James Rhys Edwards: A Response to Zachary Wallmark’s article

The first article was but the response was Party all the time!

abject zen shakuhachi: it's only rock and roll but i like it

I understood the first article and found it mildly amusing. I didn't know whether to agree or disagree with it. The second article is written in such a way as to be incomprehensible, but I think I agree with it. Not sure though because it is written in such a convoluted way. I wonder if there are people out there who understand this academic jargon and could translate both articles into standard English?

Maybe Kiku or another Ph.D. type could explain, is it mandatory for them to write this way, or do they actually think in rambling run- on sentences?

Reading "Wallmark’s emic turn facilitates a suturing with ethnomusicology’s cultural relativist theoretical doxa" reminded me of Henry Sidgwick's comment after reviewing J. M. E. McTaggart's Fellowship thesis on the Hegelian Dialectic. Sidgwick is reported to have said "I can see that this is nonsense, but what I want to know is whether it is the right kind of nonsense." Apparently Mr. Edwards perpetrates the right kind of nonsense as he recently won a prize awarded by the Society for Asian Music for a paper on the "ecocritical aesthetic of noise in the sound art of Akita Masami". The winner received a 5 year subscription to the Society's journal which seems a fair and just punishment.

Very confusing... now I can't figure whether I'm a "good" player or a "bad" player! Better to return to my first sensei's one and only dictum: "shut up and blow"

I have skimmed the Edwars' article but not Zachary Wallmark's. Where is it?
Sorry I have deadlines coming up and this makes me a bit confused....

Forgive me, Kiku
I entered the link to Zachary Wallmark’s article under a separate heading in The Library:
http://www.shakuhachiforum.eu/t931-Zachary-Wallmark-Sacred-Abjection-in-Zen…

Thank you Torsten, for bringing our attention to these two articles. Both are, in my opinion, excellent.

Edward's reply is certainly not, as Brian and Rick point out, an easy read; Wallmark's article was only marginally less difficult for me to understand. Both discuss issues that are pertinent to shakuhachi players, though Edward is writing primarily about broader issues that (probably) only ethnomusicologists would spend (waste? :-) so much effort reading and writing about. Taking the time to read them, AND understand what I was reading, reminded me of what I like about academia - thought provoking writing with an over-abundance of meaning packed in every well-crafted sentence, with just a sprinkling of scholarly competitiveness to keep up the standards. Not everyone's cup of tea, for sure, but it does wonders for one's vocabulary.

In any case, as Pepe implies in his response, reading and writing articles on the shakuhachi in and for the Society of Ethnomusicology's journals are definitely not the same activities as listening to and playing shakuhachi.

Riley, it reminded me of one of the things I dislike about academia - pretentious word spinning using an unnecessarily obscure and barbarous jargon instead of language that any reasonably well-schooled person can readily understand. Mr. Edwards and others like him should follow the advice of Bishop Berkeley and Schopenhauer, both of whom wrote brilliantly on difficult subjects using plain language. Think with the few, write and speak with the many.