Although I decided to become an expert on poetry, I read a lot of fiction. With my first asthma attack I spent all night reading Chaim Potok. I read all of Updike and Bellow, and Roth. All of Vonnegut. I read Lord of the Rings every summer until I didn't want to read it any more. I read Robert Penn Warren's The Cave multiple times. When I learned Spanish I read almost all of Galdós. I've read every Borges and García M. short story, every Cortázar short story. Novels by Vargas Llosa. I re-read Catch-22 over and over.
Much later, I went on an Elmore Leonard binge.
At a certain point fiction did not interest me much any more. There are only so many New Yorker stories or Great American Novels you can read.
Showing posts with label Intellectual Autobiography. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Intellectual Autobiography. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 17, 2016
Tuesday, August 16, 2016
Lorca as reader
I'm reading this book about Lorca as a reader. It is ok; not the greatest but I am prejudiced against the author LGM. Anyway, there is always something to be learned even if the information is not presented efficiently here.
I was thinking that my life as a reader might be of some interest. After all, I belong to those whose identity was formed by reading. LGM points out that this might not be the case for subsequent generations. It was not the case for my own generation, but it was for me, and might be increasingly uncommon in future generations.
So...
I think my first author was Milne. We had some poetry books by him, like When we were very young. I was taught to read using a phonetic alphabet in first grade, and then switching to the normal alphabet in 2nd. Some kind of educational experiment. So this was my first poetry too. I liked the odd reversal of perspective in the poem in which Christopher Robin does not allow his mother to go into town by herself. I don't remember any prose by Milne from that time. I think there was another book called Now We are Six.
I wasn't yet a great reader. My next big discovery was a library in my third-grade school. We had moved from Ann Arbor to Piedmont, a suburb of Oakland while my father did a visiting thing at Berkeley. My other school had not had a library where you could just go and check out books. It was here I was born as an intellectual. I checked out books on history, mostly. I wanted to know the history of the entire world and loved ancient civilizations most of all. It was like the Zukofsky line Creeley quotes: "Born very young into a world already very old." I read a child's illustrated book about the First World War and memorized all the information therein. Although the information could not have been very complete, I'm thinking, I never had any problems the rest of my life remembering anything about that war.
I read the Bible and wondered about the weird logic of events there. The Israelites would just never learn from their mistakes, and kept getting wicked over and over again. It was pretty obvious what would happen each time they got wicked again. I wasn't quite sure what they were doing wrong, because there was kind of a vagueness there, whereas the God seemed very immediate and real. "Walking with God" I took as a literal expression. You could find him and walk with him, so why would anyone do any different if it was an actual guy who seemed all powerful and would punish you immediately if you messed up. This was the cause of my loss of religious faith about a year later (one of the causes). But anyway, it was fun to cheer the Israelites invading a country that God had promised them, but then frustrating when they couldn't keep their act together. I read Beverly Cleary, and when I pictured the house where Henry or Beezus lived it was my house. Their mother looked like mine.
I pretty much read anything I could get my hands on from around then. I liked old boy scout manuals. When the class would order Scholastic Books the box would come and each student would get a book or two and I would carry home the box with my 12 or 14 books, go home, and read them all at once. There was a book about a polar bear terrorizing an island, another about a boy building his own canoe. Later I would read Dr Seuss and Frank Baum to my brother, who had all the Oz novels, but fairly soon I switched to adult novels.
Reading then was absorption. The outside world disappeared and you were simply living inside the book. This is a strange way for identity to be formed because you are not yourself when reading. When you lift your head you wonder why you are you and not someone else. Identity is arbitrary because you were someone else, mentally, for several hours.
My main interest was in Greek mythology from age 9 or 10-11. It seemed like many years at the time, but looking back I see it was not a long stretch of time. I simply learned from books my father already owned about this subject. I was also interested in primatology and other subjects and became a reader of encyclopedias. It seemed that the encyclopedia was simply where the knowledge was, in complete form, A-Z. It was inexhaustible. I learned from those more than at school, which seemed a waste of time as far as learning was concerned, especially in those subjects which interested me. We had child's encyclopedia's and normal ones as well, and at one point we bought the newest Brittanica.
My first real novel was Of Human Bondage. I think my father must have explained what the title meant. Another reading that distanced me from religion.
I was thinking that my life as a reader might be of some interest. After all, I belong to those whose identity was formed by reading. LGM points out that this might not be the case for subsequent generations. It was not the case for my own generation, but it was for me, and might be increasingly uncommon in future generations.
So...
I think my first author was Milne. We had some poetry books by him, like When we were very young. I was taught to read using a phonetic alphabet in first grade, and then switching to the normal alphabet in 2nd. Some kind of educational experiment. So this was my first poetry too. I liked the odd reversal of perspective in the poem in which Christopher Robin does not allow his mother to go into town by herself. I don't remember any prose by Milne from that time. I think there was another book called Now We are Six.
I wasn't yet a great reader. My next big discovery was a library in my third-grade school. We had moved from Ann Arbor to Piedmont, a suburb of Oakland while my father did a visiting thing at Berkeley. My other school had not had a library where you could just go and check out books. It was here I was born as an intellectual. I checked out books on history, mostly. I wanted to know the history of the entire world and loved ancient civilizations most of all. It was like the Zukofsky line Creeley quotes: "Born very young into a world already very old." I read a child's illustrated book about the First World War and memorized all the information therein. Although the information could not have been very complete, I'm thinking, I never had any problems the rest of my life remembering anything about that war.
I read the Bible and wondered about the weird logic of events there. The Israelites would just never learn from their mistakes, and kept getting wicked over and over again. It was pretty obvious what would happen each time they got wicked again. I wasn't quite sure what they were doing wrong, because there was kind of a vagueness there, whereas the God seemed very immediate and real. "Walking with God" I took as a literal expression. You could find him and walk with him, so why would anyone do any different if it was an actual guy who seemed all powerful and would punish you immediately if you messed up. This was the cause of my loss of religious faith about a year later (one of the causes). But anyway, it was fun to cheer the Israelites invading a country that God had promised them, but then frustrating when they couldn't keep their act together. I read Beverly Cleary, and when I pictured the house where Henry or Beezus lived it was my house. Their mother looked like mine.
