Maelstrom, Part VIII: Scourge

A cursory overview:
Maelstrom, Part I: Immolation (April 10, 2006)
"Let me tell you of this outrage."

Maelstrom, Part II: Reckoning (April 11, 2006)
"I have made my judgement, alongside many of my comrades: Bowling Green State University is beyond salvation."

Maelstrom, Part III: Oblivion (May 7, 2008)
"At this point, the fact that Bowling Green State University is still screwing me is absolutely ludicrous."

Maelstrom, Part IV: Annihilation (May 13, 2008)
"Bowling Green State University will be razed to the ground and its dark presence will be but a distant memory." 
"Until that day, this maelstrom is not over."

Maelstrom, Part V: Nemesis (June 2, 2012)
"...I have been spurred into action, taking steps toward fulfilling my destiny as the scourge of BGSU."
"Instead of wallowing in those negative memories, putting myself at the mercy of their volatility, I became their master."
"I feel emboldened, and even just a little bit thrilled by revealing my hand: I am become nemesis."

Maelstrom, Part VI: Domination (August 10, 2014)
"All of this is how much I hate Bowling Green State University."

Maelstrom, Part VII: Revelation (March 28, 2016)
"Today, I bring you my moment of glory."


See also:
The War of Perception (March 25, 2016)
"I won't stop until all of you who have benefited from the disgusting favoritism at BGSU can at least fucking admit it."
"One by one, I want to change my erstwhile colleagues' perceptions until I have converted everyone to seeing the light. Some people need reminding, while others have always been in denial and need their illusions shattered. This is not to alienate them, but to reconcile with them."
"I am waging war to demolish any false perceptions you might still have."

Long Time, Long Distance (March 31, 2016)
"Indeed, this spring I have been stricken by a deep fondness of BG friends and a yearning to have squeezed in more time together before the end... and a haunting regret that I couldn't have been more than I was."



So. Here we are again.

In 2014, before my wife's cancer changed everything, I was building towards something. 2015 started with a great momentum towards catharsis with regards to BGSU, as well as many other bucket-list items. 2015 was supposed to be... my year. Instead, in the spring it took a turn. 2015 was an existential nightmare-athon, and put things like Maelstrom into a perspective I never wanted to have.

2016 was a year of reflection. I reflected on everything. Everything. Every. Thing. I also reflected on every chapter of my past, every flake of debris, every airborne bit of ash cast by every still-barely-smoldering fire in my heart related to each time and place. I would cycle through these compartmentalized modes of nostalgia like putting on an LP of regrets and cherished, iconic memories from each.

So, granted, as you can see by the links above, 2016 did see a return to this angle of projects, intentions, and ambitions. And so I continued to build towards something...

2017 was a hell worse even than breast cancer. The Accident in March (on our wedding anniversary, no less), and then, at the top of October, when my wife still hadn't recovered, an overlapping crisis of melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer. Fucking skin cancer. Ostensibly unrelated to invasive ductal carcinoma. Some doctor (I forget who, in the rotating blur of medical personnel in my encounters) said she had better chances of winning the Powerball than getting both cancers. (That was the week we started buying lottery tickets, because fuck it.)

Now, here we are. Building towards something... bundling up energy like a cactuar in Final Fantasy...

Truth be told, for the longest time I couldn't even come back to it. My list for BG-related progress and catharsis was too daunting, too demanding, too... draining. I couldn't even think about it for a single day without burning out. So I'd turn away. Every time the war horns would sound across the plains, I would shut the windows and turn up the stereo. I would be willing to fully immerse myself in any other mode of nostalgia and just focus on other goals.

The prerequisites for BG Mode progress were too steep in cost, in terms of time and energy. But eventually, I knew this perpetual state of deferral couldn't last. I had to move forward. One thing that was holding me back was the overwhelming task of my old Master's Thesis project. As I'd posted on Facebook on February 14th:

I have been in a vivid state of BGSU nostalgia since Saturday. Part of it’s the dreary, cold weather, which is rare here. But I also finally got around to something that’s been nagging me for a long time. An old project that needs fixing.

