How could you make these paragraphs more concise?

"We are getting inquiries about Employee summer pay notifications (SPN’s) that have been sent this week because they don’t include summer pay for the entire summer so I am sending this email to explain why SPNs are incomplete and when you can expect to get another SPN with your entire summer salary included in the document.

 

Ordinarily, our office and grant coordinators start entering faculty summer pay into a system called Summer Pay Notification (SPC) in early April. KU Payroll takes the information entered into the SPC system and enters it into our HR/Pay system which then generates the SPNs that get emailed to faculty detailing their summer pay for the entire summer.

 

The late union pay increase process required us to delay entering summer pay information into the SPC system. This has delayed the date that KU Payroll can key summer pay information into SPC so they are prioritizing entering summer pay that starts on 5/17/26 since that is the first payroll date for summer pay. This is then generating the SPNs but only for summer pay that begins early in the summer. In roughly two weeks, KU Payroll will begin entering summer pay into HR/Pay with later payroll dates. This will then generate another SPN that will be emailed to faculty with a full picture of their summer pay for payroll dates between 5/17/26-8/17/26 (8/18/26 is the first payroll date for Fall 2026).

 

I would appreciate it if you could forward this message to your faculty so they are aware of this delay to help minimize anxiety and questions.

 

Thank you for your patience as we work through a compressed summer pay collection process. Let me know if you have any questions." 

Dream of [not] conducting Beethoven's 9th

 I was supposed to conduct Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. I had been invited to do this as an ancillary thing in relation to some professional conference I was going to. We showed up at the venue (I was with other, unidentifiable people.) There had been a scene before of trying to get served in a Chinese Restaurant. We kept moving tables in search of more comfortable seating and we were worried about the waiters finding us with our food that we had already ordered. 

Anyway, it was not clear to me where I had to go, there was a big party with a lot of people, and various rooms. I started to doubt whether it would really happen, since I am not a conductor [!] and of course had not even looked at the score. Would I just wave my arms around? Surely the orchestra knew the music anyway. I was in a room getting ready. I opened a door and found a piano, and started playing the melody to "Bemsha Swing." I could not see the keys because they were covered with velvet, but I could still play (though somehow the melody did not seem right.) 

I never did get to conduct, since I woke up after that. 

Clearly the dream is about retirement, which starts today (kind of). There is ambition, but also the idea of not being qualified or prepared. Beethoven's 9th showed up because my daughter has recently played in it, and also because it is a big, ambitious work that one woudn't want to conduct without the proper conditions.  

Dream of Nicole Kidman

 There was a Nicole Kidman meme going around. It consisted of a picture of her with some similarly looking young women dressed in white. The meme consisted of finding malevolent or simply uncharitable interpretations, like, "I bet they all hate one another," or "Soon those dresses will be soiled." There was a similar meme in a male version, with men dressed in black, who bad intentions were more evident.

I was in a store with some people. It was kind of a hip place and one of the guys I was with said "You know, this store is not part of the economy." I had a long argument with him and called him stupid to his face for not being able to come up with a definition of "the economy," which I understood to be goods and services exchanged for money. The conversation morphed into another discussion...  

Reading Murakami in Catalan

 Here's an anti-joke.

Why does Jonathan read Murakami in Catalan?  --Because he doesn't know Japanese. 

Ei, hola. ¿Com anem? Com que avui tinc el dia lliure, aquest matí m’he arribat al zoo de la ciutat a veure els cangurs. No és gaire gran però hi ha moltes espècies, des de goril·les fins a elefants. De totes maneres, si t’agraden els animals com ara les llames i els óssos formiguers és millor que no hi vagis, perquè no n’hi trobaràs. Tampoc no hi ha impales ni hienes. Ni tan sols lleopards.

Murakami, Haruki. L'elefant desapareix (EMPURIES NARRATIVA) (Catalan Edition) (p. 54). (Function). Kindle Edition. 

Let's do the four methods of understanding.  Cognates. Well, I know Spanish so "hola" is "hola," Dia es día, etc.. There are cognate from French: mati is going to be matin in French.  Trobaras is cognate to trouver in French.  

Hello, how are we ???. Since ??? I have the day free, this morning I have arrived at the zoo of the city to see the ????.  It is not very? big but that are a lot of species, from gorillas to elephants.  Anyway, if you like animal like llamas? or ant bears? it's better if you don't go there, because you won't find them. There aren't impalas or hyenas either. Not even leopards. 

From context we can gather the avui means today. To get a cognate from a word that starts with ll, we can get rid of one of the l's, like lleopard.  Com anem means how are we doing (going.). I'm going to guess that cangurs are kangaroos. In Spanish it is canguro.  Ossos formiguers is probably going to be anteaters. If a word starts with h in Spanish it might start with f in another Romance language, like halcón and falcon, so hormiga in Spanish becomes formiga. Formiguer would be ant-er.  One who ants. Hi is a particle equivalent to y in French, meaning there.  

I guess a 5th reading strategy would be phonetic / orthographical conventions.  Like a piazza in Italian would be a plaza in Spanish, in the same way that piano corresponds to plano or piazzere to placer. If I see an Italian word that starts with pi, I think pl in Spanish. If the word in Italian is gh, I think of gu in Spanish. Italian doesn't use x so espresso will be "express."

"I  also discovered how important rereading was. It was a rule from the very beginning that I couldn’t simply skip over a sentence and go on, but had to work on it until I either understood or saw that I could not. So, unless I did understand it right away, which happened more often as I continued to read the book, I would have to reread the sentence.'

Davis, Lydia. Essays Two: On Proust, Translation, Foreign Languages, and the City of Arles (p. 451). (Function). Kindle Edition. 

Four methods for vocab

I teach my student four methods of figuring out words they don't know.  

Cognates:  amenazar is menace (threaten).  English has lexicon from French and Latin, so it has a lot of Romance language cognates. 

