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!

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!

Advisement/Avertissement

In lieu of an actual post, I direct you to Dr. Crazy's recent thoughtful post about the process of becoming an "academic" in the psychological sense. I always enjoy Crazy's writing on the ethics of advising undergraduates to continue on to graduate school, the essential question being, "given how unfulfilling and ultimately unsuccessful academia will be for the majority of those who choose this route, why do we encourage our students to go on to graduate school?" Entering graduate school because you want to be like your tenured advisor at a fancy pants school, who seems to spend all of his or her time thinking great thoughts and enjoying long summer vacations, is a recipe for disaster.

I have a number of students, graduating seniors, who plan to apply to doctoral programs in musicology next fall, so I've been thinking about this a lot. I think I know these particular students well enough to tell myself that they are indeed suited for academia, and will do well both intellectually and emotionally. But with any of my students who ask me about graduate school, I try hard to be both encouraging ("Yay, you like musicology and are really smart!") and realistic ("Just so you know, all of your TAs have been living below the poverty line for the last five years"). Not that I kid myself that the advice I hand out is that important. Honestly, I didn't listen too closely to my professors about such things when I was an undergraduate, and I know perfectly well that they probably aren't either.

For me, there is also another aspect of this ethical question too. I, for one, believe that musicology would be a much better discipline if its members came from more diverse backgrounds. Therefore, when I have a student who is a student of color, or the first in their family to attend college, or is even from some interesting musical subculture, there is a part of my brain that thinks, "I should encourage this person to enter academia, so that academia will be better." And then, the other part of my brain responds, "Okay, so academia will be better off for having this kid, but will this kid be better off for being an academic?" Obviously I can't really answer this second question for another person, but I think it is an important internal dialogue to have with yourself.

Hmm, so much for "in lieu of an actual post." Back to work, Barnet Bound!

Researching American Music

Over at Dial M for Musicology, the ever-thoughtful Phil Ford has a post that really threw me for a loop. There's a lot to engage with there; I admit that my immediate reaction was a little defensive, as in some ways he totally has my number. One of the fundamental approaches of my dissertation is looking at a lot of different sites of cultural production in one historical period, and drawing as many parallels as possible. I have some quibbles with his critique of that approach--I don't think there is something inherently wrong with a speculative approach to history, as sticking to just bare bones facts is exactly how certain historical narratives get reified. It's that old archive/repertoire distinction in performance studies: if you just stick to the written record, you're going to miss out on layer after layer of historical knowledge that is often dissenting from and resistant to normative historical narratives. Looking for connections between disparate events is one possible way to attack history from a different angle.

But overall, I definitely share his concern, and one of the main points of my own project is problematizing that annoying Ozzie and Harriet mythology of the fifties. Reflecting further, I think (hope!) what saves my own work from that trap is that I spend an almost excessive amount of time historicizing. I try to do my homework, in other words, and not just make lazy parallelisms. I spend time getting to know my historical subjects, in primary and archival sources. I try to let the music tell me what's going on, rather than assuming my 2007 self knows.

However, there is a structural problem in musicology that stands in the way of doing the kind of work I want to do. This leads me to the real substance of this post, which I'm afraid is going to be somewhat whiny, and most definitely connected to, shall we say, certain material realities of my own life as I await word on funding for next year!

What is with the lack of funding for research in American music? I know of only one source of funding that specifically targets American music, an award given by the Music Library Association. It's all of $2100, which of course would be an honor and a privilege to receive, but only goes so far. And is limited to one or two graduate students a year. And as far as I know, that's it.

So that's the problem: there is precious little money out there to encourage archival work in American music. If you are doing European music, well, sometimes it seems like people are tripping over themselves to give you money. The AMS has no less than three travel grants for research outside of the United States, the Bartlet, the Wolf, and the Powers grants. At my own University, there is a travel grant for research in Europe that my colleagues regularly get, plus a grant within my department for travel which is limited to music before 1950. Plus, there are a number of interdisciplinary centers at my school which give quite a bit a support to musicologists, but are limited in spirit if not name to non-American research: centers for medieval and renaissance studies, for 17th- and 18th-century studies, and so on. And then of course there are the various federal programs like the Fulbright, Fulbright-Hays, the FLAS, and so on. There are no equivalents for these Eurocentric programs, in the AMS, at my university, or in my department.