My Master’s Thesis was a symphonic tone poem, which never got so much as an offering for a reading, even when the resident orchestra was offering readings. In February 2006, just as I was calling the composition finished, the Finale file became infested with gremlins who ruined the MIDI playback, so I didn’t even have THAT to show for my months of toil. I became so burned out on the bullshit limbo Dr. Lillios purposefully kept me in to the point of screwing me out of graduating on time, and the epic saga of the thesis betrayal has been thoroughly blogged about, that for the longest time I couldn’t even muster the stamina to look at the notation file. (I still don’t have that stamina, really. I hate Lillios, Shrude, Beerman, and to a lesser extent, Kuehn… not to mention at least 51% of the student body.) Then, it became a matter of Real Life taking precedence over such trivial matters as personal catharsis. Either because I had bigger fish to fry or because I couldn’t bear to gaze down the steep precipice that was BGSU Mode, I kept resisting the call to deal with this and about a dozen other unresolved concerns.

Now, though, I am intent on using Logic Pro to get a reasonable digital mock-up of the damn thing, but it’s taking me to a dark place. And the amount of work it’s going to require is overwhelming to think about. But, gods damn it, I need the satisfaction of this accursed recording. I have so much “unfinished business” from Bowling Green. On the bright side, it is motivating me to rekindle old friendships. 

I just had to say something, because so often I keep things limited to my own head, so no one ever knows I go through weeks like this, and I think my BGSU peeps should know that I still think about you a lot. Hell, I just the other night watched Revenge of the Sith in your honor. Or, dishonor, depending on how you feel about the movie. 

I also often think about an epic lightsaber duel-to-the-death with each of the composition faculty members, individually. In a field of boiling acid geysers and lava and noxious fumes and flying piranhas and needles and voracious Pygmy-Cthulhu demon babies. 

I mean all of this in a productive way. My graduate thesis still mocks me twelve years later. I must kill it. Evil was allowed to endure, now I must cast it into the fires of Mount Doom from whence it came. Sooo… who wants Pita Pit?

Shortly after announcing it, I burned out again. Volition is just too taxing. The second year of my two-year grad school experience was dominated by Lillios fucking me over with it every week. Being, as she herself best put it, her "anal-retentive self" about perpetuating its pointlessly circular revisions, evidently for the sake of keeping it from congealing into a final draft. (I have much more to say on this.)

Other than that, also there are over twenty items on the BG list, the main thing is Unfinished Fever Dreams, which I laid out in detail in Maelstrom, Part VI: Domination. At the end of 2014, when momentum on this had become an unstoppable juggernaut of motivation and productivity, I fully intended on making 2015 my year. I had grand designs. But then... yeah. 2015. You know the story.

I was keeping a low profile until such a time as Unfinished Fever Dreams was ready to drop like an atomic bomb, an overkill of scathing satire, in one fell swoop. Twitter, YouTube, SoundCloud, whatever. I thought of the scene in Gladiator when he takes off the mask and reveals his identity to his nemesis. I had to save myself for that, because let's face it: on Twitter, you get ONE SHOT at being a royal dick before you are blocked. And I wanted Dr. Lillios to choke on her own reaction like Commodus did in Gladiator.

From the blog post Maelstrom, Part VI: Domination:

My alter ego Mittens’ next opus will probably be a multi-movement work I outlined while I had too much time on my hands as a night watchman, exactly the time of the blog post Maelstrom, Part V: Nemesis. 

When I close my eyes, I can hear the bells tolling for the Church of New Music, a cacophony of mindless textures and saxophone extended technique. At my old job, as I was researching and listening, listening and researching, what began as a small piece to imitate the music I couldn’t get out of my head grew into more movements. Five, six, eight. Ten. Sixteen. The final outline of the work is sixteen movements. I was meticulous in my outline, charting which pieces each movement are modeled after, which pieces fit best with which titled movement, and how they would give shape to the overall composition (that probably no one will ever want to hear). I culled the list from works from the Big Four, obviously—the composition faculty from my time, Beerman, Lillios, Shrude, Kuehn—but also from the likes of Ligeti, Feldman, Wolff, Babbitt, and a few others who I won’t mention because they might not make the final cut.