I pretty much read anything I could get my hands on from around then. I liked old boy scout manuals. When the class would order Scholastic Books the box would come and each student would get a book or two and I would carry home the box with my 12 or 14 books, go home, and read them all at once. There was a book about a polar bear terrorizing an island, another about a boy building his own canoe. Later I would read Dr Seuss and Frank Baum to my brother, who had all the Oz novels, but fairly soon I switched to adult novels.
Reading then was absorption. The outside world disappeared and you were simply living inside the book. This is a strange way for identity to be formed because you are not yourself when reading. When you lift your head you wonder why you are you and not someone else. Identity is arbitrary because you were someone else, mentally, for several hours.
My main interest was in Greek mythology from age 9 or 10-11. It seemed like many years at the time, but looking back I see it was not a long stretch of time. I simply learned from books my father already owned about this subject. I was also interested in primatology and other subjects and became a reader of encyclopedias. It seemed that the encyclopedia was simply where the knowledge was, in complete form, A-Z. It was inexhaustible. I learned from those more than at school, which seemed a waste of time as far as learning was concerned, especially in those subjects which interested me. We had child's encyclopedia's and normal ones as well, and at one point we bought the newest Brittanica.
My first real novel was Of Human Bondage. I think my father must have explained what the title meant. Another reading that distanced me from religion.
Sunday, November 16, 2014
Lightning
When I first decided to be a poet, I was 11 and we had to write a poem in school. At that moment I decided to be a poet, without really understanding anything of what that entailed. I suppose my first idea was that a poet wrote poems for other people who needed them but did not know how to write poems themselves. Maybe a kind of Cyrano idea of poetry? (I didn't know that story then.)
Anyway, I got some books about poetry, and a few poems struck me, like Wallace Stevens' "Disillusionment at 10 O'Clock." I still think a poem has to be that same thing, a poem that grabs you somehow. I still feel it in the Cummings poems I used to like, and still do to some extent. It is in Vallejo, like "A veces doyme contra todas las contras." Or Ceravolo: "like cellophane tape / on a schoolbook." Let's call it electricity. A poem without it is worthless.
There are two ways of disagreeing with me about this (at least two). You could disagree about what poems have lightning, and how much lightning they have. Or you could disagree with me that this is even a meaningful way of talking about the problem. The first form of disagreement is not troubling to me, because we expect individual differences of response. I am shocked when someone doesn't respond to Vallejo like this, and often doubt whether the person has any feeling for poetry at all. But after I calm down I just chalk it up to individual differences. The second kind of disagreement is more crucial, because then I don't understand the point of studying or reading poetry at all. The rest of poetry, aside from the electricity in it, is a dull and worthless thing.
Anyway, I got some books about poetry, and a few poems struck me, like Wallace Stevens' "Disillusionment at 10 O'Clock." I still think a poem has to be that same thing, a poem that grabs you somehow. I still feel it in the Cummings poems I used to like, and still do to some extent. It is in Vallejo, like "A veces doyme contra todas las contras." Or Ceravolo: "like cellophane tape / on a schoolbook." Let's call it electricity. A poem without it is worthless.
There are two ways of disagreeing with me about this (at least two). You could disagree about what poems have lightning, and how much lightning they have. Or you could disagree with me that this is even a meaningful way of talking about the problem. The first form of disagreement is not troubling to me, because we expect individual differences of response. I am shocked when someone doesn't respond to Vallejo like this, and often doubt whether the person has any feeling for poetry at all. But after I calm down I just chalk it up to individual differences. The second kind of disagreement is more crucial, because then I don't understand the point of studying or reading poetry at all. The rest of poetry, aside from the electricity in it, is a dull and worthless thing.
Thursday, May 1, 2014
Formative (19): Borges
I don't remember when I first read Borges, but he was part of the mix in American "postmodernism" (metafiction) and behind or underneath the Latin American boom. Everyone had read Labyrinths, a book that does not exist in Spanish. I really went to school with Borges, reading all of it, poetry and prose, going back to works that he later suppressed, etc..., and reading parts of what he had read. I am more Borgesian than Borges.
Borges is a great innovator whose theory of literature is that innovation does not exist. Everything has already been invented. His beef against Hispanic avant-garde poetry was the narrow emphasis on the creation of new metaphors. For B, a valid metaphor had to be one of a narrow set of universal metaphors. You couldn't just arbitrarily forge new ones. In this he anticipates the cognitive science approach to metaphor developed much later. He is also one of the main translation theorists, with a perspective more useful, even, than Benjamin.
***
I won't have many posts on individual writers in this series, but I believe Borges was formative for me.
Borges is a great innovator whose theory of literature is that innovation does not exist. Everything has already been invented. His beef against Hispanic avant-garde poetry was the narrow emphasis on the creation of new metaphors. For B, a valid metaphor had to be one of a narrow set of universal metaphors. You couldn't just arbitrarily forge new ones. In this he anticipates the cognitive science approach to metaphor developed much later. He is also one of the main translation theorists, with a perspective more useful, even, than Benjamin.
***
I won't have many posts on individual writers in this series, but I believe Borges was formative for me.
Wednesday, April 30, 2014
Formative (18): Mon père
My father, Leon, was a sociologist who later became a university administrator. I was born while he was doing his PhD at Harvard with Talcott Parsons, the main American sociologist of that period, with a dissertation on civil rights. One thing he told me later was a surprising finding: that companies that actually tried to discriminate less would often receive more complaints of discrimination. The explanation her gave was that employers who simply did not make an effort insulated themselves and were not approached by African-American workers in the first place. Complaints tended to arise, instead, in the contact between two culture. [I could be remembering this imprecisely, but this point has always stayed with me.]
It seemed logical that he would go to his school, as I went to mine. We lived in Ann Arbor in those days, the early and mid 60s. He was against the Vietnam war right from the beginning. I believe he was still working on the dissertation for several years while he had his job in Michigan. They just called him in one day and told him he had tenure: no paper work, no bureaucracy, and then he moved to Davis as full professor and chair of the department. For several years UMich was trying to get him back. He edited The American Sociologist in the early 70s. Then in 76 he became Vice-Chancellor and spent most of the rest of his career in administration until he got seriously ill. He had always been sickly, and a bout with rheumatoid fever triggered rheumatoid arthritis. He would spend a lot of time on his back when he wasn't working. When he was about the age I am know, (and I was finishing my PhD and getting my first job) he got pneumonia and never fully recovered. He died in 2001 a day short of his 65th birthday. He is still a frequent visitor in my dreams, though less intensely than in the past.
