1-liners

 

Is a callous part of me? I lose some dry skin yet feel none the less. 

***

I feel less Angst than Bronk that things have no meaning. 

***

I was a scholar not a poet. The decision was made for me. 

Degrees of confidence

 Surrounding the Jason Arday case, there are huge areas of deception, inconsistency, fraud, plagiarism, exaggeration, embellishment. It is not just a question of plagiarism, but of an entire back story that kept changing shape. This not a question of one or two lies, but of a pattern of shifting narratives. 

The result is that it is impossible to have any degree of confidence in any claim made by Arday, or claim made on his behalf by others. Some things in his memoir may be true, but why would anyone have any confidence in any of it? Even a seemingly innocuous detail could be false.  

It would take a rigorous forensic process to sort out the lies and deceptions. At the same time, we're told that Arday was subject to far too much scrutiny! 

Mediocrity

The first point is that half the people are going to be below average, in any given endeavor.  There will be a lot of people clustered in the middle, on any bell curve, as well. If your definition of mediocre is below average, then that will be half. If your defintion is "middling," then you will get a substantial number. 

The second point is that mediocrity is defined contextually, by people already engaged in doing something. So a mediocre second-baseman will look mediocre compared to others in the same league, but still be better than anyone who couldn't play in the league in the first place. He had to have risen to that major league level even to achieve "mediocrity."  

Mediocre is pejorative adjective, that seems to mean "middling," but has come to mean "bad" instead. The connotation has usurped the denotation. This is because it is only used when something doesn't meet expectations for excellence. On a tenure committee I was on everyone was judged excellent by their departments, to the point that calling them "very good" was almost insulting, and caused heated debates. That is because rhetorically speaking nobody can be below average, even though we know honestly that there is a middle and a bottom to the curve, not just a top.  

When I hear the phrase "mediocre white man" I don't think of myself. Nobody does. Only other people are mediocre. If I object to the phrase, then I sound defensive.  

Jason Arday

 I have been reading some of the takes on the Arday case. 

1) Andrew Gelman is a statistician and expert on scientific fraud and malfeasance. He has no problem with the obvious fact that Arday is a fraud:  

"Actually, it’s worse than that. Cambridge was informed about Arday’s research fraud three years ago, but the university first refused to investigate the problem, then last year when a news story was about to come out on it, they sicced lawyers on the newspaper to suppress it.

So, here we go again. Jason Arday, like David Agus, did not live up to his part of the bargain. Society gave him status and he returned the favor by lying all over the place."

2) Jason Stanley is a philosopher and purported expert on fascism and propaganda. He doesn't look closely at Arday's actual research, but concludes that since Arday's articles have some citations, that Arday must be a legitimate scholar after all. But of course, if they were plagiarized and fraudulent, then the number of citations wouldn't matter. 

3) Henry Giroux blames big factors. Systemic colonialism, systems of power:  

"Arday’s death must be understood against a wider culture of cruelty and dehumanization, one nourished by systemic racism and by a social order organized around greed, dispossession, hierarchy, and profound inequality. This is a system in which the legacies of colonialism have not disappeared but have been absorbed into institutions, cultural assumptions, and structures of privilege that continue to determine who belongs, who is protected, whose failures are forgiven, and who is subjected to relentless scrutiny."

Every thing's to blame except actual humans taking actions. It's all structures and systems doing the work, the bigger and more pervasive, the more explanatory power.   

4) John McWhorter views the problem as one of assuming that black intellectuals are mediocre anyway. If you accept that, then you will hire a black professor as a token and not care about the quality:

" Compared with some other examples of the genre, Arday’s mendacity and incompetence are especially stupefying. But he is nonetheless a symptom of academia’s dehumanization of black scholars and willingness to accept intellectual mediocrity in its self-seeking pursuit of virtue."  

Every one of these responses is completely predictable by the commenter's particular vantage point.  Gelman is an expert on fraud in academia, especially in the social sciences. McWhorter is black linguist who has come out against wokeness, Stanley is a philosopher who has branched out into rather superficial political commentary, Giroux is an expert on critical pedagogy.  