The first movement, though, Repressive Voices, uses real audio of various people from BGSU talking about the program itself, which I gathered over time. What starts out as quotes taken out of context evolves cleverly into a rearrangement of the words to have them say what I think they should be saying, to more accurately depict the true nature of the program. I don’t have it completed yet, but the script is brilliant, if I say so myself.

Why do it? What’s the point? What’s the point of studying music I hate to imitate it out of spite?

I think you just answered your own question. Spite.

Also, because of the title itself: Unfinished Fever Dreams. Maybe by doing this, it will be out of my system and I can finally have peace and quiet. Because these thoughts spiral around like a fever dream that never finishes.

That, and because once it’s online for the whole world to see, it will be a clear “fuck you” that will hopefully garner some hateful comments on YouTube. That is my endgame with this piece, as with most of Mittens’ other works: to troll BGSU and everyone like them. It is essentially a musical hate letter to Bowling Green State University. And it will be done someday.

Unfinished Fever Dreams
I. Repressive Voices
II. Arrogant Escapades
III. Antagonistic Impulses
IV. Sophistic Trances
V. Pedantic Episodes
VI. Didactic Verses
VII. Stochastic Pontifications
VIII. Iconoclastic Interludes
IX. Pretentious Images
X. Intransigent Expectations
XI. Narcissistic Interpolations
XII. Declamatory Interruptions
XIII. Solipsistic Diatribes
XIV. Syllogistic Afterthoughts
XV. Masochistic Variations
XVI. Regressive Outbursts

And then, in that post, I went on to detail my outline for the twenty-movement symphonic poem The Destruction of Bowling Green, Ohio as well. But that's for a future post. Another accomplishment that is an overwhelmingly demanding prerequisite for any glorious revelation.

Apart from all these ultimately unnecessary composition projects (and a few even more frivolous and eccentric projects that I won't even mention here because, while BG-related, they are not musical in nature, but just for my own gratification), mainly I just wanted to get back in touch with my friends from grad school. I felt like, while taking a few years off of social involvement out of necessity to deal with survival, time marched on without me. It felt like all my friends got used to me just being a tragic footnote in their list of supporting characters, and everyone left me behind.

As of this post, we are still living in an unfinished house, years after moving in, because cancer hit at the same exact time we bought the damn place. Meanwhile, our private business is also demanding. Our three-year-old Tasmanian Devil child is demanding. And there are other health concerns still taking up a lot of time and energy. Our lives are not easy, orderly, or out of the proverbial woods. Free time is preciously scarce, so it was looking like the people I knew from BGSU were just going to forget me altogether. So that's that. Right?

Recently, when kicking around the idea of focusing on this particular niche area of my life, I gradually came to realize that my grand plans, while certainly grand, were unnecessarily so. Earlier, I did use the word "overkill" to describe it, after all.

Over a year ago (I don't even remember when), progress was stalled when I couldn't work out the kinks in the fourth movement of Unfinished Fever Dreams. I had started composing movements out of order, but I planned on uploading a total sixteen-movement playlist on YouTube. I gradually came to realize that I didn't need to. The first three were finished a long time ago, and were just sitting on my computer, unknown and unheard by anyone. What a waste. Ultimately, the first movement was by far the most important anyway. That was what I most wanted the world to hear, cringe at, and get angry at me over. It's not like anyone would sit through the whole sixteen-movement cycle anyway. And since I could just single out any one movement in a Tweet as needed, I could always come back to it later.

The other thing stopping me was what was apparently a very common inherent bug in iMovie. Eventually, I found a clever run-around. (Don't get me started on explaining it, though; what a pain in the ass!)

So, while not ideal, it was already more than enough to say what needed to be said years ago. I decided to just create a separate YouTube playlist for the existing first three movements of Unfinished Fever Dreams and just post subsequent movements if and when I finish them to my liking. I made sure to list all of the movements in the video description anyway.

Tuesday, June 5th. A day of wrath. A day of ruin. A day of catharsis.

