BunnyBlinks

My recent post on “Poolboy, Tags, and Labels” developed from thoughts I’d mulled over concerning a (straw-man variety of) music theorist’s tendency to label musical events (think: a sonata’s purported “exposition, development, recapitulation”) without addressing the (to me) more interesting things like, say, process or meaning. I brought something personal–Poolboy, in this case–into the discussion as a way to focus the post. It’s a device I’ve been criticized for in some of my “scholarly” writing since it’s a slippery slope from the grudgingly accepted first-person authorial voice to the still (and in many cases rightly) academically unfashionable “testimony.” “Let me tell you how I feel,” is hard for some to swallow when it’s not masked behind a more impersonal “Let me tell you what is.” I won’t beat down a door that’s already been open: I hardly think there are too many of the old guard remaining on the lookout, ready to pounce on excessive use of the first person. (Digressing already, I wonder if I should blog in footnote style, with links to my tangents hosted on other pages. Perhaps I might now shift to a discussion of how hard it is to come up with an appropriate subject/agent for any given sentence when you’re describing how music moves ((or as music theorists once liked to say, “the music itself”))) ….

Focus. I think the rhetorical device worked in the Poolboy case–not to say it was great writing, but he held it together. With him as the main character in the post, it became easier to delete the (many) points I wanted to include but couldn’t. Blog-style writing is hard for me. I’m a fan of elaboration, and it’s hard for me to leave the tangents for the links …. …. Why am I writing this blog? Sure, it’s partly to connect ideas to each other and myself with others, to participate in a larger conversation. (or is it a smaller one?) I want to respond to my friends, while helping to shape the arguments that matter to me. More than this, it’s to help me

Focus. I’ve been working on a dissertation for a long time now. And well, it’s been oh-so-slow going since I gave up smoking just over two years ago. The end is still in sight, but it hasn’t been easy without the constant nicotine stimulant to help me

Focus. (Sorry, I’ll drop the modified Gwendolyn Brooks thang). The important thing about writing is that, like anything else, if you wanna do it you just have to do it. My intention was to work out ideas here on my blog, while hopefully getting some feedback. I’m a firm believer that the best feedback on academic writing often comes from people outside of your discipline and even academia. Even without feedback, however, at least I’d keep the gears grinding.

Unfortunately for my productivity, I started writing when the primary elections were in full swing, right when the smartest, most inspiring politician I’ve ever had the chance to support actually started to win this race. I was distracted.

Of course, there are millions of Obama posts out there, so I’ve been consciously speaking to a smaller, targeted audience of people who know me and, I hope, care what I think. I know, however, that’s not how you get feedback. You get feedback–I mean, “hits,” comments, links–by narrowing in on a targeted audience, participating in select, topical forums. Part of me wants to do acquiesce to the advice of this Blogger help page:

A good way to build an audience is to speak to one in particular. When you keep your audience in mind, your writing gains focus. Focus goes a long way toward repeat visitors…. Also, try to be descriptive when you blog. A well crafted post about something very specific can end up very near the top results of a search…. Strive for succinct posts that pump pertinent new information into the blogosphere and move on. Keep it short and sweet so visitors can pop in, read up, and click on.

Yeah, maybe not. Be it due to nature or nurture, I can’t help but resist the compartmentalization and specialization that would turn me into a better self-promoter. Ultimately, I’m writing this to learn to enjoy writing again. It’s now clear that writing is a much different process than it was with the constantly dangling cig. It takes longer, for one. Short, awkward bursts need to be channeled into something grander, or at least re-imagined as such. No one would golf 18 holes with only a putter, unless you had someone to talk with on the long, slow walk.

Ideology aside (neither of us are the ideologues we’re sometimes accused of being), I really enjoy reading Althouse. Just tonight I noticed my blog’s current tagline, “an audio theoretician’s glog, only sometimes concerning audio theory” is an obvious subliminal rip-off of “I‘m a law professor, and sometimes I write about law.” I hadn’t heard of Madison’s local/national blogger until I read this 2006 post (and many more like it) during the run-up to Wisconsin’s unfortunate “constitutional” ban on “gay marriage.” (By the way, those weren’t unnecessary quotation marks.) I was struck by the reasonableness of the debate (which she’d continue to moderate in the comments), even on points on which I strongly disagreed, which were few. I soon found I was curious about her thoughts on topics other than the political issues that initially drew me in. It’s better still when she pulls it together: like writing style and “retro-feminists“.

While we both (dare I say?) have excellent taste in cab companies, Althouse is unlike me in that she’s famous and highly paid. Expect my future posts to be more often about music.

And hopefully shorter.

A running (and perhaps somewhat childish) inside joke in my inner circle of Madison friends involves no more than a scripted, indignantly delivered one-liner: “Why do you always have to label me?” Other variations include “Why do you have to label everyone?” or “What’s up with you and your categories?”

