about race without the white kids tuning out. I did have to work on learning how to project my voice better. (Aside: at one of the first academic papers I ever gave, a very famous scholar who chaired my panel took me aside and told me, nicely, that I would never make it in academia if I didn't learn to speak louder. That was some very effective advice!) But that's no big deal. Yes, I occupy a slightly minoritarian subject position when it comes to sexual orientation, but honestly, that can carry its own sort of privilege in academia, especially if your everyday performance reads, as I think mine does, as mostly straight.

This is all to say that because I try to be fairly self-reflexive, it was hard for me to take much pleasure in my teaching abilities. But I do think I made some progress this year in figuring out how to use the reality of my own self for more effective teaching:

• Rather than fight it, I have in some ways become more formal. When I taught my own class I almost always wore a jacket. (This might seem obvious to readers from elsewhere, but in Southern California seeing professors at all dressed up is very uncommon.) When I am actually gainfully employed as a professor, I can really see myself being the sort who wears a tie every day. I also rather enjoy lecturing my students in a rather haranguing fashion. Oddly, they seem to enjoy it too. Part of it is no doubt because my formality is paired with the fact that I am a big softie when it comes to grades and late papers, but I think it is more than that. Although I really appreciate pedagogical approaches that try to break down authority in the classroom, I don't think progressive teaching has to necessarily go that route. As any member in good standing of the queer community knows, authoritarianism doesn't have to be a bad thing. There's nothing wrong with a little dominance and submission, as long as everyone knows the safe word.
  
  
• Which also means treating students with a degree of formality and respect. My favorite undergrad professor who I talked about above, ran a very tight ship. He didn't allow any questions at all while he was lecturing, but saved twenty minutes at the end of class for questions. Students addressed him as Professor X, but in return he addressed them as Mr. and Ms. Y.
  
  
• I talked about myself a lot. This does two good things. One is that the students find it amusing. But it also introduces self-reflection. This is a good thing for college students. One of my typical sermons is about privilege. I have a lot of privilege, I tell them, and I list everything about me that makes me privileged. But the upshot is, everyone who is in a college classroom also has privilege. Privilege is not an on/off situation, it's a continuum. Everyone has at least some, and you've got to know how to deal with it.
  
  
• More than anything, I've tried so hard to listen to my students. I always hate it when students, or even audience members at a conference or participants in a seminar, ask a speaker a question, and the speaker is so wrapped up in his or her own thoughts they don't actually listen to what the questioners are saying. Listening to what someone is saying isn't always easy, and it means thinking on your feet and often spouting stupid things in response, but I think listening is the single most important tool for getting students to stay engaged.
  

Obviously much of this won't work for everyone. And I hope I can keep self-reflective about my own teaching, just like everyone should. But I think I am finally at a point where I've learned how to teach. Watch out, world!

The Time This Blog Saved My Career

The listserv of the American Musicological Society is currently embroiled in an extremely frustrating discussion of the "disco sucks" movement. Obviously this listserv is not the place one goes for intellectual stimulation--a usual discussion thread will be something like, "Hey, let's list every piece of music we can think of that is about trains!"--but you know, I wish it didn't want to make me tear my eyeballs out. I can deal with boredom, but this...

Anyways, my friends and I joke that one's cultural capital in musicology is inversely proportional to the number of emails one sends to the AMS-l. But because I need to vent steam, this is what I would email in were I more careless. It is apropos of several emails from various scholars assuming that we all agree disco music is shallow and dishonest. My response is the boiler plate response anyone who has remotely studied popular music would give.

I myself was not born until after the famous Disco Demolition night in Chicago, so disco is purely a historical phenomenon for me, as it is for the undergraduates I teach--their knowledge, and mine before graduate school, largely comes from doing the "YMCA" at middle school dances.

So given that most of us historians of a sort, it seems important to emphasize that it might not be so productive to reproduce a historical debate as if we are now unaware of its ramifications. If the music was shallow, then the implicit argument is that those who found meaning in it were themselves shallow. Rejecting an entire genre of music wholesale is also to be rejecting those people who listened to it. Perhaps not everyone in the 1970s was aware of disco's original fan base in urban communities of gay black men, but presumably everyone on this list is now aware of this.

See, blogs make everything seem much more civilized. If I sent this to the list, people would think I am accusing them of homophobia (and they would be right), flames would ensue, my enemies would end up on a search committee someday, bad bad bad. Here, I can post this, maybe a few people will respond, and it's all good.

Incidentally, many congratulations to my two friends who received their doctoral hoods today! May we all live to see such a day for ourselves.