I had the house to myself that day. I ritualized it. I quadruple-checked that everything was running perfectly before I set privacy to Public. I put on my BGSU T-shirt. I set my desktop wallpaper to the Kobacker Recital Hall lobby. I even went so far as to watch Revenge of the Sith with Captain Morgan (historically speaking, it should have been Jim Beam, but I didn't have any on me). I changed my profile pic and timeline cover to a Mustafar combo I used the last time I was in this focused state of mind. I uploaded, long overdue, the dormant payload of revenge music I'd been sitting on since 2015. And I'd already crafted a slew of ready-to-go Tweets to unleash in a Twitterstorm that lasted the rest of the day.

And this blog post is my victory lap.

You see, from here on out, Mittens on Twitter shall become a troll. My plan all along, since creating him on Twitter, all came down to Unfinished Fever Dreams.

And so, finally, here it is:
Unfinished Fever Dreams
(The "Unfinished" doesn't refer to the composition itself, but the feeling of everything being unresolved and never-ending)

Mittens is fulfilling his destiny.

No, hold on. You've got to say it right. Hang on. Ahem.

Mittens... is fulfilling... his desssssssst-inyyyy!

I posted a link to the YouTube playlist onto Facebook with the preamble:

If you went to BGSU with me, I ask ten minutes of your time. If nothing else, at least that means listening to the first movement of this cycle (although the third one is pretty good, too). 

If you do give it a listen, don’t skim; every second of the first movement matters, and you’d miss the commentary as it is organically developed. Don’t skim, don’t flinch. 

Unfinished Fever Dreams is an electroacoustic expressionist portrait of my suffocating experiences in grad school. It is also a satire on the music that was pushed on us so hard at BGSU.

I should have published this a LONG time ago. I never did, because I wanted to post the overwhelming entirely of its sixteen movements in one fell swoop, but ran into technical difficulties with the fourth movement. Truth be told, most movements aren’t even composed yet beyond a thorough outline because it all became bottom-tier priority when Juliet first got cancer in 2015. Only recently did I realize that I don’t HAVE to post all sixteen movements, especially when the first three are the most important anyway. 

Personally, I think the first movement is brilliant. It is a commentary that encapsulates the academic world of New Music at BGSU, a damning criticism, while still being a “legitimate” electroacoustic composition. The best part of this is that it sounds like the kind of music that would be championed there. I fantasize about going over the faculty’s heads to program this on an alumni recital. I have more to say on this, but for now, you can just read the video description on the page. 

I think it is so well done as to be hilarious. I have taken my spite to a new level: nuclear. It makes me chuckle that this is out there now, and I look forward to being a Twitter troll with it… 

They say success is the best revenge. Satire is a close second.

And the following comment, followed later by screen captures of most of my subsequent Twitter activity:


I. Repressive Voices
My personal reflections on the music composition program at BGSU, impressions of the environment of favoritism, and what it was like to study there when you were not encouraged to have your own voice. This is as much about the toxic and dogmatic environment of intrigue and insecurity manufactured by the student body as it is about the atrocious faculty. 

II. Arrogant Escapades
This is a study in the style of Burton Beerman, modeled after select works, particularly his opera Jesus’ Daughter. You have heard of “a labor of love,” but this is a labor of hate—a contemptuous parody, though I admittedly put too much effort into getting it just right. The title refers to my impressions of the weekly composition master classes (aka comp seminar). 

III. Antagonistic Impulses
While the second movement is entirely a study of Dr. Beerman’s music, the third movement is very much modeled after several compositions by Elainie Lillios and a little bit of Mikel Kuehn, two other professors of the Big Four at the time I was a student. This movement represents the discordant feelings from the artistic struggle to pursue your own voice in a stifling intellectual environment that meets you with resistance, demanding conformity, causing you to languish instead of thrive. This depicts the dogmatic shackles of conformity, the constant attempt to discourage straying from the path of the sycophant.


And the YouTube video description:


As years went by after completing my Master’s Degree in Music Composition at Bowling Green State University, the profoundly negative experiences I had with the program there festered and took root in my soul. Since then, I have already composed and published a lot of “satire music,” tearing down the pretentious and giving harsh indictments of the realm of Academia and what I call the “Church of New Music,” but it was like I could never get some pieces of music out of my head. In 2014, these spiraling thoughts coalesced into a focal point: this magnum opus. As I began researching and listening, listening and researching, what began as a small, one-movement piece to encapsulate the repertoire of compositions I couldn’t shake from my head grew, divided into more and more movements, and matured into an arc. 