I never thought of going into social sciences. I hated how those people wrote: Parsons is probably the worst prose stylist of any intellectual of comparable fame. It was an advantage having an academic family, because I knew the expectations and could get professional guidance at home. My decision to go into academia was never really in question. That's what I would do. My younger brother also got a PhD (UCB, where my dad had done his undergraduate degree) in Finance. My father had extensive literary and musical interests. He was a bit of what you would call now a "mansplainer." He would go to a museum and lecture the guide about the exhibit he was seeing. It would drive my ex-wife crazy.
He subscribed to the New York Review of Books. I read it too, of course. I found the letters and responses to be formative of a style of intellectual debate.
He was used to being the smartest person around. He wasn't particularly imaginative in his thought, though. His last book was about the constitution of the public sphere and was indebted to Habermas, a figure with whom I feel very little affinity. We had two very different kinds of intelligence, but had great conversations over Chinese food. He helped me get out of high school into college where I thrived. I did get one B in college, but that is another story.
It seemed logical that he would go to his school, as I went to mine. We lived in Ann Arbor in those days, the early and mid 60s. He was against the Vietnam war right from the beginning. I believe he was still working on the dissertation for several years while he had his job in Michigan. They just called him in one day and told him he had tenure: no paper work, no bureaucracy, and then he moved to Davis as full professor and chair of the department. For several years UMich was trying to get him back. He edited The American Sociologist in the early 70s. Then in 76 he became Vice-Chancellor and spent most of the rest of his career in administration until he got seriously ill. He had always been sickly, and a bout with rheumatoid fever triggered rheumatoid arthritis. He would spend a lot of time on his back when he wasn't working. When he was about the age I am know, (and I was finishing my PhD and getting my first job) he got pneumonia and never fully recovered. He died in 2001 a day short of his 65th birthday. He is still a frequent visitor in my dreams, though less intensely than in the past.
I never thought of going into social sciences. I hated how those people wrote: Parsons is probably the worst prose stylist of any intellectual of comparable fame. It was an advantage having an academic family, because I knew the expectations and could get professional guidance at home. My decision to go into academia was never really in question. That's what I would do. My younger brother also got a PhD (UCB, where my dad had done his undergraduate degree) in Finance. My father had extensive literary and musical interests. He was a bit of what you would call now a "mansplainer." He would go to a museum and lecture the guide about the exhibit he was seeing. It would drive my ex-wife crazy.
He subscribed to the New York Review of Books. I read it too, of course. I found the letters and responses to be formative of a style of intellectual debate.
He was used to being the smartest person around. He wasn't particularly imaginative in his thought, though. His last book was about the constitution of the public sphere and was indebted to Habermas, a figure with whom I feel very little affinity. We had two very different kinds of intelligence, but had great conversations over Chinese food. He helped me get out of high school into college where I thrived. I did get one B in college, but that is another story.
Tuesday, April 29, 2014
Formative (17): Americanness & Britishness
I have lived in the States of
Mass / Mich / California / NY / Indiana / Ohio / Missouri / Kansas. In that order. The most time in California and Kansas, with Ohio and Missouri also figuring prominently in my bio.
The Mayhews go way back in American history to colonial days. I am also related to the prominent Hinckley family. Gordon, president of LDS church, was 1st cousin to my grandmother. I have extended family in Utah. I am mostly of British descent (English and British Isles), with one great-grandmother from Switzerland.
So of course I am professor of Spanish. Otherwise I would be almost redundant. An English English professor. The American Bildung is to look beyond oneself.
Mass / Mich / California / NY / Indiana / Ohio / Missouri / Kansas. In that order. The most time in California and Kansas, with Ohio and Missouri also figuring prominently in my bio.
The Mayhews go way back in American history to colonial days. I am also related to the prominent Hinckley family. Gordon, president of LDS church, was 1st cousin to my grandmother. I have extended family in Utah. I am mostly of British descent (English and British Isles), with one great-grandmother from Switzerland.
So of course I am professor of Spanish. Otherwise I would be almost redundant. An English English professor. The American Bildung is to look beyond oneself.
Formative 16: Visual Arts
All arts are "visual." Even music.
I've always considered that a weakness of mine, my inability to draw well and my ignorance of visual arts. Really, though, I am not too bad. I would look at my parents' art books, like one they had of El Greco, and I admired ancient Greek sculpture in my mythological phase in mid-childhood. I know if there's an old painting with a guy with keys, it's Saint Peter. My favorite painter is Rothko. I went through an intense Joseph Cornell phase.
I always thought poetry had close connections with music and visual arts (all arts are visual). I've always thought that visual and concrete poetry was not visual enough. I remember Charles Bernstein saying, about a painter famous for incorporating text into her work, that maybe she should hire a poet to help her. I respond to visual art strongly, especially its poetic and rhythmic dimensions.
I keep finding more to say in this "formative" series. I see that Clarissa and Leslie have joined me in this thread. I still have to talk about: my parents, nature, sexuality. And possibly other topics.
I've always considered that a weakness of mine, my inability to draw well and my ignorance of visual arts. Really, though, I am not too bad. I would look at my parents' art books, like one they had of El Greco, and I admired ancient Greek sculpture in my mythological phase in mid-childhood. I know if there's an old painting with a guy with keys, it's Saint Peter. My favorite painter is Rothko. I went through an intense Joseph Cornell phase.
I always thought poetry had close connections with music and visual arts (all arts are visual). I've always thought that visual and concrete poetry was not visual enough. I remember Charles Bernstein saying, about a painter famous for incorporating text into her work, that maybe she should hire a poet to help her. I respond to visual art strongly, especially its poetic and rhythmic dimensions.
I keep finding more to say in this "formative" series. I see that Clarissa and Leslie have joined me in this thread. I still have to talk about: my parents, nature, sexuality. And possibly other topics.
Formative 15: Music
Not a musician, but music is important to me and a significant part of my Bildung.
