musical thursdays and the masculine logic of the sentence

this morning in my lecture i went off on a tangent about the masculine logic of the sentence and the way in which our grammar is gendered male. as i waved my arms around and ranted about the way in which the politics of the sentence are weighted in favour of the subject -- that infamous component that determines the form of everything that follows it -- and function with an inherently masculine, even penetratory logic (is "penetratory" a word?), my students, i think, found me a little ridiculous. the whole performance was motivated by a comment virginia woolf makes in her essay "women and fiction". women, according to woolf, need to find a new way of writing, because the sentence is a thing made by men.

it's fitting that i should tackle such a topic on a thursday, for thursdays are both days of performance, and also days of my escape from the world of logos. thursday afternoons i play duets with a colleague in my department, and thursday nights, i get together with some good friends, play some music and eat wonderful, fresh pasta from a local italian specialty shop (pasta genova, i salute you!). i find that slipping into a world, the primary language of which is so different (and yet, so similar) from that which i wrestle with every day, is a wonderful way to mark the end of my teaching week. now please don't think i would be silly enough not to recognize that the language of music has its own gendered logic and structure -- of that i am fully aware -- but there is something about the experience of making music that i truly find transformative. there is also a quality of the pieces that i most enjoy playing that subverts this logic, often parodying it, and turning it on its head (claude bolling's suite for flute and jazz piano trio anyone?). it is for this reason that i have become completely fascinated with this man, greg pattillo, a busker in NYC who mixes beatboxing and flute riffs of tunes from pop culture. as i said to a friend in an e-mail this afternoon: "i want to be this guy when i (musically) grow up!"