11

 El mismo mar de todos los veranos

El amor es un juego solitario

Varada tras el último naufragio 

The titles of these three novels are in the 11-syllable line.  The backbone of the meter is the strong accent on syllable six. 

 El mismo mar de TOdos los veranos

El amor es un JUEgo solitario

Varada tras el ÚLtimo naufragio 

That's what makes the line a meter, not must a random number of syllables.  You could say the line is more constrained at the cadence 

de todos los veranos

un juego solitario

el último naufragio 

These are 7 syllable lines.  So the first four syllables are free. The iambic pattern is fine: 

El mismo mar

But the first or third syllable can be accented: "El amor"

The English pentamer feels different, because syllables are more weighted, and average word length shorter.  You are going to find a lot of 8-9 word lines, and some lines of 10 words:

A little touch of Harry in the night

To be or not to be, that is the question 

The country cocks do crow, the clocks do toll

Never again would the bird's song be the same

I have been one acquainted with the night 

I was thinking there are two way of approaching it. There are individual lines that are just self-contained and great examples, but the real achievement is the paragraph of several lines in a row, where each line is still a great example on its own, but the effect is of the sequence of metrical phrases, some crossing the line.  My daughter was explaining to me that the secret of good trumpet playing is to have a continuous flow of air between the notes. The beginning student will play each    note    by    its     self, and have difficulty with legato. 

There is almost a Charlie Parker quality to passages of great rhythmic stretchiness:

Now entertain conjecture of a time

When creeping murmur and the pouring dark

Fills the wide vessel of the universe.

From camp to camp through the foul womb of night.

The hum of either army stilly sounds...  

No two lines are alike.  

El mismo mar

 There was a novel very well known at the time, El mismo mar de todos los veranos.  It doesn't seem to have last--no new editions or critical studies. Esther Tusquets, the author, was very well known and this was the first of a trilogy.  The title is memorable because it is a perfect eleven syllable line of poetry (if it were a line of poetry.) Another novel in the series is "El amor es un juego solitario" which follows the same metrical pattern.  

MVA

 I own several books by María Victoria Atencia. They are part of my research library, my personal collection in my own field. I have taught poems by her in class, put her on the reading list. Yet I have never written about her work, simply because I never had an idea about her that was worth developing into an article. This doesn't reflect any lack of interest in her work, any lack of respect for her work or her person (I met her once at MLA).  

There are other poets in this category too. What you write should be a fraction of all the things you know about.  

CBT (iii) / spoiler alert

 I finished Corazón tan blanco. I guess it is fine if that's the kind of thing that you like. Everything exists in triplicate here. Every character, every situation, is not only squared by cubed. The intertext is there for you to find: Macbeth, from which the title of the novel comes. 

The narrator's father, Ranz, the only character in the novel who is a full, well-rounded character, murdered his first wife to marry the second. Confessing his crime to wife 2 on the honey moon, he sets in motion her suicide. He then marries the sister of wife 2, the mother of Juan, the narrator.  

He confesses to Luisa, Juan's wife, while Juan listens from an adjoining room.  This is the logical solution, of course,  

CTB [ii]

 Now we have a chapter about the narrator meeting Luisa, while they are interpreting between a Margaret Thatcher like figure and a prime minister of Spain. There is a long digression about the work of translation, where the translator acts as conduit without remembering any of the information later. 

The narrator talks about bribing some gypsies play their music further from his house so he can work. Later, he questions how he did it, thinking he should have been more diplomatic. Then, a digression of a girl in a stationery store that he had a crush on as a teenager. She still works there and he goes in to buy some items before his wedding. She is slightly younger [both in their 30s] and he has a little fantasy about having courted her when they were young rather than just going in to buy pencils without ever talking to her.  

He has doubts about the wedding, reinforced by his father, Ranz.  We get a long look at the father (whereas we know almost nothing about the narrator's wife, Luisa). He is an art dealer and has also worked at the Prado. An anecdote about how the father convinced a museum guard not to set a painting on fire. The father is corrupt, using his knowledge of art to trick people and get extra money. 

I am seeing cleverness in this novel, not brilliance. He is able to go off on interesting tangents in a kind of tour-de-force way. Perhaps my lack of interest in fiction of this type  is to blame here, but it is hard to believe that this is the best book of Spanish literature in a 50 year period. 

The narrator himself is rather bland and faceless. 

I am 27% into the book and beginning a chapter about the narrator's mother (Juana) the suicidal sister (Teresa) and the rather (Ranz).  

CTB

 I decided to read Corazón tan blanco. I was in Spain and saw a list of the 50 best books since Franco's death (50 years ago).  That was at the top. I had read only one by Marías before, El hombre sentimental, and was underwhelmed by the grey prose and banal soap-opera plot. 

1st chapter:  The suicide of a woman just back from her honeymoon. The widower will go on to marry the sister of the woman who shoots herself. The narrator is the son of the widower and this younger sister. The widower had been married and widowed once before. 

2nd chapter. The honeymoon of the narrator with Luisa. Both are translators / interpreters, so a lot of emphasis on language / communication. Luisa gets sick in Cuba. The narrator, standing on a balcony, is interpolated by a mulata woman who thinks he is her lover, in the next room in the hotel. The narrator eavesdrops through the wall separating between their two room. The action of the novel is displaced: we care more about the plot between Miriam (Cuban mulata) and Guillermo (Madrid Spaniard) than between Luisa and nameless narrator. Miriam wants Guillermo to kill his wife (a woman in Spain who is supposedly dying anyway.) The narrator reflects on the veracity of the Guillermo's story, and wonders what side to take. Miriam sings the same song the narrator's Cuban grandmother used to sing.  Everything seems doubled in the novel so far.  Two honeymoons, two sisters, two Cuban women singing the same song, two Spaniards in the same hotel. Two sick Spanish women (Luisa, and Guillermo's wife). A man who has been widowed twice.    

We don't know which side of the family the Cuban grandmother is on.  It is typical of Marías to have multiple, international settings for this novels. This is a moment when Spanish literature is self-consciously trying to be more international.  The idea is to write novels that work well in translation to other European languages, as Spain enters NATO and the EU and emerges from the Franco period of isolation. In fact, the book was a big hit in Germany. The narrator is multi-lingual and interprets at a high level (between heads of state). 

The prose is bit like Juan Benet, with long, serpentine sentences, but this style serves a different purpose than in Benet.  

Granular

 Lorca studies is extremely granular.  No detail seems too insignificant. As Andrew Gelman likes to say, "God is in every leaf of every tree."  

There are several advantages. 

Avoidance of factual error. 

Avoidance of oversimplification.  (Well, you would think a granular subfield would not be prone to this, but it is.  The best antidote is granularity.) 

The third benefit is that insights can emerge from close attention to detail--insights not available from a bird's eye view.  

Of course, you have to be on the lookout for this insight.  The individual detail itself is not as important as the juxtaposition of two or more details that together show something new.   

A granular approach that is only granular is dull, lacking in insight.  A bird's-eye view that is blithe, indifferent to detail, is hollow.  

Laura

I've had some interesting talk with Laura GL and her sister Isabel. The songs they sang in their family were the same ones recorded by Germaine Montero, with the same lyrics. 

Both Lorca nieces acted. I saw Laura doing Zapatero prodigiosa years ago. Isabel was a dancer, then actress, and then psychotherapist.  

Isabel told me her father Paco and Federico liked A Midsummer Night's Dream movie with Mickey Rooney.  