My father liked classical music and pontificated about it, my mom taught piano, and my sister and daughter are trained classical musicians.
I trained myself in jazz listening. My dad had a few recordings and I would listen to faint traces of KPFA in Berkeley, and one of those hokey "music of your life" stations to get enough big band music. Just because once in a while they would play a real song. It was hard until the mid-70s when my local college station provided me with a steady dose of Coltrane. I thought I knew a lot about jazz but it took me a while to really know anything, as with anything else.
I wasn't into the pop music of my own youth.
Late came salsa and other afro-cuban styles. I reclaimed some of the legacy of my youth and returned to classical music too. Haydn string quartets; a lot of Bach. Morton Feldman. Flamenco. My musical interests are more varied than almost anyone I know, though once again I tend to go narrow and deep rather than wide and shallow.
I've played clarinet, piano, and percussion. I sang in choirs. Now I cannot sing well.
My father liked classical music and pontificated about it, my mom taught piano, and my sister and daughter are trained classical musicians.
I trained myself in jazz listening. My dad had a few recordings and I would listen to faint traces of KPFA in Berkeley, and one of those hokey "music of your life" stations to get enough big band music. Just because once in a while they would play a real song. It was hard until the mid-70s when my local college station provided me with a steady dose of Coltrane. I thought I knew a lot about jazz but it took me a while to really know anything, as with anything else.
I wasn't into the pop music of my own youth.
Late came salsa and other afro-cuban styles. I reclaimed some of the legacy of my youth and returned to classical music too. Haydn string quartets; a lot of Bach. Morton Feldman. Flamenco. My musical interests are more varied than almost anyone I know, though once again I tend to go narrow and deep rather than wide and shallow.
I've played clarinet, piano, and percussion. I sang in choirs. Now I cannot sing well.
Monday, April 28, 2014
Formative (13): Percussion & Translation Theory
I took up percussion when I was about 35. I'm not particularly good, but that is hardly the point. My project for my free semester is to get good on a single kind of drum, or really two: to be a decent conguero and bongocero. I could play timbales too if I wanted to learn.
I can play a four against five polyrhythm without thinking about it too much. I know cáscara and clave, martillo and tumbao. I can play a jazz ride pattern and comp with my feet and left hand.
This part of my formation is really more of an obsessive-compulsive reaction. I need to understand rhythms, since that is the way my mind works. It is "the prosodic imagination," as it were. I do not play in bands.
***
I started translating almost the second I started learning Spanish. Really before that, because I remember trying to translate Blake's poem about the Fly into French. The first poem I translated from Spanish was by Lorca or Jiménez. "La rosa / no buscaba la rosa." And "Mariposa de Luz." I've always thought translation was central to everything I wanted to do, though I've never published a book of translations. Somehow I always put that off and do another book of scholarship instead.
I can play a four against five polyrhythm without thinking about it too much. I know cáscara and clave, martillo and tumbao. I can play a jazz ride pattern and comp with my feet and left hand.
This part of my formation is really more of an obsessive-compulsive reaction. I need to understand rhythms, since that is the way my mind works. It is "the prosodic imagination," as it were. I do not play in bands.
***
I started translating almost the second I started learning Spanish. Really before that, because I remember trying to translate Blake's poem about the Fly into French. The first poem I translated from Spanish was by Lorca or Jiménez. "La rosa / no buscaba la rosa." And "Mariposa de Luz." I've always thought translation was central to everything I wanted to do, though I've never published a book of translations. Somehow I always put that off and do another book of scholarship instead.
Sunday, April 27, 2014
Formative (12): Le surréalisme
Je suppose que je pensais, comme tout le monde, que la poésie espagnole plus importante du XXième siècle était "surréaliste": Neruda, Lorca, Aleixandre. Ce ne pas vrai, mais j'ai commencé de cette façon. Le surréalisme m'a influencé beaucoup.
J'amais, aussi le poésie surréaliste française. J'ai conservé un livre d'André Breton: "Young Cherry Trees Preserved Against Hares." Le vers: "Jersey Guernsey dans le temps sombre et illustre."
J'amais, aussi le poésie surréaliste française. J'ai conservé un livre d'André Breton: "Young Cherry Trees Preserved Against Hares." Le vers: "Jersey Guernsey dans le temps sombre et illustre."
Saturday, April 26, 2014
Formative (11): Le français
J'ai étudié le français pendant plusieurs années. Ce que j'ai fait, essentiellement, est étudier la poésie espagnole comme si c'était poésie française: avec un esprit plus moderne. J'ai appris le français avant l'espagnol, mais d'une façon imparfaite. Je peux lire les romans de Balzac sans grandes problèmes. Est-ce que je peux écrire en français sans erreurs? Certainement non, mais mon "browser" m'indique quand j'ai fait une erreur d'orthographie. Comme s'il savait que j'écris en français!
Un écrivain avec une influence bien forte sur moi est Raymond Roussel, sur tout ses premières ouvrages en vers. John Ashbery a écrit sur lui, et Michel Foucault aussi.
Un écrivain avec une influence bien forte sur moi est Raymond Roussel, sur tout ses premières ouvrages en vers. John Ashbery a écrit sur lui, et Michel Foucault aussi.
Formative (10): From the Narrow to the Broad
So I have been accused (by myself among others) of having narrow interests. But I have gone from relatively narrow and circumscribed interests to broader ones. So aphorism, prosody, jazz, poetry, Borges, Lorca, New York School poetry, translation theory, crossword puzzles, Latin percussion. That's "all" I'm interested in. But each one of those things opens up entire worlds. It's like Wallace Stevens image of a planet on a table. (The planet is book; it fits on the table.)
The academy tells you you should be interested in: novels, films, popular culture and most especially the sociological and historical themes in novels, films, and pop culture.
I end up somehow very knowledgable about the civil war. Lorca dies at the beginning of it. Unamuno too. Machado at the end trying to escape. Miguel Hernández dies in jail a few years earlier. Gamoneda's most striking poems evoke the early years of the war. The war determines the fate of exile writers. My entire field is defined by the war and its aftermath, then.
The academy tells you you should be interested in: novels, films, popular culture and most especially the sociological and historical themes in novels, films, and pop culture.
