More Spicer

So I have a new idea to introduce a separate brief section, really only four paragraphs or so, into Chapter 1 that deals with Spicer's interpretation of the duende. Interestingly, he doesn't use the word duende, because it hadn't yet become a cliché. Yet his rhetoric of ghosts and dictation pull in that direction. I I can look at his letters to Lorca, instead of merely analyzing his apocryphal translations, as I did in Apocryphal Lorca. It is in these letters that the dialogue with Lorca's poetics takes place, I can argue. Then I can compare that kind of poetics with what Valente and Gamoneda do.

That was my new idea of the day.

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I ended up working a lot more than three hours for Friday, Sat. and Sun, so my total is inching up to about 50 for the week. Fifty hours is 7.1428... (let's say nine minutes), 7 times a week. It is helpful to know there are 168 hours in a week. Sleeping twelve hours a night gives you 112 waking hours. So 56 hours means working half the time you are awake. I think 50 is about my maximum, for a week we have a job candidate.


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My other idea was to look a little more closely at narratives of Spanish romanticism from Flitter to Silver. I just read a harsh but convincing review of Flitter's book by Noel Valis. It is interesting to see how the arguments about the ideology and authenticity of Spanish romanticism are going to play into my book.

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There is a way of writing that I sometimes practice. I don't know a lot about something so I write only a paragraph about it as a kind of placeholder. Then I do research and write five paragraphs instead. But then I end up condensing that material back into one or two paragraphs that are much better-researched than that placeholder paragraph was. So when you tell a student to write 10 pages? Is it 10 pages of place holding, of padded research, or of condensed research and thought?