Andalusia

I was especially struck by the part about "the flamenco artists and bullfighters of Southern Spain, near Andalusia where he was born." This is hilarious, because Southern Spain is Andalusia. If you are near Andalusia but not in it, then you are in Murcia or Extramadura, maybe. Or Portugal or La Mancha. The singer who is doing the duende project contacted me a few years ago to ask me about the duende. We had a phone conversation. She was nice enough, but of course, my perspective is not going to be welcome to people with this kind of approach.

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I think people lacking a sense of humor will never get me.  Maybe that's the problem with Venuti?  Humor comes from discrepancy, things that are unexpected.

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I thought I knew about bad poetry, but there is a whole 'nother dimension I discovered yesterday, in a poem by Alice Walker cited by one of the commenters on Clarissa's blog. I had a hazy view of Walker, knowing her mostly through the film version of her novel, The Color Purple. Apparently, she has gone off the deep end into anti-Semitic tropes. The poem in question is not only written as inept prose divided arbitrarily into lines, in classic "bad poetry" style, but repeats in all earnestness tropes from medieval misrepresentations of the Talmud, that I guess have found new life on youtube. This is ugly hate speech reminiscent of Hitler.  I can't even quote from it, because I don't want to perpetuate it. But the idea is to claim that the Talmud says certain things about how Jews will control the world and kill and enslave everyone who is not Jewish.  These claims were accepted in medieval times because the texts existed only in Aramaic. Medieval anti-semitism was not some genteel form of social prejudice, but a virulently hateful ideology with often deadly effects running deep through Catholicism as well as early Reformation figures like Luther, who advocated extreme measures against the Jews, even genocide.

There is nothing funny about this, but I am imagining a darkly satirical novel about our times, in which respectable figures get away with this, while others are persecuted for comparatively minor transgressions. I had a strange day yesterday. A younger female relative of mine had been texting me about her new boyfriend; there seemed to be a few things off about him in what she told me, but then I googled his name and found out he strangled a guy, something she hadn't thought to mention. He is a "poet"too, of course, and his blog is all about peace and love, but in a kind of blathering, incoherent way. Reading this, combined with the Walker text, made me see our mental hold on reality as extremely fragile. For example, I am supposedly an expert on poetry, but what passes for such just seems like insane ranting, and not in a good way. What is it that I know then?