The Sunday Chronicle

 It was a beautiful Sunday, which would only have been improved by the company of the love of my life. Aside from that singular, albeit major complaint, everything went well.

I started my day with a lavender latte, which got me in the correct mindset to properly appreciate the springtime. The weather in the Bay Area is stunning this time of year, high 60s, slight breeze, very few clouds, bright sun, birds singing.

I made it to the Bart station just in time to catch the 12:05 train to San Francisco. Eventually, I made my way up to the front car, where I found Rubina, Cam, and Simon. Allie, Soren, and his sister Louisa were already in the city, and Rodney was on the very next bus over. The trains were very crowded today (because of the cherry blossom parade, as I later found out), so the four of us were standing huddled together in one small corner of the car. 

Cam's go-to for making conversation is What have you been listening to lately? A pretty normal and natural question to ask in a music department. You can learn about a lot of weird new music that way. But Cam's idiosyncratic way of asking makes it sound like he's trying to draw information out of you in order to find out what kind of music other people listen to. The clip that immediately comes to mind is Jared in Silicon Valley asking Richard about a party. "What was it like there? Were there gelatin shots?"

I said that, in all honesty, I've been listening to a bunch of dad rock by going through that big playlist titled "Vietnam War Music". It featured a lot of Rolling Stones, The Doors, The Who, etc. That is to say, 60s/70s bands who are now trickling into our Spotify blend. That provided an open door for Simon and Cam to compare Rolling Stones albums, a topic about which I had nothing to say. Because, like I said, I'd just been listening to isolated songs in a big playlist. But since Simon is teaching his 1968 class he had a lot to say.

Cam has been listening to the Quebequois band Angine de Poitrine. Chandler and I watched this performance later in the evening, and I do admit they kind of rule.

That music conversation ended because we began overhearing a guy right behind us in the train car. Simon and I shut up to listen to this guy, and we were looking at each other, trying not to laugh. Rubina thought we had some sort of inside joke about the way we were holding the rails of the train car or something or something. But I quickly brought Rubina up to speed and pointed her in the direction of the guy we were eavesdropping on. I was facing away from him, but from the little glimpses I got, he seemed to be a bit younger than us, talking to, (rather, at) some girl, whose voice I never heard.

People say that the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand started World War I but if that hadn't happened, something else would've started the war because of the agreement to... and so on and so forth, for a long time.

That first date seems to be going swimmingly, Cam said.

Blueshirt continued explaining World War I to this girl, at length.

And we're under the Bay right now! There's literally no way for her to escape! I replied.

Eventually, we made it to San Francisco without any catastrophes setting off a chain of events that led to WWI. We made it out of the Bart station at Civic Center and walked to the bus stop to get to Golden Gate Park. It was a bit of a journey, because of the delays and detours from the parade. We made it onto a crowded bus. On my right, there are two young guys waxing philosophical about the art of boxing. On my left is Simon, telling me about how he's started looksmaxxing.

Simon is such a hilarious character. There are some people where you can't tell if they're being ironic or sincere, because there's some kernel of truth tucked away under layers of ironic armor. Then there's Simon, who says something like "looksmaxxing" and is being 100% ironic and 100% sincere at the same time. It's like how they say Jesus was fully God and fully human. 

We get off of the bus and start toward the rose garden, where Allie and Rodney are waiting for us. Simon and Cam are talking Clavicular interviews. I introduce Simon to the concept of plantmaxxing. We walk around the rose garden for a while. We come across a rose labeled "White Delight."

That's my pornstar name -- Cam

I decline to comment.

After we've seen all the roses, we walk back onto the JFK concourse. Sunday swing dancing is just wrapping up, so we go over there for the last fifteen minutes of social dancing. None of us know how to swing dance, but we find a spot to ourselves and dance anyway. I try doing what few swung dancing moves I remember, but quickly give up and just dance. I try my best not to be self conscious, and dance the way I always do, and it's a great time.

After the music stops at 2, we make our way into the museum. Allie leaves to go to a concert, but the rest of us buy our tickets. We have timed tickets for 2:30 for the Monet exhibit, so we spend our time until then going through the African art. We see some statues by Dogon artists. We later learn that the Dogon people are a group in Mali. But before that Simon says "some Doggone artist!" He also stands in front of a Dogon statue and goes (Michael Jackson voice) "That doggone girl is mi-ine"

The Girl is Mine

This is the point in the blog post where I digress and tell you my thoughts on the song "The Girl Is Mine" by Michael Jackson feat. Paul McCartney.

Reader, I LOVE that song. It is unbelievably funny to me.

1) Automatically hilarious for Sir Paul McCartney to be there.

2) Granted, I obviously know very little about the personal lives of these men, but I struggle to imagine a woman who appeals to both of them. What is the overlap in their taste in women?

3)  Imagine being that woman. It's a nightmarish scenario. What do you even do? How do you react to that?

4) This song is another entry into the illustrious canon of songs featuring goofy dialogue.

5) Simon says that apparently McCartney was not happy about singing these lyrics. That tickles me, too, because it's not as if these are the worst lyrics he's attached his name to.

Here ends our digression.

Mo' Monet Mo' Problems

 We get into the Monet exhibit at 2:30, and honestly, Reader, we all find it kind of mid. The title is "Monet and Venice." It's exceedingly crowded, difficult to walk through. 

