New Site

Hey everyone,
I completely forgot to put a link here to my new blog location.
http://accenteddissonance.wordpress.com/blog/
At the moment wordpress is working better for the type of division into long and short content and I was imagining for my blog. I've moved my posts over there but I'll be keeping this one around (for a while at least). The link above is for the blog portion, but I have some other sections, so click around.

Frigid Air Masses and New Mythologies

I’d like to take some time here to explore the stories we tell ourselves. I like to think about these as “meta-stories” that cut through the surface of our literature and historical writing like the arc of a conical cross-section. It is on the plane of this cross-section that we can find some of the underlying motivations behind allegorical depictions or constant re-interpretation of historical data. I won’t try to list these motivations, either in full or part, because this is really the constant task of historical research and the reason we keep producing art. Instead, I’ll begin with a story of my own and the train of thoughts it lead me on. 

A couple of weeks ago I found myself stuck in early morning traffic heading towards the city. In keeping with the general theme of many mornings this winter my primary sensations were tired and cold. I was one of the mindless automata in the highway traffic–settled quite snugly into my seat, enjoying the music on the radio and tapping my foot to the contrasting rhythmic counterpoint of the brake lights in front of me. After some minutes I was dislodged from this soporific choreography by a sudden cloud of fog that enveloped my vision. The fog, of course, was the combined exhaust of the cars in front of and beside me. It had apparently built up on the ground in between and underneath the cars, but as we all moved forward as a fluid whole, the fog was released from its captivity. By its sheer volume this fog would have caught my attention in any case, but what really brought me ought of my revery was the delicacy of the chilled carbon monoxide as it rose and surrounded the car. 

I followed these billows up and around as they rose in sync with the continued rhythmic braking as the herd rounded a curve and with a view onto the downtown skyline, where the same dance I saw around me was being played out on a grand scale. 

After several days of snow and clouds, the skyscrapers seemed to be stretching their legs and lifting themselves up into the freshly cleared firmament. They were set against a great bank of clouds still suspended over Lake Michigan and the sun was making a belated orange-hued ascent. In response to these long awaited rays of warmth and color the buildings were sending up their own plumes of steam and exhaust to mingle with the lake’s fog bank. –– I’ll stop there for fear of going too far down the path of anthropomorphizing these blocks of steel and concrete and their water vapor and smoke. 

Regardless of the source and content of this experience what I came away with was the elegance of it. It was, in fact, startlingly elegant. In retrospect, however, it ought not to have been. The morning was exceptionally cold in a city that needs to heat millions of people and fuel extensive networks of machinery, which produces copious amounts of hot vapor that condenses and floats away slowly in the frigid air. 

When I first reflected on this experience I put it into the context of having recently returned from Japan and the continued reverse culture shock I had been experiencing. All of the familiar things that hadn’t existed to Japan, like extreme cold and snow, now seemed to greet me with fresh vitality. A short time later, however, I finished a book (Black Hills, Dan Simmons) that ended with an attractive depiction of time in the not-too-distant future when large swaths of North America have been returned to a pre-European-settlement state. 

The idea of a return to a state before human over-population is a theme that I’ve been encountering with some frequency lately. Some of these visions have been in fairly old books as I work through science fiction worlds of the distant future. Some, however, are cropping up more frequently in popular culture with television shows and basic cable movies exploring what would happen after some kind of collapse in western society. The common element that I’ve latched onto in these fictional worlds–whether it is a world where electricity has vanished, a world overrun with zombies or some other disease, or one where our environmental mismanagement has forced us to retreat to some other world–is that we often imagine a world in which we can scale back our abuse of nature and that things will revert to normal. 

Would this really happen? Over hundreds or thousands of years, of course, the world might return to a state that we might recognize as untouched by human hands. But would it happen simply by our elimination as a species or by a drastic reduction in our industry? I doubt it. Many signs point to the damage we have done as being irreversible at least in the short term: even if we could cut carbon emissions and other pollutions to pre-industrial levels tomorrow, we have clearly entered a period of ever hotter summers and ever colder winters. And yet we seem to be telling ourselves that things will get better “if we can just change our ways…”

Which brings me back to my smog-fog-exhaust filled morning. Even when I consider the implications of that scene in terms of carbon emissions, I still see the natural processes at work that created the version of that pollution that I saw. As I reflect on it that scene brings to mind others from my childhood when I would be in the Sierra Nevada in early spring or late fall and would watch the sun rise over a cold and foggy lake. What was always amazing to me in these moments was the way that the fog would increase with the rising of the sun. Although a great deal of moisture from the warm daytime air had condensed in the night it always appeared to me that the warming sun would make this blanket on the water increase in size. Then small wisps of fog would rise above into the air above and only when the sun was quite high would the fog finally “burn off”. It was elegant and I would have been perfectly happy simply to sit down on the bridge at one end of the lake watching that moment play over and over. 