 

Weird

 It's very weird, but my Spanish improves after a few days here. I get more confidence. Yesterday there awoke was a brilliant talk by a professor of dance. After her, a famous Spanish composer spoke about his opera. Then an Italian Romani guy: he had his text written in Italian, but tried to give it in Spanish.  The effect was not good. He spoke in a loud voice, and it was like being shouted at for an hour.  

My element

 My whole identity professionally speaking is being a Lorca scholar. Today I'm going to the Centro FGL to attend the first day of a conference where I am an invited speaker.  

I feel a sense of confidence going in.  

Adaptation

 I was thinking that the vitality of Lorca's work can be seen in adaptations, parodies, translations, graphic novels about his life, musical works, etc... 

The one exception is this: you can't imitate his work stylistically, or take a play and add to it.  

I mean, you can, but not with good results. You could when writing in English, but not in Spanish, for example.  

Effusive

 I am in Granada. In the Barcelona airport, on the way here, I got the País, which had an effusive review of a book by Iain McGilchrist.  It's a 1000 page book about how civilizations get too left-brained, too reasonable and egotistical, and not right-brained enough (empathetic, etc...).  I am no neuroscientist, but my bullshit meter was way off the charts.  Obviously, for the brain to function at all, it needs all of itself. Certain parts of the brain seem to be in charge of certain functions, but so what? 

At the best, it is simply tautological.  If a certain part of the brain does empathy, and we like empathy, than we can treat that as the hemisphere of the brain we like.  We don't need neuroscience at all.  

Language

 A well known language poet posted on Facebook a bogus story about women more than 100 years ago organizing floating libraries on the Mississippi.  The story and the photos are very obviously fake. I looked around a bit and there is a lot of this fakery going around. There's another one about Appalachian heroic women librarians in the depression riding around on horses to distribute books.   

What's the give away?  It's more than one thing, of course, but it doesn't look like any photo from 1904. I find this sad and hilarious at the same time.   

 

AI

 A guy in my university made a documentary about a banana grower in Honduras from the last century. He used an awful, robotic sounding AI narrator, and also touched up historic photos with photoshop to make them look perfect.

He pronounced the word docuMENntary as documenTAry.  Granted, he is not a native speaker of English, but if that is his profession that is one word he should know in English.  

Demos

 Populism is from the word populus, or people. 

Democracy is from the word demos, or people. I guess it depends whether you like Latin or Greek better. 

People also comes from populus, via medieval French.  We have pueblo, peuple in Romance language. 

Demófilo is lover of the people, the pen-name for Antonio Machado y Álvarez. 

Demagogue is negative, democrat is positive.  

A Republican will always say the "Democrat Party," not the "Democratic Party."  Res publica, the public thing, is not the same as democracy, rule by the people.  

puzzles

 My new strategy for doing puzzles is this. I will do Wordle, Connections. For the Spelling Bee, I only look for the pangram, or word that uses all seven letters. I won't waste time looking for 40 other words. Curiously, I can often just look at the letters and see the pangram right away. Or if not, I just look at it later in the day and the word will often come to me. If I try to find as many words as possible, finding the pangram is much more difficult. (I will look at the hints to see how many pangrams there are, and will try to find all of them.)  

There is a newish game called "strands." I don't do it anymore because it is too easy.  I feel like an adult doing a child's game.  

For crosswords, I will do the mini, and then try to complete a puzzle in 5 minutes for Monday, 10 minutes for Tuesday, etc... For today's, for example, I completed a Friday in about 26 minutes, close to my goal.  

I was explaining

 I was explaining in the culture class this morning that there are three kinds of cultural value. 

1) The cultural object has value because a culture can be proud of it.  It is the artistically accomplished patrimony or heritage of a nation or otherwise linked-together group. 

2) Culture has value because it represents the everyday life practices of a group of people.  

3) Culture is valuable as a means of exchange, economically or otherwise.  

Flamenco employs all three of these cultural value systems.  It seems to me that fusing flamenco with other genres is a way of extending its exchange values.  

Concentric circles

 I was thinking of Rosalía. The NYT is promoting her as "the one good pop star," which is pretty ridiculous.  She began in Flamenco, wasn't especially popular within that subculture, went to Latin Pop, triumphed in the Latin Grammys, now is promoting an album where she sings with Bjork and uses 13 languages, including Ukrainian. A clear bid for global pop status.  Lavish production and attention to image and spectacle. 

Her "Mal querer" was college project, the equivalent of a M.A. thesis. It's intellectually somewhat unusual to use a medieval Occitan narrative poem as the basis of a pop or flamenco album. Traditionally, flamenco was not learned in school, but it looks like she's covering the academic / intellectual base too, making her perfect for promotion in the TIMES.  

I'm not being cynical here. I think she is talented and her projects are interesting.  But what is interesting is how the package is being created and marketed.   

Stride

 I was looking at people's gaits the other day. You could easily see degrees of relaxation, tension. How athletic the person might be. The angle of the back, depending on the weight of the student's backpack, the way the shoes affected how far the feet could rise from the ground, the way having arms in front holding phone distorted natural movements. Older people with shorter steps. You could recognize someone you know from their gait alone, like my daughter once told me they did in Chicago in the Winter, when the face was not visible under hats and scarves.  Facial expressions, though, are also informational on a warm day: a look of determination on the face and a determined, tense stride forward. A person walking slowly and with sort steps, and seeming to hug themselves in a comforting way.  

Then it occurred to me that this was also how you could read someone's voice. All the suprasegmental stuff is also informational, affected by tension or relaxation, or simply expressive of an attitude.   

I'm retiring

 We have an offer to retire, with one year salary as buy-out for no work.  I'm taking it since I was going to retire anyway, in another year: spring '06 will be my final semester. 

I've done pretty well. I rose fairly easily to be a top scholar in my field. Then suffered a while, rose again to be top, coasted for a while longer. I've always felt I could have done more, but yet I've done better than a lot of other people.  

Book club

 

Here is the reading list for a book club my mom led from 1971 through 2020. 

Meter la pata

 I was in the attic, closing windows for the winter. You can't step on the ceiling itself, but you have to walk on planks. I accidentally stepped off the plank and put my foot through the ceiling of one of the guest bedrooms, creating a huge hole and a mess, with boards, dust, and plaster and insulation everywhere. . , This is not my house (I live in an apartment), but rather my girlfriend's house. Naturally, she was not happy.  It will be extensive cleanup and expensive repair.  

The worst thing is that I feel that this is a huge personal failure, even though I have gone up to the attic to do this more than 20 times over several years with no incident, twice a year for 15 years, with a few times that someone else was hired to do it. I had gotten complacent. I fully admit to being maladroit.    

Specific to vague

In this dream I was creating a certain number of characters, people of representative kind. The clarity of their definition was high, and each was distinctively different.  I could hold them all in my head at once. When I awoke, I had nothing. Not a single detail or even a good way of explaining what I had built in my head.  

Kenyon

 I went down to Fort Scott for a bird watching trip last weekend. It started to rain, so I went from the nature preserve to the downtown and there was a used book store. I bought the collected poems of Jane Kenyon. She is not the usual kind of poet I admire, but she is respectable and I thought I would give it a try.  I reviewed a book of essays by David Shapiro, and he has a review of Donald Hall (married to Kenyon) that made me reconsider why I have always considered Hall a total mediocrity.  Maybe I was also giving short shrift to Kenyon as well.  

Part of the intention here is to examine my own responses. I find her work understated, unpretentious.  She's talking about her experience without trying to make herself sound superior to other people, in the way Mary Oliver does. She can bring off an ironic effect, but without calling attention to it. You could almost miss it. Sentimentality is rare in this poet.    

