Intellectual Curiosity

Intellectual curiosity is probably the most powerful of the scholarly superpowers. It is elusive to define, in some sense. We can't be infinitely curious about every possible thing, because we need to pursue some interests more intensely than others.

Two anecdotes:  I very early read Frank O'Hara's essay in Morton Feldman.  But for many years I did not go out and investigate his music, which I now view as essential to me. When I began to be interested in Feldman, it was as though I was discovering something that I should have known from the start. I could accuse myself of a lack of curiosity, but I eventually did go out and find Feldman's music.

A similar thing happened just this past week or so.  Thomas asked me who a good dance writer was.  I answered "Edwin Denby" off the top of my head. Now I had known of Denby for many years, as a poet of the New York School, like O'Hara. I had read some of his poems, but never his dance writing. So I went out and did it. Denby is a great writer about dance, and I once again felt that something had come full circle for me. He should have been within my radar, but was not, despite my devotion to NY school poetry. I am going to use his prose style as a model for my own writing.

So it seems that I am lacking in intellectual curiosity, always getting there late, wherever there is. There are probably other things awaiting my discovery, things that are there under my nose, virtually. I only discovered Mompou last year!  Some element of serendipity must be involved, since many other undiscovered things might possibly just be not that interesting. You can't just indiscriminately go and look at everything in existence, but have to follow particular cues from your own self.  So maybe the idea is to be able to listen to those cues when they come up. To be attentive to them.

What is your superpower?

It could be the ability to write very well. It could be intellectual brilliance or erudition. It could be an endless stream of energy and motivation, or the ability to focus strongly. It could be consistency of effort, the ability to work for months at a time. The ability to focus on intrinsic motivation and forget about external rewards for scholarship.

You probably won't have all of these things at once. For example, I am not particularly erudite and have a serious lazy streak. I am able to come up with interesting ideas and have a high internal standard for what I want to produce. I can sometimes write very quickly, even though I know that slowness is actually preferable. I think my writing is very good, verging on excellent at times.

So you want to develop two or three things at are your scholarly superpowers. Are you able to organize your research materials super well at all times? Then you have an advantage over me in that respect. It would be easy to be more self-disciplined than I am, or have a better grasp of theory. Maybe you have developed a very strong ability to construct perfectly organized 6,000 word articles with everything in place.

Everything you read is going to have strengths and weaknesses. I do about two tenure or promotion to full evaluation a year; I read articles for journals, and I read book manuscripts for presses. I see work of a wide range of quality. Intellectual brilliance is probably what I see the least of, in terms of these superpowers. I am rarely blown away by someone super smart, though that happens too. A recent book I read was very good, checked all the boxes in terms of erudition, novelty in the field, writing, and organization. I was left strangely dissatisfied, though, because the whole didn't add up to anything exciting to me. I feel that this is almost too much to ask at the point. The book does what it's supposed to do and that should be enough.

Music Notes

Doing a major scholarly project on music allows me to use parts of the "scholarly base" that I didn't even know I had. Those 7,000 "songs" on computer, for one thing. (Or 7,000 things). I put that in scare quotes because a song might be a movement of a string quarter or a symphony. All the thinking about music I've ever done my whole life. Instead of viewing my lack of musicological expertise as a great obstacle, I'm now seeing that letting this limited expertise into my scholarship on Lorca is like opening up a floodgate.  Other clichés that come to mind are "pay dirt" and "the mother lode."  There is nothing like tapping into something that profound. And instead of being a pure ego thing (though the ego is there too), it is more like knowing that my life is not wasted by listening and thinking through music. It is a profound connection. I think I needed to start playing and composing to really get there, that listening alone was not enough. Or listening with the score in hand.

I'm playing sections of an extended series of compositions called "Música callada" by the Catalan composer Federico Mompou, an homage to San Juan de la Cruz. It is very beautiful, and the access to that through one's own fingers provides a different kind of understanding, even though my piano playing is worse than mediocre. Just getting to an 80% tolerable version of a very simple piece is tremendously satisfying. As is singing the "Tres morillas de Jaén."

