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.