The writing is uneven. Sometimes she has simile-itis, where you just put in a simile because that is expected in a poem, rather than from a true artistic necessity. But there are sharp visual observations, attentiveness to what's going on in the immediate surroundings.  

The poems are different enough from one another, so that the effect is like getting to know a person. 

God only knows

 Somebody was saying that "God only knows" in the famous song of that title was a grammatical error. It should be "Only God knows." But obviously that is an idiom so it would be wrong to say it any other way.  

***

What I like in the Levertov translation of that Nahuatl poem is the weird rhythms created by words of varying length. The whole text has an improvised, jerky feel to it, and the words come in a surprising order. It would be easier to have a smoother version of it.  

Pygmalion

 I was going to play the role of Henry Higgins in Pygmalion. I drove to the theater but realized I had left my costume (a suit) at home, so I dropped the actress playing Eliza Doolittle there and drove back. Then I realized that I had not memorized my lines either, so I never made it back because obviously I wouldn't be able to do it. Later, I was hearing some people  saying they had seen the play with an understudy doing the part, because the actor had flaked out.  I felt really bad about not having done the part, even though I knew at some level I was dreaming. I stayed asleep and within the dream had to take responsibility and hear the actress scold me for irresponsibility.  Obviously we had never rehearsed. Somehow I had assumed I could do the role just by the force of my voice and personality.  

The Artist

 

I've like this Denise Levertov translation from an old Toltec poem, since I read int Rothenberg's Shaking the Pumpkin in the 1970s. 

The artist: disciple, abundant, multiple, restless.

The true artist: capable, practicing, skillful:

maintains dialogue with his heart, meets things with his mind.

The true artist: draws out all from his heart,

works with delight, makes things with calm, with sagacity,

works like a true Toltec, composes his objects, works dexterously, invents;

arranges materials, adorns them, makes them adjust.

The carrion artist: works at random, sneers at the people,

makes things opaque, brushes across the surface of the face of things,

​works without care, defrauds people, is a thief.

It seems to convey an idea of aesthetics as responsibility to the world. The good artist just does things right doing art badly is a form of fraud. I think I'm looking for a kind of universalism. There are universal principles of aesthetics, just that they manifest themselves differently in practice and those impede us from seeing their connections.  

Tone Row

 I found this tone row I wrote, in an audio file in garage band. I play it 4 ways, inverted, backwards, etc... Then I improvise over it a bit, then play it again. Garage band transcribes the notes automatically, but with weird note values, since I am not following any pulse.  The row of 12 notes sounds jazzy, because I can favor certain intervals, like diminished triads. It is almost impossible to deliberately construct a row that sounds musical but doesn't sound like something suggestive of tonality.  The tonality is still there, because every interval is still itself, any three notes in a row sound like some part of some possible chord.  

Peyrou

 Mariano Peyrou has an interesting idea in his book against the prejudicial idea of '"intellectual" music. It is really the intellect that is getting in the way of appreciating this music. The fear of not understanding prevents a more open attitude toward more difficult music. 

"Una buena parte de la música que se tacha de intelectual busca deliberadamente colocar al oyente en una posición en la que lo intelectual no sirve: está diciendo que ha de escucharse con los oídos, abandonando el marco de referencia que el oyente conoce y con el que se siente cómodo."

Peyrou Tubert, Mariano. Oídos que no ven: Contra la idea de música intelectual (Spanish Edition) (p. 125). (Function). Kindle Edition. 

A large portion of music accused of being intellectual deliberately tries to situate the listener in a position in which the intellect doesn't work: it is saying that it has to be listened to with one's ears, abandoning the frame of reference that the listener know and with which s/he feels comfortable." 

In what direction does the sun rise?

 I would say it rises in a Westward movement. It rises in the East, but its direction is always Westward.  Please be careful in your use of language.  

Seriousness and pretention

 You want to study every day culture in a serious way. Food, drink, clothing, social customs. But then you also don't want to subject this culture to an overly pretentious theoretical metalanguage. What makes it pretentious is the mismatch between the everydayness of the experience, and the pretensions of the language.  

It is an interesting question, I think, to look at other types of mismatches. An analysis of a poem that is written in an anti-poetic way, for example. Maybe these aren't even mismatches? Maybe it's that our expectations are wrong, and that pretentious language should be welcomed in any academic subfield, as a way of guaranteeing its seriousness. 

Decadence

 On the other hand, it doesn't seem disputable that the Hapsburgs were "decadent," that things weren't going too well for them in the later part of the 17th century. The so called "siglo de oro" was over. The last major author was Calderón, who died in 1681.  Quevedo, much earlier, denounced decadence in "Miré los muros de la patria mía." We see a cultural critique, in the baroque period, of this decadence, in the picaresque novel, for example. It won't do to say that other nations had their problems too, or that the entire bad reputation of the Hapsburgs rests on propaganda from other countries.  That just sounds like defensiveness.  

Baked into

 “White supremacism is baked into the foundations of some academic fields."  (Ruth and Bérubé). That means that teachers and researchers doing those fields become supremacist just by doing their regular jobs in a more or less unexceptional way, from day to day. It would be hard to see how we could defend their academic freedom, then, even if their disciplines are run in a professional way. 

So the argument shifts from singling out a few egregious people, like Amy Wax, to de-legitimizing entire disciplines. The books shifts into the idea that Critical Race Theory should be the foundation of academic freedom itself. But surely this theory should itself be open to free debate?  If the theory is foundationally  "baked into" our conception of academic freedom, then it becomes simply undebatable. 

Once again, CRT can be looked at in two ways. It can be said, oh, it is simply an acknowledgment of racism in American history. Or it can be a more specific body of work with very specific ideas. The first is undebatable: there is racism.  The second is debatable, and surely would include internal debates as well as questions from outside this theoretical framework.  

All fields of academic inquiry have debates within them.  We don't know in advance what the answers are going to be. Surely there should also be debates within CRT as well.  We should find people in this field disagreeing with one another, as we all do in our academic fields.  

Exceed expectations

 Now the administration is talking about how candidates for promotion should "exceed" expectations rather than must meeting them. But that means (as I pointed out in the union meeting today) that the expectations are not the expectations any more.  The stated expectations, in other words, are not the real ones. If they say you need six articles, but you actually need nine, then nine is the new "expectation." Of course, we are all above average, so it will never come to that.  Everyone's expectations are inflationary, so departments will continue to rank everyone as excellent, and "very good" will come to mean mediocre.  

Buero Vallejo

 We (me and the person I was with at the time) saw a play in Madrid in 1984 or 85, Diálogo secreto by BV.  It's about an art critic who is colorblind, and hides this. His whole career is based on a fraud, since he has to fake his entire expertise, essentially. I remember our reaction as kind of skepticism about the plot device. He had used blindness as a metaphor before, and deafness, too, in a play about Goya, but here the plot seems especially contrived. Some with Daltonism decide to make a career as an art critic in the first place?  And is art criticism wholly about the perception of color? Heavy handed symbolism is almost his specialty, but here he takes it one step too far.  

AI

 I came across an AI site of book summaries. Here's one that I thought was pretty bad, but my students didn't notice anything about it.  

"La obra Viento del Pueblo recoge una selección de poemas escritos por Miguel Hernández durante la Guerra Civil Española. En ellos, el poeta refleja la dureza de la contienda, el sufrimiento de los combatientes y la injusticia de la guerra. A través de sus versos, Hernández denuncia la brutalidad de la represión franquista y al mismo tiempo exalta la lucha del pueblo por la libertad y la justicia.

