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.