I GO TO WHERE MUSIC WAS BORN (reportedly J.S. Bach's last words)

VADIM BATITSKY

a.k.a. Boom Boomboomsky

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Cancel my subscription to the resurrection.

 THE DOORS.

The farewell message below was originally posted in late Spring of 2020.  It was removed a few months later for reasons discussed in the post  Ready. Aim. ...Tweet!.

That farewell post is now back to active duty with a few changes due to its post-mortem status.

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I GO TO WHERE MUSIC WAS BORN. (J.S. Bach`s last  words)

If writing one's own obituary can be fun, I must have been doing something wrong because the task struck me as annoyingly sentimental.  Perhaps it is because I thought of obituaries as summaries of notable achievements, whereas my achievements have been less than modest and were intended to benefit only myself and two other persons, the persons without whom my life would be barely distinguishable from mere existence.  (One is my wife, the other is our English Labrador.)

I was not trying to be cute.  There wasn't much to receiving a fellowship and later a humanities PhD. from a second-rate Ivy League graduate program.  Ditto for receiving a tenure-track appointment and later tenure from a regional university. This much has been done by people whose only notable qualities were assiduously cultivated verbosity and grotesquely inflated sense of self-importance.  As for getting a few papers published in selective peer-review journals, initially this may seem impressive, but not after these papers sink to the pitch-black bottom of every academic quarry lake (Google Scholar, JSTOR, etc.) because it takes more than a few citations per year to keep a paper afloat.

Not an obituary then, just a death notice.  The kind one could find in the olden days at the very end of a small town newspaper informing its readers of the passing of some beloved mother and grandmother whose cookies and pies were for many years the glory of the town's social events.

Still, why go public?

Here is why: Although much of what had been written in this blog deals with music-related subjects, it is not one of those blogs whose keepers morosely rip one commercial CD after another and just as morosely post digital copies in (what I suspect are) delusional hopes of acquiring friends (why not get a dog?), validating their lives (why not donate sperm instead?), or fighting off boredom (ever tried switching hands while masturbating?).  My blog was only my way of having fun by advertising my enthusiasms and venting my frustrations derived from encounters with art music, art criticism, journalism, academia, and a few other subjects I found worthy of my time.  At the risk of flattering myself, I took it that those few people who periodically visited my blog did so because they were interested in, if not always pleased by, what I wrote about these subjects.  And this made me feel that such readers deserved to know that this blog had become inactive not because I got bored with it or ran out of things to say, but for a biological reason beyond the reach of modern medicine.

In the meantime, I thank my readers for keeping me company over the years.
 

VADIM
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Ready! Aim! ... Twee!

 

... there are times when the interests of the proletariat call for ruthless extermination of its enemies... 

We would be deceiving both ourselves and the people if we concealed from the masses the necessity of a desperate, bloody war of extermination...

Vladimir Lenin, Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the Soviet Union

To overcome our enemies we must have our own socialist militarism.  ...   As for the rest ... they must be annihilated.

Grigory Zinoviev, Chairman of the Communist International

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I thought my farewell post of May 2020 would be my last. I was mistaken.  That post was removed a few weeks later because I came across news articles (1, 2, 3) describing how distinguished academics came to grief for publicly voicing opinions deemed heretical by the Stalinist-Maoists hashtag activists who see themselves as front-line defenders of diversity, inclusion, social justice, and other 'virtues' described by equally vacuous combinations of words. If it weren't for their eminence, these academics would quickly find themselves standing in line at their local unemployment offices, wondering why the fuck didn't they major in Finance to become high-earning investment bankers at Goldman Sachs. 

Of course, I am a tiny fish in the academic pond, and the internet visibility of my alter ego is very low.  Still, the possibility of having to stand before the execution squad of trigger-happy administrators - whose principal job these days is to console and hug consumers of educational services (formerly known as students) who complain about not being sufficiently cuddled by providers of educational services (formerly known as professors) – would be enough to poison my rapidly shrinking future. 

Have I become paranoid?  Maybe.  But then again, maybe not.  Not in the world where reason and sanity have been "cancelled" by infantile, ignorant, arrogant, self-righteous, brain-washed, Twitter-Instagram-Facebook-addicted members of American Komsomol.