I want the scene from this winter in Chicago to be another version of that from my childhood, even though I know it isn’t. I want to see nature going on about its business even in the midst of our tremendously artificial existence, which in many ways it does. 

Although we haven’t yet broken the laws of physics, we have done severe damage to world around us. Day by day, however, the world still goes on much as it has for eons and humans go on much as we have for eons. In fact, we have been stewards of nature since well before we were recording our history and while at some points and in some places we have been good stewards, in the long run we have gotten it wrong (or so it would seem at this point). So barring some sort of catastrophe that wipes out our technology, we really have no choice but to continue our stewardship and try to get it right. 

I’ll save the comments about what the role of government ought to be in all of this (large) and the big changes we need to make (getting rid of exurban living and gigantic single car commutes would be a good start) for another day. For now I’ll just try to use as much natural light as possible, leave the thermostat low, and put on another sweater. 

Holding Pattern

This past week I was working registration for a conference downtown. This entailed sitting in a basement for hours on end with little to do except hand out name tags and tote bags filled with so-called swag. For the most part I divided my lunch hour into two parts: I would eat my packed lunch in the hotel lobby and then head out into the wet and windy streets for a restorative cup of tea and a well-needed walk to keep myself from silting up like the long vanished former paths of the Nile. 

Somewhere in the middle of one of these walks my mind turned to Albert Camus's The Stranger. Specifically, I thought of an exchange between Meursault and Masson in which the latter is unequivocal about the value of taking a walk after lunch: his wife likes to nap, while Masson prefers to take a walk, which he praises as an aid to digestion and as a marker of generally desirable character traits. Meursault is, understandably, non-plussed by the vigor with which his companion makes his case. I, however, have always been intrigued by this scene. I can't really say why, I just think of it every time I take a walk after a meal. In fact, I have done so for the last 16 years. This time I wondered if it might be because it's an incarnation of the "there are two types of people..." trope, which I've never really cared for, or if it's because I am fascinated by how much time people devote to this sort of mundane question. Unfortunately, the end of my lunch break interrupted this train of thought, but I figured that this much would still serve to keep the blog going while I prepare the backlog of other things I have waiting in the wings. 

Graduate school goes for a walk, finds out there's a world out there

I’ve been musing about what I ought to write here for quite a while, jotting down notes on my phone and in notebooks. While I wait for these ideas to ready themselves for sending out into the ether, my attention has been pulled by temporal concerns. To be specific, I mean the future of the academy and part of the past that my slice of the academy is built on. (I fear that this will end up being a mini-series of sorts, so I thank the reader in advance for your kind patience.)

I’m a pianist when I’m not being a music historian. I have long since abandoned any ambitions of making a career out of my skills at the instrument–which is just as well, since there are plenty of far more accomplished pianists out there who are filling the world with music. Nonetheless, I still play for myself, much as I did well before I even considered that I could major in music. 

It was in junior high and high school I started to piano seriously and actively sought out things I liked from the radio and from the LPs around the house. Very quickly I found myself drawn to the music of Brahms, even though I couldn’t really play much of it. All I really knew about Brahms was that his portrait (with the huge beard, but with the cigar airbrushed out) hung over our piano and that I really liked his music. 

Over the course of my undergrad years this abiding interest in Brahms’s piano music developed into an obsession. Since I still wasn’t up to the task of performing his really great works I contented myself with recitals of smaller pieces and indulged my obsession in academic outlets. On the surface I focused on his structural innovations, trying to suss out some grand new theories. Luckily, these investigations led me forwards and backwards in time and I eventually came upon my current historical lines of inquiry (another story for other posts). 

