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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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