Wrapping up some loose ends
Conclusions and openings
So it’s the start of 2026, and it’s also the tail end of the sabbatical leave I’ve been enjoying since the end of last spring semester. I’ve spent the time (mostly) wisely: while I was in the UK this past summer I was able to get my Mel Powell book into good enough shape to send it off to the publisher (currently I’m awaiting readers’ comments); then my autumn trip to the Berkshires led to the sort of reflection and mental stimulation that a sabbatical is supposed to lead to. November’s joint meeting of AMS and SMT was productive and busy, and I got to reconnect with some good friends and clever folk. I finally managed to edit and send off to a journal the long interview I conducted with the amazing percussionist Jan Williams back in 2022, so that’s in the pipeline too. And just today I consolidated the separate files comprising my New York School oral history book into one single mega-file so I could see what it’s going to look like as a book: 249 pages in its present form, not counting the index I somehow will have to create, and the bibliography that I’m still putting together. I gave myself until March 1st to get it off to the publisher.
In terms of personal and family life we had a wonderful visit with daughter Gabi and son-in-law Paul for Christmas. It featured an excellent meal at one of our favorite neighborhood restaurants in New Orleans, two visits to an escape room (we had to go back and try again after failing to escape from the swamp vampires the first time), a lesson in making kimchi from my son-in-law, some board games, and lots of laughter. I’m happy that Kathy is settling into retirement and finding meaningful things to do, including advocacy for prisoners, church work, and some craft-related activities and entrepreneurship. Son Jack continues to work remotely, functioning as some combination of human-cyborg relations specialist, air traffic controller, hostage negotiator, and customer service representative (he communicates with coders in India, execs in New York, factory people all over the US, and so on). Gabi has another two semesters of PhD coursework and then will be ABD (all but dissertation), and plans a lengthy stay in Alaska this summer to gather data for her final project. She and Paul (who has just recently started a post-doc, 100% remote, at Cornell University) are looking at moving to Portland, Oregon sometime next year to be closer to Paul’s sister and his parents, who are looking to move here from Seoul for at least part of the year. So we may be spending some time on the Pacific coast in the medium term.
We all get along and love to be together. All in all, we are one of the wealthiest families you can imagine.
Looking ahead I have to start the lurch back into full-time employment next week—a faculty meeting next Wednesday and an all-day faculty retreat on Thursday. Then classes begin the week after. I have the coveted Tuesday/Thursday teaching schedule so I don’t go back into the classroom until the 13th. Both of the courses I’ll be teaching are at the graduate level, which provides a gentle segue back into it—the older I get and the weirder the current century becomes, the wider the comprehension gap between myself and the present crop of eighteen- to twenty-two year olds becomes. So I’ll have some time before I need to confront that in the classroom.
The upcoming year will include some changes, some routine. I’ll probably use my March break to go up to the northeast and visit friends up there, while exploring in an archive or two or three. We’ll probably visit Gabi and Paul in Colorado in May, just before their lease runs out and they have to change apartments. I won’t be participating in my usual study abroad program in London and Edinburgh this summer, alas; it seemed like a good year to take a break. (My colleague Vince will be part of the crew for the LSU in Oxford program, and the third member of our Musketeeriate, Irina will spend the summer in Siberia visiting her parents.) I do hope to get something accepted for DubMAC, the UK/Ireland music analysis conference in July, though; if that works out Kathy and I will spend a bit of time in Ireland, which I’ve never visited. Less time away in the summer means more time with my zany, recalcitrant dog Dalrymple. He’s not getting any younger and I don’t like to be away from him for the whole month.
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I’ve mostly avoided political commentary in this blog because (1) there’s plenty of that in the blogosphere, and everywhere else, these days, and (2) I have nothing very original to add; there are some very insightful people writing about our present predicaments, many of whom are right here on Substack. Also, (3) one of the purposes of this blog has always been to provide a measure of self-administered mental health care, and spending time doom-scrolling or inveighing against the present regime and its many crimes would be the opposite of therapeutic. But the political licks at the heels of everything we do or try to preserve. Today’s article in Salon by Digby presents a good case for the role of the arts in responding to, and shaping resistance to authoritarianism. A folk song can’t topple a dictator, but it can help nourish the forces that do so.
I recall, for some reason, the opening ceremony to one of the Olympics, some time during the post-9/11 years. Back then, for quite a spell it seemed as though if you weren’t 100% all in for America’s frenzied, supercharged militaristic insanity you were ipso facto a terrorist; seldom has this country been more isolated, less beloved than after the cynical, senseless invasion of Iraq in defense of Dick Cheney’s mania and greed. I watched the ceremony on television and noted what an impressive job the organizers had done: they’d created a pageant, a fiction, of world unity and of a common human society. It was a show biz, of course; a Potemkin village simulacrum of human unity and celebration. But it held a mirror up to what our country was up to at the time—while we were doubling down on American exceptionalism at its most paranoid, angry, and exclusionary, some athletes, artists, and performers were gathering somewhere else to at least pretend that a real, unified, sane human society was possible.
I end with the dedication that John Cage placed at the beginning of his second book, A Year From Monday:
To us and all those who hate us, that the U.S.A. may become just another part of the world, no more, no less.
Come visit Maine, Jeff!