As we start going through the exhibit I turn to Simon and say "Oh I see. The first room is Monet not in Venice, and the second room is Venice but not Monet, and THEN---"

"Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis"

"Exactly."

That's a little dialectical humor for you, dear Reader. If only George was there to see his friends being so properly dialectical.

We get to the Monet portion and I realize that Monet was incredibly prolific-- I feel like every single art museum I've ever been to has at least had a water lily. Even though according to Chandler some of these paintings hadn't been on display in years, I had the uncanny feeling I had seen every single one of them before. And that makes sense. According to Wikipedia, Monet painted the grand canal of Venice 37 times. 

The painting that stood out to us the most was in the last room, when they started showing some of the water lilies series. Playing the hits, as it were. We saw two water lilies side by side, one the usual greens and blues, and the other rich, dark, red. 

"Imagine Monet coming home one day going "Ohhhh I'm so frickin mad!" and venting by painting a red water lily."

That joke was a hit. It hit again when I told my brothers later.

After the museum, we went to Underdogs in the Inner Sunset to get some food. I just had chips and guac and a diet coke. I figured (correctly) that if I was seeing my dad and brothers right after then I'd likely not have to pay for alcohol if I wanted any. We were just sitting and chatting on the outdoor patio of the restaurant. I was singing goofy-style to the 80s jams playing on the speakers. HERE IN MY CAR!

We parted ways after the restaurant. Rubina and Simon went to a concert on the other side of the city, Cam went back to Berkeley, and I started walking to Foghorn where Chandler, Alex, and my dad were sitting outside.

Saturdays are for the Bed

Today was remarkable for its sheer unremarkability.

That being said, you're about to hear some remarks.

I stayed home, essentially just in my room all day, which was not as bad as it initially sounds. I spent too much time on Instagram etc, but I did at least do some other things.

I called my mom and talked to her for almost two hours. We talked about a lot of things, but also sort of nothing. For the one hundredth time, I had to remind her what exams I'm taking this semester, and how long my PhD program is. I tell her over and over that six years is the standard time to degree, but she always says a lower number. I told her six and in her very next sentence she said five, like she's trying to negotiate me down. If I had to hazard a guess why that is, it would be because she wants there to be the smallest number of years possible that I am obligated to live in Berkeley.

After this it's just your dissertation though, right? You know, your aunt Amanda has a PhD, and she was working full-time at Coca Cola headquarters while writing her dissertation. (oneword aside: Can you think of a more Atlanta thing to be doing?) Couldn't you just do that? Well, I guess you have to teach, and you have to be on campus for that.

Short version is: I need to finish the PhD as soon as possible, but also, failing that, I need to find any way to complete it from anywhere else.

Since I've been an adult woman (to whatever extent either of those terms apply), I've had this experience where I'll speak to my mother and, out of nowhere, be hit with something heartbreaking that I'm just going to have to think about forever. And this doesn't seem to be the case with any of my brothers. My mom, in the middle of this conversation said

For twenty years, I never heard I was smart from your dad. He never treated me like I was smart. Now, in the past couple of years, I've had lots of my friends tell me I'm one of the smartest people they know, and I just think "You must not know a lot of smart people."

And there's this knot you get in your chest when you hear something that is simultaneously devastating and not at all surprising. I know he doesn't think she's smart. I know none of my brothers think she's smart. My dad has never given any indication that he thinks I'm smart either, though my mom and I are the only two in the family with masters degrees. But we're also the only two women, so I guess it cancels out.

And it's sort of maddening, isn't it? I love my dad, but there are plenty of times when he's been so dismissive and misogynistic, and I know that if my mom tried to tell any of my brothers about it, they wouldn't believe her. Because they can grow up in the same house I grew up in and not notice the things I noticed. And there's something tragic in it too, because as I've gotten older I see all the ways that my mom and I are so much alike, but I end up defensively preventing myself from showing it, because the rest of my family might love her, but they don't like her.

As I quietly recovered from that series of gut punches, the conversation drifted along to other topics -- her new house, the dogs, what's going on with her friends. She made me agree to let her know anything I hear about opportunities to go see Adam Lambert on Broadway, and then we hung up.

---

What is it about Grace Kelly?

The rest of the afternoon was taken up by my Grace Kelly double feature. As illustrated above, I tend to be a good, angry feminist, but boy, is there something about Grace Kelly that washes feminist rage away. 

During the pandemic, and a bit after, I spent unconscionable amounts of time in those Kibbe body typing Facebook groups. In the Kibbe system, Grace Kelly is the absolute standard of peak womanhood against whom we are all being measured. I'm only slightly exaggerating. On his proprietary kiki-to-bouba scale, the very center point is called "Classic." That used to be a body type you could have (you get banned from the FB group if you say "body type" though. They're "image identities,' which is clearly different, naturally). However, David Kibbe has since revised this, saying that actually nobody is purely classic; everyone has to lean at least a little bit to one side or the other. Everyone except Grace Kelly, that is. Nevermind the fact that "classic" means that you have "perfectly balanced" features, and that the definition of "balanced features" is something that can never be objective or neutral. Your classicness, in other words, could also be marked as your proximity to Grace Kelly.

You can understand that all of it is a load of garbage at best and a kidz bop version of phrenology at worst. You can understand all of that, but then you look at her in a movie like To Catch a Thief and you get it. She really is the blueprint. And the worst part is that she feels like an almost attainable aspiration. People used to tell my mom she looked like Grace Kelly. So I think Well if my mom looks like her, then I potentially could, too. 