En sus poemas, Miguel Hernández muestra una profunda empatía con los más desfavorecidos, con los que sufren en primera línea las consecuencias de la guerra. Sus versos están impregnados de una intensa emoción y una gran sensibilidad, que conmueven al lector y le hacen reflexionar sobre la condición humana en tiempos de conflicto."

Coming out the other side

 One's early research is specialized, and one doesn't know as much at that point.  The perspective is narrower. You're not even going to be a a good generalist yet, because the total amount of things you know is limited. As knowledge and expertise grow, there can be less narrow projects. If you specialize intensely in one thing, you will have to know a lot of other things to understand it; you can come through on the other side with a knowledge both broad and deep. A good generalist will be a specialist on several different things. 

White supremacy

 It is easy to agree with Bérubé that racial supremacy should be beyond the pale. No reputable academic should be espousing those views. But, then, I've heard a lot of things called white supremacy, like music theory or math, showing up on time, etc.... You can't argue for the value of the protestant work ethic, maybe.  In the more expansive vision of supremacy, every normal thing that one does could be a symptom of that, and every defense of a normal practice could be seen in the same light, as a defense of white supremacy.  

So the belief that white supremacy is beyond the pale is a way of smuggling in a compulsion to believe in a certain world view, the idea that this supremacy is pervasive.  

No it could be true that white supremacy pervades a lot of thinking in an implicit way.  But that is a point that should be debated, not simply imposed.  Conflating KKK style racism with everyday practices that might be pervaded with a more nebulous idea of supremacy is not intellectually honest.  

Academic freedom

 I was thinking about a book by Bérubé about academic freedom. He and a colleague, Jennifer Ruth, with whom he wrote this book, It's not free speech, argue that academic freedom is not the same as 1st amendment freedom, and that certain opinions, even if free speech, should be beyond the pale in academia. Scholarship that argues for the inferiority of certain races, or that Western colonialism could be a good thing.  These rules should be enforced by faculty committees, not by administrative units. So the faculty should police itself to make sure no bad opinions get expressed.

Here's the problem: what about a book that says the leyenda negra is false, or that Hapsburg Spain is not as benighted as it seems? Or that the left started the Civil War in Spain? There are all kinds of things that can be debatable, where one can learn from the other side of things, without agreeing wholly with the argument. We can read things in a devil's advocate spirit. 

You have to go down that road if you want to make the best arguments "on the right side of history," so to speak. I've often noticed when leftist arguments are obviously weak, because they have been developed in a vacuum, without consideration of counter arguments. We should be able to argue that DEI programs are not all that great, without being put in the Trump camp. Even the notorious "Western colonialism was positive" article has to be considered in that way.  

Who gets to decide where the line is? We have to already know the truth to decide what opinions are beyond the pale... 

Of course, putting it in the hands of other professors does not solve anything, since academia's range of opinion is narrow.  

Further development of the 5 ideas:

 I. Hay un “giro literario” en la música que afecta no solo a Lorca, sino a otros poetas como Miguel Hernández. El fenómeno se produce no únicamente en el flamenco, sino también en la llamada “canción de autor.” 

 

A. Hay un fenómeno global, que incluye movimientos como a la nueva canción folklórica latinoamericana, la chanson française, el “folk revival” anglosajón, la canción catalana. 

B. Estos movimientos combinan tres elementos: música folklórica, compromiso social y político e interés por la calidad poética de las letras. 

C. Hay un proceso de selección, que favorece a los poetas canónicos pero populares y de izquierdas.

D. Lorca es la selección lógica porque cumple con estos requisitos, y es además el poeta más musical, en varias dimensiones de su vida y de su obra. Sus obras se cantan primero en la canción de autor (Paco Ibáñez), y posteriormente en el flamenco.  

 

II. El Lorca que entra en el Nuevo Flamenco es un Lorca vanguardista e intelectual—aunque el elemento popular y folklórico nunca está lejos, en las canciones grabadas con La Argentinita, constantemente tocadas, cantadas y grabadas de nuevo en géneros musicales diversos. 

 

A. Camarón y Ricardo Pachón, en La leyenda del tiempo, utilizan un texto sacado de Así       que pasen cinco años, con otros textos lorquianos de procedencia diversa. 

B. Con Omega, Morente se aproxima al poeta a través de Leonard Cohen, en un viaje de   “ida y vuelta” con el Lorca neoyorquino.  

C. Poveda, en Enlorquecido, introduce un elementos biográfico ausente en homenajes          previos, con fragmentos de poemas de Poeta en Nueva York y con una carta lorquiana muy     personal. 

D. Camarón y Poveda (con otros, como Linares, Estrella Morente) siguen teniendo en      mente las diez canciones grabadas por Lorca, con otras como “La Tarara.” Estas           canciones son el ADN de la recepción musical de Lorca.   

 

III. Con la introducción de una gran cantidad de textos literarios, el flamenco mismo se transforma: se vuelve menos purista, mezclándose con otros géneros. Se introducen otros instrumentos y se profundiza en el análisis armónica. La poesía es uno de los motores de este cambio; su prestigio cultural es enorme, como música de patrimonio en Andalucía y en España.  

 

            A. Expansión del género para ofrecer más posibilidades tanto en la letra como en la          música. Final del “purismo.” Otros instrumentos y desarrollo de teoría armónica.  

            B. Una idea antológica pero no nostálgica de la historia de la música flamenca. La            vitalidad de la música en su historia, pero también en la innovación. 

            C. La poesía entra plenamente en el flamenco. Cantar la poesía de Lorca y otros ya es      una excepción, sino algo completamente normal.  

            D. Los que cantan a Lorca (y a otros poetas) son algunos de las figuras más destacadas, así            que no se trata de un fenómeno marginal (Morente, Linares, Poveda). 

            

 

IV. El efecto es doble: la literatura da respaldo el flamenco como música de “patrimonio” cultural. La poesía canónica se vuelve doblemente canónica, valiéndose de la importancia canónica de una música arraigada ya en el prestigio literario, desde el romanticismo en adelante. 

 

            A. El flamenco goza de prestigio como música de patrimonio. Siempre lo has sido, hasta   cierto punto, pero ha habido también anti-flamenquismo o “desprestigio del flamenco   entre los intelectuales” (Mairena). Este desprestigio es, ya, imposible. 

            B. La poesía cantada de esta forma, igualmente, goza de un estatus doblemente canónico:            pervive a través de la música. De la misma forma hay novelas gráficas, traducciones,      adaptaciones en otros medios, que son la señal de una literatura culturalmente viva. 

            C. Es, entonces, un apoyo mutuo, en que los beneficios se comparten entre la música y la poesía culta  

Fracasología

 I read this book, on the recommendation of another blogger. It's written from a right-wing perspective of traditional Spanish nationalism. The argument is that with the change from the Austrian to the French (Bourbon) dynasty at the beginning of the 18th Century, the Spanish intellectual elite became self-hating. The Hapsburg achievements were suppressed in historiography. The "black legend," invented by other colonial powers hypocritically to downplay their own colonial atrocities, was adopted by the Spanish intellectuals themselves. 18th Century Spanish literature is derivate of the French, despite the glories of Golden Age Spain. The ruling intellectual class was "Frenchified." Moratín was trying to impose French neoclassical ideas onto Spanish literature, but in an age when the rest of Europe was in the throes of romanticism!  Moliere was buried outside of sacred ground, because theater people were automatically excommunicated. But Lope de Vega had a hero's funeral.  

