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BFRC

I am posting this as a benchmark, not because I think I'm playing very well yet.  The idea would be post a video every month for a ye...

Tuesday, May 29, 2018

Brought to me by a google scholar alert

The woman in the Spanish society is merely a bearer of children. It is she from whom the land prospers because her sons are the fillers of the soil and the fecundation for the women of the future. Her role is important in this respect. The male’s role in this system is not nearly so severe or as unyielding as that of the females. A true double standard of morality is maintained in this country as in other countries of the world. The man’s procreative powers are revered by the women,for without a man, she is unable to fulfil her mission in life. He is the strength and the power by which the woman survives.

4 developments

I sat down with my friend in a coffee house two days ago and I took some fountain pen notes for two and a half hours, while she worked on her travel writing work. Here are some of the results.  

What are the main development in music in the 20th century?  I have no idea, but these are four that I think are significant.

1) Musical modernism, conceived as serialism developing out of classical harmony but at the same time anharmonic.  This music is defined against tonality, but also needs tonality for its very definition, since you have to know what to avoid. They are also alien to any vernacular tradition.

2) A classical tradition that cites echoes vernacular or folk idioms, following 19th century effort along these lines.

3) The rise of elaborated vernaculars, like jazz.  These vernaculars are modeled on classical music in that they aim toward complexity and sophistication, and develop their own forms of modernism / avant-garde, Neo-classicism, etc...

4) The mass-commercialization of vernacular idioms; the creation and development of new vernacular idioms out of commercial music.

These are not all the developments, just those relevant to what I am thinking about.



Sunday, May 20, 2018

Family Synergy

My cousin Michael Barrett is doing a concert of Lorca music in NYC in April, with the NYFOS that he directs with another guy.  I saw Michael in Washington this weekend, where he was doing a Leonard Bernstein concert at the Library of Congress.  

***

My brother took me to a bookstore, politics and prose, in DC.  I bought this CD set of Miles and Coltrane. Later, without knowing I had already bought it, he mentioned it to me. He had been listening to it on his phone.  

My latest



I never get tired of publishing articles:
Jonathan Mayhew argumenta que el análisis de la poesía no es ya una disciplina muy popular o recurrida en los medios académicos actuales, sobre todo en los dedicados a los estudios culturales, al considerársele un género elitista que tiene, además, un público reducido. La poesía que en el presente más llama la atención en esos círculos es aquella que reclama una posición ideológica clara, o la que versa sobre asuntos sociales. Se obvia por muchos estudiosos, entonces, un gran corpus de creación lírica que en apariencia no pretende en sí misma atender a o contextualizarse en su momento histórico, sino abstraerse de él. Una manera de sortear el impasse, arguye Mayhew, es enfocarse en la lírica no a través del vínculo temático, sino como expresión de ‘estructuras de sentimiento’, un concepto que toma de Raymond Williams. Así se examina la poesía como un reflejo de la sensibilidad individual, definida en su propio contexto cultural, y justificada por éste. “In so doing, we can see the historical relevance of poetry, even when it is seemingly disengaged from historical currents” (Mayhew, «Adolescence» 126).


La poesía escrita por mujeres, durante la Transición y en sus linderos temporales, is “one of the most significant literary developments of the period” (Mayhew, «Adolescence» 110). Él se concentra en dos poemarios, Baladas del dulce Jim, de Ana María Moix (1969), y De una niña de provincias que se vino a vivir en un Chagal, de Blanca Andreu (1981). El primero aparece motivadopor una nueva sensibilidad a finales de la década del 60, luego llevada a su fruición durante la Transición, pero ya relevante en el franquismo tardío, caracterizada por una orientación política de izquierda, una actitud desdeñosa y mordaz hacia el poder o las instituciones, y un jovial espíritu proeuropeísta. Como escribe Mayhew, el elemento común en los poemas de Moix es su sensibilidad punzante y algo insolente («Adolescence» 133). La suya en las Baladas es una poesía en prosa “cortante y juguetona, con esa libertad expresiva y paralelística propias de lo poético, predominando la función emotiva del lenguaje” (Ortega), donde la seriedad de Moix se esconde detrás de una frivolidad engañosa (Mayhew, «Adolescence» 133). Demuestra poseer una comprensión histórica sofisticada de su propio lugar en la España franquista, a la vez que audacia en su cuestionamiento de la sociedad de su tiempo.


