A Little Light Reading

Looking for a little light reading? Have access to online journals through your local library or institution of higher learning? Then you should check out my new article "Rekindling Ancient Values: The Influence of Chinese Music and Aesthetics on Harry Partch" in the Journal of the Society for American Music. The cover features my picture of Partch's Chromelodeon and is full of fun facts like Partch's experiences in San Francisco Chinese theaters. You can read the abstract and more about the article on the journal's webpage.

Writing Away the Summer - The End?

The book is now officially finished! All pages are written and for the first time in the three years I've been working on it I can see the end.

It's time to celebrate!

At least until I consider the amount of revision I have ahead of me.

Writing Update

The month 'o writing is over and as of right now, everything is done in the rough draft for the book but two or three pages of the prologue that I play to finish this next week. So the month is going to be one of those long months that stretches into the next as I also finish revisions on two articles. Still, after ignoring the book for a year, it is nice to have the rough draft done and revisions underway. For you, that also means I'll be back to regular blogging now, and I've plenty of stories from the past month and our travels this month to share.

Still Writing

I thought you might enjoy a small update. As of Friday, I have finished a rough draft of chapter eight and am closing in on completing chapter one. If all goes well, by this time next week, I'll be polishing off the epilogue and only have the short prologue to write. Locking yourself in a room with a computer for seven or eight hours a day can do wonders for productivity, but not for general socializing.

We All Need a Little Poetry

Someone has recently decided to pepper my campus with small sections of poems pasted to red construction paper. These poems have bloomed more reliably than our tulips and have provided, for me at least, a small mental oasis as I stop and take time to read the poetry.

As a result, I thought I would share a few poems from Ron Padgett, a poet with a delicious sense of whimsy and irony. Who else would write a poem like this one:

"Haiku"

First: five syllables
Second: seven syllables
Third: five syllables


Or another favorite:

"You Never Know"

1) What might happen.
2) How people will behave.
3) Oh anything.

Three rules that live
in the house next door.

Along comes the big bad philosopher,
and at their door
he hurls the mighty bolts
of lightning
from his brain.

The door is unimpressed.
Behind it the rules
are chuckling.

I witness this scene
through the kitchen curtains
as I rinse the dishes.

Grammar Tips Flow Out of My Fingers

Sorry you haven't heard much from me over the past week or so. We're five weeks into the semester which means that the first round of projects and tests are all coming due. For the students, that means getting a few days to relax after working feverishly; for the professor, that means getting to continue working feverishly while adding grading on top of my duties. I've been grading worksheets, essays, journals, and paper proposals. The rest of the week will be spent dealing with tests and listening journals and worksheets examining various types of printed music. Needless to say, I'm a bit cross-eyed at night.

But all this grading invariably turns a professor's thoughts to dreams of proper grammar. I keep a small folder of the most egregious examples of bad writing, those little gems that become unintentionally hilarious by means of misplaced modifiers and incorrectly used commas. The folder even contains some of my own writing, but thankfully all of those examples are from before I submitted the paper or article. Not so with my students, and not with other faculty. I'm still chuckling over the faculty member who e-mailed a significant portion of the faculty and student body under the subject heading "Your invited" and proceeded to exhort us all that "you got to be there!" I still haven't figured out what of mine was invited. Perhaps my hand so we could finally answer the koan "what is the sound of one hand clapping?"

I've developed a reputation among the students for being something of a Nazi when it comes to grammar (their phrase, not mine). It's a reputation I wear with honor. I join the proud rank and file with my newly-discovered favorite podcast, The Grammar Girl. Hosted by Mignon Fogarty, The Grammar Girl's podcasts are short, snappy, and snarky tips on common grammar mistakes. She's addressed "Which vs. That," "Who vs. That," and even my personal favorite, drilled into me by a music history professor of mine, "Split Infinitives." I've started recommending her site to my students, but the podcasts are just so darn entertaining and informative that you should take a look too.

In my attempts to break up the monotony of grading, I've also stumbled across a website that deals with another topic dear to my heart - the useless quotation mark. The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks collects reader-submitted pictures of inappropriately-used quotation marks that have humorous consequences like this one or perhaps this one. I see this all the time as students do not know how to use quotation marks for musical works. The signs collected on the "Blog" offer a good antidote to the decidedly un-humorous task of grading papers.

So, dear readers, favorite grammar-related stories of your own?

What all Music Criticism Needs - More Venn Diagrams

For your amusement and edification today, I present one of the most groundbreaking, thoughtful, and penetrating pieces of music journalism I've read in a while:

"Hot Hot Heat: A graphical dissertation on the number one song in America"

by Rob Harvilla

I read this, I weep, I wonder why I didn't think of writing this article first. Seriously, have you ever seen your hotness so accurately and devastatingly diagrammed?