It started with “Poolboy,” who earned his nickname in part with his handiness and helpfulness, but mostly, to be sure, on account of his appearance. Poolboy rolls with lots of different folks, including his young, cute, and clever kids, and a large, diverse group of friends and family. Perceptions of Poolboy vary remarkably from person to person and situation to situation, and he’s well aware of this phenomenon. So frequently it’s surreal, he’s asked oddly personal questions by strangers and acquaintances alike.

“Are you gay? But don’t you have kids? and wasn’t there a girlfriend?” he might get asked in the local gay bar.

Then there’s the just-as-frequent line of questioning: “You’re straight? But the purple hair!” someone will ask when they notice his lingering glance at a physically attractive woman I somehow failed to notice. (The hair, I’ve observed, is a conveniently mentionable symbol for any confidently expressed flamboyant mannerisms that usually go unmentioned.)

Generally, acquaintances feel forced to conclude, usually in a whisper, that “he must be bi.” All this unnecessary–and to him, pointless– speculation gets to be a little much for Poolboy. If pressed, he’d probably admit that his resistance to these categories is partially a political response. Mostly, though, the questions just annoy him. “I’m a doer, not a labeler. Can’t I just be ‘Poolboy’?”

Of course, without labels we’d have no language; without categories, education as we know it would be impossible. (We might, however, pay more attention to which sorts of words make for the best labels, describing processes, not things.) Moreover, many of us feel that gay (somewhat more so than lesbian) politics is based in the knowledge that people are born gay, and so “gay” must be a category.

In academic circles, there’s a push to embrace more and more narrowly defined labels as we specialize in ever smaller areas of expertise. I will admit to consciously resisting this trend in my own scholarly and pedagogical endeavors. But there’s no denying that labels–some helpful, many meaningless–are at the heart of “music analysis,” whose apparently jealous sibling discipline, “music theory,” constantly strives to label bigger and better systems.

Academic careers can be built on the coining of a new term or theory, especially once people adopt and/or reproduce it. This might not be a musically sensitive process, but it’s power. After all, academics are capitalists, too; especially, so it sometimes seems, when they claim not to be.

Admittedly, in talking about labels and categories we could be talking about any cultural phenomenon. Think: advertising and political demographics, like “Soccer Moms,” “Nascar Dads,” “Green-collar workers,” and “Obamicans.” How many tags–or should I say labels?–should I affix to this post? and why?

Poolboy, I think, is right to resist. Sure, the rest of us initially teased him, throwing what we first heard as trivial protest back at him. Now, though, questions like “Why do you have to label her a ‘bartender’?” have become a way of poking fun at each other while embracing the absurd. The childlike banter has evolved beyond the “your mom” joke into surprisingly sophisticated real-life sketch comedy.

A lot of power lies with those who frame a debate. We can, however, challenge and teach the debate framers, and refuse to answer with a simple, confirming or denying “yes” or “no.” We’re better off reformulating those questions that serve no purpose other than to divide us.

Poolboy reminds us that we can fight the power by playing around it.

To those of you who got spammed because of me: my apologies.

Live and learn. Wayne&Wax forwarded me a spam this morning, which at first glance appeared to come from me. While the scare prompted me to change my passwords to something even more ridiculously complicated, it turns out I was just silly to leave my old blogger domain name unclaimed when I did this weekend’s change-up. The email stemmed from the domain I abandoned (which is no longer associated with me, and ridiculously NSFW), not the one you’re reading now. I reported the splog to the blogger staff, and I’m relieved to know nobody actually spamjacked my current account.

Having already acknowledged his appreciation for this sort of poetic byproduct of the internet advertising era, Wayne couldn’t help but point out the dissonance contained within the spam he received today, which resulted from the multitude of predictably and clownishly obscene spamlinks crowding around one lonely heartfelt line in the middle:

“My little munchkin turns 9 today. Happy Birthday sweetheart. Love you LOTS.”

Speaking of turning 9 today, I’ll leave you with this favorite:

Part I

Home from college at the end of my first year, I was hanging out in my parents’ yard with a small group of close friends who still lived full-time in the town where I grew up. I’d just come outside after a long shower. Fumbling for a cigarette, I asked Nat for a lighter. Sometimes a gentleman, Nat lit my cigarette for me. Sometimes not a gentleman, he also commented on my “gnarley” fingernails and cuticles, whose long soak in the shower exaggerated the damage done by my teeth.

“Dude,” he asked, “Why chew your nails if you’re gonna smoke cigs?”

I couldn’t answer him. I shrugged, hoping the conversation would quickly turn to making fun of someone else in the group or, just as likely, someone’s mother.

I quit biting my nails that summer. It took me another dozen to quit smoking.

Part II

I stayed home tonight to write; and I’ve successfully alternated between blogging and dissing. I just took a break to heat up some split-pea soup on the stove, which I intended to eat in front of a 10-minute TV news broadcast at the top of the hour. I sat down to eat, discovering only then that the cable was out.

“Dude,” I asked myself, “Why watch cable TV if you’re gonna surf the ‘net?”