Maybe my response is predictable as well. My reaction to each of these takes is a foregone conclusion. I will have more to say about Giroux later. How can an academic culture so cruel and hierarchical also align itself so perfectly with Giroux's own ideological position? 

How I made it in academia

 I had a successful academic career. I retired recently as a full professor at a flagship state school, published a number of books and numerous articles. I won the major research award in my university. I was nominated a few times by my department to be a Distinguished Professor, but I was not selected. I applied for other jobs once in a while at more prestigious universities, but I did not get them. I probably rose as high as I was meant to. Salaries stagnated in my institution while I was a tenured faculty member there, so I never made the same amount as other full professors made in my same department the year I was promoted. When I complained about my small salary bump, a prominent "feminist philosopher" who was associate dean at the time told me I was lucky to have a job at all. 

This is how I did it: 

I had long been fascinated by poetry. I was a voracious reader and wanted to be a poet. But my actual aptitude was for figuring out how poetry worked. I became a good student of literature simply because I had read more than most people had, even most people going into the field, and because I thought about literature more analytically than most people.  I essentially trained myself. Of course, I also studied for my courses, but I tended to learn more from my own reading and study than what others could teach me.  

I was also a second generation academic, so I had started to think like a college professor when I was a teenager. This is what we would call privilege, now.  Let's say, though, that starting early is an advantage, as in almost every other human endeavor. 

I switched my major from English to Comp Lit. and studied a year abroad in Madrid. I pursued a comp lit degree at Stanford, with the goal of being a specialist in Spanish and/or Latin American poetry. I realized that the Latin American field was too politicized for my taste, and that I could leverage my knowledge of Spanish poetry to become an expert. I read the secondary literature in my field, and assessed its quality. I saw that I could do at least as well as some of the experts in this field. 

My interest, for better or for worse, is how poetry works on its terms, a kind of poetry engineering, as it were. This could still be done in the 1980s, when I began. I am not opposed to politically driven research into literature and culture, but it is simply not my thing, not what I am good at.  

I wasn't interested in studying Spanish fiction. A lot of people did this, and the field was crowded while also being prone to plot summaries. It would be easy to distinguish myself in a smaller field. 

I realized that a lot of people going into Spanish were not literature nerds like me. Those people were going into English. I had an automatic advantage over people who were going into the field for other reasons. I could leverage my greater understanding and knowledge of literature and the privilege that came with being a second generation academic. 

I wrote a dissertation on major, but still only half-recognized poet, whose work had been ill-served by the critics, in my view. I wrote the dissertation to be my first book, with few revisions. I know people tell students now that the only important thing is finishing the dissertation, not how good it is, and that the first book project can be something different from the dissertation, but I thought I needed to start my career on a solid foundation.

Looking back on it, the dissertation and first book does not seem as intellectually deep as some of my later work. But if still stands up well in my own biased opinion. 

I determined what the top journals in my field were, and submitted articles to them, with success. I hedged my bets by also publishing in some second-tier journals. My first university, another flagship university in the midwest, was on a quarter system. I learned that you could teach a summer quarter, of shorter duration, and take one of the three other quarters off. I did this a lot and had time to write a second book, which is still one of my most cited works. 

I was recruited to another flagship university and got the job. There was a fallow period, in which I began projects without being able to finish them. I still published enough, so that there are not significant gaps in my cv unless you look very closely. 

Then I got an idea to write about the most canonical Spanish poetry, Federico García Lorca, in American literature and culture. Lorca was well-studied, but not from this angle. In a way, it was having the idea to right this book that was the most significant moment of my career. 

At around the same time, I completed work on another book on contemporary Spanish poetry. Two books appeared during, and I was promoted to Professor. I needed four books to accomplish this promotion, not the normal two, because I had not produced at a steady rhythm, and had not excelled in my service obligations to the university. (Later, I was able to figure out how to contribute to the department more productively.) I am also not a natural born teacher, and had difficulties until I was able to figure out how to do better there.  

The Lorca book brought me a lot of attention, since it was of interest to readers of American poetry as well. Also, working on a canonical author brings more rewards. People talk about the value of non-canonical authors, but their actions speak louder. When dealing with a canonical author, the interest of the audience is simply assumed: you don't have to argue for the importance of Lorca. The audience is automatically larger and more engaged. 