Travel outside of the United States is more of expensive of course. It is easier for me to self-fund my research, as I did this last fall when I put a trip to Chicago on my credit card. I had been desperately needing to visit the John Cage papers at Northwestern for years, had never been able to get any funding to do so, and finally just had to suck it up so that I could get my chapter written. But you know, it's not actually that much cheaper. The expense of spending a month looking at archives in, say, New York City is not that different than the expense of a month in Paris. In addition, fellowships are not just about funding; as my friend Sushi PJs pointed out, they also lend your project crucial legitimation.

But most importantly, what kind of message does this send about doing work on American music? It is a loud and clear message from the world of musicology that archival work on American music, and I would argue by extension historical work, is not important or necessary.

And that, my friends, sucks.

Nothing Metonymic About This One

I just had my very first fellowship anxiety dream. In my dream, I got rejected from a certain fancy national fellowship from which in real life I have yet to hear. But it wasn't just an email rejection, in my dream. Rather, I received an automated phone call. And rather than simply informing me I didn't receive the fellowship, the pre-recorded voice broke the fellowship down into all the little expenses for which it would have paid, and rejected me one by one. Like, "Here are the results of your application for the X Fellowship: You did not receive $500 for travel to archives in New York. You did not receive $5000 towards tuition. You did not receive $12000 to pay your rent." And so on.

Happy Easter!

Que Sera, Sera

I've been at a conference this past week, is why the absence of posting. It was a good conference; I caught up with friends, saw a new city, played with gigantic helium-filled silver mylar balloons, drank my fair share of the city's beer supply, and ate a lot of McDonalds. Plus, I gave a paper at this conference, and it was very well-received. I was proud of how I delivered it--I tend to be a bit of a mumbler, so performing an academic paper properly is something I've worked on a lot. And not only did my paper go well, but I saw a lot of stimulating papers by other scholars, had many good academic conversations, met lots of fascinating new people, and got lots of good advice from other students, professors at other schools, and even a publisher or two. And furthermore my first academic publication came out this weekend. It's a very minor publication, to be sure, but it is neat to see your name in print, all professionally typeset and everything.

It was really a great conference; it is every year. I'm always amazed how this one particular annual musicological conference can be so productive, when the "main" musicological conference can make you want to drill a hole in a vital organ. It's actually not too hard to figure out the difference, but here I run into one of the main problems with my blog: it is neither anonymous nor non-anonymous. I don't quite feel comfortable delivering honest opinions about things that intersect so directly with my "career." If it was anonymous, I could dish all I want, albeit in vague, coded terms. If it was under my real name, I could brag more annoyingly about accomplishments, and attempt to attach to the real me whatever intellectual capital and good publicity a blog can produce. (Heh.)

My friends and family read this, and if you read this blog and don't happen to know me, it takes about ten seconds of googling to figure out who I am. Recent linkage from blogs read by a lot of people in my field has meant that I'm getting many visitors I don't personally know. I'm okay with that; I have to be. I feel confident enough in myself that I figure that people knowing me better is a good thing. And yet, a lot of the postings here are personal enough that I prefer not to actually have my name attached directly, at least for the time being. My theory is that I would just rather not have people be able to google my real name and find Barnet Bound. It would not be a disaster if somebody made the connection, as I run a fairly clean ship, but I like to cut down on undergraduates and future employers making the direct link. Probably when I go on the job market this fall, I'm going to stop blogging here, and move to a new address under my real name. Maybe I'll split it in two: an anonymous blog full of gossip and scandalous stories--since my life is obviously that interesting--and a named one that pretends to be a real grown-up. We'll see. Whatever will be, will be.

Go Team

I'm not sure I've ever been more proud of my department. I only wish I could say I took the course, but unfortunately I just audited it last quarter.

I will say, obviously nobody listens to crackpots like the Young American Foundation when they issue press releases like this, but I am disappointed that the Los Angeles Times chose to publish this op-ed in favor of the list. My favorite line is when the unfortunate author ("Charlotte Allen, author of The Search for the Historical Jesus") attempts to define what this crazy "queer musicology" is: "a new field dating from the 1990s based in part on the idea that if you're gay, then music by gay composers such as Benjamin Britten will sound different to you than it would if you were straight." Yup. That's exactly what we do. I'm just going to just save time and print that on my future syllabus.