All thiscame to head when the French tried to impose a Napoleon heir onto Spain, and a war was fought for independence. Now the principle of national sovereignty becomes more important among the liberals than adherence to French enlightenment ideas. 

Roca Barea doesn't like the generation of 1898. She points out that it wasn't, in fact, a response to the war of 1898. Posing Spain as a "problem," furthermore, is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is the naming of Spain as a problem that makes Spain a problem.  Other nations at the same time experienced a crisis of "decadence," but only in Spain was this attributed to the cultural inferiority of Spain itself. France can be in horrid state, and also have a serious of failures, but French intellectuals will always maintain the glory of their own intellectual traditions. No other country has put itself in a subordinate position like this, wanting to be an intellectual colony of another.  

The Generation of 1927 has no fear of being Spanish. They shed this complex completely.  She also like Flamenco because it was a response to the imposition of Italian music. 

There was a rush to Germanify Spanish thought, as an antidote to the constant drumbeat of Frenchification. Max Weber was really big, and "Krausismo." Protestantism was the driving force of capitalism, so the Catholic South of Europe was going to be behind economically, per Weber. Roca Barea is anti-protestant (generally) and against Catalan and Basque nationalism.  Krausismo is an educational movement named after a German thinker who is fairly minor in Germany itself. 

This book goes against the whole ideology of my field, which is that Spain represents failed modernity. Remember that the subtitle of Spanish Cultural Studies edited by Graham and Labanyi is "The Struggle for Modernity." But Hapsburg Spain was modern for its time, and the Spanish empire was powerful. 

There are many good moments in the book. The skewering of Buero Vallejo's Un soñador para un pueblo, for example. A reformist minister tries to suppress the traditional garb of Madrid (long capes and wide-brimmed hats) and there is a popular uprising (riot) against him.  Buero Vallejo's sympathies are with the reformist, enlightened figure, Esquilache, of course, but he appears in this book as a corrupt figure rather than a heroic one. 

Another moment: Stanford university eliminates the name of a street named after Junipero Serra. But the founder of Stanford University, Leland Stanford Sr., as governor of California, exterminated Indians, rather than merely converting them as Father Serra had done. 

That I agree with this book at some points does not make me right wing. I just think you have to read a lot of sources from different perspectives. I've long thought that the struggle for modernity narrative was flawed, that the idea of a missed enlightenment or missed romanticism were flawed cultural narratives.  

One problem is that the bad, retrograde Spain that is merely a figment of the imagination of liberal Spanish intellectuals began the Spanish Civil War.  There are too many arguments from hypocrisy, the tu quoque fallacy. The tone of the book gets tiresome. It is a polemic rather than a balanced approach. The writing is sometimes sloppy, and many points are belabored. 

Maybe the black legend should be applied to all of European colonialism.  Singling out Spain is not correct. I always remember that the British expelled the Jews in 1290, long before Spain did, and there were not Jews in Britain until the age of Cromwell. 

Further development of 5 ideas

 I've modified my plan and decided to have 4 subsections for each of the 5 ideas:  

I. Hay un “giro literario” en la música que afecta no solo a Lorca, sino a otros poetas como Miguel Hernández. El fenómeno se produce no únicamente en el flamenco, sino también en la llamada “canción de autor.” 

 

A. Hay un fenómeno global, que incluye movimientos como a la nueva canción folklórica latinoamericana, la chanson française, el “folk revival” anglosajón, la canción catalana. 

B. Estos movimientos combinan tres elementos: música folklórica, compromiso social y político e interés por la calidad poética de las letras. 

C. Hay un proceso de selección, que favorece a los poetas canónicos pero populares y de izquierdas.

D. Lorca es la selección lógica porque cumple con estos requisitos, y es además el poeta más musical, en varias dimensiones de su vida y de su obra. Sus obras se cantan primero en la canción de autor (Paco Ibáñez), y posteriormente en el flamenco.  

 

II. El Lorca que entra en el Nuevo Flamenco es un Lorca vanguardista e intelectual—aunque el elemento popular y folklórico nunca está lejos, en las canciones grabadas con La Argentinita, constantemente tocadas, cantadas y grabadas de nuevo en géneros musicales diversos. 

 

A. Camarón y Ricardo Pachón, en La leyenda del tiempo, utilizan un texto sacado de Así que pasen cinco             años, con otros textos lorquianos de procedencia diversa. 

B. Con Omega, Morente se aproxima al poeta a través de Leonard Cohen, en un viaje de   “ida y                 vuelta” con el Lorca neoyorquino.  

C. Poveda, en Enlorquecido, introduce un elementos biográfico ausente en homenajes previos, con                 fragmentos de poemas de Poeta en Nueva York y con una carta lorquiana muy  personal. 

D. Camarón y Poveda (con otros, como Linares, Estrella Morente) siguen teniendo en  mente las                 diez canciones grabadas por Lorca, con otras como “La Tarara.” Estas  canciones son el ADN de l                a recepción musical de Lorca.   

Pool

 I'm in a motel and I see there's a sign: no food or drink in pool area. I'm assuming it's a swimming pool, but I'm kind of skeptical, because it doesn't seem like the kind of place that would have a pool.  I  look into the room... and there's a pool table.  

25 ideas

 Here is something I developed several year ago.  

Think of 5 ideas about something.  Do it while walking or driving, when you don't have a way of writing them down.  Write them down when you get home, or to destination.  Put them in their most logical order so that they comprise an argument. Then refine their phrasing, and expand a bit. The same idea can be expressed in 10 words or in 40.  

Each idea should be able to be explained with five steps, so you now have 25 ideas. In paragraphs of 125 words, you have a paper of 3125 words, which you can read at a conference, or develop into 7000 for an article. 

So thinking about Miles Davis. I would have one idea about his relation to the beboppers. He is younger than them, is influenced not by Dizzy, but by other players, the same way Dizzy was influenced by Roy Eldridge rather than Louis Armstrong. I could talk a bit about Miles and Monk.   

My second idea would be about Gil Evans and Bill Evans, how Miles influences and works with the whiter style of cool jazz, rather than being a hard bop guy. How the dichotomy between hard bop and cool dominated the 1950s. 

I could do a thing about his two classic quintets, one with Red Garland, Coltrane, Philly Joe, Paul Chambers, and the other with Tony Williams, Herbie, Shorter, and Ron Carter. A general reflection on how he found the perfect musicians to work with at any point in his career.  

Then a thing about his innovation on dealing with the audience. The famous "turning his back on the public" trope. It's an explicit rejection of the Satchmo style of charisma.  It's introspective and "cool." Coolness come as antithesis to jazz as "hot." (While the earlier dichotomy was between "sweet" and "hot" music.)

My 5th idea would be about later Miles and incorporation of R&B and rock styles. How he is at the root of "fusion." How fusion was rejected by the young lions group--and how to explain conflicts between Miles and Wynton. 

You should bring able to do that off the top of your head about anything you know well, like I just did with the Miles example. About how many topics could you develop 5 ideas of a certain quality or interest, while taking an hour walk? I could do it with Monk, Cervantes, or Borges. Probably a few more things, too. Frank O'Hara, for sure. 

****

1. Hay un “giro literario” en la música que afecta no solo a Lorca, sino a otros poetas como Miguel Hernández. El fenómeno se produce no únicamente en el flamenco, sino también en la llamada “canción de autor.” 

 

2. El Lorca que entra en el Nuevo Flamenco es un Lorca vanguardista e intelectual—aunque el elemento popular y folklórico nunca está lejos, en las canciones grabadas con La Argentinita, constantemente tocadas, cantadas y grabadas de nuevos en géneros musicales diversos. 