I end up somehow very knowledgable about the civil war. Lorca dies at the beginning of it. Unamuno too. Machado at the end trying to escape. Miguel Hernández dies in jail a few years earlier. Gamoneda's most striking poems evoke the early years of the war. The war determines the fate of exile writers. My entire field is defined by the war and its aftermath, then.
Formative (9): Prosody
So I learned how the iambic pentameter worked by reading Milton and Wordsworth. I was shocked in grad school that people didn't know this. I also knew French and Latin and Greek prosody, and I did my graduate exams on this subject. I was shocked when a science fiction novelist on a blog (the valve) a few years back thought he could translate Mallarmé, but he didn't know what the definition of a feminine rhyme was in French. People thought I was outrageous for pointing out that that showed a level of ignorance that disqualified you from even thinking intelligently about Mallarmé. I was the bad guy here, simply because I thought that it is important to know a simple rule of French versification, one followed by Racine or Baudelaire in all their verse. I'm sure people write about Afro-Cuban poetry without knowing the difference between the son and the rumba clave.
I enjoy the technical aspect of prosody. It's one of the few things you can know about in a fairly concrete way in literature. I enjoy the fact that others find it dull or incomprehensible: more for me to do.
I had to train myself to hear an 11-syllable line as 11 syllables (in Spanish), and scan it more or less instantaneously.
I am prone to ear-worm, but with me it occurs with words and phrases, not just melodies.
***
My attitudes did not win me many friends.
I enjoy the technical aspect of prosody. It's one of the few things you can know about in a fairly concrete way in literature. I enjoy the fact that others find it dull or incomprehensible: more for me to do.
I had to train myself to hear an 11-syllable line as 11 syllables (in Spanish), and scan it more or less instantaneously.
I am prone to ear-worm, but with me it occurs with words and phrases, not just melodies.
***
My attitudes did not win me many friends.
Formative (8): Aphorisms & Blake
I created my own avant-garde movement in high school. It was called "schmoe." I wrote the "the proverbs of schmoe" around this time, inspired by Blake's "Proverbs of Hell." Blake was a big influence on me. Of course, I was the only member of this movement, which I named by picking a random word from a slang dictionary. (Being a West Coast guy, the Yiddish word was not in my vocabulary.) The proverbs of schmoe is my great, lost work. It is great because it is lost: if I had it, I would have to deal with its obvious imperfections. Schmoe, after all, means idiot.
My imagination was always aphoristic, tending toward apodictic concision. Many years later I would teach courses on the aphorism. I get impatient with people who write and write and never get around to the important things. With the aphorism, you formulate the important idea first, and then if you want you can explain it, or not.
Blake was attractive to me because of his heterodox religious sensibility and his invention of free verse before Whitman. His proverbs come from his greatest work, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Since Blake admired Milton, I also read PL.
My imagination was always aphoristic, tending toward apodictic concision. Many years later I would teach courses on the aphorism. I get impatient with people who write and write and never get around to the important things. With the aphorism, you formulate the important idea first, and then if you want you can explain it, or not.
Blake was attractive to me because of his heterodox religious sensibility and his invention of free verse before Whitman. His proverbs come from his greatest work, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Since Blake admired Milton, I also read PL.
Formative (7): DQ
I read Don Quijote (DQ) late in undergraduate or early in graduate school. I know I've read it three times all the way through, but not recently. Somehow I don't feel the need to go back to it any more. It really is not very difficult to read, and it formative of the canon of Spanish literature, Spanish intellectual and cultural history, of the novel itself as a genre, etc... It is rich and complex, and lies behind Borges and Lorca, Unamuno and Goytisolo, Graham Greene and Smollett. I wrote a paper in grad school proving that the standard, lazy-ass interpretations of Borges's "Pierre Menard" got it all exactly backwards, since the unreliable, Anti-semitic narrator of Borges's story view DQ itself as a dull text, whereas Borges's actual view is the exact opposite: there is no need to introduce Menard as a modern reader in order to infuse interest in Cervantes's already postmodern text. (See "Magias parciales del Quijote:
One book can be formative. Books I re-read regularly include LOTR, The Cave, by RPW, and Catch-22 and Forgetting Elena. Usually, though, I realize that I don't need to re-read a book a fourth time.
En el sexto capítulo de la primera parte, el cura y el barbero revisan la biblioteca de don Quijote; asombrosamente uno de los libros examinados es la Galatea de Cervantes, y resulta que el barbero es amigo suyo y no lo admira demasiado, y dice que es más versado en desdichas que en versos y que el libro tiene algo de buena invención, propone algo y no concluye nada. El barbero, sueño de Cervantes o forma de un sueño de Cervantes, juzga a Cervantes... También es sorprendente saber, en el principio del noveno capítulo, que la novela entera ha sido traducida del árabe y que Cervantes adquirió el manuscrito en el mercado de Toledo, y lo hizo traducir por un morisco, a quien alojó más de mes y medio en su casa, mientras concluía la tarea. Pensamos en Carlyle, que fingió que el Sartor Resartus era versión parcial de una obra publicada en Alemania por el doctor Diógenes Teufelsdroeckh; pensamos en el rabino castellano Moisés de León, que compuso el Zohar o Libro del Esplendor y lo divulgó como obra de un rabino palestiniano del siglo III.}
Ese juego de extrañas ambigüedades culmina en la segunda parte; los protagonistas han leído la primera, los protagonistas del Quijote son, asimismo, lectores del Quijote. Aquí es inevitable recordar el caso de Shakespeare, que incluye en el escenario de Hamlet otro escenario, donde se representa una tragedia, que es más o menos la de Hamlet; la correspondencia imperfecta de la obra principal y la secundaria aminora la eficacia de esa inclusión.
One book can be formative. Books I re-read regularly include LOTR, The Cave, by RPW, and Catch-22 and Forgetting Elena. Usually, though, I realize that I don't need to re-read a book a fourth time.
Friday, April 25, 2014
Formative (6): dissertation
When it was time to write my dissertation I turned back to my undergraduate professor, Claudio Rodríguez. CR was a poetic genius and the tendency of the Spanish critics was to condescend to him, especially his earlier work, so I attempted to prove that he knew what he was doing, that his poetry had a poetics behind it, a theory of language.