Morphology: breaking the word down into its parts. Destejer is unweave. Desagradablemente is des agrada ble mente.  Un pleas ant ly.  The word will have a root, a core meaning, and prefixes and suffixes. You can understand amenzar better if you take away the a- prefix.  Like amanecer is related to mañana.   

Context. You guess the word from its surrounding words, or just ignore a word you don't know and go on.  

The 4th way?  Repetition.  You find the word over and over again and eventually figure it out. That doesn't work for seeing the word once in a very short text.   

 

Lydia Davis method

 There's a method of learning to read a language. Lydia Davis has an essay in which she explains how she studied Spanish.  She took a translation of Twain (Las aventuras de Tom Sawyer) and read it in Spanish. She wouldn't look up words in the dictionary, but would guess at the meaning of words and learn new words eventually from context. She would keep a notebook in which she wrote down new words she learned. She could essentially understand most of the vocabulary using cognates in French (she is a Proust translator) and context. 

I had a year (possibly more?) of college German years ago and I am trying this.  I picked up a German novel called Der Junge Beethoven for 5 bucks at a used bookstore. Obviously it is about Beethoven's young days!

For the first few pages I wrote down words I already know. Frau, Mann. Kind. Fenster. Haus, Vater, Mutter, Sohn, Tochter, Gott, Himmel, Nacht, heute, and wrote down others that I thought I knew or could easily guess.  Lippen.  Musiker. I can recognize articles, some numbers. Nouns are capitalized and verbs can be identified.  I understand the syntactic structure very well.  

I wrote down some complete sentences or brief phrases that were transparent for me, of the "Ich liebe dich" or "Wo bist du?" type.  

They live in Bonn. There is some reference to a Hinterhaus. The father is a Kapellmeister of some kind. He is happy to have a son because he can form him into a musician. He gives thanks that Gott in Himmel has answered his prayers.  

I probably have 100 words written down.  I went back to the first page and it was easier to read than on the first try. You want to get to where the most common 2 or 3 thousand words are understood effortlessly. 

Not using the dictionary is key, because the dictionary slows you down (not that I am going fast!) and also shuts down the effort of guessing, which is key. I have used something similar to this method (without the notebook) with Italian and gotten pretty far.  I can read most Romance languages fairly well but German should be a different kind of challenge.  

I picked up a pop German novel (translated from English probably) on a trip to Cuba years ago, which someone had left behind in a hotel room. I could kind of follow the plot.  

***

Here is Lydia's explanation of not using a dictionary, from another essay about learning Norwegian:

"I did not want to use a dictionary. First, it was more comfortable not to be constantly picking up a dictionary, or sitting in front of a computer. Since, at first, there would be a quantity of words on any given page that I would not know, I would have been looking up many, many words, and this would have been a cumbersome chore. I wanted to sit with this heavy book in a comfortable chair, with nothing more, besides the book, than a sharp pencil and piece of paper.

Second, though, and more important, the work of trying to figure out what the words meant was stimulating and completely absorbing. I realized, after a while, that using my brain for something as difficult as this made thinking a very physical act, much more so than the easier, almost unconscious use we make of our brains most of the time."

Davis, Lydia. Essays Two: On Proust, Translation, Foreign Languages, and the City of Arles (p. 430). (Function). Kindle Edition. 

"Another reason I did not want to use a dictionary or ask anyone for the answer was that, almost right away, this experiment interested me qua experiment, and I wanted to keep it quite pure. I was trying to learn a language the way we learn our own native language from babyhood on up. Words are repeated in certain contexts, some contexts the same and some different, and eventually, over time, with much repetition, we learn what the words mean."

Davis, Lydia. Essays Two: On Proust, Translation, Foreign Languages, and the City of Arles (pp. 432-433). (Function). Kindle Edition. 

Think of One

 "Think of One" is an another Monk tune based on the ostinato as motif.  

Cambridge and Oxford

 One person asked me to write an essay for the Cambridge Companion to Spanish modernism. A little while later, another asked me to write an essay on translations of Lorca for the Oxford Companion to Federico Garcia Lorca. I was searching in vain in my email for the invitation to Cambridge, because I thought that both invitations were from Oxford, in my shaky memory. From the Yankee perspective all of Oxbridge is pretty much the same.   

Justicia

 As a specialist on a gay writer killed in the Civil War, I won't be a homophobic Franco supporter. Not only because of that, of course, but that would be major contradiction. 

But thinking that humanities research and teaching should be mainly about promoting issues of social justice also seems wrong to me.  We are often adjacent to such concerns, but if we put them front and center as the main justification and raison d'être of everything we do, then something odd happens. Since a lot of what we do is not directly about that, then our work on a daily basis makes only a trivial contribution to any social justice movement. Most of the research questions that might be interesting will be tangential or adjacent to activist goals, at best (at worst).  

So the social relevance of the humanities is related to only a small part of what we do, and to make that the whole enchilada risks destroying the humanities completely, making most research questions seem trivial. 

A related problem is that we are after nuance and complexity, and the goals of woke movements can be expressed  in  3 or 4 word slogans.  

My vocalists (female)

 This is one of deepest categories. 

Sarah Vaughan is the best of all, especially in her first period. She had bad periods, when she was singing inferior songs or gave into her mannerisms. At her best, she was sublime. 

Billie Holiday is incomparable in emotional impact.  Sarah learned from Billie. 

Ella has probably the most consistent career. She is as good as the other two I have named before her.  The song-book albums are classic. 

After them come Dinahs Washington. What a pure sonority and blues feeling. And Nancy Wilson, with marvelous diction and ability to put across the lyrics.   

Carmen McRae and Betty Carter... They are ok, but I almost always feel they aren't as good as my big 5.  I'd rather be listening to someone else, like Eva Cassidy or Anita O'Day.  All these are good as well, though not as well known.  

***

Singers I don't like: Nina Simone, Abbey Lincoln.  They sing off tune, rather than altering the melody in PRECISE ways like Sarah or Billie.  Blossom Dearie... She is good, but doesn't have a good-sounding voice. Diana Krall. Not my favorite either.  Dianne Reeves is much better. 

