random update

Thank you to everyone who still checks back here occasionally in the hope that I might update. I appreciate hearing from you, and I'm glad that even though I update rather infrequently these days, you still consider me worth reading.
At least part of the reason for my infrequent updates is that I now keep up with most of the friends I used to update via this blog on facebook, and just because of the type of network that is I'm finding it more of a satisfyingly two-way street. But that doesn't completely invalidate this blog, as I originally started it as a site for keeping track of my online research, and it's still really useful for that purpose. I often keep research posts private these days, just because they're kind of quickly dashed-off rather than carefully written, thoughtful posts, and the knowledge that people actually read what I write makes me a little more careful about what I put out there. I want to make reading worth your efforts after all.
Another reason this is a little slow these days is because I'm spending so much time writing that when I want to relax, I often want to do it away from my computer. So knitting, sewing and crochet, cooking, walking around New York City and eating my way through the city have taken preference over blogging.
Nonetheless, writing is still my job, and one that I really love, and I have been doing lots of it recently. My dissertation adviser challenged me to turn out a dissertation chapter for lent, and so I'm frantically working on my "Karen Zoid as national icon" chapter. Right now that involves a lot of reading Afrikaans history (lots of it in non-standard late 19th century Afrikaans), and trying very hard to write like someone you might actually want to read, and not like a late 19th century Afrikaans historian, or worse, a critical theorist!!!!
Also, since late last year I have been working on two articles, one of which has been accepted for a special issue of the journal of Soccer and Society that will be coming out later this year. Unfortunately it does read much more like a piece of critical theory than I had originally hoped, but as it's about music at the upcoming soccer world cup, you may find it interesting nonetheless. Check back for updates.

long time - still hanging in there

It has been a long time since I've updated. And while I don't like blog posts that are excuses for why one hasn't posted in ages, I kind of think I have a good excuse: Comprehensive Exams!!!!
I wrote them last weekend (Friday to Monday), and am waiting to hear my results. But they are done, and out of the way, and now I have three pieces of writing to complete in lieu of finals, and then my parents arrive on Saturday next week for a three week visit. It has been so long since I last saw them, and I'm really looking forward to having them here. I'll try to keep this blog regularly updated then with our doings.
In the mean time, though, here is a nice little documentary on the Stonewall Chorale, that gives you a taste of one of the things I've been up to this year.
I cannot believe the academic year is practically over! One more year of course work left. That's a scary thought.

Comps reading

I'm reading at the moment. Reading nearly every second. And when I'm not reading, I'm listening to every piece of South African music I own. But mostly to Karen Zoid. I finally own Chasing the Sun (courtesy of iTunes), and I keep discovering new things that fascinate me.
Have you ever heard "Danville Diva"? I can't find it in preview anywhere online, so my suggestion is that you listen to it on iTunes. There is a wonderful moment in that where Karen imitates an Afrikaans Diva accent (I think I prefer "princess" to "diva", because of the connection between "diva" and camp sensibility, but they mean roughly the same thing). I spent several hours listening to that today, thinking about how I might describe that sound, specifically to a non-South African. And then when I was searching for the song on YouTube for the purposes of this blog, I came across the wonderful recently added video from Karen's February performance in London.

The accent imitation is fascinating, but I'm also delighted by the moments of what Gary Tomlinson would call (if I remember the article I studied years ago correctly) "signifyin(g)", where she sings a fragment of a Malaika number (the final moments of "Destiny"), and Mary Mary's "Shackles". I have heard both songs often enough (if you have watched South African television station SABC 1 after about 23:00, you have probably heard them too), but don't know much about these groups. Whenever I hear the name Malaika I'm reminded of the Kenyan song by the same name, though I would hesitate to suggest that the group are deliberately referencing that. It is, however, interesting to me to hear Karen Zoid singing a gospel number about slavery in an RnB style within a "Kwaito style" (as she says at the beginning of the video clip) song. There's so much going on there!

My most recent intellectual obsession has been with describing vocal timbre, and in a recent writing exercise for Suzanne Cusick's 'Feminist and Queer Musicology' class, I discovered that language and accent are particularly good areas from which to approach this task. So that delightful litttle Karen moment got me very excited.