 

3. Con la introducción de una gran cantidad de textos literarios, el flamenco mismo se transforma: se vuelve menos purista, mezclándose con otros géneros. Se introducen nuevos instrumentos. La poesía es uno de los motores de este cambio.  

 

4. El efecto es doble: la literatura da respaldo el flamenco como música de “patrimonio” cultural. La poesía canónica se vuelve doblemente canónica, valiéndose de la importancia canónica de una música arraigada ya en el prestigio literario, desde el romanticismo en adelante. 

 

5. Lorca es la figura clave de este giro literario, por ser un poeta de vanguardia, pero con raíces populares y con un interés explícito en el flamenco. 

The Collected Blurbs of JM

 I've written blurbs for books when I've been asked. I have said no a few times as well. I wrote one for a Yusef K. book over 10 years ago. I went looking for it and found it on amazon. I had not even known for sure whether they used it, because they never sent me the book.  Not very good, is it, but I guess I felt the need to say yes to this. Often I have even done it without excessive enthusiasm, but simply giving a more or less honest view with a positive spin. I often use a tone like: hey, this book is ok and might be useful to people who like this kind of thing.  

'"Testimony' is a compelling tribute. . . . It is remarkably free of kitsch and cliché and has some wonderful details. The interview with Feinstein, and Feinstein's other essay, help to explicate some of the details in the poem for readers less familiar with Bird lore.""―Jonathan Mayhew, author of Apocryphal Lorca: Translation, Parody, Kitsch"

A certain look

 I was watching Golden Bachelor, I'm not sure why, in which several women vie for the attention of a single man. This particular variant has an older guy, in his 60s, and more or less all the women are in their 60s or so, and mostly tall, thin white women with straight hair.  They all have the same look (maybe because that's what the guy is looking for, and it is late in this season), but it struck me that the aesthetic is rather narrow. Of course, the whole thing is somewhat objectionable, but why not have Latina, Asian women, and other shapes and sizes? The tone of the conversations is also somewhat monotonous, as though the producers had taught everyone the exact right thing to say. 

The only thing you know about a writer

 Kafka.  The Trial. Metamorphosis.  The "Kafkaesque." 

Proust. Involuntary memory.  The madeleine.  Swan as family friend. Maman finally kisses him good night. 

Beckett. Godot never comes. Absurd. 

Lorca. Deep song & flamenco. Gay and killed by Franco. Body never found. 

Cervantes. Fat and skinny guys tilting at windmills. "Quixotic." An etching by Picasso.  

Blurry

 Suppose a picture is blurry. The problem could be with my eyes; I am not wearing my glasses! Or the problem could be with the picture; it is blurry in and of itself.  Or some combination of the two factors that makes it difficult for me to see. 

Now, let's think about this in terms of hearing.  I can hear perfectly in my own language. Not really; it might be a difficult to understand dialect, or we could be in a noisy place, or you could be mumbling. But really, I can hear pretty well.  

But in another language, what I hear is "blurry." The problem is not my hearing, or the mumbling of the native speakers of that language.  It is a mismatch between my hearing and the things I think I ought to be hearing. 

It could be a failure to distinguish between two similar sounds...  Like a basic minimal pair problem.  

Unrest

 They want to merge our department with others. There is also a movement to give us an incentive to retire early, In my case, I would be retiring anyway but can get a year's salary without working as part of the deal (one hopes). The legislature is considering abolishing tenure, as well. The attack on the university is serious.  As I said before, we are squeezed on all sides. The administration is stalling on negotiations with the union, and meanwhile we don't even have a raise for this academic year yet. 

Even if I were young enough, I wouldn't be hirable in today's climate. When I was trained we did genres, and I chose poetry. It is true that my research now is interdisciplinary, on music and poetry, and yet I don't think there would be a job for me, in part because there just aren't jobs in general, and many ask for highly specific laundry lists of things that do not include what I do. I'm not seeing a huge future for my profession in general, and I have no interest in a lot of the more recent trends. 

Everything is interdisciplinary now, but in a way that omits actual disciplines.  

I don't mean to be negative. I have (and have had) a great career. I am lucky that this stuff is happening when I have a foot out of the door anyway.   

Xībānyá yǔ

 Words in Chinese re generally one or two syllables. There are sometimes 3 syllable words, or things like Xībānyá yǔ which means Spanish language. Nouns tend to be two syllables, adjectives and verbs, one syllable. Xinshiliu, or Saturday, is the most beautiful word I've found so far. 

You can make easy compounds like fruit cake, which is fruit + cake.  Ice coffee is bing + kafei.  It is almost Germanic in word formation. 

They say there aren't many loan words, but there is coffee, sofa, and chocolate.  

There are reduplications, like baba, mama, yeye, for family members. Or xiexie (please) or chang chang (often.). 

Sibilants are a problem.  There are a lot of zh, s, x, ch, ts sounds at the beginning of words, The syllables are usually a consonant plus a rhyme, ending normally with a vowel or nasal sound, never with a hard consonant. This means that syllables tend to sound similar to one another, silibant + nasal.  We are grateful when a word sounds more distinctive or stands out more against a backdrop. 

But I'm supposing all languages sound more mushy the farther they are from one's native language. I'm sure the mass of schwa sounds doesn't make English easy. 

Lazy

 In this dream, with my ex, we had a conversation in which she was insisting on how hard working she was, in comparison with me, I guess. Because I remember my response:  "So I'm lazy, and you are hard working, but we have had equally successful careers... How do you explain that?"  

Suppose

 Suppose you had perfect hearing and mimicking ability in a foreign language. You could hear every syllable and transcribe it in IPA, and repeat it with a native accent. Then you could understand everything except the semantics.

 Then you could memorize vocabulary by associating sounds with meanings.  

Language learning would be easy, then.  

***

Leaving aside grammar.  

We are squeezed

 We are squeezed from several directions at once.

There is the right-wing distrust of the humanities. There used to be right-wing supporters of the humanities, and, much as we despised them, there was at least a sense of something of value in the humanities appreciated even by those whose motives we distrust.  

There is the left-wing attack on the humanities. This is worse, in some ways, because it comes from within and thus is harder to resist. I remember people in my department saying they felt guilty about teaching literature. I recently saw a book that was pure position-taking, with no substance at all. 

Then there is AI, and the like.  We can manufacture new texts just by combining fragments of other texts in a plausible way. There is be no there there, as Stein would way. 

Then, there is just the relegation of teaching to adjuncts, making the entire work force of the humanities precarious labor.  

Between all these forces, the humanities don't stand a chance. 

Singapore

In this dream I was in Singapore or somewhere like that. I had no idea about the local currency, and found an ATM and withdrew, but I wasn't sure how much, so I did it again. I didn't have the address of my hotel, so getting in a taxi wouldn't do me much good. I was unsure of the language, not at all confident of my Mandarin.   

That last post was probably wrong

Language is not coterminous with reality itself, but with human cognition of reality. To the extent that languages coincide with how they construct the "map" of reality, this is what the human cognitive map of reality is.  Spacial and temporal relations; everything that language is good at doing.  

Where language is bad at something, or not as good, then it because there are parts of cognition that are linguistically efficient.  For example, you could describe a musical score with words, like saying: the sopranos have an E# quarter note, then a dotted C# eighth note.  

I guess language is not experiential, in the sense that it depends on the experience with which it coincides. It cannot convey new experiences to someone who hasn't felt them before, or convey qualitative things in their full immanent presence, or transcendent experiences.  It is an abstract system. But then, there is poetry, which makes experience palpable by using the sound and presence of the Word.  The poem itself is an experience. 