Through continued work on contemporary Spanish poetry, I became known in Spain as well, and was invited to lecture there with some frequency. I continued to work on Lorca, and became known and respected in this subfield. I began to specialize in musical settings of Lorca's work, another well-known but at the same time ill-studied subject. I have now retired, but still work on my research projects. 

This essay is not meant to be advice, because I don't know if my trajectory could be reproduced in today's academic climate. What I had going for me was an educated family background, a strong intellectual interest, set when I was very young, vast amounts of reading and thinking about literature, a strong competitive drive to be one of the best scholars in my own field, and the luck to be able to leverage these advantages in environments favorable to my scholarly temperament. I've only received two job offers in my entire career, at two flagships where I worked. If I hadn't been hired, then I would have had no academic career at all.

The massage therapist and the onion farmer

 I was hearing my niece and another middle aged guy discuss the value of bartering, exchanging things of value instead of using money.  Money is of no intrinsic value, and earning or exchanging money allows the government to tax.  

Later, I developed an idea about this. It is fairly obvious, but suppose an onion farmer wants to get a massage. She can go in and pay for it with 80 pounds of onions. But now the masseur has 80 pounds of onions. He has to figure out how to barter those with some other people, for other things. Nobody is going to want that many onions, maybe. So for every massage there will be too much of something else on hand. He will need a certain number of hours in the day to negotiate a lot of deals. A lot of people won't want to do regular business with the farmer, because they don't want that many onions at a time. 

Now, would you like $80, or $80 worth of onions? Money is fungible, so you don't have to worry about having too much of it on hand. Some barters are beneficial and easy, maybe, but as an overall system it isn't practical.  

Voracious

 Every high-level academic I have ever known is a voracious reader. We read, or have read, vast quantities. Just saying... Even low level academics are readers. 

Usually, you have to read in your own field, in the course of doing research, and also just to keep up generally with things.

Then, you usually have some side interests, as well, and a general knowledge of history, philosophy, etc... 

You will know a lot of things superficially, and a few things well. Breadth and depth. 

There is also maturity. I was smart when I was 28 and just got my PhD, but my depth is greater now.  My total score: depth, breadth, originality, and quickness of thought, is probably better now.   

Suspect

 Someone in Grad school, in David Halliburton's theory course my first semester, said that in a capitalist society scientific facts are generated in the same way that industrial products were, through a capitalist mode of production. I thought that was a strange idea, so I asked for an example, and the example offered to me floored me.  The person's example was a scientist who argued for genetic component in intelligence, on racist grounds. 

Now, this racism is despicable, but it had no bearing on the phenomenon of which it is supposedly an example. This has nothing to do with capitalism, etc... There wasn't some actual mode of production of scientific data infected by capitalism. It was simply science in the service of something bad. 

I could have protested, but instead I felt humiliated, in a strange way. I knew instinctively that I couldn't argue, because even if I knew I was right there was another part of the picture: I realized that there was a different standard for arguments in this academic milieu, which was Stanford's Modern Thought and Literature program. (I was in comp lit., but we both shared this theory seminar as our intro course.) If you could tie something to politics in a crude, inaccurate, handwaving kind of way, that is all you had to do to win an argument.  The reference to racism sealed the point, because those are magic words for winning an argument.  Of course, most science is not about heritability of intelligence, and most scientists reject that idea, in fact. How can this be typical or illustrative in any way?  

Strangely, the person in question is someone I personally like and still count as a friendonfacebook. 

Another friend from High School who I like posts cringe memes on Facebook, inspiring stories of achievement written by AI.  They are written in the dark and stormy night style. Other leftist friends post cringe worthy content as well. There is something wrong with me temperamentally, because I find this kind of thing unbearable.  

When I was a kid

 When I was a kid I was trying to figure out how poetry worked. I wasn't a gifted writer, but I was curious about how it worked, kind of like from an engineering perspective, though I would be a sorry excuse for an engineer. I studied it from a college textbook when I was 12, maybe, and then went through the whole Norton Anthology. I just tried to figure it out from the inside. I still wanted to be a poet. 

