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.