Then earlier I read an article by Cornelia Fales that Jason Stanyek recommended to me (if you have access to JSTOR, the link above will work, if not, you won't be able to access this particular article, and will just have to take my word on it). It's on timbre alright, and is a concerted effort to write (ethno)musicologically about timbre. But while I think the author's attempt to focus strongly on timbre rather than other aspects of music analysis is interesting, I was a bit disappointed by what I read as a collapse into references to the strongly visual. She uses spectographs to represent much of what she describes, and in the end doesn't really achieve much. I agree that the lack of vocabulary makes it impossible to talk directly on the topic, but I think that a more productive strategy, and one that I think Louise Meintjes exercises particularly effectively in Sound of Africa involves listening to how musicians (in her instance, studio technicians) talk about the sounds they're working with. It works, I think, because the writing focuses on a purpose beyond itself. She isn't writing about timbre for its own sake. She is writing about it to explain how a particular set of South African identities are constituted musically, and it works. I'm not entirely uncritical of her broader project (I think the collapsing of Zuluness, South Africanness and Africanness is the most troubling fault) but I do think she is doing the most exciting work of this nature I have encountered yet. Other related projects include Gage Averill's Four Parts, No Waiting and Aaron Fox's Real Country.

I love having an excuse to do all this good reading and listening!

total eclipse of tne moon

I just spent about 10 minutes (all I could bear in the cold) out on my balcony watching the full moon be swallowed up by the earth's shadow, and then renew itself, seemingly brighter than before. Around me were people on many other balconies on my building, and the two buildings opposite, and on the rooftops of buildings on either side of this one. All of us together, braving the cold, watching a total eclipse of the moon in this crazy, busy city. It's a strange way to connect with people, but it does feel like a sort of a fellowship, in a strange way.

And on a slightly different note, I'm very excited, because one of my dear friends has been offered a fellowship by my department from the fall. I really hope she accepts.

More exam readings

Below is list number 2 for my comps. This one focuses on issues of voice and race. There is a huge amount of material on race and music, but in the interests of producing a list I can actually get through by April 11, I am focusing explicitly on singing voices. The anomaly, then, occurs at the final two entries on the list, which deal with speaking voices, but in such a literalist, hard-science way, that I couldn't resist adding them. I did a vaguely tongue-in-cheek experiment with my students last semester, playing them the same piece of music sung by a counter tenor, a female soprano, a treble and a digitally constructed combination voice, and asking them to guess which was which. I once joked that a similar experiment with singers of various races would be interesting. And now I find someone has done it! And written a PhD thesis on it!!

And just because I think it is worth saying, the article by Grant Olwage called "The Class and Colour of Tone" is, in my opinion, the strongest writing on this topic available at present. Well worth a read.

Racialized voices bibliography

Antelyes, Peter. “Red Hot Mamas: Bessie Smith, Sophie Tucker and the Ethnic Maternal Voice in American Popular Song.” In Embodied Voices: Representing Female Vocality in Western Culture, ed. Leslie C. Dunn and Nancy A. Jones, 212–29. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Averill, Gage. Four Parts No Waiting: A Social History of American Barbershop Harmony. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Hardy, Sarah Madsen, and Kelly Thomas. “Listening to Race: Voice, Mixing, and Technological ‘Miscegenation’ in Early Sound Film.” In ClassicHollywood, Classic Whiteness, ed. Daniel Bernardi, 415–41. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.

Lavitt, Pamela Brown. “First of the Red Hot Mamas: ‘Coon Shouting’ and the Jewish Ziegfeld Girl.” American Jewish History 87/4 (December 1999): 253–90.

Leonard, Neil. Jazz and the White Americans: The Acceptance of a New Art Form. London: Jazz Book Club, 1964.

Lhamon, W. T. Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip-Hop. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998.

Mann, Geoff. 2008. “Why does country music sound white? Race and the voice of nostalgia” in Ethnic and Racial Studies Vol. 31 No. 1 January 2008 pp. 73_100

Olwage, Grant. 2002. “Scriptions of the choral : the historiography of black South African choralism” in SAMUS: The South African Journal of Musicology Vol. 22, pp. 29-45.

