Category: Academia
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Signs
[Los Angeles, 1992] The session chair is standing, the first paper is over, and through a long wave of applause intended for someone else I move through a labyrinth of aisles towards the stage. I’m wearing khakis, emblematic of the Eastern aristocracy, the conservative controllers who went to school with me; shoes beige and just…
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Hero / Craven
Many many things to do: this is the high-pressure week, probably of the entire year. Grant application, promotion application, leave application, masses of administration, three courses to start teaching (one entirely new), and of course that PAPER to finish (aargh). (The paper is about 5/6 complete – but the last part is just, well, it’s…
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Soothe the savage
Angry. Exasperated, stomping around. (And yes, I know, it’s ‘breast’ not ‘beast’ – although you can see why the mistake is always made, ‘savage beast’ is pretty good there.) Hard news, difficult news, and some distinctly bad news. Feeling as though the world is not friendly, not at all – several projects, so many of…
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Morning; and teaching
Bright, windy, very clear: beautiful. When I came here I was told that what I experienced (as this was the coldest place I’d ever lived – Washington, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Adelaide – except perhaps Berlin of course, and this is probably even colder if less gray) as ‘cold’ was locally known as…
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The Idiot
I have, unfortunately, volunteered to do a presentation on Friday on some materials and a paper I’ve written on Meredith Monk – foolishly, insanely foolishly, given that I must finish the Buffy article for presentation in Liverpool Tuesday, given that part of Saturday is lost to a birthday lunch, given that it was entirely and…
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Edits
Editing academic papers… maddened with boredom, procrastinating absurdly. I was reassured when David said to me last week, Yes, editing other people’s work is so boring – given how hard-working and efficient he is, it made me feel better that he would acknowledge the annoyance of this really rather simple and supposedly stress-free task. The…
Paul Attinello 