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.
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