Existe un paralelismo entre las sensibilidades de Moix y de Andreu, explica Mayhew. Los poemas de Blanca Andreu retoman la sensibilidad posmoderna que los novísimos habían anunciado en la famosa antología de Castellet, en 1970. Ciertos elementos comunes con Moix refuerzan la percepción de compartir, hasta cierto punto –separados sus libros como están por unos doce años– una análoga ‘estructura de sentimiento’: la postura ideológica de la adolescente, el uso de técnicas disociativas características de la vanguardia, y la formación de una subjetividad individual por recurso de la identificación ‘mágica’ con referentes icónicos culturales (Mayhew, «Adolescence» 133-4). Falta la ironía y el cosmopolitanismo de Moix, empero, como si la Transición, en 1981 tal vez en su apogeo y en su agonía concurrentes, no coadyuvara a tal liviandad. Habría hacia el comienzo de los 80 en el ambiente una tendencia a ‘normalizar’ el ejercicio poético, tal y como la Transición aspiraba a componer el país después de la dictadura. “Hence, the role [it] envisions por the poet is that of a well-adjusted citizen spaeking to similary situated subjects” (Mayhew, Twilight 35).


Moix y Andreu son importantes voceros y precursoras de sus respectivas épocas, así y todo que sus paradigmas hayan sido efímeros, al evolucionar la poesía escrita en España en las décadas del 70 y del 80 por otros derroteros. Pero esa transitoriedad ilumina también no sólo sus personalidades literarias, sino también el medio histórico, cultural y social que las produce.

Thursday, May 17, 2018

I don't think I understand English any more


As a follow-up to preliminary information collected by Human Resource Management (HRM), and to effectively diagnose the complex issues happening within the Department of X, the College of Y will be taking the next step of an organizational assessment. This process will be facilitated by Z, an organizational development specialist, facilitator, trainer, and coach with experience working with departments, teams, and individuals at the University of K. This organizational assessment, coupled with interviews of faculty, lecturers, staff, and others, will inform a whole systems approach to address existing departmental concerns.  These concerns may entail insights and assistance from Faculty Development, the Office of Diversity and Equity, the College of Y, the Office of Institutional Opportunity and Access, and HRM. The hope is that a holistic engagement of university resources will shape an environment for transformational change.

 I really don't understand a word of this.  I mean, I understand the words, but not why this would take place just as the school year is over, when people are dispersing here and there, and in response to unspecified "issues." Five separate units of the university are supposed to provide us with "insight" and "assistance." I think we are screwed.

Wednesday, May 16, 2018

The preface begins

In 2018, after publishing two books on the literary reception of Federico García Lorca, it occurred to me that I could write a third one on musical adaptations of his work. A conjunction of fortuitous events brought this topic to the front of my mind: my daughter Julia, then an M.A. trumpet student at De Paul University in Chicago, told me she would playing in a performance of Silvestre Revueltas’s homage to Lorca. Around the same time, my piano teacher suggested that I look at some pieces by Federico Mompou, a Catalan composer who—I soon discovered—had also set Lorca to music. I began to compile a playlist on Spotify, using what I already knew about this topic from my previous research, along with searches on the usual databases. As this list swelled beyond twenty hours, after a few days, my excitement grew. I had given a talk about musical uses of Lorca in 2015, and I touched briefly on other musical topics in my other two Lorca books, but I had not yet seen the potential for an extended study. Nor had I seen my own increasing involvement in music over the course of several years as preparation for writing music criticism.

Tuesday, May 15, 2018

LP and flarf

I spent years defending the Language Poets, because I felt their project was valid, that you didn't have to rule it out of bounds, as so many wanted to do.  This was not out of any belief that all these poets were equally good, or that I myself subscribed to those particular doctrines about writing.  I just wanted to defend them because, well, they had some good work that I liked to read. Some of their work doesn't seem so great, in retrospect, but that is inevitable. What I didn't like, in fact, were people dismissing them because they presumably all wrote in the same way, something that was not true at all. Perloff, too, got lots of grief for defending them.

I also defended flarf.  Some of it was because my friends were writing it.  But once again I think I disliked the idiot critiques of it. You can say you don't like it, but you aren't allowed to make idiotic criticisms of it.

Dream of Obnoxious Lorca

There was a well known language poet in this dream, one whom I know from facebook but am not rl friends with.  We were separated by a large geographical distance but somehow got into a real life conversation. I explained my Lorca and music project to him, and he said: "why do you have to work with such an obnoxious poet?"  In the dream I wasn't offended, but instead connected the remark to certain aspects of Lorca I don't like. It felt very liberating, actually.  I won't name the poet here since I wouldn't attribute that opinion to him, since it was actually coming from a part of my self. Why I wanted to exteriorize it like that is anyone's guess. I guess the Language Poet crowd did not have that romantic impulse that admirers of Lorca have had.

