In my previous post, I talked about the existence of Christian Patriarchy. I estimated that it left one quarter of women in the US effectively out of the running for education-requiring professions. It’s hard for people in education-requiring professions to recognize the problem because the Christians they encounter are primarily Mainline Protestants and Catholics. Professional Evangelical Christian men are unlikely to talk to outsiders about how they treat their family unless they are the sort of luke warm, backsliding, liberal evangelicals who don’t follow the biblical literalist beliefs of keeping their women in their place and beating their children into submission.
Continue reading
Christian Patriarchy
As part of my series on leaving academia: patriarchal indoctrination is widespread and has profound implications for disciplines trying to achieve diversity.
Totalitarian, patriarchal religious sects are more common than anyone wants to admit. In the US we really like to pretend that misogynistic patriarchy is a Muslim problem. We’ll sometimes mention ultra-orthodox Jews. But we really, really don’t like to acknowledge that extremism shows up in Christianity. Continue reading
Baba Ganoush
Baba Ganoush is one of my favorite things to do with eggplant. The best thing about it is it freezes and when it is defrosted it retains its texture perfectly. That means if you make a ton of Baba Ganoush in the summer when eggplant is in season, you can just pull it out of the freezer in February and it will still taste shiny and new.
Green Tomato Ratatouille
We’re not in California anymore. In New York, you can’t just put a blanket over your tomatoes at night for the couple of nights in January when it might frost and treat them as perennials. We’ve got a 50% chance that our first frost will show up towards the end of September. At best, bundling up our tomatoes will make them last until sometime in October. The time has come for eating green tomatoes.
Performance Post-Mortem
The other day, I was invited to take part in a concert hosted by the Albany Sonic Arts Collective with Jason Lescalleet and the Pitcher/Chen/Van Nort Trio.
I don’t intend to review the concert–I’m not a good reviewer. I get caught up in the music and a few disjointed points might stick with me later, but not enough to write up a concert in a way that does anyone justice. The best I can do is tell you that the entire concert rocked, which lacks specificity. Instead, what you get is my self-reflexive take on my performance.
Composer as Performer
One of the things a lot of composers I’ve talked to wrestle with is the problem of performance. We’ve specialized and aren’t performers. We write virtuosic works for virtuosic performers of instruments we can’t play virtuosically ourselves.
Failure vs. Amazingness
I haven’t blogged for a while because I realized that I’d been doing a lot of explaining why I was leaving academia and not so much engaging in my compositional process. Today, I’d like to figure out why.
Mentoring isn’t Somebody Else’s Problem
As part of my series on why I’m no longer in academia: mentoring is important. If are in the position to mentor and you don’t do it, you suck.
Mentoring and Networking
As part of my series on why I’m no longer in academia: mentoring is important. Mentoring includes helping your students network. It doesn’t matter how amazing your students are; if you act like you’ve never met them at a conference, people will think you don’t think highly of them.
Mentoring and Publication
As part of my series on why I’m no longer in academia: mentoring is important. It turns out people aren’t just born with an innate store of arcane knowledge about academic publishing.