Never fear, Ms. Allen, you have your friends in the academy. Really, it's a good thing, all of this. Soon I can write the sequel to my dissertation, "Music and McCarthyism 2: This Time We Mean It, Godless Pinkos."

Graduate Students and Service

There has been a flurry of discussion on academic blogs these past few days about the subject of academic meetings: how burdensome are they actually for faculty? How does one run a good meeting? How much does service count for tenure? Why do some faculty end up with more meetings than others? And so on.

I haven't yet seen any graduate students chime in on this, so I thought I would add my two cents. We all know that most doctoral programs do a much better job of training the research, rather than the teaching, side of being an academic. Yet, from what I gather from this discussion and from my own professors' whining, service seems to make up a huge part of the daily life of being an academic. But that is one skill that is almost completely absent from our training. When does a graduate student learn how to behave at a meeting? To write a report? To lead a meeting? And probably most importantly, when do we learn how to juggle these three simultaneous academic roles, rather than just the two we juggle now?

In my program, we have a few opportunities for graduate students to develop service skills. There is a student representative to the faculty who "gets" to sit in on faculty meetings every two weeks. There is a small group of 2-3 grad students who administer a visiting speaker series. A few brave students have volunteered to serve on university-wide committees, or have taken leadership roles in our TA union. (Don't forget to vote to authorize strikes this week, kids!) And probably most significantly, our department sponsors an online journal, completely run by graduate students. This last opportunity is probably the closest experience to actually being an academic in a functioning department. We have weekly meetings, there are tasks to be accomplished outside of those meetings, and there are opportunities for leadership. I'm currently one of the editors of the journal, and although sometimes the whole thing seems awfully silly and amateur, it's easy to remind myself that learning to keep a meeting on track (I find Dean Dad's advice very useful), to delegate responsibilities, and to be a responsible adult about the whole thing are all skills I need to develop if I want to have a happy academic life.

But doing any of these service tasks, as a graduate student, requires a fair amount of initiative. It's certainly not a requirement of the program, and although there is some mild pressure to help the department out when things need doing, it's hard to fault people for not volunteering to spend their busy time doing often-pointless work. I don't really want my program to require service for graduate students, 'cause that seems like it could be a disaster. But it is something I think we grad students need to keep in mind--come real life, we're going to be thrust into the world of service, and that's something we need to prepare for as much as research and teaching.

Humanities R Us

Today is the big UCLA vs. USC football game, and my undergraduates are all a-twizzle. There are pep rallies, bonfires, even a vigil to protect the campus mascot from dastardly deeds. A number of my students are in the marching band, so they are all out in Pasadena today, performing great feats of lung-foot coordination and some milder feats of musicianship. I wish them well. **

Speaking of these two august institutions, there was an interesting story in the current LA Weekly by Justin Clark about their academic rivalry. Predictably, the two schools are constantly poaching professors from one another; in one incident, USC even tried to hire away five members of the UCLA linguistics department in one fell swoop. A lot of the competition has to do with USC's attempt to rehabilitate its academic reputation as the former University of Spoiled Children my Stanford alumni parents always warned me about. In the past few years, USC has gone from #46 to #27 in the rankings, almost tied with UCLA, and presumably they have their competitive eye on the NoCal schools as well.

Most interesting, however, is the the shifting status of the politics of this rivalry. Back in the 1960s, there was a stark difference between the two campuses: USC watched the growing "disintegration" of its urban neighborhood--and by "disintegration", we actually should read "integration"--with suspicion and hostility, seriously considering a move to join Pepperdine up in Malibu. UCLA, meanwhile, became a hotbed of student activism thanks to a fairly liberal school administration.