Thus, the title “Unfinished Fever Dreams.” Though I moved on in life, my struggle to get something useful and positive out of the abysmal composition program at BGSU left a black mark on me that never quite went away. The maelstrom of resentment, the folly of trying to make it all somehow worthwhile, and a litany of grievances against the institution that I even wrote a letter to the dean about… would periodically give me bouts of vivid nostalgia. These sixteen movements are my unfinished fever dreams of trying to contrive some sort of enlightenment out of the utterly worthless and irredeemable, dogmatic, narcissistic hellscape that was (and remains) the music composition graduate program at Bowling Green State University. 

This cycle of movements is both a study of and a satirical homage to dozens of compositions of varying fame and notoriety, but it is also something of an epic tone poem of my own experiences in academia. 

I. Repressive Voices
II. Arrogant Escapades
III. Antagonistic Impulses
IV. Sophistic Trances
V. Pedantic Episodes
VI. Didactic Verses
VII. Stochastic Pontifications
VIII. Iconoclastic Interludes
IX. Pretentious Images 
X. Intransigent Expectations
XI. Narcissistic Interpolations
XII. Declamatory Interruptions
XIII. Solipsistic Diatribes 
XIV. Syllogistic Afterthoughts
XV. Masochistic Variations
XVI. Regressive Outbursts

Copyright 2015



In all seriousness, though. If you could bring yourself to read this long-winded bullshit, you can at least give the first movement a listen. That's the whole point. That's the most important thing to me.

Skip the second movement if you want; it's just an obsessive "fuck you" to Burton Beerman and anyone who admires him. The third movement is almost as good a verbal commentary as the first, while simultaneously being a parody of Elainie Lillios' Arturo, Listening Beyond, Stargazing, and Au deuxime etage, and Mikel Kuehn's Crack. Like I said, these first three were the most important to me anyway, so I can accept a world in which the remaining thirteen movements never see the light of day.

So, what happens next?

Project-wise, in the future I will one day blog about the following:

Volition
I still have to re-create a digital mock-up of my orchestral tone poem and master's thesis, Volition. This is entirely a technical challenge; the music is almost literally set in stone (archived on a BGSU website somewhere), and shouldn't be altered. But I never got to have any of my classmates hear it. They just gushed at the impressive and immaculate 11"x17" score, in 2006. But I was kept in the shadows by the faculty. It must be heard.

Fantasia Academia
A free-form expansion of Volition, closer to my original envisioning of it before Lillios steered me wrong. Potentially a 45-minute work, I am not sure yet.

Untitled electroacoustic opera
A while back, I started outlining this and spitballing ideas with none other than Jordan Sommers. An autobiographical account in allegorical form. A bloated avant-garde epic. But logistically, it will be programmable, not just an impossible fantasy; it will be (probably) entirely digital, but using live vocalists in addition to pre-recorded electronic manipulations.

The Destruction of Bowling Green, Ohio
As described in Maelstrom, Part VI: Domination. Once upon a time, I had been editing temp tracks for each of the twenty movements, but haven't touched it in a long time. Lots of film music influences, but I wanted to save it for later because I initially intended on citing and developing material from Volition. In fact, the idea for this symphonic poem eventually diverged into the aforementioned Fantasia Academia to free me from that need.

Post-Academic Sketches
Got the idea one night when I was walking the dog who has since died. A string quartet heavily inspired by Bela Bartok's string quartets. Current outline has eleven movements, but one working title I love is "Gilded Idols of the Ivory Tower," which I think aptly describes a lot of the music that is worshipped in Academia. Gilded, meaning a cheap veneer of fool's gold.

Unfinished Fever Dreams
The rest of it still needs to be uploaded, obviously.


None of those are a priority now, though. I do still have a life, you know. I just take pleasure in announcing them here.

Now, though, I am suggesting a return to the more glorious aspects of BG Mode. I want to show to myself (and maybe to my BG friends) that the best parts that we cherry-picked about those two years in Ohio are still alive, or at least can return.