For some reason some variant of the "Diane" name is ascent among female vocalists of the 20th century, like Diana Ross or Diane Schurr, Dinah Shore, etc...  

My Vocalists (male)

 #1 is Ray Charles.  Yes, I know he not strictly a jazz vocalist, but he is probably the best jazz vocalist in spite of this. He is also the best country and the best soul singer. 

Louis Armstrong got the whole thing going.  His singing is incomparable.  

A personal favorite is Chuck Baker, for an arbitrary reason: his voice is kind of similar to mine in timbre and range. I like the fact he doesn't have to have a rich, Johnny Hartman type of voice. 

But I also like Johnny Hartman!

Sinatra? Well, yes.  I have many good Sinatra associations, but I am not crazy about his mannerisms.  The same with Tony Bennet. 

Nat King Cole is one of my favorites as well.  He has impeccable jazz phrasing, and also a beautiful voice. I hate, though, the lazy hazy days of summer. That is as painful as Satchmo's "It's a wonderful world." 

The depth of the male vocalists is not the same as with the women.  

 

Kindness

 I got a message from someone who couldn't attend my retirement party, who had been interim (outside of the department) chair of my department, and is now an associate dean. Anyway, she also highlighted my kindness. Obviously, this is the highest possible compliment, because it can only come from outside the self. We can't measure our own kindness, because that can only be judged by those on the receiving end of it. 

Remember that Ellen DeGeneres created a whole brand around kindness, but was abusive to her own staff. Literally, her brand of skin care products is called "Kind Science." Once someone sets themselves up as being kind, be careful!  But I'm fine with other people saying it.  

Music and cognitive complexity

 I was listening to an interview with drummer Steve Gadd. It struck me that to know about music involves multiple cognitive, emotional, and kinetic factors. The entire body and mind are involved. 

The little I know about jazz drumming, is probably very little in comparison to what I know in general, but it is is fairly intricate knowledge (as far as it goes; I am not a great drummer), about the kind of cymbal sound that might be preferred, the size of the bass drum, implication of drum tunings, particular rhythmic patterns, like displaced quarter note triplets. Subtlety of the ride cymbal pattern.  A little bit about the history and evolution of playing drums, the interaction between drums and bass and piano. I've spent years of active listening, not just having music on in the background.  

Yet when I was hearing a podcast or video with some musicians taking apart a Ray Charles album, I was amazed by the level of insight they had. (The great bassist Christian McBride was part of this conversation). I never realized that Roy Haynes was on this album, playing "I got news for you," etc... Obviously the level of insight here was higher than mine by several degrees of magnitude. 

It's not humility to say this, it's simply a recognition of reality.  There is a granular knowledge there that I can learn from, even without sharing it.  

And I have that kind of knowledge in my own field, as well.  And the things I know about music are part of the total package of what I know, as a scholar of word and music. 

Monk's Motif

 A lot of Monk's songs are blues.  He also liked the 32 AABA form, and some oddly shaped forms that don't fall into those categories. He liked contrafacta.  

The motifs are angular and difficult, but also catchy and melodic. Think of the central motif of "Straight no Chaser," or "Misterioso," or "Blue Monk,"  Think of Andrew Hill. I like him a lot, and he is also a piano player known for original songs, somewhat in the Monk mode, but I can't hum a single melody to an Andrew Hill composition, despite my having listened to them many times. Ornette is a much more talented melodist than Hill is.  

What interests me about the motif is how small it can be.  The technical definition is the shortest possible musical idea. Bernstein in his concert for young people points out that the motif is not a tune, and longer melodies are not as useful as building blocks than these very, very short ideas are. Not that I don't like what LB is calling "tunes," but I also like motivic development. Sometimes, I guess, there is a lot of motivic development that might be be intelligent composition, but that I don't feel as super interesting. You can have to best of both worlds if the original motif is distinctive and catchy rather than bland.  

 

Dream of Mozart

 I am singing Mozart's Requiem today with the faculty / staff choir. In anticipation of this, I dreamt that I left my music in the car. Some colleagues (who are not in the choir) had shown up as well to sing. I was a little miffed at that, since they hadn't been to rehearsals all semester.  One had a solo, and he was practicing it in a very trained voice. (In reality I don't think he sings at all.) This solo had no relation to Mozart at all.   

I went outside to get my music from the car, but I couldn't find that car. I kept clicking with the key fob so the car would beep at me.  

I woke up relieved that I knew where my car is, and I had not lost it.  

Wrong notes

 Victor Wooten says you are never more than a half step away from a right note. Monk says none of the 88 notes on the keyboard are wrong notes. The worst possible note is probably the fourth played against the maj 7. So play CEGB in the left hand and F in the right.  That sounds pretty terrible. But against a 7 chord (Bb) it sounds ok. 

You can play every note in the scale and except for the fourth and the seventh, and you have a pentatonic scale. Think of the beginning of "Someone to watch over me."  You can pretty much improvise over the blues with six of seven notes. 

All the notes that aren't in the key are chromatic leading tones or chord alterations. So a wrong note can be corrected by playing a right note right after it.  

Improvisation is easy then.  The caveat is that there is no guarantee that the ideas you play will be any good. Here other factors come into play. You have to play with rhythmic dynamism.  The improvisation cannot be too random, or too predictable. You have to have enough technical ability to play what you want. 

The best thing is to find that you have played something that you liked.  Then you can use your own taste as the guide. 

My sax players

The sax is really the core instrument of jazz, and when it supplants the clarinet as the reed instrument the music develops in a different way. 

Two giants stand at the head. First, Coleman Hawkins. A deep, throaty sound and endlessly confident arpeggios, locked into the beat. He not only inaugurates the sax, but also can hold his own in the bebop era.  

