Lost In Translation: Musical Selection in Figure Skating →
Since Johnny Weir’s loss last night is still fresh in my mind, I thought it might be nice to share the paper I wrote for the 2006 EMP conference regarding creativity in the sport of figure skating — and how music matters/doesn’t matter.
Re-reading this paper, I should make some retrospective remarks:
- This is probably the first real “research” paper I’ve ever written. Maybe I just went to the wrong school (that’s a post for another time!), but my program hardly encouraged writing and research skills. The curriculum gave us one writing intro class in the first semester of freshman year. Here is what I recall of my freshman year of college: mono, shitty roommates, mono, going to concerts, mono. As you can probably guess, I fared well that semester.
- The paper was strategic move to help land my stupid ass in grad school. I definitely did not think any school would like a smartmouthed blogger/photographer/etc, so I had to show potential schools that I could possibly hack it. (The jury’s still out on this one, really.)
- I haaaaaaate my conclusion, and I chalk this up to my lack of writing know-how. If I were to write this today, there is no way I would insert my own personal narrative into it. (Not that my 13-year skating career doesn’t account for something, this was not the place for it.)
- I’m very sorry for any typos in this thing. When I switched servers, the page got borked and so I had some cleaning up to do. Not sure if everything’s 100% but eh.
Enjoy reading!