Forty years later, though, things have changed: USC has invested heavily in its surrounding neighborhoods, and has come to view its urban location as a major draw. UCLA, thanks to Proposition 209 and the gradual depoliticization of the UC system as a whole, has become increasingly less diverse: enrollment of black students is down to offensive levels, the student government is now controlled by an conservative (and explicitly white) slate, and Westwood is now a bland marketplace of chain stores and dull restaurants. This change, of course, mirrors many larger changes in American politics over the last forty years. Once upon a time, conservative power rested in the Republican "old money" WASP areas of Pasadena and Downtown--USC territory--whereas the largely Jewish and Hollywood-funded Westside was Democratic and liberal--UCLA. That distinction is pretty much gone nowadays, replaced by much more fragmentary and temporary political alliances. UCLA's enclave amongst the ritzy towns of Beverly Hills and Bel-Air increasingly has the feel of a gated community, while USC's urban location allows it to engage with the outside world on an ongoing basis. Obviously there are many complicating factors, and it will take a long time for public perception to catch up. But I think we've only seen the beginning.

Anyways, the one thing this article doesn't talk about it is how central the humanities are to some of these academic and political rivalries. USC has for the past few years been making a point to hire a broad range of very exciting humanistic scholars--just since I came to town, they've hired Judith Halberstam, Josh Kun, Alice Echols, Karen Tongson, and Bruce Smith. More that I'm probably forgetting about, or haven't heard about. UCLA? Not so much. Yeah, they brought in Sue-Ellen Case a few years back, but that was a no-brainer. Can anyone think of any other exciting senior hires? Even if there are some examples, there is nothing like USC's campus-wide commitment to bringing in these amazing humanists who are all on the forefront of their respective fields. These are people who publish a lot, do the actual teaching of their students, attract top grad students, and are genuinely committed to the social mission of an urban university. Top scientists might bring in a lot of research money, but they rarely contribute to the intellectual life of a university as a whole.*

The thing is, developing a talented faculty in the humanities is really cost effective. Let's be honest, we humanists have low expectations when it comes to institutional support, and we work for cheap. A recent New Yorker article points out that when Duke University wanted to raise its academic stature, they realized that for the price of one middling scientist's salary--not to mention all the labs, support staff, etc--they could hire three or four humanistic scholars at the very top of their field. And for Duke, it totally worked--despite that institution's somewhat checkered history, and location away from the usual centers of academe, it is still has one of the great English Lit doctoral programs in the country, and one of the best university presses. This seems to USC's approach, and assuming that they come through with sustained institutional support--not to be taken for granted!--I bet it will work wonders.

In other news, I highly recommend watching all eight minutes of this cartoon version of the Communist Manifesto, assembled from classic Hollywood cartoons. What could be more LA? Via Billtron via Sushi Pajamas.



* I don't say this lightly; my partner was a chemistry major in college. At a small college, the sciences faculty are often integral to the community, and that's a great thing. At a large research university, however, much scientific research takes place in hospitals and institutes far removed from anything that might be considered "education."

** My god! We won! I could care less, but that was kind of cool!

Fellowship Collage

Fellowship season is in full swing. These past few weeks, my classmates and I have been up to our necks in sample chapters, "narrative timetables," "relevance to broader humanistic inquiry," and finicky online applications. Take your project, the proposal for which you slaved over for months and which is about 26 pages long, and boil it down to four pages. Take your beloved 55 page chapter, and cut it in half. Cobble together a two page "sample bibliography," wondering which books will make you seem smart, and which are passé. Fellowship season is all about chopping yourself into little bits, rearranging those bits as instructed to do so by a mildly fascistic fellowship authority, and somehow trying to inject a little bit of life into the mix

There are ups and downs to being an Americanist. There are less fellowships for us to apply for, for one thing. If you want to go do archival research in Europe, there are tons of funding opportunities. And while I suppose it is a little easier and cheaper for me to go to my archives, it's actually not that easy or cheap, and I wouldn't mind support. At the same time, a friend of mine has a fancy fellowship to spend time in a foreign country, and the paperwork is just astonishingly arcane and intricate. So, you know, ups and downs.

I finished my main fellowship today. Another big one to apply for in January, and another in March. Here's hoping that some referee somewhere finds the relationship between music and McCarthyism so unbearably fascinating that they want to shower me with piles of money.

The good news? Now that I've done this, it is officially time to really move on to my next chapter! I love me my John Cage, but I'm looking forward to writing about music I can hum to when driving to school. Music of Changes somehow just didn't cut it.