Secondly, Lester Young, who invents coolness itself. (only a slight exaggeration). His lines float over the beat in an uncanny way.  He also has a way of improvising that is telling a story, as he liked to say, rather than using arpeggios and scales.  Lester paves the way for Bird, the greatest jazz musician of all time.  Bird makes time feel almost infinitely elastic, in the way that Cortázar wrote about in his short novel about him.  

Two swing era alto saxes, Johnny Hodges and Benny Carter, are also favorites of mine. 

Rollins and Coltrane define the post bop sax.  Rollins develops motifs, whereas Coltrane offers sheets of sound, and develops a different kind of rhythmic approach beyond the swung eighth note feel.  

Coltrane and Ornette define avant-garde jazz.  Bird, Coltrane, Ornette, are major jazz composers like Monk or Ellington/Strayhorn.  

Yet there is also a wealth of players in hard bop and cool jazz. Lee Konitz is probably one of the best, but there are many others. Paul Desmond? Mulligan?  

Friday 13

 I was getting obsessed with Monk's tune "Friday the 13th." It has four chords repeated over and over (the Andalusian cadence!) and a melody that consists of motif, repeated 3 times.  After being obsessed for a few day, I turn on the jazz station this morning, and there is French pianist explaining the tune to an audience, and having them whistle the tune. 

Then he starts playing "Ruby, my Dear," a completely different Monk tune with a far more complex harmony and structure. 

His name is Laurent de Wilde. I discover now that he is the author of a book about Monk. He is a pretty bad ass player.  Unfortunately I missed the first part of this show, but now they are having a clip of a Dizzy big band playing in Copenhagen.  

Extreme simplicity and extreme complexity. They aren't even opposites, they are complementary. The same way a Jobim tune can have a super convoluted musical structure and sound like a relaxing pop song at the same time.  

"Desafinado" is one I've also been obsessed with in the past. The title means "Out of tune," and the melody has an odd shape, as though it were out of tune, though it is really not.  

Layered

 We can think of intellectual life as layered in chronological stages over one's life time.  Of course, it is perfectly possible that someone can die young, and yet make a significant contribution at an early age. In those cases, we don't know what the later stages of development might have brought. 

One layer sits over another layer. We still know what we learned as children in school. There is a layer, then, of more specialized (and general) knowledge gained in college. 

Graduate school is layered on that. Now knowledge is even more specialized, but general knowledge should increase there as well.  

Early years as a professor, young researcher.  Then the "mid-career" scholar. Then the recognized expert at the highest rank.  All throughout these stages there are plateaux, and even possibly declines.  You can actually get worse as scholar, or become simply repetitive.  I know at one point I was very repetitive. I probably still am repetitive.  

Intellectual depth comes from the layering of these stages. Growth doesn't have to stop unless there is an actual cognitive decline.  Otherwise, we can be innovative as long as we want to.  

The best of many worlds

 My friend would tell her friends when we were first going out  He is handsome, and so smart. 

Then, after a while, she would tell them. He is so kind! 

One Note Mayhew

 I'm kind of obsessed with songs that use 1 or 2 notes as the central motif. "One note samba" would be the obvious example. Of course, it uses more than one note, but the initial theme is monotone. It adds the Bb after a while, and then the B section uses a ton of notes. 

Second example, "Thelonious" by you-know-who.  The motif is Bb, repeated, going down a half step to A, then back again to Bb.  There is only one other note in the A section of the tune, a fourth up from Bb to Eb.  

What else?  C Jam blues has a melody that goes up a fifth from the tonic.  

So the movement that normally was in the melody is transferred to the harmony, in the Jobim example. The initial F sounds different depending on its relation to the underlying chords. There is also rhythmic dynamism. It don't mean a think if it ain't got that swing / dah dah dah dah / dah dah dah dah / dah dah dah dah /  dah dah.  The last part is all on one note.  

Staying on one note for a while is also an improvisatory technique.  It could be "honking," in which a tenor sax will pick a low note and just milk the hell out of it while the audience goes crazy.  Or, in Sonny Rollins, a way of creating tension and rhythmic variation.  Repetition creates tension, because the listener wants it to end, to resolve to something else. 

En effective technique is to play one note for a while, then a crazy ornamentation that goes all over the place.  

What other tunes use this device of repetition?  

Spot the fallacies...

" Decades ago, the sociologist Robert K. Merton worried that the rise of more rapidly changing forms of knowledge would exacerbate the costs of academic gerontocracy. It might have been more defensible in the past — the medieval university coming honestly by its premodern characteristics — but no longer. “Today everything is quickly acquired, even that experience in which formerly consisted the sole and genuine superiority of the old over the young,” Merton cited his forerunner in sociology, Robert Michels, as saying all the way back in 1911. Modernity meant that “age has lost much of its value and therefore has lost, in addition, the respect which it inspired and the influence which it exercised.”"

Anyway

 Anyway, there is a CHE article about gerontocracy in academia.  It states, outright, that younger professors are more innovative, and that we old folks just teach what we learned in Graduate School 40 years ago. This is so true... I only teach semiotics and structuralism.  The author has open contempt for values like wisdom and experience. Modernity means that we learn faster, and don't have to bother with accumulated traditions, like they did in medieval times.  

Look, I was smarter at 28 when I finished my dissertation, than I am now.  By smarter, I mean that I had a brilliant mind.  And yet, my work was (relatively) shallow at that point.  (But not as shallow as this guy's critique of us geezers in our tweed jackets with elbow patches!) What I might have lost in brilliance I have gained in depth. There is a balance there. You need both types of intelligence. 

Of course, when our generation of privileged white men finally retires, there won't be these privileged positions any more anyway. Academia will be destroyed anyway.   

French Revolution

"This generationally toxic combo means that younger academics today regard those elders much as serfs on the brink of the French Revolution saw the noble lords."

I think this writer is a bit confused about the French Revolution.  

Dream of JCO

 I was to share a room with a former student of mine, on some kind of field trip. I was nervous, even though we had two separate beds. I promised to myself that if she tried to come into my bed I would reject her. But really, dreaming of NOT wanting to sleep with someone is the same as dreaming you do want to. (The logic of dreams is reversed.) I said goodnight and asked her if she had gotten into the program I recommended her for, perhaps in nursing?  