That was vague. I'm still working on how to articulate it.


From the blog post "Dying Embers" (January 17, 2013):

Maybe if Lillios hadn't fucked me on my thesis deadline in March and then immediately deep-sixed me into a waiting list for her attention in order to meet the summer deadline, I would have had more time to nurture those friendships, and we wouldn't be drifting like this. That's why I started my thesis so much earlier than everyone else--so I could enjoy the last couple months of grad school and enjoy our good friendships! Because I was under the impression that extra hard work and an early start would pay off! But no, what happened was that Lillios kept juggling my progress every week, backpedaling and retreading redundant ground during our lessons, and then, when it was because of her that I couldn't graduate in May, as soon as I was bumped to the summer, she further neglected me because I suddenly wasn't on the short list of her top priority students. So then she continued to prolong my thesis process until the absolute final moment it was due to be turned in online. Even though I started monthsbefore anyone else, because of her I finished dead last, and all the procrastinators got to fucking graduate on time. Some adviser, huh? Way to make someone feel valued. 

No, I haven't forgotten. Every time I ponder how we're drifting, I can't help but wonder... if the faculty at BGSU hadn't fucked me over and over and over again, I might have had more time to invest in my friends. That was my incentive, after all. The series of old blog posts called "Maelstrom" is not over.


Similarly, from the blog post "Long Time, Long Distance" (March 31, 2016):

I am, have been, and always will be, profoundly regretful that the faculty screwing me over cost me a lot of time in April and May that could have--should have, damn you--been spent with an easy yoke and light burden which would have allowed me more time for my friends, time to feel good about ourselves and about each other. Even back then, I declared that to be one of my motivations for starting my thesis so much earlier than everyone else. And, had Lillios and Shrude not been utter failures to me, I would have at least had that consolation prize. So, I'm sorry. I will always be sorry that I couldn't spend more time with you guys. It was Lillios' and Shrude's doing. The saga is well documented. But all along, I just wanted to feel good about grad school in the end. Since my time there was so miserable, I worked twice as hard to make the end of it redeeming, but it was for naught; the faculty saw to that.



But I also occasionally think about What Should Have Been in much broader terms than just the last few months I spent there. What the whole grad school experience should have been, had the whole establishment not been rotten to the core. I went into it believing it was going to be an amazing new chapter in my professional development. I was sad to say goodbye to my friends from Truman, but excited to begin the next big thing. It should have been a nurturing environment, encouraging and invigorating, where we lifted each other up (or at least stayed out of each other's way) in our growth as we further developed our craft. But three fundamental factors endemic to BGSU poisoned the garden: the dogma, the toxic faculty rivalry, and the intrigue manufactured by the insecure grad students who were all about passive-aggression, appearing inviting on the outside while subverting anyone's aesthetics they deemed threatening. Sooo many frenemies there.

And so many comments by people years later revealing that they had the same impression of the environment that I did.

From a former classmate who shall remain anonymous:

But like I said, little of what you wrote surprised me. Partly because BGSU isn't an anomaly, I've seen that sort of faculty warfare everywhere I've been and many of my friends have become collateral damage as was your case. And as unfair as it is, the system's rigged for them, in large part because most students are only there for two years. It's a big piece of leverage: the historical memory is remarkably short, and no one wants to risk their degree for just a few more months of misery by the time they're getting close to graduation. Sucks though, no doubt. A friend I mentioned that had a similar story as your story of writing your thesis under Lillios might shed an interesting light on the matter...

From another person:

I did feel like I was supported at BGSU. I honestly don't really know why either. Maybe I fit the mold more in some ways, I don't know.
...
I know there was some super bad blood between faculty and it looks like it came down on you. There's a vulnerability to being a student and when the faculty are trying to tear you down instead of build you up, it sucks, and it sucks in a way that's hard to describe.


