Oxford; Self-Doubt
So I went to Oxford again, and again arrived late. In fact, I missed the entire colloquium, although this was partly due to the fact that I was locked out of the building. But regardless, this means that I have never, in my life, arrived in Oxford on time. The Spaniard has no reason to believe that I have ever arrived anywhere on time. We were making plans to travel to see Tess Knighton's talk on Spanish musical historiography in Cambridge next week, and he suddenly got all serious—"Let me plan everything. If you are on time, we go together, if not, I go alone." And he wouldn't have even known about this talk if I hadn't invited him!
So what's wrong with me? The obvious answer is that I have essentially no schedule for anything in my life now. When I gave my Royal Academy presentation, it was the first time I'd left the house before 9am since... well, since I arrived in the UK, I think. As we all know, productivity grows out of structure, and so, while I do feel busy all the time, I'm not actually producing much to show for it.
Have we all looked at the new AMS Newsletter that just came out? In Jan LaRue's obit, we read:
His time on Okinawa led to one of the earliest American Ph.D. dissertations on an ethnomusicological subject.... He catalogued, identified, and classified virtually the entire body of eighteenth-century instrumental ensemble music, bringing together detailed information on manuscripts and prints in libraries from Bremen to Bombay. [...] Concerned not with description but with explanation, Jan transformed the way we talk about musical style. His influence in this regard was not limited to the Classical period, but spread across the entire discipline of musicology. LaRue’s work on watermark identification and papyrology is the cornerstone of all such work in the discipline....
So, not to make someone's death all about me or anything, but how can I compete with this? I mean, seriously! Even my own adviser... The Stolz article and the Frezzolini articles alone, at my current rate, would seem to have taken me about two years each. And nobody even reads the Frezzolini article, since it's in such a crap publication!
Self-doubt... it's the new self-confidence!
So what's wrong with me? The obvious answer is that I have essentially no schedule for anything in my life now. When I gave my Royal Academy presentation, it was the first time I'd left the house before 9am since... well, since I arrived in the UK, I think. As we all know, productivity grows out of structure, and so, while I do feel busy all the time, I'm not actually producing much to show for it.
Have we all looked at the new AMS Newsletter that just came out? In Jan LaRue's obit, we read:
His time on Okinawa led to one of the earliest American Ph.D. dissertations on an ethnomusicological subject.... He catalogued, identified, and classified virtually the entire body of eighteenth-century instrumental ensemble music, bringing together detailed information on manuscripts and prints in libraries from Bremen to Bombay. [...] Concerned not with description but with explanation, Jan transformed the way we talk about musical style. His influence in this regard was not limited to the Classical period, but spread across the entire discipline of musicology. LaRue’s work on watermark identification and papyrology is the cornerstone of all such work in the discipline....
So, not to make someone's death all about me or anything, but how can I compete with this? I mean, seriously! Even my own adviser... The Stolz article and the Frezzolini articles alone, at my current rate, would seem to have taken me about two years each. And nobody even reads the Frezzolini article, since it's in such a crap publication!
Self-doubt... it's the new self-confidence!
posted by Grrg at 11:42 AM
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