in the hall of mirrors

Marking

Marking many, many first-year exams in twentieth-century musics... but, for the first time ever, with the help of two postgraduates, which makes life vastly easier.

There are the usual glitches and amusing misstatements... although it's a pretty solid class (only one fail thus far!) and most of the exams are pretty coherent.

However, at least two amusing and inadvertent pictures so far: one was John Cage as a major exponent of dance music (we later figured out that they had written "chance" music, but with the c and h very close together). Which suggests... a high falsetto singing 'Everybody Dance Now!', with the drum part played on a prepared piano....

Okay, the other one's better. Several students got confused about the Second Viennese School, and the Darmstadt School, thinking they were actual... schools. As in: "Webern studied under Schoenberg, who taught at the Second Viennese School"... I suppose if Webern's kindergarten attendance had been better he might have gotten into the First Viennese School.

Which suggests Webern's school report: "Works hard on coursework. Something of a loner – needs to pay more attention to extracurricular activities."

Multitasking

Apologies for not posting. Many students, classes, administrative e-mails flying back and forth; and preparing to go to Zürich next week to study with the Jungians.

(As in the Gilbert and Sullivan tune: "mystical Germans, who preach from ten 'til four"... though that was written too early to refer to Jung.)

But life isn't chaotic or annoying, particularly, except in some of the details; things are going fairly acceptably. Given how nervy I was about getting back into the saddle with my first years, and teaching a new course on an ambiguous and messy topic, it's all turned out to be incredibly easy... acknowledging of course the usual masses of obsessive-compulsive over-preparation. (What must my students think when they see a seven-page introductory bibliography.)

Perhaps because under all this I'm reading... there is a seminar in feminine psychology during the Zürich study week and we're supposed to read either Robert Johnson's She (a sloppy pamphlet, even lower than his usual rather easy level, a plagiarization of Neumann with actual published grammatical mistakes!, and something I read in half an evening); Neumann's Amor and Psyche, which is intelligent and deep and fascinating, and which I'm finding surprisingly apposite to my own concerns; or von Franz' Golden Ass of Apuleius, which I'll read this week. (Yes, I know: I am most certainly a bibliomane and a grind, reading all three possible texts.)

Perhaps the von Franz, written by a strong woman and (apparently?) power dyke, and twenty years after Neumann, will reassure me about my vague background concerns about essentialism. Neumann is very intelligent and complex about it, but still... a certain gender essentialism is always the most disorienting thing about Jungian reading.

But: this has felt like important reading, like reading that gets somewhere. It is possible, no, probable, that I won't be able to start serious studies as a Jungian any time soon (all possible supervisors are in dismayingly awkward locations); but I'm engaged with it. Reading about something that actually matters, becoming aware of things that matter: a sense of change and growth and movement, like – strange as it may seem, in mid-February, with snow outside – fresh green leaves....

Don't forget Foucault

I was startled into guilt yesterday by reading Edmund White talking about Foucault... and I suddenly realized, with an unpleasant start, how long it's been since I read anything by Foucault – or anything substantial about him.

I have a lot of already-prepared guilt ready on this topic, because my postgraduate seminar on cultural theory has been disintegrating a bit over the past month – on the day we were to read/discuss Adorno and Benjamin, who are old favorites of mine, two of the four were sick; and then the following week the other two... and through it all I've been stumbling in my choices of what to give them to read. The articles I chose for the first weeks were pretty good, and the last weeks I think are well planned; but these middle weeks... I think I was hoping for inspiration to come to me, and to be frank it hasn't. Not to mention that this small group is already chaotically varied in their interests and backgrounds....

Yeah, yeah: kvetch, kvetch, kvetch.

Well, I've chosen three articles for the next class at the end of January; but one of them is not really cultural theory, even broadly defined, and the third isn't a great choice. Therefore I'm not quite happy, and haven't sent the assignments out. I was going to do so on Friday; but I suppose none of them are going to read anything in this holiday week, so if I take a few more days it won't much matter.

In light of the above... maybe I should give them some good classic cultural theory. Uh, Foucault, perhaps?... I do love and respect his work; for me, he's the most honest and productive of all the whole post-structuralist gang, with Lyotard and Deleuze close behind. (I'm also aware that next fall I have to teach similar topics to a large undergraduate class, which I haven't done for several years – so I'm going to have to think at a larger level about what I currently know, remember, and can teach, in any case.)