I went to school with certain poets, figuring them out, like William Blake, WCW. I've done this with Borges, Frank O'Hara. I still do this in music, with Monk. 

I found a place in academia where I could continue this, and rose near to the top of this world. I studied languages, became an expert in my own subfield. 

So if anyone else reading has done this, how can we place a value on work that does not reflect an equivalent level of dedication and training?  How can we say that it also deserves praise?  

Training

 Imagine, then, two people of the same aptitude.  

One reads voraciously, learns languages, trains himself to write, learns about a variety of other subjects, (history, art history) plays music, figures out how to succeed in academia, rises to the top of an academic field.

The other: pursues a non-academic career, does fine. Main hobby is watching sports, maybe.  

The variability is in two factors: the opportunity, usually provided by a certain amount of "privilege" growing up, and the drive to do actually do it. I had both. I could have easily had the same privilege and same aptitude, and done nothing with it. 

The training is about 90% of the academic's value. It is work: training oneself to do all these things at a top level, but also expanding the brain through music and language learning. The non-academic could have done it, but didn't.   

Only a reduced percentage of the population get a doctorate or equivalent.  Even for a smart person it is not easy. 

Of these people, only a few get to research jobs and publish. Of these, a certain percentage is more or less on the top. It is an elite proposition, and it takes a lot. This is why academia, structurally, is elitist. 

Disorientation

 Here in Barcelona I went to restaurant one Sunday soon after I arrived. It had one of those fixed menus and they advertised "jazz moodd todo el día."  [sic]  They had good music, perhaps some Sonny Rollins followed by Miles, etc... The food was a little salty but not too bad. 

A few days later I started to go to one of the outside terraces near where I live; did it several times, having some beer or wine and tapas in the past few weeks. Then yesterday, I went back to the "jazz moodd" place.  Not as many places were open, and I had the same food more or less, but sitting on the other side of the restaurant this time. I was starting the suspect something, so I exited from the other door, onto another street, and there I was, at the outdoor terrace I had been frequenting on several other nights. It was the exact same restaurant, just experienced somewhat differently: day vs. night, one street vs the other, outdoors or indoors. The wait staff was different during the say. 

 I hadn't really noticed the name the first time, so even though I knew the outside place was called "Ginger" I didn't really associate it with the "other" place at all until I had another daytime meal there.  

Dante

 I saw in an interview with Borges (by Piglia) that he didn't think you needed to translate Dante into Spanish. Instead, you should read Dante in Italian, by learning another dialect of Latin. He had read the commedia several times himself, unsurprisingly.  

He always says that the scholarly editions of Dante in Italian are quite good, which is not hard to believe.   

Dream of New Yorker

 I had a mini-story accepted by the New Yorker.  But when it was about to come out (in the dream) it was merely a negation of my acceptance. Not exactly a letter of rejection, but something that had that same effect.  

Theory of Rhyme

Repetition + difference. 

Marks endings.  

From song to poem and back again

 

Here's what it could be. There is song; a poet imitates the song form and creates the poem. The composer sets the poem to music, and there is a new song.  

But this new song is different from the original, anonymous, popular song.  In 2 ways.  Now the text comes first, and is set to music. (In the original form of a song, music and words both come first, in a way. There is no necessary precedence.)  Secondly, there is a popularization of a text that belongs to the cultured tradition.  

Simple things at a high level

I saw a video by the drummer T. Igoe about doing simple things at a high level of proficiency. That would be my philosophy too.  Complex things done with a high level of proficiency are also great, but complex things done badly are doubly bad.    

As I type

 As I type my fingers act automatically. I don't look at the keyboard: my fingers simply know where the letters are. I make mistakes, but that is beside the point. My brain knows on some level what I am doing. For example, it knows that some words only need the left hand. However, to remind my brain of where a letter is, I have to move my fingers. I couldn't recite to you the querty keyboard.  

On the piano, my fingers also know where the keys are. I can play blind, for example. I can make a mistake if the key I am reaching for is two octaves up. 

The neurological process of writing by hand is different, I'm told.  Maybe better, but there is still a beauty in the unconscious logic of typing.  