___. 2004a. Music and (post)colonialism : the dialectics of choral culture on a South African frontier. PhD Thesis, Rhodes University. Grahamstown: South Africa.

___. 2004b. “The Class and Colour of Tone: An Essay on the Social History of Vocal Timbre” in Ethnomusicology Forum Vol. 13, No. 2, pp. 203-226.

Michael Rogin. 2002. “Blackface, White Noise: The Jewish Jazz Singer Finds His Voice” in Critical Inquiry, Vol. 18, No. 3. (Spring, 1992), pp. 417-453. http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0093-1896%28199221%2918%3A3%3C417%3ABWNTJJ%3E2.0.CO%3B2-5

Rubio, Phil. “Crossover Dreams: The ‘Exceptional White’ in Popular Culture.” In Race Traitor, ed. Noel Ignatiev and John Garvey, 148–61. New York: Routledge, 1996.

Stras, Laurie. 2007. “White Face, Black Voice: Race, Gender, and Region in the Music of the Boswell Sisters” in Journal of the Society for American Music Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 207–255

Walton, Julie H. 1992. Speaker race identification from acoustic cues in the vocal signal. Ph. D. Thesis, Memphis State University.

Walton, Julie H. and Robert F. Orlikoff. 1994. “Speaker Race Identification From Acoustic Cues in the Vocal Signal” in Journal of Speech and Hearing Research Vol.37 738-745 August 1994.

new semester

The new semester has started, and we hit the ground running. My teaching this semester is very different, as I'm TAing for a course on Bach, Gilbert and Sullivan, and Wagner's Ring Des Niebelungen. It's been ages since I've done any reading in any of these areas, but one of the set books is Edward Said's Orientalism, which I have read several times, and I know all of the set music really well. I wrote a huge project at the end of Matric on the Ring, and while I didn't really expect to use it again, I guess you never can tell what's going to happen.
I'm also taking superstar Suzanne Cusick's music and gender course this semester. It's a course this department is most famous for, and I'm really excited about it. The workload is pretty intense, but I have a reduced course load this semester to assist me with exam prep, so I think this is probably the best time of all to be doing this.
I'm also in the middle of submitting a whole series of applications for summer funding and summer work. It is a bit of a challenge, as there aren't many options open to international students, but I'm stretching my options a bit, and putting a lot of emphasis on my choral experience. One of the possibilities I'm most excited about will involve training childrens' choir all summer. I would so love to do that! The summer is a challenge for all students, and a lot of people warned me about the particular challenges of international grad student summers. But I'm sure I'll be able to make something work. Worst case scenario, I spend the summer waiting tables in Johannesburg, and saving money for the new year. Let's hope it doesn't come to that!

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas

And feel like it, too. On Saturday night, NYChoirgirl and I performed our end of year concert with the Stonewall Chorale. It was a super success, with the big Church of the Ascension nearly full, and lots of great feedback from the various audience members I got to talk to afterwards. Thank you so much to everyone who supported us. It was wonderful to see so many smiling faces in the audience, to get such super applause, and to hear your very generous comments afterwards. I'm so glad you were all there, and that you had a good time.
I also put up my Christmas decorations this past week, and now have a string of steady white lights, a string of flashing blue lights, great loops of blue tinsel, and a dozen or so blue and white snowflakes adorning my living room. They blend very well with the blue and white Empire State Building I can see through the window. I haven't got a Christmas tree yet, because live ones make me sad (I hate the idea of cutting a tree down, just to throw it out, dry and sorry-looking, in January), and artificial ones are surprisingly difficult to find in this city. At least, artificial ones under $50. Online shopping has come to my rescue (as it so often does), though, and my little 3 foot pre-lit artificial Christmas tree is on its way. I love putting Christmas decorations up. And now, in the Northern hemisphere, where the sky is dark by the time I get out of class, the lights really brighten things up.
Speaking about getting out of class, I taught my last seminar of the semester today, and now have a large pile of marking waiting for me. It's actually less daunting than I thought it might be, because the student's assignments are so interesting to read. I really like these students, and am going to miss them next semester.
Finally, this is my last evening at home for a while. Tomorrow, Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights I'm attending various Christmas parties, and on Wednesday night, I participate in the NYU tradition of midnight breakfast for dinner. On Wednesday, I also attend my last class of the semester, and a week later, submit my last final. And then, I'm on holiday for just under a month.