In the morning we were to meet Joyce Carol Oates, though in the dream she somehow had the nickname "Connie," and was into occultism or tarot readings in a way I wouldn't associate with Oates at all. We didn't actually meet her, though.  

The dream morphed into preparations for a potluck. The person I was going with said she had bought and prepared the food, and even washed the dishes. This seemed unfair to me, because I had just spent more money than that on a huge present that I had to carry. There were two of us and we had to carry three heavy items to the car.  

There was a discussion of gifts: in a certain family each person got the same number of gifts, like 3 or 4, in the interests of fairness. It was pointed out that in one case two of the gifts for one person were bicycles. The obvious flaw in the system was that the gifts were not of equal value.  

My drummers

 I also like listening to drums as I am listening to jazz. In other words, I focus on the drums throughout rather than listening to the whole thing all at once. This is difficult, but it is necessary.  

The most admired drummers are those who are the busiest, who are constantly playing different ideas. I have dug those drummers too, but those who are more transparent, playing fewer ideas, might be preferable at times. Who hits that happy medium?  Perhaps it is Max Roach.  His solos are so well constructed, and his comping is so tasty.  

But, of course, the busy drummers are fantastic too, like Elvin, Tony, etc... 

Dream of Lorca monologue

 I was supposed to perform in a Lorca play, a short one (which on waking I realized did not really exist). I hadn't memorized it and was planning to use the script the whole time, though I had doubts about this. And was I supposed to do it in Spanish or English? We hadn't rehearsed at all, and the details about where and when it would take place were hazy.  The whole things was increasingly uncertain. A colleague from another university was supposed to come and do part of it with me, or have some panel discussion. The play would conclude with me doing a closing monologue. I realized I didn't have my script and also wasn't wearing my suit, which the part called for.  Did I have time to go home and get these things? 

The time had passed and the event did not occur as scheduled.  I was drinking limoncello with someone and when that was done he kept giving me shots of something else...  

3 strikes for Lovecraft

 I wondered about Lovecraft, having read very little and that very long ago.  From the perspective of today, it would seem he has three strikes, having read a few stories and short novel yesterday.  

The obvious racism behind a lot of it.  The racism isn't incidental, but hard-baked into his vision.  Sometimes it is merely implicit, but it comes out explicitly enough to be undeniable.  

The fact that it's genre fiction, not high brow stuff in the first place.  So then you don't have to balance out the racism with the fact that it's literature of the highest quality that happens to be racist.  

The prose itself is over-heated and a bit cringe-worthy.  He has a great lexicon, but the prose is always purple, and never settles down into a kind of normal writing.  Everything is fortissimo, fff, with very little dynamic range.  

Three strikes, and he is out. Yet there is something about the sheer force of his imagination that makes people want to read him (including me, this particular week).  

Dream of job interview

 I was invited to interview for a job, because of a "skill set" I had. I walked into a room on campus that was full of people. They began interviewing me, but mostly trying to sell me on taking the job. The interviewer was a middle-aged African American man, and maybe another woman too, of unidentified ethnicity. "Wouldn't you like to live in New York?" they were saying. The job had something to do with industrial espionage, I gathered, though this was not said explicitly. I wondered if I could be hired, if it was a KU job, because my retirement agreement says I cannot be rehired by the university. 

Obviously, this is a retirement dream, in which I am asking myself what I will do after I retire.  

My bass players

 "My bass players" is not the same as a list of the best bass players.  For whatever reason, I respond to some at a deeper level than others. I'm sure a jazz expert would say that Ron Carter and Ray Brown are among the best ever, and I agree with that, but I'm talking here about a few that resonate more with me. In no particular order: 

Paul Chambers. The shape of his lines, the way they ascend and descend. I think it is perfect for both early John Coltrane, before the quartet with McCoy Tyner, Elvin, and Jimmy Garrison.  

Oscar Pettiford.  I'm not as knowledgeable about him, but I do like the melodic invention and also the shape of his walking lines.  I particularly like his playing on Monk's album of Ellington tunes. 

Charlie Haden. The purity of his sound, the centeredness of his intonation. The note choice. What he brings to the early Ornette recordings, and also to collaborations with Pat Metheny and Keith Jarrett.  

Mingus. This is an obvious one, not only because of the power of his bass playing, but also because of his importance as composer and shaper of jazz music. 

Scott LaFaro.  For his work with early Ornette and Bill Evans.  

There are many others I think of as fantastically good, like Pederson, for his work with Peterson. Every bass player who has been chosen by someone like Miles or Bill Evans to play has got to be superb.  I've seen Eddie Gomez and he is great. 

What I like about the bass is that its function is so similar, so basic across a wide range of styles.  Even Haden playing with Ornette is still playing 4 quarter notes to the measure (most of the time!) or at least implying that pulse.  

I will listen to music repeatedly and focus on the drums, or the bass, or some other aspect of the music. 

Four or five pressures

 Higher ed in the humanities are not in good shape, especially in the humanities. I feel we are squeezed on all sides. 

1) Wokeness, defined here as self-parodic performative pseudo-progressive identity politics. This mindset narrows the scope of research and determines ideological positions from the outset. It leaves the humanities without a purpose of it own, and leaves it vulnerable to #2:  

2) The reaction against woke.  Okay, so you want to teach that there are a zillion genders? Then the state legislature will say you can't have gender studies at all. DEI must infuse every action of the university at a granular level? Then the legislature will say you can't have DEI at all. The right-wing reaction against woke is anti-intellectual in its motivations and it effects. I say this as someone who is no friend of wokeness itself (see 1).  

3) Economic pressures. Fewer student major in classics or want to study a less-studied language? Eliminate or gut those programs. Tuition is more expensive, while at the same time administrative costs rise, but not faculty salaries. There are more and more adjuncts. Athletics and big science make humanities budgets seem paltry in comparison. 

