More notes on, obviously, music, writing, and music writing
Welcome to Reasonable Things, an occasional newsletter about music, language, and meaning from Joel Heng Hartse.
What I Taught
Last week I finished up my music criticism class for Hugo House. It was an absolute delight to get to this. I like to refer to different thinkers/artists/scholars/writers as “patron saints” of classes I teach, and I’m not sure I’ll ever get to teach a course again whose patron saints are as diverse as John Coltrane, Jessica Hopper, Hanif Abdurraqib, Peter Elbow (the author of Writing without Teachers - almost always a patron saint of any writing course I teach), Robert Christgau, Lester Bangs, and Richard Meltzer. I’m not sure I’ll ever find a way to do something like this again. It was a joy to do, and the class culminated with a brief meet-up at my friend Sean’s Seattle bar, Draft Punk, to celebrate the release of our print zine Puget Sound Forever. (I’m proud of the name of this, which I thought up, and the writing in it, which I lightly edited but was produced by the awesome students in the class, who ranged in age from early 20s to early 60s.)
Where I Was
The brief stop in Seattle was part of an epic travel day (an 11 am shuttle from Peshtahin to Bellevue, an Uber to Seattle, a cancelled bus and a frantic booking of Amtrak tickets, and, finally, arriving home in Vanxouver around 11 pm) on my way back from the Grûnewald Guild, a very special place near Leavenworth, WA, focused on art, faith, and community. My kind of place. I had three weeks there as an “artist”-in-residence, and while I did not end up writing any of the three books I thought I had in me (more on that another time, if ever), I was able to complete and submit three manuscripts from my long-neglected, decade-old doctoral research, as well as do a bit of exploratory writing about a question that is the object of my current obsession and, inshallah, subject of an eventual big fancy book: what, exactly, is writing?
It was wonderful to have this time to read, write, and think, and I’ll be doing an online talk on some of this on Sunday, March 2 if you’re interested - register below.
AiR Meet & Greet (Winter II 2025)
Don't miss the opportunity to meet our 2025 Winter II Artists in Residence: Tamara and Joel! They will share their art-making processes and the projec...
Something I Wrote
One of the things that came up in the music writing class was the way that the landscape of writing about music has changed. The last piece we read, “The State of Music Criticism,” included the following assessments from people involved with writing-about-music as a vocation:
“I think the state of music criticism is strong, but the state of music journalism as a career path is bleak.”
and
“It's a bad time if your goal is to make (not very much) money working for legacy publications, corporations, and startups, but a great time if you want to express yourself.”
A lot of this had to do with the demise of media and the rise of, e.g., Substack and other self-publishing on the internet. All this is to say: I’m no longer quite sure what the purpose of an email newsletter like this is or should be. In a sense it’s the 21st century version of a blog, which to me used to mean “a place to write things no one will pay you for,” but it’s increasingly clear that “writing people will pay you for” is a much smaller piece of whatever economic pie exists than it used to be. There’s a sense that having a Substack (which this isn’t, by the way) is part of Having a Brand™ and Building a Platform™ and all kinds of other things that I find so distasteful that I’ve disengaged from pretty much all social media besides LinkedIn which I hope I’ll quit if it ever starts to make me feel gross about myself (of which there is absolutely a non-zero chance).
Most of me still wants to make this a way to make friends and well-wishers aware of things I’ve done out there in the real world, but I recognize that for a lot of people, this kind of thing is where a portion of their actual work lives. I don’t know yet how to feel about that, so here is a bit of something I wrote recently:
I spent all of Thursday evening in a frenzied state of writing and thinking. I had been neglecting some data my two research assistants – long since done being paid by my grant money - had collected via interviews three years ago, and faced with the first hard deadline this project had ever encountered, I buckled down and read all the transcripts, looking for interesting patterns and insights. While it wasn’t perfect, I was excited to be finally working on this project I’d been putting off for so long. Being at this conference gave me some confidence that it might work, that playing around with ideas could be valuable. Anyway, I knew I’d have a chance to bounce this stuff off people tomorrow. I actually said out loud, in a kind of insomniac moment of clarity, “what a gift!” To be able to read, write, and think? And get paid for it?
Well, if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans, as they say. The exhilaration of the all-nighter wore off, and Friday morning, fifteen years into the academic conference game, I had my first ever honest-to-goodness 100% no-show. I couldn't believe it. A very kind woman from Centralia College came by to count the number of attendees at the presentation (charitably, she wrote down two: her and me) and I explained a bit about the data to her, and also attempted to diagnose the source of the problem. Some likely possibilities: I signed up for the wrong type of session (a 90 minute panel instead of a 20-minute paper); the timing (first thing in the morning is the least coveted time slot at any conference); the subject matter (Economics professors’ beliefs about writing - boooooring).
With that out of the way, I was able to focus on what turned out to be the real reason I was in Spokane: to eat meals with friends I’d made between the ages of six and twenty-seven.
You can read the rest here, at an old-timey 20th-century-style "blog."
applied applied linguistics: Scattered Thoughts on a What Should Have Been a Disappointing Weekend at CCCC 2024 in Spokane (But Somehow Wasn't)
“How that name comes up. Mixing memory and desire." Seymour Glass in J.D. Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” “ But yield who will...
I hope you’re well!
JHH
Vancouver, BC