And then once that thought has entered your head, you're cooked. I'm normally such a good feminist, avoiding makeup most of the time due to the lethal combo of lazygirl apathy and righteous feminist indignation. But then you watch her and you think, How is she doing her makeup? How does she get her hair like that? You know, it really wouldn't be that hard to just put in a little effort, to get the perfect arched eyebrow and the perfect hairstyle. Her haircut is pretty similar to yours, you know. Do you think you would look good with blonde highlights?

And that's the devil talking. You mustn't listen. But, after all, if you had to pick a celebrity style icon you really couldn't do much better. But then on the other hand, picking the peak 1950s movie star? Extremely trad move.

And, Reader, if you took a look inside my mind, as I'm sure you'd like to do, you would see this dialogue playing out like Gollum/Smeagol, while on the outside I am sitting calmly in my bed watching a movie.

Reading back over this, I'm moving between the first and second person with reckless abandon. I hope, Reader, that you don't find it too presumptuously intimate for me to be so facilely conflating "I" and "You."

---

Baroque Ensemble

It was quite an odyssey making it to campus this evening. If the Odyssey took about 40 minutes instead of 20 years. My bus was delayed 24 minutes, which is impressive, considering that bus line comes once every 30 minutes. Determined to make it to the Baroque Ensemble show, I tried ordering a Lyft. Twenty minutes and 3 drivers later, I'm finally on the way. I was very peeved about it, and anxious about making it to campus in time.

I was frustrated about the unreliable buses. I was frustrated that I physically couldn't have walked the 2 miles to get there on foot. I was frustrated that even after paying for a ride I was still going to be late because the app kept changing the wait time. 

I texted my cohort about it and Rodney reminded me that today is Cal day. Cal day is ostensibly the day that admitted students come and visit and everyone celebrates being good ol' Golden Bears. In reality, it is a day for undergrads to catastrophically day drink on frat row. Rodney, living next door to a couple of the biggest frats, said that he'd already seen 3 ambulances. That made me frustrated in advance, for how gnarly campus would be when I got there. Then I also remembered that Bootleg was tabling on Cal Day. I'd seen some other messages in the discord server about it, and about people "celebrating Cal Day." That reminded me once again how separated I have become from Bootleg, hardly being able to do anything with them the whole school year, and it also reminded me of the fact that I'm simply older than they are, and have probably aged out of an all-undergrad club. That was on my mind as I got to the theatre at 8:07 for the 8pm show. I got out of the car and started speedwalking to the best of my ability, a decision I immediately regretted as my foot started hurting again.

I was so worked up the whole way over, that the fact that everything was just fine when I got there felt like a sort of comic bathos. (Bathos, of course, is when you make appeals to pathos in the bathtub). I walked into Hertz Hall, and scrambled to the first open seat I could find. The lights were already dimmed, so I couldn't look for any of my friends in the audience to try to sit with them (another tally on the emilyjones Grievances board).  What I failed to take into account, though, is that the Baroque Ensemble always tune their instruments for a comically long time. When I'm lucky enough to sit with my cohort, we lean to each other and say Oh, I love this piece. I'm glad they're playing the tuning song again, as the harpsichordist plays through practically the entire circle of fifths while the other musicians very slowly and methodically tune up. To be perfectly honest, I might have gotten away with waiting for that very-delayed bus and being 20 minutes late.

The opera was fun, very cute. To be perfectly honest, I didn't even try to understand what anyone was saying, even though it was in English. I just let myself listen to the music. I knew eight people in the performance. The choral parts were definitely the best, and I wish I could've been part of it. Grace, from choir, sang the role of Cupid, and she was really good. I want to ask her how I can get involved and also sing for the Baroque Ensemble. There's no possibility of me playing keyboards there before Allison graduates.

It's a short opera, only about an hour long, split into a prologue and three acts. There was an intermission after act 1. Rodney and Cam found me, and I found Soren and Rubina, so we all moved to sit together for the second half. We were all next to James, bringing my James-sighting count up to 2 for this semester. After the opera finished, we all hung around outside for a little bit to congratulate all our friends, then I walked to the bus stop to head home.

My bus home was a bit delayed, too. Rodney walked past me on his way home, and stopped to talk to me.

I never told you this, but I have a very sensible nose, like to scent. I can smell when Tessa is in the room (Aside; File that one under "skills Ella Leeds should've had") And I can smell when my roommates are home, or when there's a woman in the apartment. In the United States, when people are drinking, I can smell it in their bloodstream. That never happens at home. But today, all these drunk undergrads? I can smell they're all drunk. Oh Emily I think that's your bus.

With that, I went home. Sitting on the bus full of undergrads, I thought I could smell alcohol in the air. But maybe I was just imagining it.

The Daily Paper

 My dear, loyal Reader(s),

Today I am somewhat at a loss for what to write about, because I'm lucky enough to have been in contact pretty much all day.

I started the day with a delicious breakfast, some music, and my usual puzzles. I didn't get Connections, because I saw the word "Lance" and couldn't think about anything but jousting. Even though every rational part of my brain was telling me Emily, the New York Times did not make one of the Connections categories "elements of a jousting tournament" , there was some hopeful part of my brain that clung to the idea of that alternate, more beautiful reality.