White reminded me of how many other theorists have criticized Foucault, although frankly most of them are people I trust less (for instance, Habermas – who I continue to think is only famous because he was Adorno's student; and why didn't Metzger become famous instead, as he was also a noted Adorno student? – well, because Metzger writes mostly about music, and also because he's gay). Silly old Baudrillard, who had one brilliant idea (the simulacrum thing) and spun it out into an entire career, complete with entire books restating a few things in admittedly seductive prose, published a book titled Forget Foucault – but here I think he overstepped his bounds, being jealously, resentfully nasty about his betters.

No: don't forget Foucault.

And I won't, either: I'll go look for some things for the students to read....

A vanity of musicologists

The American Musicologists Society annual meeting, in a city that has its own characteristic reputation – Nashville – but which doesn’t really have all that strong a character, really: a large collection of people who have devoted careers, lives actually, to something that is perhaps not terribly important. A collection of mostly rather dull people, leavened with a handful of brilliant ones – and I think that my friends are the brilliant ones, of course: Mitchell, Judith, Nadine, Andrew, both Susans, and so on – but perhaps every group, every clique, that threads among this mildly unimportant mass thinks itself the only interesting one. And, pathetically, some of them are at each others’ throats – including people I thought I liked and approved of – which leaves me, at points, wrestling with a confused need to figure out which of them are right and which are wrong: but, as the younger Susan says, in the chaos of projections and unreal stories an outsider can only pick one’s ginger way… and avoiding making any final decisions.

My own presentation goes very well indeed: throughout the conference, many people keep coming up and saying how good they thought it. But I think: yes, but – what will that do? Will anybody remember it for long – like a television show that passes in the night? Or, perhaps more importantly, will it get me a job in a warmer and more amusing city? A new job might endanger me by exposing me to vast new demands, in any case; the two charming musicologists from the southern UK who take over my return trip, kindly and brusquely squiring me through their family circles rather than leaving me in a dull airport for eleven hours, are richer and more successful than I and mine, but they also seem endlessly engaged in work, work, work. But I would doubt there’s another job to come through this venue – no one who has a job available seems to care that I spoke well; the brightest spot, when two plump women from Brandeis tell me that I inspired them to stay in the field – through the simple realization that our work could actually be interesting – is more the kind of thing that will happen to me: to inspire, occasionally and fragmentarily, from above, but never to impress from below.

That last, short, night in the hotel, while having trouble sleeping for just a few hours before the airport shuttle comes, when I am fretting about all of this, Mitchell kindly tries to reassure me by reminding me that this is just how things are: and that the field of English literature, similar yet so different, is comparatively an ecosystem of flash-flood trends... so the boredom of our field can be compared with the problems of other fields, and nowhere is perfect.

The hard thing is that our field, with its vast stretch of prizes given to vain mediocrities and its startlingly dull ventures into familiar territory, is so minor: I have the uneasy feeling that this is why I want to become an analyst – caught in one rather vain, useless field, I want to go somewhere where life, where work, is deeper, more important. Of course, I know that Jungians in various cities tend to splinter into groups that don’t talk to each other, so it’s probably more of the same.

Where are those thinking types, those people of the Swords suit, who are not shrill and competitive vanities, who are not consumed by their pettiest and most juvenile impulses? Consumed, until there seems to be nothing else animating their graying, respectably-dressed forms….

How disappointing it would be, if all of those satirical-academic novels were true. True, because we are all like this, and nothing else.

In any case, my Ecclesiastesian musings have led to what must be the correct collective noun for us....

Turn of the wheel

Fortunas turns yet again, but upward this time: finally that promotion – after three applications in a row, and only about a year later than deserved, according to my figuring. (In Britain, where money and business control have taken over academe, that isn't bad – administrators here love to deny promotions in order to save money).

So that's good. Better title, more money, come August....

Judgement

Encouragement that I can get work done. Discouragement that I can't get work done.

