Grad students: we make procrastination into an artform.

Along with consumer culture holding back video games, I think the inability to see them as anything other than frivolous is hurting the genre. Case in point? This game. More on it from DS Fanboy here and here. The DS Fanboy links have some screenshots. (Nothing graphic, although moving.)

Now if it were anything else--a film or a book--nobody would balk. But because it's a game--which is supposedly a child's reaction to the horrors of the Holocaust--people freak out. And the game is still in development. All Nintendo really did is say "Huh, we don't know anything about this." Nintendo's pretty close-mouthed about things in production, and there are more game publishers out there beyond Nintendo. (I have a feeling if the game does get released over here, some little house like Altus would pick it up, because they take risks on all kinds of games that nobody else will touch.)

I wonder if Luc Bernard needs beta testers...although if I get into its beta, then it *will* suck, because I seem to be completely unable to beta test a game that doesn't righteously suck. One of these days I'm going to say "screw it" to the NDAs I've signed and blog about all the suck I've tested.

So a post over on Erin's blog got me thinking in a roundabout way about men and women. The original post was about some survey that Colleen Hammond did, in which a percentage of men are threatened by women in pants. In my response, I wondered if her sample of men isn't skewed.

I'm in a male-dominated field, and it's safe to say that all my colleagues are men. All of my professors in my field have been men, and those I studied with privately were also possessors of a Y chromosome. A few assholes aside (fortunately very few and far between), I've never had a problem. Certainly not with any of my professors--who've all been encouraging.

In the interest of full disclosure, I dress like a geek. My day job involves computer support, and it wouldn't be practical--or safe, considering some of the crawlspaces I'm in--to dress in overly girly clothes, not that I'd be comfortable wearing such things. Also I don't have the figure for overly revealing clothing. So it's geek chic for me. My colleagues and professors have always been nothing but professional with me, and I with them.

Am I "feminizing" my discipline, when that term usually refers to watering down rigor? I'm held to the same standards as anyone else in my program. One thing I find refreshing from my colleagues is that they're--sometimes brutally--honest. If I weren't toeing the line or doing my end of the work, I'd hear. Then again, where are the non-white people in my discipline? I can't think of any PoC in my department, much less among the faculty.

One of the more eye-opening moments came in the context of a seminar. Someone played a music video featuring scantily-clad, ultra-thin women. I anticipated the rest of the room being attracted to it. Newp. To a person, they were all disgusted by it. Comments ranged from "Ew, gross" to "Poor thing needs a cheeseburger."

So where are all these men that are so titillated by women, that they're resentful of them in pants and can't function when women are in "men's" jobs? I'm sure they're there, like I'm sure there are women who're inappropriate at a job. Resentful at my presence? Threatened by my jeans? Doesn't overly give my male colleagues any credit.

Thinking about the dissertation...

I tend to forget who knows me in real life (and has heard about this), and who doesn't, but my dissertation is "a substantial piece or pieces" of music. (Thus sayeth the program sheet.) So I'm doing a set of pieces on the mysteries (only the original 15...luminous ones are optional, not gospel, and I hate how they break the symbolism of rosary as "little psalter," since there are 150 Hail Marys and 150 psalms.) of the rosary. They're not exact literal settings. If you're familiar with Biber's "Mystery" sonatas, it's sort of like that. I'm not exactly sure how much of it I'll talk about, and hopefully it won't be necessary to understand them. (It's more like one big poetic metaphor.)

I've got the last one done (the crowning of the BVM.) I should work on some of the Joyful ones, since that's the season we're in, but I've never been attracted to the joyful mysteries. Maybe it's the insistence on the Holy Family as something perfect and saccharine, and as a model to those of us with broken families. That insistence of the Holy Family never seemed overly fair to them (I'm sure they had their fair share of squabbles and troubles like the rest of us), and isn't overly fair to the rest of us (we aren't fully human and fully divine, our fathers weren't saints, and our mothers weren't immaculately conceived.)

But I don't want to go very far on the Glorious mysteries, because another facet of what I'm doing is exploring canonic technique. One thing I think that's been lost in computer music is melody. I was listening to some early computer music out of Princeton, and what struck me was how musical it was, as if the composers were playing an instrument, not typing punchcards. (The music department there in the 1960's and 1970's gets much maligned...but oddly enough the students I know who were there write really great music.) I've always been a melodic composer, and I love counterpoint. So far I've got functions written to make any kind of conventional canon. I've got some more tricks up my sleeve for things computers are good at, but people aren't. (Have I mentioned I like Nancarrow?)

And I don't particularly want to do the sorrowful mysteries just yet, because the last big piece I finished was conceptually based upon the seven dolors chaplet. So logically it's one of the Joyous mysteries I should be working on. I started the first one, but I don't like it much.

The other thing that's got me moderately stuck, is that I keep thinking about my recital. Most people these days don't have the attention span for 75 minutes (in 15 pieces). I know...first things first, and write! (Local folks will probably hear more about said recital when it's closer to happening...I'm shooting for next winter.)

"For the use of..."

So while drinking theraflu (head cold) and watching bad daytime TV (what else do you do with a head cold?), I'm catching up on my blogs. I found this entry about poverty over at A Nun's Life. Sr. Julie writes:

When I asked a sister about why they say “for the use of” she said that no one of us owns a single thing in the congregation — even that prayer book that we’ve used for years and which bears the marks of our praying hands and of our tears. By the simple act of writing “for the use of” a sister recognizes that she truly does not own a thing and that all she has is gift. A sister recognizes that if one of her sisters needed that prayer book, she would give it to her in a heartbeat.

Her discussion of poverty and ownership reminded me of knowledge--in a sense, it isn't really mine. It was entrusted to me by someone else, and I'm only using it, until I pass it off to future students. In a sense that which I'm learning about now is only "for the use of Jen" until such time that it's time for me to give it away to someone else.

In another blog, I found this post. Now I don't doubt that some cloning as composition teaching went on in generations before me, but I've never personally experienced it. I've never felt pressured into adopting one style over another. If a teacher played another person's music for me, it was because the piece was interesting or that it was something the teacher wanted to share, not because it was something I should emulate. Perhaps the piece represented a possible solution to a problem I had in a piece. Maybe it was just something cool. Most of my teachers have been pretty quiet on the subject of their own music--which in retrospect is a shame because I can't think of a teacher I've had who doesn't write good music.

I was warned when I was applying for my doctorate that it would ruin me, that I'd not encounter good music, and that those who get doctorates aren't good composers. The first three haven't been true, and as to the last one, I know plenty of people who write horrible music and don't have a last bit of alphabet soup after their names. I think that's the one, great equalizer of academics and non-academics--we all write bad music now and then.

I think my teachers have all instinctively embodied Sr. Julie's understanding of poverty--that the knowledge we have isn't really ours, and should be willingly given up to those who need it. Our knowledge is a gift, and to pass it on is the greatest tribute we could possibly give to those who gave it to us in the first place. Maybe those who worry about the loss of a voice or creativity never really had it in the first place.