A Month By Any Other Name

Hello, fans. It’s a month since I last posted anything here; a strange and strained month that seems to promise little more than another like it to follow, and that’s how that goes, though I’m looking forward to life in the Greater Chicago Area. I’m still in Santa Barbara, now, awaiting the official memorial for my mother, which we’ve set for Saturday, October 10th at Shoreline Park, near the wooden steps, 2 PM (come by, if you feel like it – very informal). Soon after I’ll pack up and drive to Evanston, Illinois, settle in for my first real winter, and get to assembling this dissertation.

As you may have heard, the University of California (along with the state budget) is broke, and they seem to think that they can make up some of the loss by increasing our fees and tuition by 40% (8% already, and another 32% coming up)(not to mention cutting professors’ pay 8-15%). Since I’ll be away I’m having to put more energy than I’d like into playing dueling-loopholes with the bureaucracy to keep my costs down, which also involves questions about my insurance and repayment of student loans. This is the least interesting part of the Graduate Student Game.

But the game’s not all bad. I’m getting a lot done on the writing already, and I think it’ll be a good dissertation. Some people dread the writing part, but I love it – I’m already up to nearly 90 pages (including front matter, two chapters, 5 appendices, and an ever-expanding bibliography). And I’ve enjoyed getting back to UCSB Middle East Ensemble rehearsals, seeing all the folk again, playing ud and cümbüş (though there’s no Turkish music this quarter, at least not yet).

And today at school we had our first Ethnomusicology Forum of the quarter; this is a regular weekly meeting of all the graduate students and professors to keep in contact, share research, ideas, complaints, host guest artists and speakers, etc. Today I met and welcomed the students who’ve joined while I was away, heard about research people did over the summer (I’ll present my Istanbul tale next Wednesday), and – I’ve been leading up to this – learned that the week after that there’s a subject for discussion in the Forum, “Blogging in the Field” – about researchers who blog during and about their research excursions (I guess this is a ‘thing’ – see here). Since I’ll be either on the road or in Evanston that day I thought I might post something here (that is, above, in the next post) about it… a sort of meta-post; blogging about the blogging.

I wonder if that’s such a good idea (not least because I have no idea who actually reads this), but marginally bad ideas seem to be a part of blogging, anyway, so we’ll see what comes up.

OK – thanks for stopping by!