Conference Hangover

The day after an academic conference is akin to the day after a drinking binge. (Or so I imagine, mom.) You wake up with a hangover, literal and metaphorical, with no sense of what has happened for the last few days. Your belongings are scattered everywhere, the fridge is empty, and the cats are looking at you with a wounded look in their eyes. If the police showed up and accused me of murder, I could probably be pressured into a confession.

Man. This past few days was the annual meeting of my esteemed professional organization, held here in Los Angeles. Unfortunately, this non-anonymous blog is probably not the proper location to discuss the ins and outs of the conference. Saw some good papers, saw some bad papers. Schmoozed with lots of famous scholars, caught up with old friends who I only ever see at these things. Wasn't giving a paper myself, this year, so no pressure there. I watched several friends go through the job interview process, and I can't say I'm looking forward to that next fall.

Speaking of next year--so, I'm working on my application to a fellowship for next year, due in ten days. I've got my dissertation chapter all done, which was the main segment of the application. I look at the fine print, and read this: "Include a polished, substantive chapter of your dissertation (that is neither the introduction nor the conclusion) of not more the 25 double-spaced pages."

25 pages?!

What kind of diss chapter is only 25 pages? Mine is 53, and I am told that anywhere in the range of 40-60 is typical for my discipline. And note that they do not want a 25 page section of a chapter; they specify a 25 page chapter. Am I supposed to cut down and make a special version of this chapter just for the fellowship? Mind you, nowhere in the materials for this fellowship did they mention a page limit for the chapter. It was only revealed when you log in to upload your proposal. Argh!

Treat Myself?

Amazon apparently has a low opinion of what it takes to make me happy.

Bunny Cage

I discovered something today that made all the expense and hassle of this trip instantly worth it.

The nickname that Xenia Cage called her husband?

Bunny.

That's right, John Cage, the pillar of mid-century modernism and the stern, ascetic father of experimental music, was affectionately called "Bunny" by his wife, or "B" for short. Maybe that's why he left her for Merce Cunningham.*

Seriously, it has been a productive trip. I'm actually glad I made it so short, as the archives are much smaller than I expected. The correspondence from the 1950s fits in one thick manilla folder. I had no problem taking detailed notes about all of it in one solid day of work. And I was relieved to find that there was nothing too shocking--most of my ideas about Cage are still intact, only now I have lots of details and evidence to back those ideas up. So that's a good thing.

Cage is still so slippery for me though. The man was so, so careful never to reveal anything about his personal life. I have now been through five different archives related to Cage, and I still have little to grasp on to: the Wesleyan papers, which contain mostly correspondence and rough drafts relating to his books, the Virgil Thomson papers at Yale, and the M.C. Richards and David Tudor papers, both at the Getty. All of these collections are voluminous, and all are places where one would expect to find at least some correspondence from Cage that might be at least a little personal, and deal with at least a little of his private life. But, no. None to be found, so far. Lots of polite letters home to his parents, lots of business correspondence. The most revealing correspondence was a series of letters from Xenia to some friends back in San Francisco. I don't think it is a coincidence that these letters surfaced after Cage's death, and were connected people outside of Cage's immediate circle. Those who were close to Cage clearly protected his privacy--even in their own intimate letters to each other, such as in David Tudor's letters to M.C. Richards which discuss Cage in only the most oblique terms, even as they gossip about everyone else.

Interesting. Very interesting. I should probably stop before I blog my entire chapter! Tomorrow I will poke around a bit more, and than I am having lunch with my cousin who goes to school here. Then home, and the race to write this damn thing takes off in earnest.

* Lest I sound like one more Xenia-basher, I want to go on the record as saying that I find her to be utterly charming and fascinating. Why has nobody ever done any work on her?

The Inevitable Dissertation Post

So, here's the thing about my dissertation. I would really like to write it in two years. This seems reasonable to me, and is in keeping with my department's time-to-degree expectations. Theoretically, this is supposed to be a five year program: two years of coursework leading to an MA, and one year of specialized coursework leading to a dissertation proposal and subsequent advancement to candidacy. I've managed to stick to this timeline, although the constant bureaucratic hurdles have not made it easy.