Language is coterminous with reality

 We think of language as inadequate in some ways, but really it is pretty great.  We can describe things in great detail, as much as we want.   

Borges's story, "Del rigor de la ciencia" imagines a map that coincides with the territory it covers. It is absurd, but we can imagine that, say, a description of an item can be extensive. Say, an analysis of a poem that is 100 times the length of the poem itself.  Or a 500 page novel about the events of a single day in the lives of two or three people.  Maps co-extensive with the territory defeat the whole purpose of a map, which is the scaling of it.  But we have no compunction about scaling with linguistic descriptions.  

The trope of ineffability, from this perspective, is really more about our high expectations of language.  We have to hold language in great esteem in the first place to even see its imperfections as disastrous.  

It can do almost anything we want it to do.  If there is something we want it to do that it can't, that is because our expectations are distorted by how much it can do in the first place.  

"En aquel imperio, el arte de la cartografía logró tal perfección que el mapa de una sola provincia ocupaba toda una Ciudad, y el mapa del imperio, toda una provincia. Con el tiempo, estos mapas desmesurados no satisficieron y los colegios de cartógrafos levantaron un mapa del imperio, que tenía el tamaño del imperio y coincidía puntualmente con él.

Menos adictas al estudio de la cartografía, las generaciones siguientes entendieron que ese dilatado Mapa era inútil y no sin impiedad lo entregaron a las inclemencias del sol y los inviernos. En los desiertos del Oeste perduran despedazadas ruinas del mapa, habitadas por animales y por mendigos; en todo el país no hay otra reliquia de las disciplinas geográficas."

"…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a

single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety

of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the

Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and

which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so

fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map

was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the

Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are

Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is

no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography."  --Andrew Hurely, trans. 

The ornithologist is a better linguist than he is an ornithologist

 By this I mean that supposing an ornithologist has an extensive vocabulary in her field: names of birds, words used in a specialized way to describe them, scientific terminology in general.  This extra vocabulary runs to thousands of phrases. But the ornithologist will never know more bird words than words in general, because the bird words are part of the vocabulary, and are added to the total.  The ornithologist also know how to form phrases and talk about other things, can follow the rules of phonology and morphology and syntax and speech prosody. He or she is an educated person, also, since learning ornithology was part of an education into many things.   

You never know more of any other category of things than you know words, since you are likely to use words for those other categories too. If the ornithologist know 5,000 birds words, they will still know 20,000 non bird words as well.   

I'm using "linguist" here in a novel sense, because I don't know what other word to use for this. 

There  could be counter examples, I guess. People not very good with their words. Usually, though, we are comparing those people to people who speak more adeptly. They are below average, but still fluent in their own language.     

Linguistic universals

 I guess I could look up linguistic universals and find out what linguists think they might be.  Maybe negation, words for spatial and temporal relations, words for things and qualities of things. Actions. Ways of ordering words. I'm thinking the beginning and ends of utterances are going to be important. That all languages will have units or phrases.  They will have questions. 

There are other ways of asking questions in Chinese.  Putting a question word at the end like 'na li' (where?). Another one that means "what."   

There are some verbal and temporal things: zai + verb for present progressive.  Le after the verb to make it past.  

It's not like you need some universal grammar at a deep knowledge. It's more that languages have things that they want to do, and then there have mechanisms for doing those things.  So suppose negation is a thing you would expect a language to want to do.  Then you would have some words that negate, or an affix, or whatever. Then a rule for where to place the negative element. 

Tedium and bewilderment

Chinese lessons I have done already seem tedious to repeat, but beginning a new lessons seems alien. I make myself drill the old material for a long time before going on. Then I realize I don't know the characters well enough and have to spend a long time drilling those too. Some I know more from gestalt than really knowing each stroke. 

Hey, ho, hey, ho

 I remember hearing that Jesse Jackson was at Stanford leading a chant of protesters saying "hey ho hey ho / Western Civ has got to go."This was in 1987.  There is something in me that broke when that happened. I don't know hoe to describe those kind of feelings, where you feel alienated from an otherwise progressive cause. 

I know it's not as catchy a chant to say "hey, ho, hey, ho / let's diversify the syllabus a little bit mo."  

A few more things

 I do know a few more things: two words of negation, mei and bu. Where to place these words. Chang chang will be frequently, so bu chang will infrequently. zai + verb will be doing that (progressive), not doing it will be mei zai + verb. 

"My daughter is not reading the newspaper."  I know how to construct that.  

There are two other tag phrases to ask question, ni ne, and bui dubui.  How about you, and is that right? 

Wo shi is I am, shi wo, it is I. 

Language learning

 I like Chinese grammar. So far, I know some basic word order, three ways of asking questions. 

Putting ma as particle at the end. Using haishi to ask about alternatives. Putting another particle at the end to ask "what."

I know how to make a progressive: the zai  before a word. 

Plural pronouns:

Wo / women

Ni / nimen 

Ta / tamen 

I know how to express possession with de. 

Putting ba at the end makes it into "let's do something" 

There's a lot of reduplication for family members, mama, baba, yeye... 

So a basic sentence:

Now / yesterday / In the summer 

Pronoun or noun 

There are demonstrative pronouns / this / these / those 

An adverb of intensity, like "very." 

Verb 

Verb can be preceded by an auxiliary, like to, is able to, etc...  

In the summer, people extremely like to go the Korean bookstore. 

There are several elements, and a particular order they have to follow. 

***

It looks like vocabulary is the big challenge. Learning thousands of anything is difficult. There are 88 notes on the piano, so we aren't learning thousands of musical notes. Dozens of ingredients will make a lot of different culinary combinations. We don't need thousands. Syntax is more conceptually abstract than vocab, but I have no problem with abstract thought. The lexicon, with each lexical item being written in a unique and unpredictable symbol, and also difficult to hear / pronounce, is difficult.  

Reviews

 I was thinking of those amazon reviews that say "the book came in bad condition." They seem to miss the point of a book review, oriented toward the content of the book, not the condition of any particular physical book. 

(There's a funny meme about people leaving reviews of on-line recipes, where the reviewer will alter the recipe in significant ways and then complain that it did not come out well.  "I had no eggs so I substituted honey. Horrible recipe; it was too sweet and didn't have the right texture."  That kind of thing. Once again, a kind of misapprehension of the function of reviewing.

Another form of recipe comment: the recipe is a "non-recipe recipe," labelled as such, with amounts deliberately omitted. Then someone will ask in the comment for exact quantities. There are hundreds of recipes with quantified ingredients. Look for one of those rather than commenting on one of few that doesn't.)  

I guess what got me here was thinking that the physical properties of the book do not determine its effects on the reader, except in a comparatively minor way. Sure, we like nice paper or a readable type-face, or an undamaged book arriving in the mail. But the meaning of the book is in the symbolic system of its language, which cannot be reduced to its molecular structure.  Symbolic structures seem to have an autonomy, even though every step in the process is the result of purely physical actions. 

Determinism

What if some form of strong determinism were true?  That is to say, the course of events is determined by some primeval event, and everything after is a physical consequence of that.  the Big Bang determines what parking space I will choose at the grocery store; every word of Dante's Commedia, every word of every commentary on Dante, etc... This could be literally true but absurd at the same time, like a Borges story.  

***

Another way of putting it: free will might be an illusion, but we are incapable of seeing ourselves as not having free will, in that we will always distinguish between choices that seem free and actions that do not involve choice of any kind. The person who believes in free will can answer the determinist by saying that s/he (the free will believer) HAS to believe in free will, by the determinist's own logic.  