His work was not extensive, so I essentially interpreted the hell of it. The dissertation forms the scholar. I had had good ideas before, but this made me an expert on something. I published articles and a book from the dissertation with very little effort. It was not just a good enough dissertation: it was exactly what I wanted to write and I still think that it kicks ass.
The main formative phase of my life, then, occurred between the ages of 8-28. The part I liked most was college. Before then it felt like I was just waiting to go to college. Graduate school was formative but not enjoyable.
The formative person in my academic life was my father. In another post I'll have to talk about his role in making me into an academic.
His work was not extensive, so I essentially interpreted the hell of it. The dissertation forms the scholar. I had had good ideas before, but this made me an expert on something. I published articles and a book from the dissertation with very little effort. It was not just a good enough dissertation: it was exactly what I wanted to write and I still think that it kicks ass.
The main formative phase of my life, then, occurred between the ages of 8-28. The part I liked most was college. Before then it felt like I was just waiting to go to college. Graduate school was formative but not enjoyable.
The formative person in my academic life was my father. In another post I'll have to talk about his role in making me into an academic.
Formative (5)
So far we have
*religious education (rejected)
*academic family, with easy access to books and libraries, encouragement
*intense periods of self-directed study
*languages & study abroad
My dad wanted me to go into classics, I'm not sure why, but I always wanted to study modern literature. I am also interested in other periods, so I could have done medieval or baroque (though not 18th or 19th century).
My writing of poetry was also formative, but at a certain point I came to an impasse. A lot of poets did not seem smart enough, frankly. Of course there are poetic geniuses, like Claudio R. or Lorca, but a poet seemed to have to rely too much on pure ego. If you are poet, but you aren't actually a good one, then you are really more of an arch-enemy of poetry, so that seems a contradictory kind of existence. I wanted to write the poetry I wrote, but without making my professional identity dependent on that in the least, or even less have my ego depend on how talented I was (or not). My strictly amateur approach does not mean I write bad poetry, or don't take it seriously, but that I have enough respect for it not to make any claims for myself.
***
Next: the dissertation.
*religious education (rejected)
*academic family, with easy access to books and libraries, encouragement
*intense periods of self-directed study
*languages & study abroad
My dad wanted me to go into classics, I'm not sure why, but I always wanted to study modern literature. I am also interested in other periods, so I could have done medieval or baroque (though not 18th or 19th century).
My writing of poetry was also formative, but at a certain point I came to an impasse. A lot of poets did not seem smart enough, frankly. Of course there are poetic geniuses, like Claudio R. or Lorca, but a poet seemed to have to rely too much on pure ego. If you are poet, but you aren't actually a good one, then you are really more of an arch-enemy of poetry, so that seems a contradictory kind of existence. I wanted to write the poetry I wrote, but without making my professional identity dependent on that in the least, or even less have my ego depend on how talented I was (or not). My strictly amateur approach does not mean I write bad poetry, or don't take it seriously, but that I have enough respect for it not to make any claims for myself.
***
Next: the dissertation.
Formative (4)
So the one missing piece in my early education was language. Because of my interest in prosody and poetry generally I became a very good language learner. That, and my exceptionally robust memory. My junior year abroad in Spain was a formative experience. I learned the language by reading hundreds of pages of literature while I was in the country and speaking only Spanish as much as I could. While my Spanish wasn't perfect on my return, it was good enough to be a Hispanist.
***
In Spain I studied with Claudio Rodríguez. That was a formative experience, because I had never been in the presence of pure poetic genius before. I quickly left Bousoño's class. Whatever the opposite of poetic genius is, that is Bousoño.
***
Naively, I thought I needed to be better prepared for graduate school, so I read most of the boom novels the summer before. Oddly, I found when I arrived that I had read more than a lot of other people. It was odd that we were to read Roa Bastos, whom I found to be a mediocre writer. Maybe I was wrong but I haven't returned to him.
***
Another formative experience was the discovery of the periodical room at the UC Davis library. I used to go there before I was even in college, and it was fascinating to discover that there was a journal just for works of William Blake. That seemed a marvelous thing, simply that that existed. I have spent many hours in periodical rooms and bookstores. Library stacks are wonderful too.
***
I read the introduction to O'Hara's collected poems, by JA. He had a list of writers that O'Hara read, so I read those writers, especially Henry Green and Flann O'Brien. I had invented a technique that might be called backwards reading. You start with Borges, say, and then you read everything that Borges thought important. I tried Ronald Firbank too, but I didn't get it at all.
***
At Cornell, where I lived for a time, I systematically trained myself in my field, by reading all the individual books of poetry I could find by the novísimos.
***
I am sorry that my formative experience did not consist of sitting in the classroom and learning from some charismatic professor. I did learn from the British poet Thom Gunn, and from a guy named Richard Coe, a French professor who was also a specialist in autobiography. I took a class from a noted Beckett scholar, Ruby Cohn, and found her a mediocre mind. I liked Elliot Gilbert, a Victorianist married to Gilbert, of Gilbert and Gubar fame. Elliot later died tragically due to hospital incompetence. I did study a bit with Sandra too. Still, I am mostly an autodidact.
***
I would go to all the poetry readings. I saw Richard Eberhardt and Stephen Spender, and many others. In Spain I saw Rafael Alberti and Luis Rosales.
***
While preparing to write my dissertation, I came across a new book by Debicki, Poetry of Discovery. I was really shocked that a third-rate mind like this could be the big name in my field. That meant, in my arrogant opinion at the time, that I could be an even bigger name. Later I became friends and colleagues with him, and even taught the rest of his course once when he had cancer.
***
The Nobel prizes for Neruda and Aleixandre in the 1970s really motivated me to go into this field. Naively, I expected that this would be a normal kind of thing to have happened, but I have never met a colleague who entered the field for that reason. The journals were filled with translations of Neruda, so I thought that it would be cool to read him (and others) in the original. There are many Spanish professors for whom poetry is a complete mystery. They do not read it (aside from what they read for exams in grad school) or teach it. There are others who specialize in it, but have a very rudimentary understanding of it.
***
We talk about experiences that are formative. Formación in Spanish means professional training & education. Bildung is a similar concept: culture, development. We might also look at Greenblatt's concept of "self-fashioning," or my own idea of the "scholarly base." If we look at the idea of "cultural capital" that is another approach to this question, from a sociological perspective. I don't like the idea of capital as much, because it makes it sound like it is a mere birthright, something you acquire effortlessly just because of your social class. Of course I did inherit a good deal of this "capital," in the sense that the materials for study were always right there.
