My Life and Thoughts

After my recent post about Vampire Weekend, I got an email from my friend Sam Frank (a former copyeditor of n+1, a current music reviewer for Dusted, and a future editor of Triple Canopy), forwarding me the links to two reviews of Vampire Weekend—pro- and anti-—in the Village Voice. Reading these pieces, I found myself musing upon the reasons why I don’t like music reviews, which is what I’m going to write about today.

The main reason I don’t like pop music reviews is their increasing bent towards political criticism. Music reviewers have developed a whole lexicon (“precious,” “twee”) to pass off sociopolitical critique as aesthetic critique. It’s true of course that music can be an effective instrument of social change, but it’s not like there aren’t other, more direct instruments out there (teaching in schools, lobbying Congress, etc.). So why has social progressiveness become the privileged benchmark of musical merit?

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In spring 2007, shortly after the publication of n+1’s “Symposium on New American Writing,” I received an email with the youthful subject-line, “hello!,” from a young person called Ezra Koenig, a recent Columbia graduate and a former student of Caleb Crain (who was next to me in the n+1 symposium, because of the magic of alphabetical order).

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OK OK, so I may be really excited about old historical novels and octogenarian translators and restorers of 18th-century clocks (see earlier entry)… but I have not forgotten my interest in today’s youth. In fact, last week marked the first meeting of Humanities 199A, my undergraduate thesis-writing workshop. This hour was full of delightful surprises. One delightful surprise came when I informed the class how much I had enjoyed reading their thesis proposals, and it emerged that the class already knew how much I had enjoyed reading their proposals, because, as one student explained: “They actually sent us your blog. I’m the one writing about St. Jerome.”

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Inscrutable youth, with their enormous sweatshirts and tiny telephones: what are their hopes, their dreams, their intellectual interests? It is in my nature to sit around making big generalizations about things, so that is what I was asking myself as I paged through the thesis proposals of my potential future students (see previous post).  Here are my findings.

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Happy new year, dear readers, whoever you may be! Whatever you seek from 2008—be it

tumultuous recollections,
relief from labors,
live pictures or bons mots
or faults of grammar—

may you find, in this blog, at least a few crumbs!

Some of you may recall that I spent the past seven years getting a Ph.D. in comparative literature. Well, in 2008 I will be putting this degree to use as a Visiting Lecturer at Stanford, where I’m going to teach an “academic writing workshop” for seniors who are writing interdisciplinary honors theses in the humanities. I am very excited at this opportunity to convert my own recent dissertation-writing experiences into beautiful pedagogic theories. “Do as I say, not as I did,” I will tell my students, whom I will be instructing in the use of EndNote.

Do I myself use EndNote? This is a technical question. Many scholars don’t; I remember one professor who renounced it on the grounds that he didn’t want any superstructure mediating his relationship with the text. For me, it was always more about how EndNote costs $250. But now I have scored a free copy from the Interdisciplinary Humanities program (w00t!), so you know, bring it on. (more…)