When my beloved PhD advisor, Jonathan Sterne, entered hospice care this past March, waves of appreciation and then mourning rippled out from the many communities and institutions he touched. These voices were so helpful in arraying all the things that had made Jonathan a delight to read and to work with: there were the Jonathanisms, the farewells from editors and organizations, a host of voices at an SCMS panel that Amy Skjerseth and company converted into a remembrance session, and of course Carrie Rentschler’s stunning obituary for him, alongside many others.

A specific note that rose up against the backdrop of these brilliant remembrances, for me, was an appreciation I’d always had for Jonathan’s touch for the practical—his exceptional and strangely efficient quality as an advice-giver—and the attitude toward academic life that animated it.

This month, as I’m entering a new career phase and looking around at an academic landscape where the humanist enterprise is suffering deep wounds from the various legal, financial, and technological instruments of far-right depredation, I’m thinking about how Jonathan valued academic life—not the degree to which he valued it, though I feel that degree was quite high, but rather the ways in which he managed to seize upon the best things the career offered despite the always arbitrary, usually compromised, and all-too-often eroding structures that define it from the outside. I’ve come to think of this quality in Jonathan as a kind of romantic pragmatism: a capacity to feel and act romantically toward the why of academic life by being extremely practical about the how.

Jonathan’s pragmatism was a quality through which he granted me, like so many of his advisees, invaluable doses of clear-headedness throughout the murky course of grad school and a dissertation project. But I’ve also come to see it as the quality through which he was able to explain—or rather to produce a felt clarity around—the point of lifelong study in the humanities. There has never been a time when I felt more clarity about why people do this than I did in Jonathan’s presence. (Time spent reading his work does remain a solid runner-up.)

The examined life; the lively conduit between critique and creation; the playful, rigorous exercise of real intellectual freedom (which, for him, necessarily meant the extension of that freedom to others); real community; the hard and delightful work of maintaining a capacity to be surprised; the delight in surprising an audience; ideas. This is some of what Jonathan and his collaborators showed (not told) could be won through this strange career in spite of all its variously lofty and belittled trappings.

Jonathan didn’t glamorize academic careers. When I think about his pragmatism, I inevitably think of the first time Jonathan and I spoke in person. It was at a conference at UCLA in 2014, where he gave the keynote talk. I thanked him for the extremely thoughtful reply he’d sent a year prior when I’d been put in touch with questions about my undergrad thesis project; and I expressed something to the effect of, “I’d love to do what you do.” He answered with enthusiastic grace and with a deftly positive note of caution: “If there’s anything else you think you might find fulfilling, make sure you’ve ruled that out first.”

I’m paraphrasing, and I should note that Jonathan expressed some consternation, years later when I related the anecdote, that he might have said something spirit-dampening. But that’s not how I heard it. Responsible advisors take it upon themselves to raise the practical concerns (read: job market) with prospective graduate students during the application process; for Jonathan, it was reflexive. I benefited a lot from the couple years I spent ruling some alternatives out instead of rushing headlong into a PhD program. When I did eventually apply and, to my enormous luck, got the go-ahead to work with Jonathan at McGill, I made the decision to proceed not because I had a green light from this authoritative voice in the field but because I knew I had to attempt this very particular thing in order to feel I’d led life on my own terms.

When I arrived at McGill, I got to see another dimension of Jonathan’s pragmatism. Jonathan’s formidable output as an academic (and musician!) was not the product of a ruthless pace or unhealthy work culture. It was the product, as far as I can characterize it, of the fact that he was doing what he loved and that he both asked for and gave himself the help he needed to get it done. He was proactively gracious, toward students and coauthors as well as toward himself, when illness and other life events interceded in projects. When life got out of his way, he would Get Things Done™; he was as keen a critic of Silicon Valley-style productivity culture as anyone, but he didn’t let that excuse him from pressing the time-management tactics that worked for him into service. In meetings, for instance, rather than promise to put a word in with so-and-so at the next chance, he would simply send them an email on the spot.