But that then leaves you two years to write your dissertation. Which sounds fine, but I have run into a complicating factor: ideally, one would like to have a fellowship for their last year of dissertation writing, so that you don't have to teach while you are finishing up and applying for jobs. For me, that would mean getting a fellowship for next year. However, fellowship applications are due in the fall and winter of the preceding year, i.e., now--the first one is due November 15. And these applications all require you to submit at least one completed chapter. To summarize, in my mind this means that if I want to finish in two years, I need to have completed a dissertation chapter by November 15, and it needs to be Good.

I am somewhat optimistic that I will be able to do this. I've done a lot of research, and have written a good chunk. I've given myself a November 1 deadline at which I need to have a fairly polished draft to distribute to committee members for revisions. I have two more research ends that need to be tied up, both of which will be hopefully solved next week with a quick trip to Chicago and a even quicker trip back to the Getty.

It means, though, that I need to write. A lot. And I am finding this difficult. The subject of this chapter is a topic that I have been working on since I was a junior in college. I wrote my undergraduate thesis on it. I have written several seminar papers on it. I have given several conference papers on it. I have published on it, I have been cited on it. I know this topic.

And yet, writing everything I know about this subject down, in the form of a dissertation chapter, is extraordinarily difficult. I am pulled in two different directions: on the one hand, I despair at fitting everything into one chapter, and mercilessly cut down excess points that seem tangential. On the other hand, I find myself questioning every single little point, checking every fact, re-thinking every argument, knowing that this time, above all, everything I write needs to be right in some fundamental way.

Phew. I can do this. I just need to stop thinking, and start writing. My goal is to write ten pages today. I'm hoping that by blogging this goal, I will have to stick to it!

Judy and the Beach

According to my little Sitemeter widget, which tracks visitors to my blog, readership has blossomed to a whopping 33 unique visitors a day. Why is this? Is it the trenchant commentary on Beethoven, Kandinsky, and the perils of British horse farms? No, 90% of the visitors to my blog come here, apparently, by googling the phrase"What does Fergie's song London Bridge mean?", whereupon they are directed to my epic exegesis of said song, which unfortunately comes to no solid conclusions. Sorry kids. That, and a bunch of people doing image searches for Boston terriers are being directed here, for no reason I can fathom. Pablo does indeed look like a Boston terrier, but no pictures of Boston terriers are to be found here. Just one slightly loopy looking cat.

Anyways, today I tried to achieve the perfect day for an academic living in Los Angeles. That is, I attempted to combine, in one day, a trip to the beach, and a lecture by Judith Butler. The beach went great--we went to Will Rogers, and spent a happy two hours splashing around. Unfortunately, the equally important Judith Butler aspect of the day was unsuccessful, as the the lecture hall was so full we couldn't even get near the door. Apparently, the entire world is dying to hear Judy speak about "Sexual Politics, Torture, and the Secular." I did get up on my tip-toes and actually saw Butler (greyer hair than I expected), so I can at least now say that I've seen her. My friend who arrived earlier and made it inside the hall reported that the talk was great, even humorous. So I'm actually quite sorry to have missed it, especially given how awesome her recent work has been. Incidentally, did you know that Butler's first teaching job was at my alma mater? Forward-thinking institution that it was at the time, Wesleyan didn't think it prudent to offer the future Smartest Academic of the World a permanent position. But for a brief shining moment in the mid-eighties, it was possible to take her course "Philosophy of Sex" concurrently with Henry Abelove's course "History of Sex," with frequent campus visits from then-unknown Eve Sedgwick, who was up at UMass-Amherst adjuncting and finishing Between Men. My non-queer studies readers might not appreciate what that all means, but trust me--man, that would have been cool.

Finally, this evening, a trip to the theater. It's Mary's birthday in a week, so her mother got us tickets to see the LA production of Doubt as an early present (Thanks, Phoebe! Great seats!). I will let my more eloquent and theatrically-inclined roommate review the play when she goes to see it next week, but we both thought it was really terrific. Crisp and intense.