Dinner with the President

I have been feeling a little down about the project of the research university for a while, partly because I've seen, through teaching, what a raw deal so many students (particularly, or specifically, undergrads) get when they enter a high-profile research university like NYU, and partly because I've realized that my commitment to education, and my understanding of the goals of the academic project more broadly, are not commensurate with the goals of a large number of my peers and seniors. Before I expand on that, though, let me say that my experiences tonight, to my surprise, have given me fresh hope and new energy.

So here is the full story: About a week ago, I received an invitation to have dinner with the President of NYU, John Sexton. The opportunity was intriguing. I have become disillusioned with the conflicts between the NYU mission to be a university of New York in New York, and what, from the inside, at least, looks like a quest to gain status and rank at the expense of an engagement with the lived reality of this city, which is cosmopolitan in the best and worst ways. NYU, it seemed, was riding the elitist ivory tower image right up there with the most iconoclastic of the ivy league, attracting well-resourced undergrads in order to finance the graduate students who would teach them, while the big-name tenured faculty got on with the business of research. It isn't a terrible model, particularly if you are among the big-name tenured faculty, but for the students, particularly undergrads, who expect to have life-changing, though-altering experiences through their interaction with the best thinkers in the world, finding out that your intellectual heroes have little or no interest in teaching, or worse, great interest, but no time, due to the demands of the tenure track, can be somewhat disappointing. No wonder the academy and its discourse has such a bad reputation in the world out there. You need to be taught academic speak in order to understand the work being produced, but the people most qualified to teach you that would rather be talking to each other than to you, even if you are paying huge amounts of money for the privilege of their attention.

Don't get me wrong, this is not a critique of the faculty themselves. I have benefited immensely from a large number of outstanding intellectuals who have gone above and beyond to help me get to where I am. And I'm also benefiting greatly from the financial management of a university that can afford to fund my education for five years, in exchange for a few semesters of teaching. Heck, I'm one of the biggest beneficiaries of the system. But I'm also critical of that system because it encourages a view of education, the practice of teaching, that labels it the unfortunate baggage of an academic career. Teaching is the despised responsibility. Research and publication are the goal.

Quite frankly, as far as I can tell, there is no point in doing research and publishing work if one has no intention of teaching it. Knowledge is only as good as the use it is put to, and there are only two ways that the knowledge we produce can be put to good use: through our own application of it (i.e. "advocacy" or "public sphere work", both second-class considerations in the academy, and non-entities in the tenure process), or through our teaching of it to others, who will apply it. And we should be publishing so that our insights are available to those who we cannot teach directly.

One clarification here. I don't mean teaching according to the classical model of students sitting at the feet of the master. I mean teaching in the way that it works in a graduate seminar, or in the undergraduate sections I've been lucky enough to work with this semester. Teaching becomes about providing a set of materials and interpretive tools, and then letting the magic that is learning happen. Sometimes, that means that students make use of those tools right there with you, and all of you come away with something from the classroom encounter, and sometimes it means you demonstrate a few ways of using them, and let the students take that away and work their magic, either in private, or, if you're lucky, in the work you get to grade. Either way, no one is the end point of knowledge. It's all a great set of endless possibilities. How exciting!

A while ago, I read this document, published my John Sexton on the university website, in which he proposes a role for "university teachers", as distinct from research faculty. I agree with a lot of what he says, but I find myself opposing the document as a whole on the basis of his caveat that

[the university teacher] will be capable of appreciating and of participating in
the research enterprise. But he or she will have chosen to tilt the
personal mix of research and teaching more dramatically in the direction of
teaching than would be appropriate for one seeking tenure. The university
teacher will dedicate a full professional life to the university as an active
participant in the institution and a premier participant in the education of
students. The university teacher will not be given the lifetime position we
associate with tenure, but the possibility of remaining with the institution for
a whole professional career will be very real

So my big question is: why is it not appropriate for a faculty member who "tilts the mix" of research and teaching more strongly toward the side of teaching, not to get tenure? Why is teaching valued less strongly? What is the mission of the thinking individual if not to disseminate their thoughts? And how, other than through teaching, do we do that?

