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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