And another person wrote to me:

I felt like I was being patronized, and that my "conservative" work was "tolerated" because I was only an undergraduate. I never felt like I fit in with the studio full of grad students, for a variety of reasons. The age/degree disparity was definitely a part of that, but the chief factor (on my end) was my perception of the studio as being avant-garde elitists.
At first I felt like a fraud, because I couldn't understand the works of the other students. Then I felt like a charlatan for not enjoying it. Eventually, I could hardly contain my eye-rolling at student composer forums. I resented that I was forced to take the computer music courses...
...
I don't think about it very often. But I have to admit, reading some of your angry posts got me reminiscing about how much of it was total bullshit.


The bit about "avant-garde elitists" and "eye-rolling at student composer forums" makes me want to print and frame this message and put it on the hearth.

I suppose all of this parched grassland was truly kindled by a very lengthy, tell-all conversation, as far back as August 2014, which I had with someone who used to be employed by the university. Some serious truths were affirmed for me that day, and the vindication felt liberating... but also enraging. (A few days later, I wrote the blog post Maelstrom, Part VI: Domination.)

There are some quotes from that conversation that have been echoing in my mind ever since:

You're absolutely correct about that, and BGSU (provincialism) syndrome is that those petty matters tend to rule more than they even normally do. The history of BGSU's music school can be written in terms of Shrude's enmity with Beerman, which seems to have been replaced with her enmity with Lillios. And in both cases, one sees a transparent dose of envy.
...
They kept up a public front that hid a private slime pit. So no wonder students felt they couldn't trust anybody.
...
Sadly, you are not the first nor have you been the last of her students who have been screwed over for spiteful reasons. And it is entirely likely that you were humiliated to get back at [Dr. Lillios] for god knows what reason. This is the main driver of Lillios's hatred for Shrude. Shrude has a history of doing this to the students of other faculty, and coming down hard on the intellectual curiosity of students who were especially bright and especially good writers.
...
Shrude is driven by grasping jealousy and envy, because she wants to be considered the most important figure in the department, no matter what. She is already the highest paid...



I want all of that on a fucking plaque.

Personally, the revelation that Lillios and Shrude have only come to hate each other more over the years makes me say, "Good. Those two deserve each other." Especially since I wasn't even fully aware that there was animosity between the faculty members when I was a student there. I mean, I kind of knew, but I didn't know.

That's what bothers me. Some other students who were not as burdened and abused as I was by the faculty were able to get a better sense of the "toxic faculty enmity," whereas I was so caught in the middle that I focused on the main truth that I knew, and still know: they did single me out a lot. I also was always busy with the insecurity-driven vanities of the other grad students battling over each other's perceptions.

And I to this day absolutely despise Praecepta, the student organization for New Music. (I hope that makes some of you feel shocked and uncomfortable. We need to talk about why.)

The reason any of this matters now is two-fold: Because some of these people are still in my present-day sphere, and because the worst people are still in positions of power in some form or another.

Meanwhile, I am intent on reconnecting with my old friends from grad school. I was going to do that in 2015, but... ever since then, I couldn't really. I am intent on not just reviving my friendships, but improving them. That is the Light Side of BGSU. Redemption.

It matters to me that we don't all just drift apart and lose each other. I know, we aren't the same people anymore. That doesn't mean we lose each other. We are not the same people as we were. We are better. I am rebuilding everything.

But, a few years ago, I was also building towards this.

You shake your head, feeling pity for me, thinking I'm obsessed with past grievances that are ancient history. Hold on a second. It's not like that at all. It's more of an occasional hobby, really.

After the last three years of dire, life-altering health crises with my wife, a lot of this is a numb memory of a past life, a faded photograph. It feels so distant now. So irrelevant. I am not a prisoner of those feelings anymore. So, it's not that I can't just "forget it," it's that I won't.

You see, that's how they win: like my friend's point about short-term memory. So many people I know have simply buried BGSU, looking back with contempt, but deciding not to think about it anymore. "At least I got out of there, right? Fuck that place." Thus, the cycle continues.

I suppose that's what it all comes down to: a strange sense of intellectual justice in the name of full disclosure. Some people were never punished. There can be no balance until they have been confronted and exposed.

And so the scourge begins.

I am still holding back a little bit on Twitter, though; I still want that one-on-one confrontation with each of the Big Four composition professors from my time. I still want that final lightsaber duel...