4) Cultural factors. There are fewer of those nerdy super-readers who are the bulwark of the humanities students. Maybe there were never that many of us, but students have less capacity to read large amounts of material.  

5) Technology.  The rise of Artificial Intelligence means you can write a mediocre paper on literature very easily. Students will use this to varying degrees even if told not to.  Then you no longer get the core of the humanities: engaging with intellectually challenging material through writing academic prose. The point of this is not the final result (the paper) but what has occurred in the student's brain. I always say it's like sending a robot to the gym to do your bench presses for you.  

Dream of Harrassment

 In this dream I told a colleague (chair?) that I had been accused of sexual harassment. He punched in the face and told me I was fired. Then another colleague punched me.  Neither very hard. Being fired didn't seem a big deal, because I only have a few days left to work. 

I was trying to sort out my possible guilt, but not until I was fully awake could I convince myself that I was in the clear.  

Dream of Stephen King

[I am updating this from 7 years ago, because I just found it and I like it.]

I do not especially care about King. I am not a fan (particularly) or a detractor. I have seen movies and television series, but I haven't read his books. One day I heard an NPR interview with him and, without knowing his identity at first, I assumed he was a highbrow writer of a different type. In this night of particularly fertile dreams, though, Stephen King and I were having a conversation. I was with a friend who knew King, in a workshop where my friend was doing an arts and crafts project. King was not there, but was being Skyped in. I had to lie on my back to see him, projected on a screen above my face.

He challenged me to tell a story about my life in two sessions, like we had done before. I said I wasn't a good storyteller, that I didn't have the kind of experiences that leant themselves to being tied up in narrative bundles like that. He scoffed at me a bit, though not in an unfriendly way. Throughout the whole conversation he was a skeptical but benevolent figure. I also told him I was a schmuck, that I didn't do things well, and so that the story would end up being about my various failures. He said something to the effect that we are all schmucks. I didn't want to ask him how he came up with the ideas for his stories, but I said that I mostly wrote poetry, and that occasionally a plot for an entire novel would pop into my head, fully formed.

He said something that implied that that was the easy part. You had to have the self-discipline to write the book. The first example I gave him was of a man who gradually wasted away. He said that had been done already too many times. The second one was of a science fiction novel in which the aliens were taking over the world, but that the reader didn't know it. In other words, the transformation of reality was so subtle that it could be attributed to other causes. This is an idea I have actually had in waking life. Stephen King didn't quite get understand my plot, though it seemed as though gradually we were getting to some meeting of the minds.  

Without a car...

 My car is in the shop for 2 weeks.  

I can walk or take the bus to work. I also need to feed the cat every two days. Can walk from work to where the cat is, and back to work. My friend (owner of cat) is out of the country, and cannot drive me anywhere. [I could use her car, but I don't feel like it.]

I went out with friends on Friday. I got a ride home after that from a friend who lives on the same street. 

Took a bus to get some dinner this evening, then the same bus back to choir practice. There was thunder storm and I walked back anyway. The rain was not too heavy and I barely got wet. I could have asked someone for a ride, but didn't. 

(On Sunday, I was going to be in a 5k run in the morning. I was going to walk there, but the run was cancelled because of the rain.) 

I have books to donate to the library, which I cannot do without a car. 

So the lesson is... The car is good to have, but not necessary every day. If I had my car, I would have used it, but I don't need to use it that much. Not having a car is inconvenient, but having a car means using it too much.  

Poison pen

 I got this poison pen email a few weeks ago. 30 years ago, I apparently accused a graduate student of plagiarism... and she dropped out of our program as a result.  She wanted to tell me now much of a jerk I was. 

I have no memory of this event, so I have no defense, and cannot reproduce the events in my memory.

  I do remember a particularly weak student in this class, with whom I argued about the interpretation of a Cernuda poem. In this poem, the speaker or the poem is attacking Cernuda himself, in a typical ironic reversal.  It's not even a controversy, because it is so obvious and unsubtle.  Cernuda will write things like "society is just, it treats everyone, the way they deserve." This is exactly the opposite of what Cernuda believes, of course. I had a student evaluation that I didn't accept other interpretations... probably from the student I disagreed with.  Possibly it is the one who is now accusing me. 

I didn't answer the student, because I didn't want to fuel the flames.  I don't think I would have accused a student of plagiarism without evidence. No other student has accused me of misconduct, and after so long a time I feel quite defenseless. 

Mark Halperin was in this class, and said that is was the most intellectually challenging class he ever took before then. He had been Linda Willem's student at Butler. Also, Paqui Paredes, a student from Galicia, who has also had a good career.  I had assumed that, since KU was a top rated program, the students would be great.  Some were, but others I was probably impatient with, because if you are graduate student, you shouldn't be an idiot.  

Dream of injured foot, affable man, and small polar bear

 I was walking from the airport terminal to my car over snow or ice, barefoot. My feet quickly became numb, so I somehow thought this made it ok: numbness = no pain. Then there were two pieces of metal in my foot, and I had to take them out. One was a screw. There was blood. People pointed out to me that I was bleeding. A piece of my foot appeared to be missing, where I had torn out the screw or other piece of metal. 

An affable man was in this dream. Every conversation in which he was involved was very pleasant: he naturally made others friendly by his own friendliness. The conversations were about scarves, or something trivial like that. 

Later, at the house, we were living with a smallish polar bear. He didn't know his own strength and pushed my niece or sister off the bed with just one swipe of his paw. I was thinking of ways to get rid of it. It wasn't exactly threatening, and more the size of a very large dog, but I still thought it was dangerous.  

The 9th kind of poet

 Ranking 9 out of ten are the poets who are fearless and cut through one's perceptions, like Frank O'Hara or Yeats.  In some ways they are preferable to the poets ranked at 10.  

The 10th category: poets who are canonical and deservedly so. The ones recognized by everyone as the best of their particularly tradition. The only problem here is that one never knows whether people like the poetry because of its status, or because they truly like it.  