Words cannot describe

I've talked about this trope before. In a formulaic way, words cannot describe just means the experience is powerful.  It really isn't about words themselves, but about experience.  You expect me to say something, but any statement pales in proportion to the experience itself. "I have no words..." and then the speaker gives a speech anyway about having no words. 

The next stage of the trope is to focus on language itself. Here, the point is that language is inadequate on some fundamental level. Inadequate for the enormous experience... but I would say also not really suited to evoke even ordinary life. I cannot make my words smell like cinnamon. If you already know what it smells like, then the word just functions as an arbitrary surrogate. If you don't know the smell, or if you don't know the word, then it doesn't work at all.

The third step in my argument is that this is not what language is supposed to do anyway. It was never supposed to be a surrogate for reality itself. It can only be judged inadequate because we have a false idea of what it's supposed to be. Take music. We can use language to notate music, but it is a bit awkward: a quarter note triplet played legato on G4. We have another system, called sheet music, that does the job better, though it is also awkward to read and write except for highly trained musicians. The sheet music is inadequate too, but good enough to preserve musical ideas and tell the performer how to realize them.  

Here's where it gets interesting. Even though that is not the main job of language, language can be evocative also. It is no longer an abstract representation of reality, but an experience that is real in its own right. This is something that we call "poetry." The combination of words gives us something new, something that cuts through our ordinary perception with an intensity. Think of a poem that tries to talk about the experience of listening to Monk play.  Ok.  It will probably be a bad poem because it sets itself up to fail by trying to replicate an experience in an inadequate medium.  Now think of a poem that is not about Monk but replicates the experience of his music in a different medium, adequate to itself.  

 

Terrible arguments

 You need to study humanities because it is the only way to learn critical thinking, etc...  

Then explain how people in the humanities, the actual professors and prestigious intellectuals, propose and accept really terrible arguments?  How will the undergraduates studying these things be able to escape terrible arguments, or judge which arguments are better than others?  We cannot even agree about what a poem means. 

I'm not setting myself up as the arbiter of what a good or bad argument is.  But I am a professor of humanities (at least one of the humanities), and some arguments seem bad to me.  Is it because I didn't study enough humanities?  What if I and another humanist disagree about what a terrible argument is?  Who is going to decide who is right? A third humanist? A committee? 

(I'm not giving examples, because then we would be debating the merits of particular arguments. Maybe my example of a terrible argument is something you think is wonderful. That is the problem in the first place.)

***

I guess the shortcut is to think the left wing arguments are supported by critical thinking, and the right wing ones are right wing memes.  But then the critical thinking arguments disappears, because the right (left) answer is always obvious. It is "on the right side of history."  No thinking is required after all! No amount of humanities education fixes this.  

Act of God

 There was a video with Joe Pass saying his talent was God-given, etc... 

There's another one where he explains how he learned to play: he would listen to a Charlie Parker solo for hours in order to replicate it perfectly, and then do another, another after that, etc... with many solos by many players of various instruments.  He wouldn't just learn guitar solos.  

Let's say that both perspectives are valid from the point of view of the player, and there is no actual contradiction between being given a gift and putting in a superhuman effort to make that gift something real.  Maybe the gift is just sitting down and doing it for hours at a time for many years.   

They asks Ron Carter about his bass influences. He said his influence was a trombone player, J.J. Johnson, getting that agility moving from note to note efficiently while seeming to move the slide very little. Johnson was trying to play on a brass instrument with the grace agility of a saxophone, not emulate other trombone players. I think Roy Eldridge on the trumpet was trying to play like Coleman Hawkins, not other trumpet players.  

A movie dream

 I had a kind of disturbing dream.  It wasn't happening to me; it was more of a movie I was watching. A man was attacked and had to kill his two attackers. It was at a school where his daughters studied, but it happened off hours. I will spare you graphic details. I knew there were twenty minutes left in the movie, in which the police would interrogate the man. It wasn't clear whether he would be accused or not.  

I awoke with some relief that it was only a dream / only a movie and didn't concern me directly, though somehow I was the protagonist of the narrative, at one remove.  

