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