Today I still play his music, and what draws me in each time I do is the same thing that drew me in all those years ago: his constant interweaving of dissonances that simply sit there. The work that brought this to mind again recently is the following (I’ll save the detailed unpacking of my thoughts on this music for another time.):

The whole set is great, but variation 5 (starting at 8:07) has been especially on my mind. 

As I was playing through in my slow and careful way, I savored the dissonances and the skill with which they were made into unapologetic and unavoidable bumps in the road of his counterpoint. They aren’t necessarily wrong but they aren’t obviously necessary either; necessary or not, these dissonances are integral to the music and for me, make the piece into something much more satisfying than without them. 

For me this observation is inseparable from the fact of Brahms’s enormous talent as a pianist. While I am the last person to exalt piano music by virtuoso pianists simply because of their skill (I’m pro Chopin and Brahms, have only recently begun to warm up to Liszt and have never cared for Rachmaninov…), lately I have been increasingly thinking about a career like his: he had the skills for a piano career and instead found himself on a very different path as a composer and antiquarian-historian hybrid. I won’t say he chose this new path, or that if he did that his choice was founded on convictions about the worthiness of either career path. Nor am I necessarily claiming that he was particularly suited for one path over the other; historically fallacious platitudes about the luck we have that so-and-so did not choose a different path and rob us of his or her great works have hopefully been put to bed by most. What I am claiming is that such a career shift today often falls into one of two cultural tropes depending on the direction of the shift: the wasted talent story or the hard luck turned triumph story. 

And this is where the academy joins the discussion. 

Recently the internet, which seems to be heavily populated by academics, whether failed, successful, or indifferent, has been home to a variety of articles about why the university system in the US needs to change. A couple of years ago we had beneficent professors advising the world that PhDs were a bad idea; they take too long, cost too much, there aren’t enough jobs to go around, and anyway, most PhDs students to naive and need some waking up to the harsh realities of life. Most of these things are true, barring the final observation (I’ve met naive grad students, but certainly not any more than I’ve met outside of our hallowed walls). We also had at this time a spate of snarky web animations about the foolishness of bright eyed undergrads who think they will change the world with their graduate work and have some idyllic life earning 6 figures when they land that plum college job (complete with scotch and leather chair, no doubt). 

Since then, in the face of real cuts to the academy and relatively little drop off in new PhDs, cooler heads have prevailed. The most recent addition that I have seen is this, which appeared recently on my facebook feed. It has some of the most sensible advice I have seen in one place, especially as someone in the humanities who has interests that stretch well beyond the narrow topic on which I am writing my dissertation. I have skills and knowledge that could be useful both in an outside of the academy. Some of these interests and skills are those that I am actively cultivating as I write my dissertation and think about my career path as a musicologist. 

Then there are others that I usually keep just slightly below the surface of my daily life. I like to think of these as my own interwoven dissonances–they aren’t strictly necessary to my academic life, but they are an essential part of my daily life and I like to think that keeping them in the picture enriches even seemingly unrelated things. 

At the risk of skewing saccharin or platitudinous, I suppose that’s my ultimate point here. As someone who is privileged to have access to information and technology that is in many ways unbounded, it would be foolish of me not to seek out new things that don’t obviously fit into some sort of quantifiable whole that has been defined as “what I do”. I hate hearing other people in my field say things like “oh, I used to play viola” or “I was a singer in a former life”–even if you haven’t been serious about the instrument for years, if you devoted enough time and energy to be able to really play an instrument at one time, you ought still to be able to identify with that instrument. Of course, there is no way to be as good or as devoted as you once were, but surely the benefits of making time for continuing that instrument (or a new one) outweigh the time lost to other pursuits. Similarly, I see no reason not to expand our purview as scholars to include other academic interests outside of our specialties. By this I mean more than traditionally complementary interests such as music and literature of the same period, or anthropology and political science; why not combine some samba with German expressionist art and studies of French and Russian trappers in the Americas? If we can train our minds to one subject, surely we have something worthwhile to say about others. 

To sum up, I think that this sort of ecumenical approach to academic life can make us all better thinkers in anything we do. There is certainly something to be said for specialization and finding the unifying thread that interests you and informs what you do (cf., my first post), but it does nobody good for society to be bogged down with specialists who are only fit for one particular job. In the end this might please the foes of academia who go on about our uselessness, but I think it falls in better with more progressive thinking in which we all contribute according to our abilities, receive according to our needs and we have room to change and growth on both ends of that equation.