These categories ultimately dissolve into the air, because what truly matters is the quality of the poetic itself, which can be found anywhere and nowhere. The respected poet who never approaches the poetic itself is the worst thing possible, even worse than the rank amateur.  

Puzzle routine...

 I will do crosswords around 9 p.m., the regular mini, midi, and full size NYT for Monday-Fri.  

I will do wordle and connections first thing. I will do pips, easy and medium, too. The difficult level is tedious and I will sometimes get to it later in the day, sometimes not. There is a very easy word search called strands that I will do quickly at some point in the day.  I will do the spelling bee, but I only look for words that use all seven letters (the pangram). I will stop after I find it, but will sometimes go back if there is more than one such word. Often, the word will jump out at me in a few seconds. I don't wanting to be finding 40 words and taking all day to do it. Finding many words makes it harder to find the one word that rules them all. If the word doesn't jump out at me, then I will try later in the day, but never stare at it for more than a minute. 

I won't do Sunday NYT puzzle, because it is tedious and fills too much of the screen. 

What I've read

 I used to read every novel by Philip Roth, John Updike, and Saul Bellow as they appeared. I would read entire books of poetry, not just poetry anthologies, in English when that was the only language I knew. I would read the collected poems, not the selected poems. When I was interested in a poet, or a particular author, I would read everything. 

I have read most of Galdós, something nobody does unless they are an expert on this author. I never finished the last series of the Episodios nacionales.  The summer before grad school, I read all the boom authors, GGM, Cortázar, Donoso... 

I would never just read what was assigned in classes. I would read all the novels of Henry Green, for example, though Henry Green was never assigned in any course where I went to school.  

At some point I lost my love of novels. I read them now to practice reading in foreign languages. I have read Elena Ferrante in Italian... I like to read Murakami in Catalan, etc... I can read in most romance languages.  

A lot of my "reading" is a practice of memorization. So it is a little different from reading prose fiction where you make linear progress but don't remember the words in your brain. I have read Basho in multiple translations and compared them. 

The sheer quantity and intensity of my reading practice explains a lot about me.  Of course, this is to be expected in a literature prof, but I still think I am not wholly typical. For example, I don't know anyone personally who has as much memorized as I do, or who reads as much in multiple languages.  

Library

 One's personal library is a significant scholarly resource. 

Accumulated over the course of six separate decades, in my case, from the 70s through the 20s. It consists of primary sources (books of Spanish poetry, mostly).  A significant collection of poetry of the New York School. I simply bought every book by Ashbery, Koch, O'Hara, Schuyler, and Guest as they came out, and actively searched for rarities. I also collect books by Creeley and Coolidge, and by William Bronk.   

Books of literary theory. A set of Diacritics. A shelf on which are my own books, journals with articles or poems by me, or contributions to edited collections. I have several editions of Frost and Yeats, Williams. 

Not much of my collection has any value or meaning to anyone other than myself, not even to friends and family.  I am donating some books to the public library, which resells them to raise money. Others I am leaving out for others in my department to pick through. One colleague wants one of my bookshelves, not the books themselves. 

What remains will be my New York School collection, my basic Spanish poetry and Lorca books (though I'm giving away some cheap or duplicate editions of Lorca as well.) And some other books that have some personal meaning to me in some way. 

A library will be in excess of what is actually used in scholarship, but also insufficient. One also needs access to a good university library and its electronic resources as well as its physical books.  

Retirement

 

What Arrangements?

 There was a review of one of Keith Jarrett's live trio albums of standards that said the arrangements were nice. In an interview, he said something like "What arrangements?" It was him improvising and the bass and drums playing along. 

On t.v. I saw a video of Chet Baker, playing trumpet and singing with a bass and a guitar, in a nightclub in Belgium. They play things like "Love for sale," standards like that. And at several junctures he gives credit to the arranger (Don Sebesky).  Yet this music does not seem any more "arranged" than Jarret's standard albums. Maybe even less so. 

So the lesson is?  

10 ranks of poet (7) (8)

 7) # 7 is the good poet in a particular style, like a Philip Levine or James Tate. Here we are getting to poets who are actually good, with no apologies. There will be some sense of musicality here, not like the novelist poets who aren't really giving us something to sing to. Of course, these two poets wrote a lot that was not up to the level of their best work.  But you can see why they are famous poets.  Maybe Barbara Guest falls here? I can like some of these more than others. 

8) The poet with a distinctive personality and voice, that makes you think differently about poetry itself. Here I am thinking of Koch, William Bronk, or Ammons. These poets are whole worlds unto themselves. Maybe Notley is in this category, though she might be better than most of these. This category is somewhat similar to 6, but you can easily see why Ammons is better than Brautigan.  

Levels 5 and 6 (out of 10)

 5) The local hero, the respectable mediocrity, the professional academic poet with some claim to fame, like a Celeste Turner Wright. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?volume=100&issue=1&page=41. Maybe a poet working in an old, unoriginal style. Someone who never had an honest critique of their work, or who has very limited range, like a Billy Collins.  

6) The poet without any particular pretension to being great, but who manages to make a good poem or two out of very little (apparent) artifice. A Richard Brautigan, or Charles Bukowski.  You might wonder why it is a poem at all, yet it actually beats out the more respectable and earnest modes we have discussed so far. Sometimes a prose writer writing poems will achieve this level, like a Raymond Carver or like the two I've already mentioned. John Updike writing a poem can achieve a 5 level, maybe a 6. On the same level as a 6 might be a poet like Gilbert Sorrentino, who is brilliant in prose but only so-so in verse, despite his extreme degree of poetic culture. For this level, a poet would have to be have a distinctive personality as a writer, even if the poem itself doesn't come off.  I'm not sure why all the names I'm thinking of are also writers of prose? 

5 levels of poets (3) (4)

3)  Here is the person with some talent, who has not read a lot.  A naturally verbal person who can turn a phrase, but without a deep poetic formation. Or it could be an earnest beginner.  Or a person without too much talent but who has learned some formulas that work out ok for a decent poem. They are trying hard, but probably getting rejected a lot. I think I might need more than 5 levels, here, maybe ten. 