I didn't get to ask that question tonight, though I'm going to ask it via email once this crazy semester is at an end, in a few weeks time. But I did hear a whole lot from our university president that suggested to me that his goals for the production and dissemination of knowledge line up more strongly with my own than I had previously thought. At the very least, I encountered an openness to conversation about these matters that I had not expected, and that gives me some hope. I still think teaching is undervalued, but I no longer think that the university is all about money and prestige. And that is a big relief.

InaDWriMo

I just pledged 10 000 words on InaDWriMo. Of course, I'm not at dissertation writing point yet, but that conference paper I just finished needs to be turned into a publishable piece, and I have a few other bits of writing to pull together by December. I wonder whether I'll be able to stick to it?

P.S. I was asleep about an hour ago, but the Halloween partying is in full swing on the street below, and so I won't be getting much more sleep for a while, at least. There are some disadvantages to living in the village. Not enough to make me want to move, but they're there, nonetheless.

Columbus, here I come.

I am headed for Columbus, Ohio, tomorrow, for SEM. I can't believe Hawaii was nearly a year ago! I'm excited, and a little nervous, but mostly just looking forward to seeing friends and colleagues again. I always enjoy conferences, even without the beaches and warm weather. My paper is on Saturday morning, fairly early, but hopefully there will be a few die-hard attendees who aren't completely wiped out by then, and who will have some useful feedback. I don't know what internet access I'll have, but as we are in the conference hotel, I'm sure there will be something, so I'll blog as I have the opportunity.

Street performance, and the Drakensberg Boys' Choir

I had the craziest day today, running around town from one end to the other (literally: Brooklyn, Harlem, NYU, Harlem, Union Square, NYU, and finally, Harlem again), but quite abruptly earlier this evening I was stopped in my tracks by one of the best street performances I have yet seen in NYC. Three guys were playing drums using a combination of two upturned buckets, a barrel lid, and two of the plastic containers that hold newspapers on street corners around NYC. They were doing some pretty elaborate stuff, and it was really nice to have an excuse to stand still and just listen for a bit.

Also, one quick note. I noticed through my blog stats this week that someone has been searching repeatedly for "Drakensberg Boys' Choir lyrics "I wish I were"". This is one of my absolute favourite of their recently programed pieces, and can be heard at their website or via this link (the recording quality isn't great, and doesn't do them justice, but it should at least give you an idea of what they and the piece sound like. The full title of the song is "I Wish I Were a Punkrocker", and the lyrics are available here.

Day one, year two

After a really fun long weekend, the new semester starts today. I'm not actually teaching today, technically, but I do have the first lecture of the course that I'm running a couple of recitations for, so today will be the first opportunity I will have to see the new students and get a sense of the classroom situation. I have been excited about this for a really long time (one of the first things I said to my advisor when I arrived in New York was "I'm really looking forward to teaching"), but I'm also beginning to feel both more clear about the course, and a little nervous. Most of these students are not music majors, and while only very few of them are freshmen, I feel like this is a really important opportunity to open up their academic experience. I am TAing for a course called "Expressive Cultures: Sounds", and the topic of the class is "Contemplating Voice". This course is part of a general academic program that students have to take a certain number of courses from during their degree. For many people, this is a course they don't especially want to do. They are taking it because they have to, and they are taking this class in particular because they think it will be an easy A. For some of these students, this is the only liberal arts course they will take during their entire course of study, and for others, it is the only music class. So I'm invested not just in selling them on the university experience, but also of giving these students a little bit of a sense of the value of something outside of their usual experience. The course lecturer has decided that we will be seeking out opportunities to use our voices during this course, and we will be doing some vocal exercises during every lecture, which is a great place from which to start, but I also want to find ways for students to think about and use their voices that are not necessarily expressly musical. Singing is such an important part of my own life, because of the level of physical engagement it gives me, but speaking is also becoming more and more important, and I hope to use this class as an opportunity for the students and I to think more about how we use our voices in mundane and also creative ways. I want to teach students about what it means to communicate in a classroom so that they have a skill that they can take beyond this course, and I want to teach them about the type of learning that happens when you act or perform or use your body to engage with the things around you. But if the only thing students come away from this course with is the knowledge that they spoke in recitation every week, and were listened to, that will be a pretty good start.