I got another email from the pretentious poet

 It was similar but not identical to the first one.  There was no acknowledgment of my unenthusiastic response to his first message.  I'm not sure if the poems he is sending me now are different or the same from the mediocre ones he sent me last time.  It kind of feels like a joke or an AI thing. I'm not sure even if this person exists. Probably he or it is sending these messages to many people. Some new kind of spam?  

So this time I won't respond at all.  

A dream

 I was walking near some docks, and the memory came to me of having worked there. I remembered some nasty union officials and company bosses, and co-workers who nicknamed me "college boy" or "college." I was skeptical because it didn't fit in with anything I remembered or with my self-image. 

As I woke up I thought about other situations in which the dream world had a kind of self-consistency, as though it were a world that existed. One in which there was some kind of summer work and a particular bus to take to get to a coastal resort.  

A first?

 Alice Notley notes that when she was writing poems about being pregnant and then a young mother and taking care of kids, etc... that that kind of poetry, based on that experience, had never been written before. I'm not going to dispute that because what matters is her perception of this. She is probably right, and any counter example would be the exception that proves the rule.  

I mentioned that Cummings poem about Buffalo Bill is the first poem ever about the death of a pop culture celebrity.  I can't prove that either, and if someone has an earlier example I would stand corrected.  

Another first might be Keats' "This living hand, now capable of earnest grasping...."  This is the first poem I know that has that quality of emotional rawness to it. It's not even in other Keats poems. 

Of course, once you see that, you can go back and find precursors to any thing that seems to be a "first," like Borges's precursors of Kafka. Kafka is a first: there is not that particular feeling in literature before that.  

That would seem to be the important thing, because all the archetypes have always existed, the narrative structures of quest or homecoming, the particular rhythms of plots with up and down movements, problems being posed and resolved. You can't be original with that, but new kinds of feeling can come into being.  You can have the -esque of Kafkaesque.  (And I don't mean the Kafka cliché, but the feeling one gets from it.).  

What are some other firsts?  I associate this with writers who "cut through" and identify new forms of feeling, make them recognizable.  

What's wrong with this?

I was looking at this report:  

https://worldhumanitiesreport.org/report/

The humanities are a resource of critical analysis and interpretation. At the same time, this report reveals a tension between the humanities understood as core practices of national identity formation, imperialism, and dominance, and the humanities understood as the critical global humanities: resources through which nationalism, imperialism, and dominance have been questioned, analyzed, dissected, and displaced."

What's wrong with this?  

Monk Project

 I have a Monk project. consisting of learning as many tunes as possible. I know Bemsha Swing very well, and have learned Friday the 13th as well.  I purchased the Monk fake book and am working from there but listening to records as well.  My next tune is North of the Sunset, a blues in Bb.  A lot of the tunes are not in difficult keys.  

I will learn a ballad, Ruby my Dear, always one of my favorites.  

The nice thing about Friday the 13th is that is seems almost impossible to play wrong notes when improvising over it.  Yes, I can play "wrong notes," but I almost have to try to play things that won't fit. I tried the method of soloing over it with one note, using all twelve possible notes.  Some notes are more difficult to use, some easier, but it is a spectrum, not an absolute dichotomy.  

I use different methods of improvisation.  For example, a chorus of only very short phrases. Another of long phrases, then one mixing long and short.  Play only quarter notes, only quarter note triplets, only half notes, etc... Solo using only two notes, only three notes.  Use only the notes of the chord. Use mostly scalar movement, use mostly arpeggios.  Start every phrase on the and of 1.  

The goal of this project?  This will be revealed to me later.  Aside from the obvious purpose: to spend time with Monk and make friends and influence people. 