Discouraged that the AHRC (Arts & Humanities Research Council, the rather incompetently run bottleneck that the British government employs to give lecturers and students funding, or actually mostly not to give it to them) did not give me additional research leave, which means I'll be back to teaching in September. Encouraged, a bit, that I'm promised a light fall semester – so possibly, if I can get work done (see above), I might get the book written.

Encouraged that Melinda, in a wonderful meeting with me last week, was so supportive. Discouraged that the day after that meeting I was worth nothing at all, depressed by gray weather, never got out of my robe all day. Encouraged that Patrick interviewed for a really wonderful job, discouraged that he might get it and leave. Encouraged that I might still get the promotion, discouraged that I probably won't get the New York interview.

And this week, my dear Janet, a lovely and amusing friend, is staying with me to work on the Buffy book. Janet is not only amusing, but also quite sharp, organized, take-charge – which is making me feel both relieved that everything will be all right, and at the same time even more helpless, more inept, that I'm not like her; though I'll try to keep up. A bit discouraging. Or encouraging. Depending on the time of day – moments when one of the book chapters seems as though it can be edited, fixed, improved, made successful; others where the confused mess of papers left by Vanessa's death leads us down unexpected dead ends, makes me panic about the amount of work left to do, the hopelessness of the whole venture.

And then I have to do all this kind of thing again, in April, with Joyce, working on the Stäbler book – which emphasizes my own ineptitude, my own inability to simply finish these damned projects, let alone to write the monograph that these projects are distracting me from. Leaning on Janet, on Joyce, as I leaned on Vanessa – I shouldn't need to lean; but I do. And, of course, as always, on women: I'm such a younger brother, always – I'm lucky they don't just throw up their hands in frustration.

Or, contrarily, those moments that remind me that these projects aren't that hard, and are well within my abilities....

•••

Tonight, when Janet was tired from editing all day (she was probably focused for as much as, say, seven hours, maybe a bit less; I, on the other hand, was only clearly focused for perhaps two or three? – sigh) she said, let's watch a movie. Her first suggestion, Brokeback Mountain, was vetoed by me – far too sad for me at the moment; her second, The History Boys, rather tentatively accepted.

Yes, well played, yes, an interesting film; but one that left me a bit bemused and distracted – I still find the peculiar British attitude towards sex between men so confusing, and (therefore) I can't understand why all the major British critics identified with this movie so much. (I'm equally confused by the obviously hugely significant gay element in the cult film Withnail and I, which is also, to an American, fascinating and disturbing.) Should I be encouraged, pleased, that they are so unclear about boundaries, identities, actions? But I never am – somehow it's even more confusing, discouraging, dismaying that all the straight men have looser boundaries here than at home. It seems to make anyone who is "really" gay particularly pathetic – or does it? – in any case, being viciously teased by young straight men seems like the nastiest possible hell for a gay teacher, and in Britain it also seems like the norm for them.

(I'm very glad, in my case, that I teach at university rather than in a school – we don't spend as much time with them, we don't get as close to them – and university students aren't as nasty, of course. Not to mention my relief, which I have felt strongly for years, that I'm seldom attracted to them at this age anyway – I think teachers and lecturers who fall in love with their students are just asking for trouble; thank God I only get really interested when they pass about the age of thirty.)

Of course, this is also one of those damned movies that Vito Russo so hated, where the Gay Character Must Die. Especially the older one, especially the more ridiculous one, and of course especially the one who Touched A Boy. What an utter, and pernicious, cliché.

Contrasting to that is the one Woman's Moment – when the older woman history teacher gives her remarkable tour de force on men and history, a real coup de thêatre; but it does feel a bit pasted in, as a sop to women in a man's play. But the actress certainly takes it even further than one would have thought possible – her angry eyes, her cigarette, as powerful as any prison warden or tough cop; but completely believable. Oh, and the handsomest of the guys: the red-headed piano player – no doubt about that one.

But I suppose this film is really (really) about judgement, about school boys getting into Oxbridge, or not getting in (and does anyone really believe that they all make it in the end? – impossible, just impossible). So it's about competition, or about the chaos of getting judged in a system that's ultimately cruelly arbitrary – or about losing all chances when you're young. (For me, not getting into Princeton, which, ridiculous as it may seem from this distance, utterly broke my heart, and my spirit – and at an age when I wasn't wise enough to realize that it might not be important, at all; and as for my colleague blahfeme, not getting into Cambridge, which was clearly as shattering for him: don't they realize how terrible these decisions are, for some of us?)