The Tradle today was the Pitcairn Islands, a British Overseas Territory with a population of 35 that does not appear on Google maps. When I saw the total exports were only $1 million, I knew we'd be on a tiny island. I just had to google a list of South Pacific islands. I eventually got it. Bogus choice though.

I, silly me, rushed to campus to make it to Morrison Hall in time for my meeting with Nick. He was nowhere to be found, of course. Once he finally arrived around 11:40, he was in a weird mood. Acting very moody and self-deprecating, in a way that was simultaneously to himself but also an invitation for me to say something. I didn't take the bait. Longtime emilyjones fans know her go-to strategy when someone brings up a topic she doesn't want to talk about: clearly change the subject by talking about something funny. It's not subtle-- at some point she thought it was subtle or at least elegant but she has since been informed that it's as transparent as a mime's invisible box.

"My brain is totally going. It's the end of the semester! I know that's not an excuse but I've been messing everything up lately" and so on and so forth

"By the way I watched Galaxy Quest this weekend. It was awesome"

"Isn't it?" He instantly looks and sounds normal again. "'By Grabthar's Hammer, what a savings...' Isn't that just peak Rickman!"

Subtle or not, I'm in the clear now.

We went through my outline I wrote last night, and it was really productive. Nick seems pleased with the work I've done, and confident that I know the material well enough to write a full essay. If anything, I chose too many examples for the outline. He liked the plays I chose, though, especially America Hurrah, because it's a very silly and quirky example of a play that is critiquing the invasion of television into all areas of everyday life in the 1960s. I also had a good balance of fact recitation and my own takes, and he seemed to agree with my takes.

The meeting ran a bit over, which is to be expected since it started 70 minutes late. I had to rush to ballet, and I just barely made it in time.

---

Readers who communicate with me through other channels will be aware that it ended up being a successfully Beauty and the Beast themed ballet class. This was followed by a quick lunch before rushing to Music and Capitalism, which these same readers will know dealt with KPop and modern economic structures of the music industry. We talked about Fordism, post-Fordism, platform capitalism, and the gig economy.

There's no lecture on Thursday, because Nick is leaving town tomorrow to play another gig. He just had an album drop on Friday. Something he's been working on for the past few years, collaboration with some scholars of Haitian music. I saw his lecture recital about it at AMS my first year. Haven't listened to the album, though.

After the lecture was choir. Nothing much to report on that front. We're getting ready for our concert, and I'm not super hopeful. It will probably come together as it always does, but there are a few pieces Wei wants the choir to have memorized. I can't speak for anyone else, but I certainly don't. And she's also trying to add minor staging and small choreographed movements to some of these pieces. It might be too late in the game to add these sorts of things and have them stick.

It was very amusing to watch Harry give advice, and then for Wei to immediately contradict him and tell people to do the opposite. Worth noting that nobody asked Harry and he holds no position of power in the chamber choir.

---

When I got home, I immediately started making my Japanese curry. I watched a little bit of YouTube while it was cooking, and most of an episode of 30 Rock while I ate. Maya came home while I was still at the table. I offered her some curry (she liked it) and we spent the next long while chatting.

That's the thing with Maya. We don't see each other for weeks and then every once in a while we'll talk for hours. I gave her the rundown of the situation in the music department and the state of my quals. It turns out that Maya's situation in her department was very similar to Sasha's in ethnomusicology, which is why she's mastering out. She has a lot of good takes about the precarious structure of academia. It is sort of dangerous and unpredictable how much of your experience of academia is decided entirely by specific personality matches or clashes. Her relationship with her advisor is the main reason she's ended up needing to leave. She compares that to the situation in my department, where there is no standardization, and the faculty apply very different expectations to students even within one cohort. 

Then we talked for a while about music. Maya studied Indian classical voice for 14 years -- she's really knowledgeable and very good. But she doesn't sing anymore. We were talking about the differences between the two music systems. It came up because she asked me about my lessons with Maddie. I was saying that we've had to transition mostly to teaching by ear. She had some insights into ways to combine ear training and written notation, since Indian classical music is traditionally taught entirely by ear, with written notation only being added way later.

That brings us to about 9:30 pm, at which point I took a shower, sat on my bed, and started writing this post. My deadline is coming up soon, so let me close with some pictures I took today:

Haven't looked into this "Stop AI" group, but this is a very fun place to put one of your stickers.

"Tesla QED?" As in Tesla is a proof in and of itself? To quote Erlich Bachman, "You just disappeared up your own asshole"

PS: I put these blog posts into WordCounter to look at the stats. I hope the quality isn't dipping. Of course, the first post was the longest, because I had a lot of interesting conversations that day that I wasn't able to text about. Today it's a bit shorter. What concerns me though is that according to WordCounter, the reading level is going down. I believe my first post was at an 11th-12th grade reading level and this one is 9th-10th. Am I watering down my staggering intellect for the sake of speed, or is it just that the word "Auratically" bumped me up a level the first time?

Teaching, Contradictions, and Plantmaxxing

     It goes without saying how many things that is.