Enough for now. I've been a bad TA recently, so I need to go do the reading that I've been telling my kids to do. E.T.A. Hoffman on why Beethoven is his boyfriend. Tomorrow we're doing Ludwig's Piano Concerto No. 5, the "Emperor." Ironic footnote? I first performed this work when I was a last chair violist with the Oakland Youth Orchestra, circa 1996. The soloist was a young pianist in the area, who later went on to Juilliard, and is now... a classmate and friend of mine! Small world.

Conference Roundup

My conference this weekend went very well.

Now, I just have to grade, grade like the wind for the next two days. And then, on to my exams!

Doris is Everywhere

My project this weekend has been to finish up a seminar paper before I head out of town this week. The topic is doo-wop, specifically the early African-American vocal quartets of the late forties and early fifties who sang in what is called the "sweet gospel" style. It includes groups like the Ink Spots, the Drifters, the Orioles, the Penguins, and so on. Anyhow, I've been struggling for a specific topic to focus on. I've always been intrigued by the classic doo-wop chord progression: I-vi-IV-V. (The educated reader might know it best from a song like "Earth Angel.") Rarely in popular music is a single chord progression so utterly dominant--there are literally thousands of songs from this genre that use it.

So anyways, I was jut listening to lots of this music, when I stumbled across the fact that two of these early groups, the Orioles, and the Moonglows, recorded cover versions of the hit 1953 Doris Day song "Secret Love," a song I know quite well having just delivered a paper on it at a conference. The weird thing is that while the Orioles version does a fairly straight version of it--a bit jazzed up, but otherwise so straight it could be a parody--the Moonglows version reharmonizes the song to fit a variant of the doo-wop progression. They keep the melody the same, but underneath it just paste I-vi-ii-V. It doesn't fit at all, and when they get to the chorus they have to give it up and go back to the original chords. Still, the compulsion to use the doo-wop progression makes them do pretty weird things to the tune. So bizarre!

Conference Roundup

My conference went pretty well. My paper was fairly well-received, I think. Giving a paper at these big conferences is often anti-climatic. Beforehand, you visualize all these scenarios where famous senior scholars quiz you on minute details of your presentations, and you spend hours trying to think up snappy replies. In reality, you get one or two questions about some insignificant detail, and that's it. Still, I think people were pretty receptive. They laughed at my jokes, at least.

Friday night I had dinner with an old family friend--my grandmother's boarding school roommate, as I said earlier--who is the grande dame of Nashville society. It was pretty amazing, and involved a gigantic mansion and a butler, but I'll leave it at that. Afterwards I went out with her grandchildren to the Bluebird Cafe, a famous little bar in Nashville that is a forum for up-and-coming country songwriters to show off their tunes. Friday nights they have a regular residency with these four guys who have been playing together there for twenty years--the only one I had heard of was the songwriter Don Schlitz, who has written songs for Mary Chapin Carpenter, Kenny Rogers, Johnny Cash, and others. The bar is a tiny little place that seats about 50. There is no stage, just a little clearing in the middle where the four musicians sit in a circle facing each other. They play their own tunes, chat, tell jokes, and it is a very entertaining few hours.

Today was a whole range of papers to see. A really good one about the fifties child star Brenda Lee was probably my favorite. Then tonight, the graduate students all hit the karaoke night at the hotel. Hearing a grad student sing a song that he is writing his dissertation about? Good times. And there was even a Very Distinguished Senior Scholar listening to all of us from the corner of the bar. Afterwards, suffice to say, I cannot say I really know Very Distinguished Senior Scholar all that well, but I can say that I have done shots with him.

Looking forward to coming home tomorrow!

Supporting NYU Grad Students

I urge anyone who is in the position to do so to support the NYU graduate students on strike. The history of labor relations at NYU is too long and complicated to go into here, but even just a little bit of research will show the callousness of the NYU administration towards those who do the majority of the teaching at a very privileged, and very expensive, private university. Beginning this quarter, the administration has "terminated the fellowships" of striking workers. As Bitch Ph.D. points out, they have to use that awkward terminology because if they were to simply "stop paying" the strikers, that would be admitting that the graduate students actually are employees who do work for the university. Can't have that. We graduate students are just lucky for the privilege of working our butts off for our "fellowships" that put us below the poverty line.

Bah humbug.