And he loved to write. He knew how to push ego aside and crank out “shitty first drafts” (from Ann Lamott’s advice that he re-shared prodigiously). His core belief about how writing happened was “ass in chair,” as he put it. He knew how and when to get good feedback, and I’m sure it didn’t hurt that he ran an inexhaustible surplus as far as any balance between feedback-giving and -soliciting was concerned. Compunction, in short, did not stand a chance. He often credited his productivity to “proscrastinating on work with other work,” which on one hand sounds like a capacity you’d have to luck into; on the other hand, it can only be the result of a hard-fought campaign to arrange one’s life and career on one’s own terms.

There was a lot to learn in witnessing Jonathan’s habits as a scholar, to be sure, but the advice continued to be where his sharpest—and perhaps hardest to imitate—pragmatism shone through. That kind, frank, upbeat nugget of guidance I got at UCLA wasn’t a fluke. Jonathan was somehow courageous, thoughtful, and minimalist, all at once, in his advice-giving. The advice, in a way, tended to trace the “hourglass” structure that we often want to follow when writing articles. You could come to him with a nebulous mess of hopelessly interlocked and life-encompassing dilemmas; he would hear you, then rephrase what you had said in a way that revealed a single, usually pretty material, knot at the midst of the nebula, the decision that had to be made first (Do I say yes to this teaching opportunity? Do I choose this conference or the other?). And then, mostly just through his contagious optimism, he would nudge you in the direction of contemplating the bigger vista that waited for you at the other side of having made your decision.

Of course, as Sadie Couture put it at the remembrance session last SCMS, he never gave advice on what ideas to pursue; most of us advisees certainly had moments where we wished he would. I’ve thought a lot, during the PhD and since his passing, about why he never “just told us what to do;” and I don’t think it was solely about his humility or a boundary he’d drawn concerning agency and influence, though I’m sure those were factors. Rather, I think it gets at that strange blend of pragmatism and romanticism Jonathan held toward life in the humanities: in this line of work, if an idea wasn’t one you chased on your own initiative and on your own terms, then what would be the point in chasing it?

But the advice he did give, like his ideas, could unfold as you mulled it over from stark simplicity into something that contained both nuanced applications and long-term perspective shifts. The quintessential piece of Jonathan advice in that regard—and the line that, arriving late and lightly in Carrie’s obituary, landed as the best kind of gut-punch for me—was “do what makes you happy.”

When Jonathan passed, I was still making my way through the trenches of the job market. This week, I start as an Assistant Professor at Seton Hall University, in the Communication, Media and Arts department. I’ll be reimagining the sound-related offerings in a program called Visual and Sound Media that has a very cool track record of combining liberal arts and production-based approaches to media studies. It will come as no surprise to anyone who knew Jonathan, or who got help from him at some point, that he was majorly involved in my job search process—and in my landing this role specifically—long past the point in his illness where anyone would have expected it of an advisor. I’ll have a lot of work to do in trying to pay that kind of generosity forward, and it’s the work I want to spend my career doing.

On Monday I’ll start teaching a course called Sound, Technology, and Culture—–a pretty nail-on-the-head configuration of the interests that first led me to Jonathan’s work. I’m excited to get back into the classroom with him.

From the syllabus:

“If we do not begin our discussions of the future of music by considering what music is for—and by extension, what culture is for—the answers will be decided for us.” – Jonathan Sterne, MP3: The Cultural Meaning of a Format (p. 226)*

*While syllabi don’t typically include dedication lines, this one is so heavily and happily indebted to the work of Jonathan Sterne—who passed away last spring—that it feels warranted. Jonathan was a once-in-a-generation thinker and mentor who helped inspire, hone, and advocate for many of the ideas we will encounter in this course. He was also someone who, with his partner Carrie Rentschler and other collaborators/bandmates, showed how a critical disposition toward sound, technology, and culture can (or, really, should) go hand-in-hand with a joyful creative practice in audio media. The world in which people make sound central to their examination of life is richer for his reverberating contributions.