Adventures in Academe

Okay, I've been putting off and putting off writing a report here, not because I've been upset or depressed or anything, but because I've been trying to figure out how to get the tone right -- how to convey that I was, in fact, pretty upset, but that at the same time I know it's really not that big a deal.

Because, really, the talk on Tuesday went really well. Like I said, there are parts of it that I'm quite pleased with. More than that, though, there was really just one person in the audience that I really needed to impress. You know: the young opera studies professor, co-editor of a particularly important publication... that one. In my mind, he was the only person who mattered. And that particular person really, really liked the talk. Granted, he is also a really nice guy who seems to like me personally, so he might have been generally positive even if he hadn't actually enjoyed it that much. But on the basis of his questions, I'm pretty sure that he genuinely thought I had said something interesting and correct.

So far, so good. But then there was this other Oxford faculty member. The one who writes dreary essays on Bach. (Bach scholars! Why do they vex me so!) This other faculty member did not like my talk. More than that, he thought that the kind of questions I was asking were fundamentally unfit to be asked. To his credit, he did not say this publicly during the Q&A -- rather, he came up to me afterwards. He said a lot, and it hit me so fast I wasn't really able to process it all at the time. But the words used included: "misleading," "meaningless," and (most memorably) "duplicitous."

Why should I let this get under my skin at all? Normally I'm pretty impervious to this kind of thing. Then again normally I'm a little more confidant about my arguments. Here's the thing: he started out with a criticism that was completely valid. (I was, in fact, painting "twentieth-century singing" with a very broad brush -- this is exactly what I mentioned in my last posting here about the argument I wanted to equivocate around a bit more. And yet, I'd like to believe this was less a straw man I was setting up, and more a interpretive heuristic.) In any case, because he latched on to precisely the aspect of the paper I was least confident about, I was utterly unprepared to respond when he told me he thought I should do "real history" rather than airy-fairy cultural musings.

And here's where he hit another nerve, because I have, more times than I care to recall, criticized scholars (usually behind their backs) for being "not historical enough." (Often this criticism is directed at... south of Berkeley.) Was this guy actually just upset with me for making any sort of a-historical turn in the paper at all? Or had I, in fact, turned into the bad musicologist which I despise?

Of course, I have to believe that it was the former, particularly because he only criticized things that happened in the last three pages of a 30-page talk. (And I had revised the final text to erase references to any particular text, in favor of the phrase "a broadly Foucauldian reading.") In addition, his suggestion of "real history" that I should be doing was so ridiculous -- Wagner got turned on by Schröder-Devrient in drag, a piece of evidence that tells us about Wagner's psychopathology and nothing else -- that it was clear we were on completely different paths.

So... a learning experience. I have lots of ideas about how the chapter will preempt some of this criticism, added to all the ideas about how the chapter will be fleshed out that I already have scrawled down. And did I mention that the person who matters really liked it? And so did the rest of the audience? Things are good.

The rest of the week was, perhaps unsurprisingly, a bit unsettled. I went to the opening at the V&A of the Diane Arbus show that originated in SF. I went to an appalling concert in the Handel House museum. I got drunk Thursday night, then stayed home Friday to work on my cover letter.

I'm mailing off job applications today. Urgh.

Still no money in the bank.

I spent a lot of money I don't have on a ticket to Siegfried next Tuesday.

Also: I live in a city will a lot more and better art than San Francisco, as well as a lot more and better buildings. So why am I so, so jealous of the new DeYoung opening? I just listened to John King's podcast. (I have a crush on John King.) I really, really wish I were there. Perhaps it is because I associate Golden Gate Park with being on drugs...