1. Teaching

I taught my two discussion sections today. The questions I prepared took about fifteen minutes for them to work through. During those fifteen minutes, I played them some music from my descriptively-titled "Playlist #92." Talking through the questions took less time than I anticipated, though, so there was an extra fifteen minutes near the end when I had to improvise. Rather, I had to come up with more questions to goad (Goat them?) into engaging with the concept of genius, instead of it arising naturally from the reading questions. I asked them if the 18th/19th century version of genius still carried any weight in today's culture, and they seemed to unanimously think it did. I asked them who is talked about as a genius in today's discourse, and I got some interesting answers: Kanye West (in the before times), Jacob Collier, whatshisname from Geese, Eddie Van Halen (from our resident Van Halen obsessed kid). I asked what made those people geniuses, and everyone's answers might as well have been written in the 18th century: "They're original!" "They're unique!" "They're prodigies!"

It wasn't until the end of each section (actually, at the exact same point in each section, and in both cases by a male student sitting in the exact same chair. Spooky glitch-in-the-matrix moment) that someone pushed back against the very concept of the solitary Romantic genius.

 

Call today's sections the movie Yesterday because they took place in a universe without the British invasion.

 

2. Contradictions

I got into my meeting with Mary Ann a little after 2. Nick heard me in Mary Ann's office.

"Emily! I had your sections in my calendar for 2. I went into the classroom at 2 and you were Ian!" (Ian teaches in that classroom right after me)

"Sorry Nick, won't happen again. Promise I'll never be Ian again." 

 

But after that, the meeting continued as normal. Mary Ann said that there were a lot of good things in my practice essay, but she said that I didn't read the question very carefully. Reader, I think what it really was was that I didn't fully understand the direction she was expecting me to go with it. I came up with a bunch of examples that dealt with the same keywords as her question without completely answering the question she had in mind. She told me I covered a lot of ground, and it was all correct (boo ya) but that it wasn't terribly interesting or complex (not boo ya). However, it was definitely an essay that would pass (Back to boo ya again. When you're in a meeting with Mary Ann you need studio audience "Yay!" and "Aww" buttons, so you can alternate between them with each one of her sentences) 

She said that my essays definitely demonstrated that I'd read all my materials and that I knew my lists. She said that Rubina's essays were possibly the most thorough and detailed ones she'd ever seen, so she thought we had been talking to one another.

What it boils down to, and hence the title of this section, is Mary Ann's main criticism: my main goal was to demonstrate that I'd read the lists, and I did that to the exclusion of having a hot take.

Reader, you might remember a quote I paraphrased from my advisor just two days ago: that I can defer having an interesting opinion so long as I can objectively say what happened in my readings. But the day that Nick and Mary Ann give me the same advice will be the day Hell freezes over.

However, Mary Ann told me specifically that I should try to be weirder and quirkier with the essays, and try injecting some hot takes, and finding some points of contradiction within the readings, and go deeper with them.

For a four-hour essay, though, I think I did pretty well. Mary Ann's other criticism was of the people I was writing about. Anna Halprin, Yvonne Rainer, Pauline Oliveros -- "They're all just women in the 60s". And I get it.

 

3. Plantmaxxing

 For this section of the blog, I am just going to brag that I have eaten thirty different plants this week. Now, this week it was especially easy, because I bought all those fruits to serve at my little brunch get together. But I consider it a big success when I can reach thirty plants while only having one meal that I order out. Because it's super easy to eat a lot of different plants when you're spending stupid money at different restaurants and stuff. But the proof is in the vegan pudding, baby!

 

 

 

And for the purposes of this blog, plantmaxxing will also include showing pictures of plants I saw on my walk home.

 

 

 

OK. I'm going to cut off the post here. To be continued perhaps. 

The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? or Who is too Pro-Goatfucking at this Post-Show Discussion?

     A shockingly pro-Martin crowd at the post-show discussion of The Goat at the Shotgun Players tonight. I wanted to speak up throughout, but I was slightly too sleepy and considerably too timid to give my two cents. But my loyal readers will happily receive my two cents.

    The general consensus in the room was that Albee was writing a tragedy (I agree) and a parable of tolerance (I disagree). The audience was quick to condemn Stevie, Martin's wife (who in my opinion was, if anything, too reasonable), and extremely quick and decisive in its condemnation of Ross. I was shocked, because, if you'll allow me an old phrase, I looked at Stevie and Ross and thought "yeah, that's what I woulda did."

    The inventive staging forced the audience to think about the play in terms of Greek tragedy. The bare stage with its cold, gray fixtures was evocative of a Greek amphitheater. The costumes were neutral in color and full of flowing, wrapped fabrics that simultaneously evoked Chitons and the idiosyncratic dress of the upper-class artistic set. The director's note at the beginning of our program reminded us that the word "tragedy" means "goat song." In short, we were all primed to, begged to, approach this piece as a Greek tragedy. Reader, the audience did not approach this as a Greek tragedy. Or rather, if they did, they did it wrong.

    What makes a tragedy tragic is its inevitability. The tragic hero is doomed from the start--by his own hamartia, by fate, by the gods. There was no possible way for Oedipus to avoid killing his father and marrying his mother, no matter what he did. In Ovid's Metamorphoses Myrrha is cursed by Aphrodite with an irrepressible lust for her own father. She had no way to escape this. The way Martin describes his first encounter with the goat, it sounds as if he has been similarly cursed by his own delusion. We never really get a reason why he falls in love with the goat. He simply sees her, and it happens. Irrevocably. Inevitably. We never get the sense that Martin actively chose to fall in love with the goat. In fact, it doesn't even seem like Martin chose to have sex with the goat. It feels like there was simply no way to avoid it; a red string of fate tied them together. This is why Martin is tragic. When everything falls apart, it's not because his bad choices are coming home to roost and he's facing the consequences of his actions. 

