Category: Academia
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In-the-midst-of
A day that had one-thing-after-another in it: some are familiar, even long-repeated actions, some are new; there are pleasures, there are boring bits: and that quailty that has appeared in several (no: in a number) of my posts lately, of being transitional, of being sort of in-between. Liminal, perhaps. With students, cheerful or as though…
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South
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by
in Academia, Awareness, Books, Cities, Film, Food and Drink, Going Out, Indulgence, Psychology, Travel… a conference in New Orleans. On an airplane, headed from northern England, via Amsterdam and Atlanta, to the real heart of the very South. Unfortunately, I keep being surprised at the sloppy, smelly American passengers in my last couple of air trips to the States – and they always seem to be so loud,…
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With all due speed
Today I took the Metro out to Tynemouth with Michael, to have lunch, then see Andrew and Ingrid where they were selling prints at the Tynemouth Metro station. This station has a market every Sunday – with book markets four or five times a year in the summer months. It was only a regular market…
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Translation
Astoundingly enough, I am actually working on the book about Gerhard's music – a project he first handed me nearly fifteen years ago. I have managed to make this such a neurotic knot of impossibility and failure, a symbol of everything I am not focused or efficient enough to finish, or indeed to do at…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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,…
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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…
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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,…
Paul Attinello 