Encouragement. Discouragement. Judgement. Lonely, gay, straight, sexual, asexual, isolated, social. Good enough, not good enough.

Given all this – frankly – how could anyone possibly not be emotionally exhausted, hopeless – even suicidal?...

Perhaps Brokeback Mountain would have been a better choice.

A puzzlement

I've realized something a bit peculiar about the London responses to my presentation about music and AIDS.

One of the questions – really a sweeping statement – was from someone who said they had a friend who hadn't liked to tell people he was HIV+. (Amusingly, I could figure out from his elaborate circumlocutions that he was talking about David O.-S., who obviously didn't care what people thought – he just didn't want to bother with their preconceptions and prejudices.) Somehow that seemed to the questioner a significant point: why would these musicians want to go public with HIV status, with identity positions, with emotions?...

Then I received an e-mail from another participant that asked the same question in a different way: and claimed that this would be the most significant concern for most listeners.

The question seems to me utterly beside the point: what does it prove that you know someone who does not want to disclose their status? It's clearly a personal choice, appropriate in different circumstances; and analyzing whether there are social pressures on both sides seems a bit unnecessary, as most of the psychological and social literature (and in fact practically every newspaper article or television documentary) points out the same thing. Does disclosure make these more public figures (and my own public figure) problematic, or does it discredit them, or something?

It appears that, for these Londoners, disclosure is a bit shocking, or a bit shameful, or a bit ridiculous, and needs to be explained. Faced with all this data, and all the complicated cultural and aesthetic questions that arise from it, their first response is: but why would you discuss all this in public?... and they keep returning to the question, as a dog worries a bone.

If I were back in Hong Kong, and the Chinese were asking me, I would think to myself: ah yes, a face culture, a shame culture, where public image is so important – no wonder they are bothered by this. But it seems so peculiar – this isn't, after all, Victorian or even Edwardian, it's twenty-first century London – doesn't it seem odd to you, that they can't let go of this trivial discussion?...

Prismatics

Late at night: reading this very interesting dissertation on phenomenological time and Busoni – the prisms of time, a mysterious way of seeing and thinking time and hierarchy that de-hierarchicalizes everything... it is like Ballard's illuminated man in The Crystal World:

“... when my recovery is complete I shall return… with one of the scientific expeditions passing through here. It should not be too difficult to arrange my escape and then I shall return to the solitary church in that enchanted world, where by day fantastic birds fly through the petrified forest and jeweled crocodiles glitter like heraldic salamanders on the banks of the crystalline rivers, and where by night the illuminated man races among the trees, his arms like golden cartwheels and his head like a spectral crown.”

It can be disturbing, and wonderful, to dig deeply, in an almost Castalian way, into what one knows and thinks – and there are so many pieces of music, of art, that respond so well to this particular way of thinking. And I know them so well: there is almost a sense of vertigo – that time period with Stravinsky in it, with Hofmannsthal, Wolpe, Antheil, with a Paris, a Vienna on the verge of something amazing and intricate – something that was wiped away when, instead, the world wars became important.

Perhaps, when one is unafraid of the distant and possible conclusions of any thought, this is where one should be going. If I were a better artist, scholar, scientist, I might have ended up living there.

Facets....

Audient

Lately several colleagues are running Events, starring themselves, or guests... and looking to me expectantly to be in the audience. To be another warm body.

I'm unfortunately not very interested; and I've been avoiding their eyes when they start to hint that they want me to be an audient (or, as a sop to my vanity, a Discussant – oh thanks). Most of the topics aren't quite My Thing, as it were; and I've already done so many concerts, conferences, symposia, over the years, that I protect myself from anything that isn't either really interesting (interesting for me, I mean – I am perfectly willing to admit that all of these things are potentially interesting in the abstract, for someone, somewhere) or enjoyable.