Buffalo Bill's

 My friend came back from Cody, Wyoming and we were talking about Buffalo Bill in the car. Her flight came in near midnight.  I thought of the poem, "Buffalo Bill's / defunct."  I have it memorized, not surprisingly.  I remember explaining the poem to my father when I was a teenager. He wanted to know why Cummings wrote out the word "Mister" rather than using "Mr." I explained this to him.  Now BB died in 1917. Tulips & Chimneys, where the Cummings poem appeared, came out in 1923. In 1917 EEC had published some poems in a volume called 8 Harvard Poets, with a mixture of late Victorian style poems and some modernist ones. He might have written the first draft of the poem in 1917, after Buffalo Bill's death.  I don't know the exact date of the poem, but it feels occasional.  Clearly he had begun the modernist style already, as evidenced by the Harvard poems. He was about 23 years old,  a bit younger than Williams, Pound, H.D, Marianne Moore, Eliot.  (The other modernist American poets.)  

I don't know poems that early that talk about the death of a pop culture celebrity in colloquial, even profane language (Jesus / he was a handsome man).  It's almost like a Frank O'Hara poem. Buffalo Bill was a showman, using his status as Western hero to put on spectacles for the public, "breaking onetwothreefourfive pigeons just like that." The poem is an homage, but with an ironic edge too.  

Cummings never became a better poet than he was with his first book. It is all there from the beginning, the humor and sentimentality, the typography. This poem is among his best.  

I get email

 Someone sent me their poems from Spain in an email, with a very flowery email message asking me to do something, I'm not sure what, exactly. There was some talk of my "magisterio" which made me laugh a bit. It was an odd combination of a very pretentious explanation of what the poet was trying to do (think the "dreaded artist statement") and poems that did not line up at all with what the dreaded artist statement would lead one to expect. I begged off as politely as I could, and put it in an email response that will be sent a bit later today. 

Everyone that know me knows I hate that kind of pretentiousness. Mediocre poetry bolstered by pretentious explanations is even worse, because it isn't allowed to be what it actually is, a modest display of one's own literary persona.  

A paradox

 I've referred to this paradox before, where a religious believer might have serious ambivalence about God existing at all, but be quite certain of more minute points of doctrine.  

We are all subject to that paradox, in that we need to argue the finer points and be right about them, without understanding what the big picture is. How could we? Yet we need something to argue about. 

Advantages of (almost) literal translation

 By literal translation I don't mean word by word, but translation that essentially follows the most obvious path, with most elements of the text except those that would sound too unnatural or stiff. You would say dream about not "dream with" to translate "soñar con..."  

1. It is easy to follow in a bilingual face-to-face edition, where the verso is the original and the recto of the next is the translation. Easy for both the monolingual reader and the reader with some knowledge of the source language. 

2. It is non-objectionable.  It is hard to formulate objections to it, because it seem like the most correct and natural version possible. 

3. It usually avoids amplification, or introducing more words that the original had. It won't be padded or over explanatory.  

4. It will often convey literary qualities of the original text because it won't rewrite in a way that eliminates the tropes. 

Disadvantages:

It won't be particular meta, calling attention to itself as a translation. (But this could be an advantage.)

It may not be musical or have a satisfactory prosody. (But the literary and free version might also not have a satisfactory prosody.).  

Broccoli Poem Written in the Car

 

There was a time I did not like broccoli, 

Other times when I was enthusiastic about it. 

I also passed through phases of neglect and indifference

When I did not think much about it at all.

These are fact about me, not about broccoli itself--

And not very interesting ones at that. 

Dream of parking space

 I was in the living room of a house. I heard a conversation very loud outside. One man was accusing the other of taking his parking space. The other said these were not assigned. The accuser was following the other, and I emerged to look. They starting fighting but were soon separated by another man. The street filled with a crowd of people; I thought they were 50 of them. The cat really wanted to get out so I opened the door. I assumed the cat would find its way back eventually. It got dark and I was a bit worried about the cat's safety.  

Dream of milk and watch

 I had a gallon of milk in a backpack that I was obliged to carry around. 

***

I was buying a watch, of an old-fashioned analog kind, for about $100.  I thought it was a good idea, somehow.  

Poet in Spain

 I was looking at Sarah Arvio's Poet in Spain. I noticed that two reviews of the book (a translation of Lorca's poetry + Bodas de sangre) mention me, but she doesn't in the intro to the book or bibliography. She's translating everything except the New York poetry, it seems, in an effort to give a less American Lorca.  

She seems unaware of the complete history of Lorca translation into English.  

