"A little voice inside my head, said..."

...'Don't look back. You can never look back.'"

Obviously, as a historian, I feel I must disagree with Mr. Henley, yet he does have a point. Occasionally in the process of looking back, your mind just shuts down. You can't move forward nor can you move back; everything simply screeches to a halt as your body and mind scream, " "Enough!" I reached this point last week after repeatedly running into stories of sexual assaults on NYC public school teachers committed by students. Horrifying, depressing-- there are not enough adjectives.

But that did it. I needed a break from Fun City.

Instead of working, I have been doing all of that stuff that I suspect the rest of the world runs around trying to squeeze into weekends-- laundry, groceries, yard work, going to the movies, etc. This included developing rolls of film that are so old that I no longer remembered what was on them.

"The boys of summer have gone..."

One of those rolls included this photo of a friend of mine. His pose says a lot about him and, for some reason, makes me think of that line about the ability to capture the "essence" of someone's personality: "Someone who understood him took that." Of course, if I really understood, judging from his attitude, I wouldn't have bothered trying to photograph him in the first place. His pose also reflects what my topic seems to be saying to me at this moment.

"Those days are gone foreverI should just let them go, but..."

Looking at this picture, I wonder if, when I go back to work, I'll be able to connect with my topic as I did before. Have I lost momentum, broken the flow? Will I be able to fully reconnect or will there be a perceptible gap inbetween pre-break and post-break writing? Maybe the dissertation is something like a friend you have fallen out of touch with. By taking a break, you lose the essential sense of connectedness, the person or topic becomes foreign to you, and you need to work to discover the new pattern of your relationship.

Hopefully, finding your way back might be easier with the dissertation than it is with people.

Dum…da da dum.…da da dum…

On Senator Clinton's website you can find the poll that allows you, the voter, to select the Senator's campaign song. I voted for The Tempations' "Get Ready" because not only is it a classic, but it is also the only song on the list I can stand the thought of hearing repeatedly for the next year+.

This brings me to a question a friend asked me the other day: "Does your dissertation have a theme song?" After pausing to consider the possibility of opening my defense with a song, I told him that there are three songs that run repeatedly through my head as I research. Occassionally, I also hum/sing them quietly, much to the annoyance of others in various reading rooms. So, here they are in no particular order:

• "I Happen to Like New York": In my head, I always hear the Bobby Short version of this Cole Porter song. Woody Allen used it in the opening sequences of Manhattan Murder Mystery as the camera lovingly pans New York from above. The line that gets me: "I like the sight and the sound and even the stink of it." I never fail to hear that and think, "It's true! It's true! I do!"

• "Summer in the City": This choice may be the result of waiting to do all of my research in the summer or it may be the fact that I am stuck in the decade of long hot summers, in which the least of anyone's worries was the actual temperature. And, since the Lovin Spoonful version dates from 1966, it is completely of the period. I find the hopeful chorus pretty reassuring: "Despite the heat it'll be alright..."

• The Barney Miller Opening Music: Really, this doesn't need any explanation, does it? The bass line! The cast (Fish, Chano, Wojciehowicz/Wojo, Yemana and his coffee, Dietrich, etc.)! The 12th Precinct! The squad room! The finest of New York's finest! The show even looks like I imagine my topic looks, if that makes any sense, and just hearing the opening theme brings that all to life for me.

Alas, there is no poll to pick my dissertation theme, but I'll seriously think about bringing a bass to my defense.

[Update: The official theme song of the Clinton campaign has been chosen: Celine Dion's "You and I." No comment.]

"Silence was never written down"...

...goes the old Italian proverb. Playing back my interviews, I realize that there are a lot of spots without any sound. Could it be that my recorder was periodically failing? Nope. The silence indicates things that were said with hand gestures, rather than words.

To illustrate my point, here's a random sample from the middle of one interview:

Me: So was he upset?
Interviewee: [Frowns and makes the cosi cosi gesture then shrugs]
Me: [Makes the capisco gesture] Would he have been happier if you had completely assimilated? Became a medigan?
Interviewee: [Laughs as we both "fare la corna" to ward off the malocchio] No, I don't think so.

The dilemna is trying to capture the "true" meaning of this exchange. Putting it all into words, the tone is a little different:

Me: So was he upset?
Interviewee: [Sure, he was a little upset sometimes; other times it didn't bother him. But what could I do about it? You know how it is, how they can be...]
Me: [ You so don't have to tell me!] Would he have been happier if you had completely assimilated? Became a medigan?
Interviewee: [O god forbid! How could you even say that?! What a terrible thing that would have been!] No, I don't think so.

I think I have hit upon the major difficulty that Italian Americans may encounter when simply making an audio recording of their interviews with other Italian Americans. Unless I switch to video, I guess I'm going to lose about half of all of my interviews. [Eh. What are going to do?]