Crushing
Updates from a toxic attachment
Longtime readers will know that my most recent obsession is all about crushes, especially as they relate to popular music. It’s been a while since I’ve written about them here1, and I wanted to return with a few updates.
Crush Course 2.0
Last year, at the encouragement of my dear colleague, I was able to offer a grad seminar on love songs. While the topic of crushing per-se only occupied us for a week, expanding the idea to consider love more broadly opened up all kinds of possibilities for exploring music history, with a particular emphasis on the ways that amorous affects have historically functioned to smuggle ideological positions, whether as a propaganda for the political status-quo or as rejections of its normative power. I think the course went well, largely, though I never expected to teach it again so soon. This year, at a new institution, I was given that chance, and when I revisited the syllabus, I found myself unexpectedly making quite a few changes.
There are many risks built into the second version of this syllabus. The idea of opening a course on love songs with four weeks of readings that mostly don’t concern music risks alienating students, especially insofar as I’ve also condensed readings to fit into those four weeks, tackling the whole of Lauren Berlant’s voluble Desire/Love in a single class period. Should I have put more in there about Troubadors and courtly love songs? What about opera? I removed last year’s Taruskin reading because despite the fact that it was literally titled “Love Songs,” the short portion mostly discussed scores Josquin scores, without much room for discussion.
This time around, I also got rid of some of the sociological studies, which basically tracked listening habits while interviewing people about their personal lives. I replaced those with more readings on different philosophies of love and affection, largely from the The Routledge Handbook of Love in Philosophy. I also thought it was important to set some time aside to discuss the common cultural forms through which love and desire are most commonly channeled (i.e. the institution of marriage), which will give us the opportunity to talk about domestic labor and feminist politics, as well as Hallmark movies and other propaganda for a specific vision of the good life.
Finally, I squeezed in a reading about John Cage and Pauline Oliveros, both for an opportunity to discuss the avant-garde at least once, and also for an chance to consider how Western aesthetics winds its way into Cage’s works (despite his attempts to disavow them) through his anxieties over his own embodiment. In other words, Cage’s efforts to remove his own subjectivity from his music leave traces we could consider oppositional to eros, or the “uses of the erotic” that Audre Lorde wrote about, a kind of dialectical underside of a love song a white/male aversion to feeling. This helps complete a circle, hopefully, by tracing the trivialized reputation of romance back to some of the most foundational ideas in Western/masculinist philosophy.
I don’t know what my students will make of our materials, whether or not they will engender fruitful conversations, and more. But after a surprising amount of hand-wringing on my part, here is my best guess for an updated syllabus.
Book (?)
After a wave of enthusiasm (on my part) and frenetic writing, turning the crush idea into a full-fledged book project has been slow going. Well, at least in one sense. I do have a full book draft at this point, a first pass at a version of my idea; but that draft doesn’t seem—to me, or to the anonymous peer-reviewers who read an excerpt—that it will work for readers, will be compelling in the way that I want it to be. I say this here for a few reasons. First, I think it’s very much (if not important, at least) in the spirit of this newsletter to share not only accomplishments but also setbacks, which abound in the business of writing.
Second, the reasons I’m having difficulty figuring out what to do with this idea (and how to do it) are to do with matters of writing style, which I think brings up interesting debates around academic vs trade writing, and what it is, exactly, that academics are looking to do when they try to write for public audiences rather than small sets of niche readers in their specialized subfields. To put it simply, I have been trying to write the crush book for a wider readership, and have been missing the mark because I’m not really used to doing that.
Academic, trade, and crossover books are each distinct in terms of how they are written and marketed, as well as the goals towards which that writing might be bent. This seems common-sensical, but for academics to even identify what kinds of writing tics scream “academic” to readers—let alone rework them into engaging prose—remains perhaps the most difficult work we can attempt, and for a whole bunch of reasons. One of these, of course, is that we spend so much time learning about our fields that almost none is left over for learning about writing itself—there was, for most of us, precisely zero (0) training in grad school how to write well.
Another reason it’s so difficult is that academic work is necessarily divorced from the market, which is at the end of the day what trade books are all about. You can’t get a trade contract unless a publisher thinks your book might sell, but being concerned with selling is a direct impediment to conducting research, putting the two goals at direct odds.
Relatedly, there is the problem of whether or not there exists a “public” that would be interested in the kinds of ideas academics study. I think with the humanities, at least, the answer has historically been “yes,” as long as we can figure out how to write in an engaging way. But A) that public has historically not been super large (which makes selling a book to trade publishers difficult for all but those few academic stars, your Ross Gays or Sara Ahmeds), and B) we are living in a climate increasingly and uniquely hostile towards academia and by extension academics, potentially shrinking the size of that already intimate sphere.
Our profoundly anti-intellectual cultural atmosphere, which makes me feel ambiently but constantly under siege, occasions two opposed responses in me: on the one hand, a desire to fiercely defend what we do as academics and on our own terms, which sometimes translates into a desire on my part to not change a damn thing about what we do but to argue more vociferously for its value. But on the other hand, I also have a desire to share what we do with people outside of academia, a project that may be hindered by digging in heels and refusing to adjust to their needs.
The question, for me at least, is this: do we need to change how we write in order to foster a public that wants to read scholarship? Does scholarship need to be adapted/translated/written differently in order for non-academics to want to read it? Or is there some other kind of work that can be done to convince general readers that reading scholarship is a good and desirable endeavor—even when it’s written to be academic?
I am confused about all this, but one thing I do know is that we’re not doing ourselves any favors when academics constantly reinforce the widely-held belief that academic writing is bad. Sometimes it is bad, of course; but the queer/feminist push to alert us to the ways in which “neutral” “authoritative” academic writing is too often a front for white/male conventions has sparked a revolution that has helped birth a genuine proliferation of writing both unapologetically academic and also very fucking good (VFG). That said, it’s not trade writing; the purposes and the styles remain distinct—and should.
Writers who take pains to write well often do so because they want to be read by more than a handful of people. Thus, problems remain: do non-academics know about this good writing? Do they care? Do general readers still find academic conventions alienating no matter how artfully composed? How much of industry perceptions regarding what “will sell” is based on a static stereotype? What books are capable of breaking those stereotypes, of leading the reading public to places they didn’t know they wanted to go? Are we scared and beholden to pre-existing “safe bets” in the same way that democratic pollsters try to wrap themselves in knots around what people already think they believe, rather than daring to try to lead such that people change their minds, catching up eventually? Or is anything besides the absolute safest bet doomed in a literary landscape fractured by smartphone-informed inattention and monopolistic publishing?
Needless to say: I don’t have the foggiest. But I want to be thinking more critically about those differences. If you have thoughts about this, I’d love to hear them. At any rate, while this has turned into a rumination about writing style more-so than one about crushing, I want to be upfront about the nature of the difficulty I’m having. I could write a straightforwardly academic book about the crush. But would that serve the subject matter? I don’t think so. Yet I also can’t seem to figure out what will. I promise to keep trying, though, and to bring my halting, imperfect efforts to this lil newsletter. Cry hard.