What the audience discussion got right was the fact that the fundamental conflict in the play is one of misrecognition. Billy, Stevie, and Martin each have their own unshakable views of what is right and wrong, and none of them can get through to each other. For the genre-aware spectator, though, Martin is cursed by his own delusion. He is "doomed by the narrative," so to speak, to be completely incapable of recognizing that what he did was wrong in any way.

This is why I'm shocked by the audience opinion that Ross, Martin's best friend, was evil to tell Stevie that her husband was fucking a goat. Martin, lashing out to defend himself, assures Ross that he would've been able to figure it out on his own, would have been able to stop seeing "Sylvia" before Stevie found out, or come up with some sort of solution. But we know that can't be the case. He never once even implies that he wants to stop seeing "Sylvia," or even that having sex with animals is wrong. When he goes to the bestiality support group as it were, his general impression is that he doesn't understand why all the people there are so unhappy. Of course Ross needed to tell Stevie.

And Stevie did not make one single wrong decision. The most striking moment in the whole play is the moment when Stevie realizes that Martin did not just have sex with a goat; he is in love with a goat. That realization breaks her. The actress falls to the ground and screams and wails in real anguish. Collapsing, Sarah-Palmer-screaming. And I immediately understood. If your husband has been having sex with a goat, there might be a way to get him to stop, to get him to move on. But if your husband loves a goat? Loves a goat the same way and the same amount that he loves you? There is no coming back. Martin's humanization of the goat is simultaneously a dehumanization of his wife. It fundamentally changes the way your husband sees you if you know that he is capable of seeing a farm animal the same way. We know Martin can't stop seeing the goat. We know that even if he did, things could never be the same. And yet, of course Stevie had to kill the goat. The audience was condemning her for doing it. They said she "snapped," they commented on her "villain arc." To that I say, "log off of X the Everything App and start engaging with art like an adult." 

Practically speaking, killing the goat is Stevie's only chance at things possibly going back to normal, or some approximation of it. If anyone else found out about it, it would be the end of Martin's very public career, and would uproot all of their lives. Emotionally speaking, the goat is the source of all Stevie's problems. She had a perfect life, a perfect marriage before the goat. The audience phrased it as Stevie going of the rails and "killing the mistress." They said that now she is on the same level as Martin, doing something that can't be undone. I say that like an ancient Greek festival, sometimes there needs to be an animal sacrifice.

The Goat is a tragedy because every character did what they had to do. Why is Martin the only one who escaped condemnation at the post-show discussion? Martin, the only character who has objectively done something wrong? I still don't understand it. Killing a goat is arguably less of a sin than repeatedly raping one. Is Martin absolved because of the all-encompassing nature of his delusion? Are Stevie and Ross too lucid for sympathy?

When we get to the bottom of it, though, and what I think tonight's audience didn't understand, is that trying to decide which character is the antagonist is unproductive. You're starting from a flawed premise. The antagonism underpinning a tragedy isn't the characters versus one another. It's all of the characters versus the tragedy itself, trapping the characters in a narrative that can only end badly.

Writing about Writing about Writing. Isn't that tiring?

 Becoming the sole author and therefore editor-in-chief  of oneword with emilyjones has brought me face to face with the realization that, in fact, producing large quantities of words actually is not very hard. If I was able to write over 2000 words about a normal day I had, then I could absolutely write at least as much about a bunch of weird, contradictory, artists from the 60s and 70s. When people become stressed about needing to write, paralyzed with fear of just getting started, that is fundamentally a skill issue. Are you afraid of the blank page? Well, there is only one thing to do about it: fill it with stuff. 

No, filling a page with stuff is actually not very difficult, and I am very fortunate that, starting now, the majority of my job is to fill pages. I have to write my qualifying exam essays at the end of this month, and then after that, I have to write my prospectus, and then after that, I have to write my dissertation. And in between that time, I'm expected to spin off bits of those dissertation chapters into either conference papers or short articles. Once I'm in the post-QE world, I'm mainly a producer of text. 

The problem comes in when the text has to be good or polished. No, I don't have a fear of writing-- I have a fear of editing. I'd rather just purge text into a document and let it cease to be my responsibility there. In a perfect world,  I would attach computer keys to my fingers like so many leeches and just close my eyes until the words have drained out of my body and my humors are balanced again.

If writing was a humor which one would it be? Probably black bile. 

I've been having these thoughts about writing because I spent all morning doing it. There's not really much more to say about it. I woke up a little after 8, ate coffee and oatmeal, then sat at my laptop and thought really hard about "theorists and practitioners" in the 1960s who were interested in "deconstruction" by breaking up words and gestures in ways that remove them from their contexts. I just talked about that over and over to the tune of about 2800 words.

There always comes a point about an hour or two into a long bit of writing when I realize that I am, in fact, a serious person who reads books. Of course, attentive readers will remember that I also knew this yesterday. But I really knew it today. I'm starting to feel really good. However, I don't want to get cocky, because the cockier I feel today, the more issues Mary Ann will find with the essay when we go over it. That's the grad school law of equivalent exchange.

