Jessie (not Kendra) here…intermittent blogger who would really rather write about tennis. Trouble is, the tennis season is virtually over, and Verizon is involved in tense negotiations with Tennis Channel over whether it should rise to the level of the Golf channel or remain in its present lowly state. (A sad commentary on the status of American tennis spectating.) So, given the tennis vacuum….
Another AMS, another opportunity to explain why I cringe when self-identifying as a musicologist. This was the first year, after many unsuccessful attempts, that I presented a paper at the national meeting, but I felt that the quality of the papers overall was uneven. (Yes, more so than usual.) Am I just not wanting to belong to a club that would have me as a member?*
Some axioms and rarely-heeded lessons on writing, fashion, and social discourse for AMSers:
1. “Filmic” is not a desirable adjective, no matter how many times you repeat it.
2. Having a reception for self-aggrandizing musicologists in a room of floor-to-ceiling glass constitutes acoustical malpractice.
3. Juxtaposition is not analysis.
4. Orange shirts are acceptable attire for prisoners, playwrights, and the people who rip the guts out of fish. Orange socks are acceptable for academics, but mustard yellow is preferred.
5. Silence is better than peacocking.
6. Presentations should have the same entrance policy as the film Psycho: no late admittance. Otherwise presenters must field questions like, “What happened to Janet Leigh?”
7. Women who wear colorful tights to AMS do indeed plan things that way.
8. Tweed is no longer a professorial alternative to wool. Its reputation precedes it.
9. If you want to interrogate someone, join Scotland Yard. If you wish to interrogate something, stop.
10. Session chairs may only arrive late if they enter wearing a pink feather boa and a “Wagner is my co-pilot” button.
And let’s be clear about one thing: there is no time before the time-space problem. You might as well look for the time before there was a “time before time” problem.
*See Groucho Marx, telegram to the Friar’s Club, paraphrased in Woody Allen, Annie Hall, originally Anhedonia (1977).
Regarding #8: Surprisingly and for reasons I cannot explain, the tweed appears to have migrated to SEM.
Regarding #9: YES. This use of interrogate is always tied up for me with an Alex Ross column in the New Yorker a number of years ago on the EMP conference, in which he wrote, “And I bailed on a lecture entitled “Bruce’s Butt”—Bruce Springsteen’s butt, as seen on the cover of “Born in the U.S.A.”—when the speaker began to interrogate the image of the butt, which, under sharp questioning, wouldn’t give anything away.”
Regarding #10: Please tell me this actually happened.
#8: And I thought that scarves were a sure-fire way to distinguish the ethnos (except when the French music scholars wear them).
#9: Awesome.
#10: The showing up late? Or the feather boa? The late entry did indeed happen, but sadly it was not accompanied by eccentric accessories, or evidence of an unnatural devotion to Wagner.
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Pity. I am now aspiring to show up at the next AMS with a feather boa (however, I would be on time). Sadly, I’m not sure a boa would have been noticed at SEM, where scarves are, indeed, still prevalent, but mainly because the hotel is so freaking cold. On the plus side, I did just witness an argument about whether or not Wagner would, were he alive today, have been the frontman for a death metal band.