Archive III

 Things were really clicking for me, as I was thinking about the Lorca archive.  Only two of Lorca's plays were published in book form during his life time. Several were not even brought to the stage. There are also incomplete works. The sonnets, the suites, were not published until MUCH later. So Lorca's work is like an iceberg, only gradually appearing in its fullness. We are still awaiting Melissa Dinverno's edition of the Suites. 

Now, Lorca scholarship is really excellent, when before it tended to be mediocre or uneven (or sometimes just bad). This is a gradual evolution, and could not happen in a few years. 

To think, then, that with only two plays in print, Lorca was unknown as a playwright except for the people who happen to have been to his plays in person.  He was not unknown, but famous: what I mean is that his work was not particularly accessible. Only someone who had seen Yerma would have first hand knowledge of it. 

Archive II

 I remember a few years back  when people who had never been in an archive in their lives started to use that word as buzz word.  It was strangely disorienting.  An archive was a metaphor, not a material reality for them. 

Archive

 I have two books to review on the Lorca archive, both very interesting.  I coined the phrase "archival turn" today, but I think I will change it to the archive phase. 

update: there really is an archival turn; I didn't invent that. I guess there is a "turn" for everything. Every turn has its turn. 

Seriously though

 I notice university professors on Facebook parsing Charlie Kirk's statements to see if he is deserving of being assassinated.  The point is that this kind of assassination deeply harms society as a whole. It isn't really about him.  George Wallace was the vilest old school segregationist, but trying to shoot him just perpetuates the culture of violence.  

Some arguments

 1. Political assassination has never been good. Obviously, we can lament the killing of Lincoln, JFK, RFJ, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X. Killing or attempting killing of right wing figures does no good. If you want to look at the killing of the José Antonio Primo de Rivera, it did nothing to stop Spanish fascism, which did not really depend on his charisma. Having him as a martyr was even more convenient for Franco than being alive as a rival. Of course, this was not a political assassination, but an execution by the Republic: all the more convenient for Franco. Arguably, the killing of Calvo Sotelo helped to cause the Spanish Civil War. Arguably, because the war would have occurred anyway. That was just the immediate spark.

2.  You don't want to pick and choose who gets to die and who gets to live. Then you get into arguments about the merits of the people who are assassinated, and not the general principle of the thing. Failed attacks on Reagan or George Wallace promote political violence in general. It has nothing to do with sympathy for Reagan or Wallace, or dislike for their politics. 

3. Generally, the classically liberal principles should be upheld. If we are against the death penalty, against gun violence, against vigilantism, in favor of freedom of speech, then let's stick to that rather than thinking that the sniper's veto is ok,---as long as we can dehumanize the victim enough.  

Values

 

"KU Wins Grant to Increase Impact of IRISE Values

KU won a nearly $700,000 grant to help raise awareness and extend the impact of KU’s IRISE Culture Charter for the Lawrence campus.  The three-year, $699,287 grant, titled “Character Development at KU: The IRISE Virtues Initiative,” from the Educating Character Initiative at Wake Forest University, will support KU’s efforts to bring greater awareness to the IRISE values, weave them into the fiber of the university culture and encourage KU community members to cultivate character within themselves. The grant follows a $46,040 capacity-building grant KU received last year from the Educating Character Initiative, titled “KU IRISE: Values Adoption Initiative.”   The IRISE Culture Charter was developed in 2023 to articulate five shared values — integrity, respect, innovation, stewardship and excellence — Jayhawks embody as members of the university community. A committee co-chaired by university governance and administration leaders developed the IRISE Culture Charter and values with input from KU community members.  “This latest grant will build on our initial work to develop a culture of character focused on the IRISE values as integral to the identity of being a Jayhawk,” said Nancy Snow, professor of philosophy and co-principal investigator on the grants." Somehow, I just get skeptical of this. All the values are great in and of themselves: who could be against them? But that someone is the problem.  The administration that threatens to call police on us when we are demonstrating for fair salaries is at the same time promoting these values in the abstract. It is virtue signaling with no real substance.

Language change

 Here's something: language changes because everything changes. Musical styles, clothing, beliefs, food. There is a drift in everything. I'm sure Catholics don't believe the same things as 100 years ago. There is some stability in some things, but overall human culture is not a stable system, and requires huge effort and institutional power to resist change.  

There are immense time spans, and geographical spreads. 

Language has a large number of moving parts, and hence is especially vulnerable to entropy. Phonemes, lexical items. The larger the number of variables, the more unstable the system.  Morphemics and syntax are relatively stable, in contrast to the lexicon and phonetics. I'm thinking that Shakespeare's grammar is pretty much mine, leaving out the thou conjugations. If I fail to understand Shakespeare it will be matter of lexicon, not grammar.  

If a person know 20,000 words, that person will not know 20,000 of anything else. They won't know 20,000 kinds of spices. If they do, then they will know 40,000 words. The language is more or less co-extensive with the territory.  The size of the lexicon is elastic. It can expand with more words in a particular category. There have to be more nouns than verbs, I'm thinking. 

A bad idea

 I shouldn't even have to write to explain why political assassination is a bad idea. Suppose it's the assassination of someone whose opinions are odious.  That is still a spectacularly bad idea! This is not because you have to feel sorry for the victim or the family of the victim. That has absolutely nothing to do with it. It's more of a principled thing, like: let's not do this in the first place or justify it after the fact. It's obviously easier to condemn someone who kills someone with all the right opinions, but political assassination begets more of the same. It's really not the way we want to go. Anyone who says, "but..." is quite simply wrong. 

This first part of this poem came to this morning before I got up; I don't know who "Sue" is

 I missed my moment

working in the family restaurant 

early marriage to Sue

military draft

the earthquake and the epidemic

servitude to false gods

alcoholism and worse

Maybe that's the complete poem. I know continuing it would ruin whatever it has. 

A simile

 Writing with a large language model is like sending a robot to the gym for you to lift weights. 

A sudden memory

 I remember some people in my ex-wife's department saying, oh, Lorca is not that good. It's sort of a good shock to the system. These were no brilliant people. 

Knowledge

 I'm teaching this culture course and I'm thinking about how knowledge is layered. 

On one level, there is general knowledge, what you think a well-educated person might know about, well, just basic history, geography. 

Then, if you are in the humanities, you would know what every good humanist knows. A little more about comparative religion, art history, linguistics. 

(Then there is the accidental knowledge you might have through hobbies. For example, my very limited knowledge of ornithology. My knowledge of jazz more than a Spanish professor needs.)

Then, specialized knowledge every Spanish professor knows. 

Then, say, a subspecialty within Spanish literature. A genre, a period. 

Finally, knowledge of own's own subsubspeciality, the field of one's research. 

The most relevant for the culture course is the first category, general knowledge, like knowing when the middle ages were. And then the knowledge specific to being a Hispanist. The least relevant is my specific field of research, because you want the students to remember general knowledge more than narrow questions. 

But the best thing is to put together things in a meaningful way, going back and forth between the narrow and the broad areas of knowledge. 

The other perspective

 I guess the other side would be that the names that stick with periods / movements are the ones that make some kind of sense. Mozart really does sound classical, with virtues that people associate with Neo-classical aesthetics in literature. The renaissance really does make sense to talk about a period of cultural rebirth of a particular kind. It makes sense to see baroque music and architecture  as akin to each other, and find a name for that kinship.  Reconquest makes sense in terms of later Spanish nationalism, even if Fernando and Isabel saw it as more of a "restauración."