I'm still here

I promise you that I am still around. It's just that I've been teaching the summer class that I wrote about in July, and it is mildly to moderately (completely) exhausting. However, I have now completed five out of six weeks of it, and I can see the glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel! For the first time in 5 weeks, I did not need to work on my lecture the morning of class; it was done by 9:45 PM the night before! Success! I got to sleep in until 7:45 AM! Miraculous! Exclamation points!


In five weeks, I have taught about manifestations of gender in (in order):

20th century USian jazz
16th century Italian pantomime
18th century French ballet
19th century French ballet
20th century Brazilian samba
20th century Puerto Rican salsa
20th century USian disco
19th century Chinese opera
18th century Italian opera
19th century French opera
20th century USian musicals
21st century USian musicals
18th century British ballads
20th century USian blues
20th century Algerian raï
20th century USian country
18th-21st century musicological canonicity
18th century German chamber music (on Moog synthesizer)
19th century German and French chamber music (on acoustic instruments and on theremin)
20th century Austrian chamber music
20th century Greek-American performance art
20th century Beatles
20th century Indian raga


All I have left is gender in:

12th century German (Latin) chant
19th century Austrian piano four-hands music
19th century Austrian piano etudes
20th century USian girl groups
20th century USian rock bands
21st century USian sing-alongs


Thank heaven for my wonderful TA, who has taught 80s-00s dance pop and heavy metal so I didn't have to, plus has shared the teaching with me on many of the above topics.


I will be back on the internet soon to tell you about the paper topics my students have chosen. I'm sure they will be as oddly varied as usual. I guarantee that this time around there will be exactly zero papers on "If I were a Boy" by Beyoncé and zero papers on "I'll Make a Man out of You" from Mulan. How do I know? I taught them on the first day of class and forbade anyone from writing about a song we'd covered in class. Just so that I wouldn't have to read any more papers about them.





And in unrelated news, a beloved dog died today. In the interests of maintaining my tenuous anonymity, I will not share her name here, but she was a wonderful canine companion for nearly two decades, and she will be sorely missed. She wasn't my dog, but she was at least a dog-in-law of mine, and I will miss her--the Christmas ornament sheep made of her fluffy undercoat, the sudden and seemingly endless foot baths under the coffee table when you hadn't even known she was there, and even the long-since-outgrown savage protectiveness of her dinner. I watched her grow from a snappish, mistreated young shelter dog into an affectionate, dignified old lady in one of the most loving homes a dog could ever have. Goodbye, old fox, and thanks for the sweetness you brought into everyone's lives.