Monday, May 7, 2018

Graeber from CHE

It was a very gentle way of saying, "Don’t be ridiculous." If we had tried to write up a plan, the result would have produced more paperwork than we were all already doing. (In British universities, this even has a name: the "forming committees to discuss the problem of too many committees problem."). 

Flaubert

My writing style was influenced by Flaubert's ideal: a fluid, seamless rhythm with nothing wasted; no needless repetition of words. Sentences and paragraphs are shapely, balanced and varied in shape. There are no poetic rhythms, but the rhythm is carefully crafted as verse. I can easily not write that well, if I am not trying very hard. But the effort does pay off. The Dean told me that several of my letters of support (for a recent nomination) praised the grace of my prose. The grant coordinator told me that my grant applications were far better written than almost anyone else's here.

What Can You Do in 2 Hours?

I could learn most of a page of not too difficult piano music.

Referee an article or two.

Read 120 pages of a novel.

Produce a not too bad drawing of something.

Watch a movie.

Walk six miles.

Shop for, cook and eat a meal.

Memorize two short poems.

Write 8 blog posts.

Write an outline of an article I want to write.

Write an abstract for a conference.

Prepare for and teach an 1:15 minute class.

Listen to music for two hours.

There are many things you can do in two hours. We have 8 hours to sleep, so that leaves 8 blocks of two hours. If you work just four hours a day during the summer, you can do two significant work-related things.


Friday, May 4, 2018

Post Title Would Go Here If I had a Good Title for This Post

Here's an idea I want to try: figure out everything I have control over. Everything for which I am the "decision maker." For an adult, this means discretionary spending, what color socks to wear, what to eat, how to spend free time. For a full professor, it also means allocation of effort on different projects, where I want to focus my attention.

This is what we might call the sphere of personal control or autonomy.  The first revelation I am having is that freedom means that I am the decision maker, not someone else, so freedom and control are the same thing in this sphere.

Having a lot of it is good, but then again it is also more difficult because everything must be decided. The next step would be to exercise optimal choices within this sphere.

You might find that there are constraints that operate within what should be the sphere of personal autonomy.  Suppose you fear wearing colorful socks because people will ridicule you. Also, you would prefer to wear $2,000 suits but there are economic constraints. Autonomy is never absolute.

Then there are cases where you can't really control what you eat, though that should be within that sphere. Or you are addicted to opioids. Then that indicates a problem. Any discrepancy in what is ideally autonomous indicates a level of dysfunction. I can choose to skip a crossword puzzle, or decide that I want to never skip one. If I skip one and feel huge anxiety, then I am addicted.

[This exercise leaves out the things that are not under your sphere of autonomy, ever.  For example, other people's private sphere of autonomy.  We're just not worrying about that right now.  

It also leaves out things from a relationship that impinge on autonomy.  In a healthy relationship, you should still have hobbies that the other person has no say about, things you can go off and do alone without worrying about it.]

What I have discovered, then, is that I do have great personal autonomy, but I haven't quite learned to use it optimally. A lot of the anxiety I have is about how to use time, energy, and money.

The first exercise might be to choose something over which to exercise control over in a week. Start with something easy (for you).  See how difficult or easy it actually turns out to be.  Look for the points of tension.

Thursday, May 3, 2018

More Musicality

My point is that we don't really know what we are talking about when we are talking about musicality in poetry.  I propose this as an analytic beginning:

We can talk about it literally, in terms of the sound and rhythms of poetry, and its direct connection to music in genres of sung poetry / vocal music.

Music is also one of the main metaphorical systems for talking about poetry. But on closer examination it is never merely a metaphor (except in merely conventional references!) because of these literal connections. What I call "deep musicality" is that connection between the central metaphor and the physical embodiment.

My assumption is that we know a lot about this, but we don't know exactly what it is that we do know, so we have to write down what we know and see where we are at.  I'm not sure yet whether there are four or twelve kinds of things that people mean when they talk about poetry as "musical."


Tuesday, May 1, 2018

Visual

I think of myself as much more inclined toward music than toward visual art, but this is probably a fallacy, in that it is not really a zero-sum proposition. There was a lot of nonsense about right versus left brain thinking, but really people are not left-brained in the way that people are left handed. You need both hemispheres of the brain to do anything, and the fact that certain areas of the brain have responsibilities of their own is fairly meaningless. There really aren't "visual learners," etc... We are all very visual (those of us with sight) and we all use our sight in more or less the same way. Of course we can train ourselves to make marks on paper that will be two-dimensional representations of 3-d objects.  Some people are better trained to do that than others, or can become trained more quickly.