daily.billtron.org

I just fell asleep at work.  I’m so tired, after staying up late working on a lecture for today.   A friend invited me to speak about listening and the subway, and it was the first time I had presented on my dissertation material in lecture format.  It was also the first time I had given a lecture based primarily on historical material.  As a popular music scholar, I have been fortunate to have a bevy of multimedia examples with which to pepper my lecture, keeping students interested and breaking up the presentation of information into bite-sized segments no longer than 20 minutes each.  But speaking about newspaper articles from 1904 was surprisingly difficult to do for 75 minutes.

I’m realizing that the archival element of my dissertation, which is coalescing into a historical account of the changing soundscape of the NYC subway system, is much better suited to writing than to speaking.  This is something I will have to work with, as I expect to speak about it much more in the future.