Right now, I'm writing for you in the front row of the Music and Capitalism lecture. Today, Nick is explaining copyright law, including AI ownership. But, plot twist, get this, if we think about all things as property, as things that can potentially be owned, then extraction goes way beyond AI. And that of course means we have to look at clips of Graceland by Paul Simon. Nick just said that when Graceland is played, "the Paul Simon estate" gets paid. Paul Simon must be upset by that fact, seeing that he's very much still alive. 

He's out there somewhere. Hanging out with Carol King, as they bond over being dead to Nicholas Mathew. 

Welcome to oneword with emilyjones

 This is the emilyjones oneword blog.

I'll be blogging old-fashioned style, giving my reader(s) something to read, say, for instance, on the bus home from work.

Really, there's not much more to it. Reader, you will pick up on the general style and tone as you go along, so without further ado, let's get right into it.

Girling (Auratically) at the Ballet Piano

Today's story starts at 10 in the morning. I arrived to ballet, business as usual. There was no guest teacher today, just the normal ballet class routine. I was playing, with very few exceptions, my usual repertoire. By this point, three semesters into playing for Ballet 1, I have memorized the pieces I play and the order they occur in. I can usually get away with playing a piece, zoning out, thinking about what I need to do during the day, or texting my beautiful boyfriend about how obsessed I am with him, until I hear Thea say something like "arms en bas, standing tall and proud, THANK YOU EMILY!" Then I just play whatever comes next in my set.

And in fact there might be something in my peculiar ballet performance that troubles definitions of liveness. If you're setting up a hard binary between "live" music and "mechanically reproduced" music, then what does it mean when I, a live person, am mechanically reproducing music without thinking about it? Have I myself been stripped of my Benjaminian AURA? Am I just a poor man's CD player?(Or rather, a rich man's, since you're paying a skilled laborer to do something a machine does for free.) What are the rammies of that?

Keeping this in mind, sometimes, like today, I try my best to be very emotionally invested in the music. You know, to cling white-knuckled to my own humanity. I'm playing, as if it's the first time I've performed it, and as if actually the reason I'm playing it in strict tempo with very loud downbeats is because that's what I, as an artiste, feel spiritually compelled to do. I was really giving Scott Joplin's Bethena the juice, doing whatever overly dramatic dynamic contrasts I could think of. 

Plus, there are also a couple of pieces that I remember the melodies of, from my downloaded ballet piano anthology or elsewhere, that I need to extend for longer exercises, so I improvise new melodies over the same or similar chord progressions once I finish the written melody. That requires a bit more mental work, even if the melodies are kind of shapeless and banal.

However, sometimes the autopilot does take over, which happened today. I heard Thea say that they were doing the tendu fondu combination at the barre, which usually gets the Habanera from Carmen, or whatever crude approximation of it I can remember. But usually they do this combination facing the barre, standing a couple steps back from it. This time, I looked up from the piano and they were standing parallel to the barre, with one hand on it. I assumed they were skipping the tendu fondu and doing an adagio developpe instead, so I start playing "O Mio Babbino Caro" from Gianni Schicchi. And, Reader, imagine my embarrassment when I'm playing adagio music for a tendu combination! I try sort of adding sharper beats to the left hand, but then that sounds really tasteless. When they do the combination again on the other leg I switch the music entirely to Carmen, because given the option, playing different music for each side is a lesser sin than playing the wrong music for both!!!

I'm realizing now that I have spent far too much time and space talking about my ballet class. So let's move on.

Those in-between moments, during which the REAL stuff happens

Both within blocks of time and between them, those little moments between are when actually interesting things happen. Between songs in ballet, I was texting Matt about ideas for Musical Theater Track. (Assigning scenes in advance, telling the kids far in advance to maybe bring shirts in the same color for showcase, having a lecture on essential musical theatre history) And between ballet and my 1pm meeting, I had an hour to chill. Right after ballet, I sat outside at a picnic table in the sun to eat my lunch. This is the spot right outside the gym where, on some beautiful days in the recent past, emerged to find my gorgeous boyfriend waiting for me. But today, I just sat there, at that little table, and ate a Berkeley Bowl falafel wrap. Which, of course, does not hold a candle to leaving ballet to be greeted by my One and Only, but is still nice nonetheless. 

Then I went to 107 to do a little work at my desk. I realized when putting together my annotated bibliography that I remember very little of substance about the book Radical Bodies, so I started reading through that again for a few minutes, but I did not get very far, because Sasha was in the office and I got some gossip from her.

The headline: chances are, Sasha is leaving the program at the end of the semester.

It's pretty contentious, it seems. She was put on academic probation last semester, and is not completely sure why. Part of it, she says, has to do with them being difficult with her ADHD accommodations. In order to get off of academic probation, she had to produce a 20 page ethnography (she's in ethnomusicology), while also taking a full course load of grad seminars, and being a GSI for a course. They were not happy with the work she produced in not a lot of time under those conditions, and now her appeal is going all the way up to the grad division. There's a possibility she'll be moving to the Anthropology department.

What makes this crazier is the context; the ethnomusicology department is losing a bunch of students. Mia, in Sasha's cohort, is leaving for UCLA. And two of the students in the cohort below Sasha have left already. I'm peering over my proverbial fence to see what's happening in the neighbor's yard.

That took me all the way up to 1pm, when I had to go upstairs for my meeting with Nick.