The truth is, I work at a very polyvalent department: lots of stuff going on, in lots of directions – many very remarkable, many trendy directions. Unfortunately, because some of those intellectual/artistic directions get lots of participants and others simply don't, I remain, after five years, the kid on the playground nobody plays with very much, but who trails around after the various groups, asking to play – it's odd, because in other places and institutions (i.e. more metropolitan ones) I've been at the center of ideas, topics, activities. When I first came to the UK, at several conferences, I trailed postgraduates in swarms – they wanted to hear what I had to say about theories, about composers, about musics. But that was down in London, where I was a fascinating alternative to the weight of tradition: interested in semi-traditional topics, but with a sharp twist. Not here, though: because these are the boondocks, the topics are all populist, and I'm a mutant from another planet. All the groups were either attached when I got here, or have been blithely co-opted by one colleague or another; and I have instead been given a position as bureaucrat, the role of herding the students the others attract. It's a bit like being gelded, really.

I have spent a great deal of time and energy nagging others to remember that I exist: how can I play, how can I contribute? Over the years this has become distinctly embarrassing: we now have big chunks of money, new buildings, new playgrounds, but none of them are really associated with my kind of work (although I continue to think, mostly to myself, that some of them could be). And it doesn't seem to occur to anyone to include me in various groups; and it is regarded as a bit tacky, a bit shrill, of me to insist on being included, like a kid who is either too old or too young for all the parties, the one who should just know when he's not wanted. Except, of course, to be in the audience, to listen to others.

So, as I have since I arrived here, I go begging, mostly using my AIDS work, since that's the only thing that makes me unique (and separates me from my more successfully acquisitive colleagues), as opposed to a minor also-ran: and twice this coming month outside organizations have agreed – kindly – to allow me to contribute, for free of course and with no guarantees, to their event schedules. I know perfectly well that none of my colleagues will be at those events – not because they don't like me, just because none of these things are really Their Thing. Perfectly understandable, really.

You will say I'm being arrogant, standoffish: why don't I just go be a part of their audiences, if that's the only way to get into the game? Well, frankly, because I don't much want to. I've listened to many people do many things over the years, and there's nothing so exhausting as trying to focus on words and music you don't really care about. And of course in the 1990s, on an international scene, I got used to having people crowd around me because they wanted to hear what I had to say, because my opinion seemed to matter. It's been hard for me to be so demoted, to become a minor participant in other people's events, a supporting character in other people's stories – frankly, under those circumstances, I'd rather not bother.

It's that most deadly and unanswerable, most insoluble, of isolations: the kid who moves to a far-away country school where he just can't really make any close friends, where there's nobody who really shares his interests. I just wish he'd get out and find someone to play with...

Against Research

All right. Having included a rather irretrievably assertive statement about getting research done in V.'s eulogy; and knowing that she would be annoyed with me if I let our projects slide too far; and having indulged myself about as far as I can this weekend (drunk to her memory, a lot, on Friday night; slept and ate a delivered pizza Saturday; started to recover and marked some papers today, but didn't do anything else really), I guess I have to have A Look At This Research Thing.

Especially in V.'s absence: I have of course always carried plenty of internal feelings and ideas (mostly rather useless guilt of course) about not writing enough, but over the past couple of years V. was the person who kept me honest from the outside – so, in a way, everything devolves to the internal. Again.

And therefore, naturally, the list of negatives comes up:

a. 'Publish or perish' has devolved to a situation where a lot of boring nonsense gets published, and none of us has time to get anything right.

b. Scholarship is kind of boring anyway. Brilliant insights, yes, they're worth writing – but there aren't enough of those, and they aren't encouraged in scholarly discourse; and as for documentation, only historians really like that. But I'm not much of a historian.

3. I don't have any ideas left. Too passive – I'm really a reader, and a watcher, and who cares about that?

iv. Most musicology is boring – especially writings on classical musics (predictable rehashing), avant-garde musics (obscure, nobody cares) or popular music (the Internet and fans do a much better job than we ever can). Why add to it all?

e. My best work is all just nice sentences – which means belles-lettres – anyway; and in a non-aristocratic consumer culture, belles-lettres are simply a useless vanity.

VI – years of hacking away in these kinds of work has made me somewhat better at them, but definitely bored with them. How do you change paths when you're stuck in a job-oriented institution, and can't simply move over to something you find more interesting?

G. etc. etc.