***
I play congas and bongoes. An analogy might be a Cuban whose whole family plays percussion. The kid might be playing at age 5 or so, and never have to wonder what the clave is. The drums will just be around in his house. The kid might grow up to the Changuito, or might never become a player of that caliber.
***
In Spain I studied with Claudio Rodríguez. That was a formative experience, because I had never been in the presence of pure poetic genius before. I quickly left Bousoño's class. Whatever the opposite of poetic genius is, that is Bousoño.
***
Naively, I thought I needed to be better prepared for graduate school, so I read most of the boom novels the summer before. Oddly, I found when I arrived that I had read more than a lot of other people. It was odd that we were to read Roa Bastos, whom I found to be a mediocre writer. Maybe I was wrong but I haven't returned to him.
***
Another formative experience was the discovery of the periodical room at the UC Davis library. I used to go there before I was even in college, and it was fascinating to discover that there was a journal just for works of William Blake. That seemed a marvelous thing, simply that that existed. I have spent many hours in periodical rooms and bookstores. Library stacks are wonderful too.
***
I read the introduction to O'Hara's collected poems, by JA. He had a list of writers that O'Hara read, so I read those writers, especially Henry Green and Flann O'Brien. I had invented a technique that might be called backwards reading. You start with Borges, say, and then you read everything that Borges thought important. I tried Ronald Firbank too, but I didn't get it at all.
***
At Cornell, where I lived for a time, I systematically trained myself in my field, by reading all the individual books of poetry I could find by the novísimos.
***
I am sorry that my formative experience did not consist of sitting in the classroom and learning from some charismatic professor. I did learn from the British poet Thom Gunn, and from a guy named Richard Coe, a French professor who was also a specialist in autobiography. I took a class from a noted Beckett scholar, Ruby Cohn, and found her a mediocre mind. I liked Elliot Gilbert, a Victorianist married to Gilbert, of Gilbert and Gubar fame. Elliot later died tragically due to hospital incompetence. I did study a bit with Sandra too. Still, I am mostly an autodidact.
***
I would go to all the poetry readings. I saw Richard Eberhardt and Stephen Spender, and many others. In Spain I saw Rafael Alberti and Luis Rosales.
***
While preparing to write my dissertation, I came across a new book by Debicki, Poetry of Discovery. I was really shocked that a third-rate mind like this could be the big name in my field. That meant, in my arrogant opinion at the time, that I could be an even bigger name. Later I became friends and colleagues with him, and even taught the rest of his course once when he had cancer.
***
The Nobel prizes for Neruda and Aleixandre in the 1970s really motivated me to go into this field. Naively, I expected that this would be a normal kind of thing to have happened, but I have never met a colleague who entered the field for that reason. The journals were filled with translations of Neruda, so I thought that it would be cool to read him (and others) in the original. There are many Spanish professors for whom poetry is a complete mystery. They do not read it (aside from what they read for exams in grad school) or teach it. There are others who specialize in it, but have a very rudimentary understanding of it.
***
We talk about experiences that are formative. Formación in Spanish means professional training & education. Bildung is a similar concept: culture, development. We might also look at Greenblatt's concept of "self-fashioning," or my own idea of the "scholarly base." If we look at the idea of "cultural capital" that is another approach to this question, from a sociological perspective. I don't like the idea of capital as much, because it makes it sound like it is a mere birthright, something you acquire effortlessly just because of your social class. Of course I did inherit a good deal of this "capital," in the sense that the materials for study were always right there.
***
I play congas and bongoes. An analogy might be a Cuban whose whole family plays percussion. The kid might be playing at age 5 or so, and never have to wonder what the clave is. The drums will just be around in his house. The kid might grow up to the Changuito, or might never become a player of that caliber.
Thursday, April 24, 2014
Formative (3)
So the decision to be a poet took root in me and determined the rest of my life. I continued to read fiction assiduously, but studied poetry quite intensely. I wrote, of course, but I had this naive notion that you also had to know about the art form itself. I was already a little professor. I studied X.J. Kennedy's textbook. My dad had some anthologies like Oxford Book of American Poetry and English Poetry. I wore out a copy of the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry.
I went through an intense Cummings phase, like probably every other kid who likes poetry. I bought the paperbacks, individual books that were not expensive. Then I saved up to buy his collected poems, which I think cost all of 12 dollars in the early 70s. I moved on to WCW, Berryman, and then to all the New York School poets.
By Junior High I no longer read children's books very much. (The "Young Adult" category did not yet exist, thankfully, or existed but held little interest.) Our class would in elementary school would order books from scholastic. I would be given the box to carry my books home in, since I would have 15 or 20 compared to one or two for the rest of the class. Soon, though, I put aside childish things. I devoured Bradbury & Vonnegut.
So you could say I was "formed" by about 14. The entire stage from ages 8-16 was when I taught myself what I would need to be a professor. The missing element was language study. I actually learned the rules of French prosody in High School from a very traditional teacher, but my French was unsteady. I began Spanish in college, starting with a summer course slightly before my 17th birthday. I had a selected Neruda at home, that I had read before I knew a word of Spanish.
Many people are talking now of GGM being a formative influence in getting into this field. In college those of us who were interested in Spanish wanted to read all of García Márquez, Cortázar, etc... This was close enough in time to the boom that the boom was still actually occurring. It was not until I went to Spain that my interest shifted to peninsular. I would have been a Latin Americanist, but I went to Stanford and the Latin Americanists there were dogmatic Marxists with a deep contempt for literature. I was forced back into peninsular, because it was what I already knew. I had read most of Galdós, except for the 36 historical novels.
I could have been a classicist. I excelled at Latin in college, then took an intensive Greek workshop. I promptly forgot ancient Greek because I was going to be a modernist, so my timing was off. I didn't care for grammar-translation, the method for teaching classics that still persists today. I could have been an English professor too, but it seemed to me that I already knew that tradition. German was not attractive to me, though I was a great reader of Kafka. Italian seemed to small and narrow. I knew modern French poetry fairly well, but I didn't like the ethos of French students: they seemed more ethereal to me.