The intro is a little off at places. She says the sonnets are unusual because they have a strict rhyme scheme, but more of Lorca's poetry rhymes than doesn't, and the rhyme is often very regular: assonance in every other line (even numbered lines).  

She thinks the Falange started the Spanish Civil War.  I am reminded of how difficult it is to state basic facts. This was a military coup; the Falange was a small party at the time, and Franco later took it over, though he was never a member of it before then. The party was very small before the Civil War, and Franco took it over in 1937, during the war, to consolidate his own power.  

She groups the Suites into other groupings, along with other poems that are not part of the Suites, creating her own Lorca sequences. This seems weird to me.  

I'm not going to nit-pick with translations any more, because it seems that the process is exhausting without leading to much substance. A few well-chosen examples go a long away.  

I was in a restaurant and couldn't help overhearing a conversation

 One guy was an older man, a composer, and he was telling another slightly younger fellow: "I used to tell my students, when I write a score it is like writing a personal letter to each musician..."  The other guy, also a musician, was telling him that his [older man's'] scores were so carefully notated that the musicians just had to play the music as written and the music would be 90% right already (something like this).  

I still have it!

 I still have it.  (I still have "it.") I went to the library and just sat there writing and researching for 3 hours, from 9-12, yesterday and today. Retirement is freeing me up.  I can write as well as ever; the ideas flow. I have supreme confidence in what I am doing.  

Part of what I am doing is eliminating things. Students, colleagues, administrators, have no more demands on me.  I am unsubscribing from everything imaginable. I looked at my retirement privileges: I have full access to library, can park for less money, and even have a grave sit in the University Cemetery--hopefully not very soon. I have plenty of money.  

I am giving some books and cds away.  I might sell some books, not because I need the money, but because they are too valuable to simply donate to the library.  

While I am not technically retired, since I am doing the Barcelona program in July, I am living the lifestyle. The missing element seemed to be very simple: going to the library and working. Why the library? That is where the books are.  I simply sit down at a desk near the Lorca section, PQ6000 and whatever. I have my own books too to supplement the holdings of the library, a collections of books by and about Lorca that I have been collecting for 20 years.  

I plan to be more productive now, keeping a regular schedule, M-F from 9-12. I will go to the regular library and to the music library, depending on what project I am working on.  

Dreams are garbled fables

We talk about intention, what the author meant to say. When I have a dream, the process is involuntary. I might be exercising my will in the dream, trying to do something, but the construction of the narrative itself, and the meaning of the dream, are not the result of an act of volition. I can interpret the dream, but even having access to the author (myself) I cannot be sure I am right, or what even being right means. In retelling the dream I can give it shape, a contour that represents it. I never want to massage it until it is a perfect little fable, when in reality it is a garbled mess--as it should be.  

2 Dreams

 1. I had gone through some wilderness mash-up in which the parts of my body had been switched with one another or other objects, while I was lost for a long time. I was trying to make sense of the duration of the experience. What I thought was 3 hours could have been 3 years.  

2. There was a little girl, maybe 8, confined to a room in a zoo, though not close to other animals or in an animal habitat. It was in a basement of a building, though in the context of the dream I knew it to be the zoo.  

She asked for help from another person, then from me. She wanted to escape. I knew the people ostensibly responsible for her, for this situation, though not parents. I attempted to find their number in my phone to text them, and promised the girl I would resolve the problem. I stayed there a while, without entering the room, until she went to sleep. The only name I could think of was Bob Cranshaw or Crenshaw, the bass player who played with Sonny Rollins for years. (Sonny died yesterday!!), so I could not text the "Bob" in question.  

Now I was with the "Bob" that was responsible for the girl. We were doing something else together and I thought it was fortunate I had found him. I laid down the law to him, gravely but not with any anger, in a way he could not argue against. I said something about child protective services. I had resolved the situation.  

***

The dreams are about care of self and care of others. Bob is not Bob, but another version of myself. 

Poem I wrote awake in bed in the middle of the night

 

I want the least grief possible--

I said to myself, in my confusion, error, or stupidity.

Is it a gift I can refuse, a price to negotiate? 

With whom, exactly, would I make this deal?  

 

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.