bits and pieces

I'm sitting at my window looking out on the Hudson river. The water is sparkling, lit up by the lights of a thousand New Jersey apartment buildings. The George Washington bridge looks like a string of Christmas lights hung out between two states, and a rather unromantic Fairways grocery store LCD sign informs me that the New York water taxi now goes to Yonkers. How is it possible I'm here? I shouldn't be able to afford it. Not least because I am able to blog from this exact spot because I got a new computer today! My old was is three years old, and still functioning (more as a desktop than a laptop, now), but I was in need of something a little more portable and robust, with wifi. And today it arrived, all shiny and new, in an enourmous box that contained more packaging than computer.
Can you tell I'm excited?
I also attended a very intensive teacher training orientation event at the university today. Have I blogged that I'm teaching this semester yet? In case I haven't, you now know. I'm TAing, along with my good friends Ben and Ivan, for our department's new ethnomusicologist, J. Martin Daughtry. The course is on voice, and I am preparing a lecture on the castrati in choral music, and will be running two tutorial sections. I'm meeting with the professor and my fellow TAs tomorrow to discuss it all.
I am also, following a successful audition earlier this evening, now a member of yet another choir in New York city. This one is 60+ voices, so will make a nice contrast to the chamber choir that I am already singing with.
All in all, a good day!

end part 1

I'm heading back to South Africa today. The semester is over, the summer has started (it is actually colder in Johannesburg than in New York at present), and my first year as a graduate student has passed. I am tired, but very happy. And I really had the perfect last day, yesterday. Church in the morning, a visit to St Patrick's Cathedral on 5th avenue in the afternoon, lunch at the Rockefeller center, a super piano recital in a down town art gallery in the evening, dinner in china town, and several hours hearing friends of mine play Irish music really splendidly in a pub, to round out the evening. I really have been having the best weekend. I have been staying with a friend, as the university housing closed on Friday, and she and I have had a really relaxing time, which, after the intensely busy past few weeks, was exactly what I needed. She has been so warm and hospitable, even to the point of baking fresh orange buns for breakfast this morning....
I am just generally feeling particularly warm and fuzzy toward all of my colleagues, at the moment, though it is not without very good reason.
Oh, and before I forget, NYU commencement was last week, and I was highly amused to note that, among other things, the Empire State Building was in NYU colours for the event. I wonder what strings had to be pulled to make that happen!
Anyway, tonight I fly to Zurich, tomorrow I spend the day in the city, and then tomorrow night I head back to Johannesburg. And next week I am flying to Durban to visit my parents, and for the real start of my vacation. It will be good to get home.

Finals time

I am having no luck blogging this weekend. I can't seem to pick out the important bits well enough to summarize it, and I don't have time to blog the whole thing. Suffice it to say that Saturday was spent at the Access to Knowledge conference in Yale, and was very productive and exciting. And now I'm plowing through the last official week of the semester, and finals. One paper down, two to go. I'm sure I'll be back on full blogging form by this time next week.

Seattle, and academic technique.