I went through an intense Cummings phase, like probably every other kid who likes poetry. I bought the paperbacks, individual books that were not expensive. Then I saved up to buy his collected poems, which I think cost all of 12 dollars in the early 70s. I moved on to WCW, Berryman, and then to all the New York School poets.
By Junior High I no longer read children's books very much. (The "Young Adult" category did not yet exist, thankfully, or existed but held little interest.) Our class would in elementary school would order books from scholastic. I would be given the box to carry my books home in, since I would have 15 or 20 compared to one or two for the rest of the class. Soon, though, I put aside childish things. I devoured Bradbury & Vonnegut.
So you could say I was "formed" by about 14. The entire stage from ages 8-16 was when I taught myself what I would need to be a professor. The missing element was language study. I actually learned the rules of French prosody in High School from a very traditional teacher, but my French was unsteady. I began Spanish in college, starting with a summer course slightly before my 17th birthday. I had a selected Neruda at home, that I had read before I knew a word of Spanish.
Many people are talking now of GGM being a formative influence in getting into this field. In college those of us who were interested in Spanish wanted to read all of García Márquez, Cortázar, etc... This was close enough in time to the boom that the boom was still actually occurring. It was not until I went to Spain that my interest shifted to peninsular. I would have been a Latin Americanist, but I went to Stanford and the Latin Americanists there were dogmatic Marxists with a deep contempt for literature. I was forced back into peninsular, because it was what I already knew. I had read most of Galdós, except for the 36 historical novels.
I could have been a classicist. I excelled at Latin in college, then took an intensive Greek workshop. I promptly forgot ancient Greek because I was going to be a modernist, so my timing was off. I didn't care for grammar-translation, the method for teaching classics that still persists today. I could have been an English professor too, but it seemed to me that I already knew that tradition. German was not attractive to me, though I was a great reader of Kafka. Italian seemed to small and narrow. I knew modern French poetry fairly well, but I didn't like the ethos of French students: they seemed more ethereal to me.
Wednesday, April 23, 2014
Formative (2)
The notion of not sinning anymore proved to be rather difficult. The problem was not bad actions, but bad thoughts. God could see inside your head. This idea produced, in me, an almost unbearable self-consiousness bordering on obsessive-compulsive disorder. After all, if you could sin by thought, and thoughts appeared in my mind without my conscious intention, there was no way around it. It seemed unfair and obtrusive.
I read most of the Old Testament. I enjoyed the Hebrews kicking ass on the inhabitants of the land they wanted. It was exciting but not very conducive to religious belief. It didn't make too much sense, because these were God's chosen people, but they kept messing up every time. Once God saved them again and they were righteous for a time, they would just screw things up for themselves again.
When we moved to Davis my obsession shifted from history to mythology. I liked to read about classical myths, and knew all 12 of the Olympian gods. That was my intellectual life for a few years, from 9-11 or so. I read Of Human Bondage, my first adult book. I became a reader of fictions. By about now I had given up religion. I tried to believe in it very hard, but I couldn't. I guess the idea of belief being a voluntary act is difficult for me to understand. For example, I couldn't believe that Michigan St. where I live now in Lawrence KS, is East of Mississippi St, since it is actually West of it. No matter how hard I try, I cannot force myself to believe that the streets are differently arranged than they are. Now I might not know where streets are arranged in some other town. I can believe that your are telling me the truth about streets in your town, but I can't believe something that I don't really believe, just by willing a belief in it.
Anyway, religion made me smarter because I had to reason all this out myself. I was incapable of belief in that sense, so I had to make do with the cognitive dissonance. Now I realize most kids just tune it out or believe in a kind of minimalist way without worrying too much about it. My mistake was taking it seriously.
I did ok in elementary school, without being excited about it. Our 5th grade teacher read The Hobbit to us out loud. I read it myself, then the complete LOTR. It was of a piece with my mythological imagination. Tolkien, after all, created his own mythology.
One day in sixth grade we were to write poems. I decided I would be a poet. All the energy that had gone first to history and then to mythology went to poetry. At one of my Grandmother's house there was a book of Poe's. I thought it strange that Poe was poet without the t, and that he had two poems for Helen and Lenore, who happened also to be the names of my aunts who were also writers. I had Babette Deutsche's Poet's Handbook, learning about forms like villanelles and sestinas.
I read most of the Old Testament. I enjoyed the Hebrews kicking ass on the inhabitants of the land they wanted. It was exciting but not very conducive to religious belief. It didn't make too much sense, because these were God's chosen people, but they kept messing up every time. Once God saved them again and they were righteous for a time, they would just screw things up for themselves again.
When we moved to Davis my obsession shifted from history to mythology. I liked to read about classical myths, and knew all 12 of the Olympian gods. That was my intellectual life for a few years, from 9-11 or so. I read Of Human Bondage, my first adult book. I became a reader of fictions. By about now I had given up religion. I tried to believe in it very hard, but I couldn't. I guess the idea of belief being a voluntary act is difficult for me to understand. For example, I couldn't believe that Michigan St. where I live now in Lawrence KS, is East of Mississippi St, since it is actually West of it. No matter how hard I try, I cannot force myself to believe that the streets are differently arranged than they are. Now I might not know where streets are arranged in some other town. I can believe that your are telling me the truth about streets in your town, but I can't believe something that I don't really believe, just by willing a belief in it.
Anyway, religion made me smarter because I had to reason all this out myself. I was incapable of belief in that sense, so I had to make do with the cognitive dissonance. Now I realize most kids just tune it out or believe in a kind of minimalist way without worrying too much about it. My mistake was taking it seriously.
I did ok in elementary school, without being excited about it. Our 5th grade teacher read The Hobbit to us out loud. I read it myself, then the complete LOTR. It was of a piece with my mythological imagination. Tolkien, after all, created his own mythology.
One day in sixth grade we were to write poems. I decided I would be a poet. All the energy that had gone first to history and then to mythology went to poetry. At one of my Grandmother's house there was a book of Poe's. I thought it strange that Poe was poet without the t, and that he had two poems for Helen and Lenore, who happened also to be the names of my aunts who were also writers. I had Babette Deutsche's Poet's Handbook, learning about forms like villanelles and sestinas.
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