***

4) Here is the professional poet who simply isn't very good. They may have a teaching position and published books, but they just don't have the ability to write poems, despite their extensive education. There was one guy in creative writing here at KU who was like this. Just the dullest possible poet imaginable. It's a step below the respectable mediocrity.  

5 levels of poet (1) (2)

 I saw a YouTube video about 5 levels of singer. From tone deaf to singing god. 

I was thinking of five levels of poet. 

1) The person who writes a poem but has no concept at all. They just fill a page with their intimate thoughts.  This is not necessarily bad, if you don't consider this page in relation to any other concept of poetry. 

2) The second level: they fill their pages with their thoughts, but they mistakenly relate this to some concept of poetry in the more exalted sense. This can actually be worse, because the gain in pretentiousness makes the poem worse, rather than better. Yet if there is some concept of a poem as something more, then the poet can develop this later on. A subcategory of this is the versifier, the person who writes with rhyme, but no meter. The doggerel poet.  Once again, trying to be poetic will make the poem worse at the lower level. 

5 levels

 I like those videos that explain a musical concept on 5 levels.  Here are my 5 levels of salad.

1. Buy a pre-washed lettuce container and top the lettuce with a salad dressing out of a bottle. Eat. 

2. Add other toppings out of a jar or package. Croutons, capers, artichoke hearts, olives. place on top of greens. Top with dressing. Eat. 

3. Elevate at least one dimension of the salad. A more interesting mix of greens. Or some vegetables not out of a jar (cucumbers, red onions). Some proteins, if the salad is going to be the main meal. Hard boiled eggs or yesterday's salmon work fine, or rotisserie chicken.  A simple homemade dressing. Eat, but also serve to guests. 

4. Make a salad that has a particular purpose in mind: a chef's salad, a Salade Niçoise, A Greek salad. Follow a recipe and give your salad a particular identity. Eat it with your guests. 

5. Create your own recipe. Everything must be balanced and coordinated now. You can still use olives or capers from a jar, or even bottled dressing. This more elevated salad may have fewer ingredients that your everyday salad, which for me is more or #3.  

I don't really like salad when it is a chore to eat, with mostly lettuce and other raw veggies. Remember a salad needs salt, that's what the name means. I don't add literal salt, but derive it from savory toppings instead. Also, don't add every ingredient you have to every salad. Then it becomes cluttered and a chore to eat. 

***

It strikes me that we can do the same with the sandwich, the soup, and the stew. Elevate sandwich by using better bread, by grilling it, by better ingredients and condiments. None of this requires any cooking skill per se. The soup, stew, or chili can be cooked in the crock pot, with no the most basic culinary skills if that. Once again, I don't really like sandwiches per se, with mediocre bread and/or cold.  

Now, find one or two recipes that are more or less foolproof for each of the following;  pasta, casseroles, fish, chicken and pork. I cook either following a recipe deliberately from the New York Times, or else making a staple dish that I can just reinvent every time (Greek salad, chili, stew, grilled cheese sandwich, pasta sauce.)   

Dinner salad

 

This will be my evening meal for later evenings after choir practice or seminar. 

Greens on the bottom:

Three of the following items on top or on the side of the platte:

    white beans

    hard boiled eggs

    tuna 

    olives 

    cheeses (one or two) 

balsamic and olive oil as dressing, with one herb (basil or thyme) 

Serve with bread or crackers 

Insight

 I got from Claudio Rodríguez this idea of the poetic insight--he didn't call it that, but he had some things he would say, like being able to tell someone's profession from the the way they walked and carried their body, or seeing a farmer sit for hours without moving the hands or body at all.  The way a dog or cat expresses their age through their movements. ... Maybe the contrast between free and chaotic movements of a dog and the way a dog's movements will be precise when trained. 

Miles Davis said he could tell if someone was going to be a good drummer by looking at the way he moved his wrists even not holding sticks. 

I had a whole chapter about this in a book I never wrote. I'm sure I am the only person who understands the poetic insight in this way.  But that's fine. 

Andadura

 I had my students observe someone's gait, looking at all the possible factors. Shoes, backpack, hands in pockets or holding phone or drink or swaying at ease; length of steps, etc... They did well at this, so I had them do the same with the body language of an interaction between two people, observed from a discrete distance.  The third assignment was to observe... anything at all. The fourth is chosen by the students. They came up with 3 ideas: observing traffic patterns, nature, or their own emotions. 

For some reason, my group likes this particular thing.  They have to speak aloud but they can prepare to say something meaningful.  It's a way of preparing them to read literature, in which concrete objects gain significance because of the way in which they are observed. 

Dream of Mustard

 I asked for mustard and was told there was none. I accepted this, but later was in the back room and saw a whole baggie full of mustard. There was a silly argument. I was angry, not because the mustard was so important, but because they had lied to me and tried to say that it was impractical to use the mustard.

The motel where we were staying was robbed. But I couldn't identity what was missing from our room. Then I woke up. 

In this same dream my brother was sick with a strange condition. 

9

 I have a course with people from 9 geographical origins, including myself: US, PR, Lithuania, Catalonia, Galicia, Honduras, Venezuela, Iran, Brazil.  Two are Spain, and two are US, but still, it is highly diverse.   

Dream of a dog

 I wasn't even thinking I was asleep but I had a waking dream of following a dog who was showing me where to find his dog relatives, or human relatives of his owners.  It wasn't very clear.  

Two parties

 There were two gatherings. One, me and some old high school friends. The other, in an adjoining room, my current friends, grouped together in larger numbers to protest the current administration.  I went in a for a few moments to the protest party, had a few beers, before going back. My high school friends were all but unrecognizable, and paid me little heed.  When I woke up I only remembered one of them, but she appeared differently in the dream, as another ethnicity.  I felt alienated from both group, but in different ways.