Wow, New York is beautiful. Summer is really upon us, and I'm loving the warm weather and green things.
Seattle was beautiful, too, though in a rather different way. The natural beauty around the city is spectacular. We spent a little time after the conference sitting on a patch of lush grass near the Pike place market, eating our lunch, and watching the boats in the sound, and the sense of absolute, simple luxury overtaking me was so memorable. And there were several occasions when, walking around the city I caught sight of a sliver of silvery moon hanging in the sky beside the space needle, or the lights of the residential areas on the hillsides around us, and was delighted by the beauty of it. The flowers in the Pike place market, and the carnivalesque atmosphere around the fish stalls were really appealing, too, and I was really happy to see all of that. But there was something about Seattle that didn't sit well with me, and while I can't articulate it very clearly, I think it had something to do with the rather obscene displays of money that abound, not least at the Experience Music Project. I'm afraid the museum did not impress me. Very high-tech, and I'm sure great fun for the children who were milling around most of the weekend, but there is very little real thought about music and the way it works, sociologically, politically, or just in a very mundane practical sense. The conference, however, more than made up for the museum's inadequacies. There were a whole lot of super panels, and I heard some really high-quality papers that made me think in all the right ways, and I met some super people.
Our panel went really well, though I did realize that I have become a little too blaze about conference presentations. It's one thing to write a paper that people will pick through and dissect, and that you know you need to be rigorous with, but it is a whole other to know what you are talking about well enough to do more than simply read it. I tried to talk through this paper, rather than reading it, and I realized rapidly that I have become too reliant on the notes in front of me. I do think that there are some things that are best read, simply because it can be difficult to be concise and artistic with words in a live moment, but in general really being able to present a paper like this means being so deeply engaged with the vocabulary that you can pull it together coherently on the spot. It's a bit like knowing a musical instrument well enough to improvise on it. Doing it well means really knowing it. So I'm applying to a couple of South African conferences at the end of the summer, and I'm going to spend some time over the break getting that in touch with my data again.
In the mean time, the end of the semester looms. Three papers, two abstracts, two presentations and one more conference (at which, thankfully, I am not giving a paper this time) left, and some smaller scale stuff in between, and then I'm back to the airport for that much anticipated trip home. Can you believe my first year of grad school is nearly over? I can't.

Back in NYC

It's quarter to 2 in the morning, and I just got back from a super weekend in Seattle. The conference was really great, and our presentation went nicely. I'll blog in more detail when I have recovered a bit, but for now, my bed, and the book I need to finish for class tomorrow, are both calling to me. I think bed is winning out, though.

Unbelievable luck

I just may have been offered the most perfect apartment today. I saw it months ago, envied it hugely, and never even vaguely believed that it was possible. And suddenly, it is a distinct possibility. It is two blocks from our department, in the village, with an unbelievable view, sun, space, and rent that I can afford. My roommate is coming with me tomorrow to look at it, but even if she decides against it, I'm going to accept. It is right at the top end of my budget, but not outside of it, and with my roommate it will be even cheaper than where we are currently staying. And infinately nicer. I am so excited, I have been grinning all day, and periodically doing a happy dance when there aren't too many of the people I have to make a good impression on around. There are several mitigating circumstances that may still make it impossible, and so I am holding my breath, but I can't even begin to make myself not excited about it. It is unbelievable. and just so great!

UPDATE:
My roommate loves the apartment, and she and our potential landlady seemed to get along well, which is important in this situation. So lets keep holding thumbs. This could be so great.

Learning to be a grad student

I'm sure I've said it before. I've certainly thought it before. Either way, it bears repeating. Student/advisor relationships are hard.
I had a meeting with my advisor today to talk about work, and also about both of our recent travels, and while it went really well in many ways, and she was great and supportive and very helpful, I still found it really difficult to talk sense. I guess I'm still in the early stage of this setup, where I'm still trying to make a good impression, and I really am trying desperately to convince her that I am a student that she could want to work with. And so I feel like everything I say is over-eager and self-promoting, but at the same time lacking the substance that comes with experience and reading. I have so much to read before I can do good work. I have often thought about the process of becoming an academic as a sort of apprenticeship, where we learn from great scholars by watching them work, and working alongside them, and absorbing some stuff by osmosis, and other stuff through direct tutoring. But really, it isn't much like that at all. Our professors give us reading that they have done already, and have to re-read much of it themselves in order to lead discussion, despite the fact that it may not fit particularly well with their own work. They then have to read our efforts, and spend time helping us improve our work, and somewhere in amongst all that, they have to fit in their own work, much of which we as students are unlikely to hear about, because we are too busy with our own concerns. I feel a bit like I have to be more together and smart and productive, just to give my advisor a motivation to work with me in the first place.
I do have a super advisor, though. And that is worth a whole lot.

Williamsburg, here I come

Tomorrow morning, bright and early, T and I are flying to Richmond, and then driving to Williamsburg for the MACSEM conference. Or rather, T is driving, and I'm passengering. So no blogging this weekend. But wish us luck. We're both giving papers.