MINO (Meeting In Name Only)

"In Name Only" is a bit of an exaggeration-- we did go over what I should be teaching in my section this Friday: digging deeper into the concept of intellectual property. The concept of the singular, individual genius is actually an intrinsically capitalist one. It requires you alone to be the monopolist of your ideas; your ideas are your property, because you have created them with your labor. There's no sense of collaboration or distributed authorship when talking about Genius. You, the genius, practically grow your ideas out of the ground, like a farmer in an Adam Smith treatise. And, of course, this works out very nicely for you when you are trying to copyright your work, and not so nicely for you when someone is trying to sue you for writing a song that sounds too much like another song. In that latter case, doesn't music belong to everyone, man? I mean like, there are only so many notes, man.

But that concept didn't take too long to hammer out; we spent a while just gabbing, because he opened by asking me, first, if I had watched Tootsie with my cohort like he told me to (I hadn't) and second, if I'd seen Galaxy Quest (I hadn't). Both of these amounted to huge, shocking oversights on my part, to be rectified at my earliest convenience. It is interesting to me that to Nick, the most effective way to explain Galaxy Quest to Allison was to say that it "fell perfectly within the emilyjones space." Intrigued that "the emilyjones space" is a legible enough concept to be a useful tool for explanation even when I'm not there. I looked up Galaxy Quest and saw that it came out on Christmas of 1999, so I said that I really should watch it, since it came out ten days before I was born. It's always very tempting to ragebait people about the fact that I was born in 2000, because it's so easy to do.

Toward the end of the meeting, I was asking for some advice about the QE oral exam, and his main advice was that, above all, I just needed to prove that I had read the books and that I understood them. That means talking about them in a way that goes beyond skimming; I should be able to explain what examples they use and how the argument is structured. It's possible, he says, to defer having an interesting opinion about the books by simply sticking to objectively stating what happens in all of them. He emphasized the fact that the most important thing was to be serious: "that doesn't mean you can never smile, or that you can't be naturally funny," but it's not the time to be "glib." Now, after a certain incident at Allison's AI conference reception, being specifically told that I needed to be "serious" put me on the defensive. Since passing the QE requires "being a serious person who reads books," I told him, "Well, I am a serious person who reads books," which he immediately agreed with. I said that I would be playing the role of a serious person who reads books.

"Right, which basically for you is like being Woody Allen" (i.e., repeatedly playing characters who are basically just myself)

"You mean I can hire Owen Wilson to do it for me?"

Successful Woody-Allen-Quicktime-Event (simultaneously got a laugh and proved I understood Woody Allen)

Really, I have seen more than my fair share of Woody Allen films. They are, unfortunately, very good, and fall into the category of "things my dad made me watch." My dad shows Chandler dramas, and shows me comedies that are also capital-F Films.

And this led into a sort of brief discussion of Woody Allen movies. The conversation was completely normal. However, if I were writing a book where a late-forties professor is acting too familiar with his young grad student, the editor would probably ask me to cut out the scene where the professor comments approvingly that she's seen a lot of Woody Allen movies compared to other people her age--it'd be too on the nose.

The Late Afternoon

Chit-chatted with George in the office for a few minutes. Classic George being George, by which I mean having the time of his life Saying Men's Names. Jenny walked into the office, George goes, "Hey, Pirate Jenny!". Jenny doesn't get the reference. I do, because "Pirate Jenny" is a famous song from the Threepenny Opera. You know, by Bertolt Brecht. The second-most famous song from that opera, aside from "Mack the Knife." Didja know Mack the Knife was Brechtian?

In a moment of Georgian Self-Parody, he told me that he mentioned Hegelian dialectics on his Hinge profile, and then corrected everyone who came into his DMs saying something incorrect about it. I mean, if it works for him. He's successfully weeding out everyone who's insufficiently dialectical, I guess. In all honesty, I couldn't define Hegelian dialectics either. I sort of don't understand it, and I mask that by pretending to REALLY not understand it. I say, "yeah, dialectics is when there's two of something. Whenever there's two things, that's dialectical, obviously." Because I know that's how people misuse the term.

But another successful quicktime event: I showed George this meme, and I knew he'd love it.

It's classic George. Rules for Dating My Daughter: followed by a bunch of moral philosophy quotes from Immanuel Kant. He did in fact love it, and he asked me to send it to him so he could put it on his Hinge profile. I only hope it attracts someone who is as hardcore about Saying Men's Names as he is.

Then I walked home, listening to my favorite radio program of all time, Video Killed the Radio Show with DJ Final Girl. DJ Final Girl already knows all my thoughts about the episode, since I sent all my reactions and feedback in basically realtime, but it bears repeating here: all of the transitions between songs were so fun and expertly chosen. I also love hearing bits of my influence come through in the programming. Especially hearing what they had to say about Electronic Hair Pieces. It was already an Emily set before, but that put it over the top.

While I was walking home, I passed this pigeon who left an impression on me because he looked like the perfect pigeon. I realize now that to me, the perfect pigeon is the pigeon that looks like a photo of a pigeon.

If I understood Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation better I might have something smart to say about that. And for the past 45 mintues, since Video Killed the Radio Show ended, I've been writing this post. I believe we're up to date.

(Steve Martin/Navin Johnson voice) What do you think I do, sit around writing letters all day?

-Emilyjones