I cannot use my own taste as a guide for a scholarly project like this.  I am just one guy and the amount of musical intelligence and feeling in all the music dedicated to Lorca is enormous. Charles Rosen, reviewing Taruskin, says something like: he writes better about the music he loves.  Well, yes, there is that. I also don't need to denigrate anything, or privilege one kind of musical understanding over another. I'm not in it for some culture wars pay-off.    

On the Side

The benefits of any side project are likely to be unexpected, side benefits.  As I was cleaning my apartment I thought of the word nettoyage.  Now Racine never uses this word I'm sure, so it only popped into my head because I was thinking in French after reading some things about Racine. So I might learn about the theater in general, about French academic politics, the French language itself, etc... on the side, without any purposiveness.

Now I have to ask myself why I value things with no explicit purpose.  It might be because the results of any such activity will not be predictable. That random quality is valuable in and of itself. I also need to prevent intellectual stagnation.

In Juan Goytisolo's memoir, I remember him talking about some college friends, and the topics they were discussing. Goytisolo goes away for a while, and encounters these friends a few years later... and they are discussing the exact same things. JG had moved on, and they were stuck in holding pattern.

Schuyler

It turned out I had books by Schuyler everywhere. His art criticism, letters, novels, diaries, and books of poems. So for this reading project I am becoming an accidental expert on him.  I guess I already was.  Re-reading A Nest of Ninnies now.

Reading

I will read hundreds of books while writing one. Most will not not even relevant to the one I am writing. I am not complaining about this ratio: it seems correct to me.

Writing is time-consuming and intensive. I only expect to write two more books after turning in Lorca II. Seven books is a respectable career, but someone writing those will have read thousands of other books.  

Today I came across a quote by James Schuyler about Lorca's "tedious lament for a dead bullfighter, whose every second line is 'a las cinco de la tarde.'" This is hilarious to me. At least one American poet could find Lorca tedious.  What a relief!  Of course I wish I had come across the quote earlier, since it was in a book I owned the whole time I was working on Lorca's impact on American poets.  I think I'll have to worm it in somewhere in another book.

Simply by reading

Simply by reading, one can develop a secondary field. For example, I could become a Balzac expert, and all it would take is reading Balzac as my primary reading interest for a few years. I could get through a lot of novels that way, and then read the secondary literature.

I recommend finding something that is not directly relevant to your field. Otherwise it is just an extension of what you should be doing anyway. It should be a different genre, language, or period from your normal tendency in reading. The time to do this should be taken from time otherwise spent binge-watching Netflix, or whatever else you do to kill time.

The purpose?  You won't know in advance what the purpose is. You need to listen to a voice inside yourself that tells you what you need to be studying as your hobby-author.  The purpose will be revealed much later, if at all.  But the larger precept here is to be intellectually curious outside your normal zone of comfort. (It is the same idea as sleeping on the other side of the bed, as Clarissa suggested.)

The beauty of it is that all you need to do is read. If you are already reading, then you just have to redirect your reading in a particular direction, with a purpose in mind. You can get through all the plays of Racine in a year, easily, or whatever it is you want to master. Once you've read the primary texts and some secondary literature, you know about it.  You can think about it and generate ideas.

I'm going to have to think about what author to read in depth.  I think it's got to be one whom I don't know much about, in French because that is the language that I can work on most easily.  It should not be a poet, and it shouldn't be from 20th century.  

  

Accidental Erudition

Usually, research takes us in accidental directions and we end up learning about things that we hadn't intended to.  It is impossible to have such tunnel vision (which wouldn't be desirable either) as to avoid getting some accidental, incidental erudition. But then those secondary fields can become primary.

I wasn't intending to look at St. John of the Cross very much, but I have discovered a mystery, or maybe an anomaly.  Although now seen as one of the greatest if not the greatest Spanish poet of all time, he wasn't translated into English until the 19th century, and he was seen almost exclusively as a religious figure. Ticknor, in a history of Spanish literature published in the 1860s, devotes less than a page to him, and puts him in the category of "didactic prose," with only a single sentence on his poetry: "His poetry, a little of which is printed in some editions of his work, is of the same general character {as the prose}, but marked by great felicity and richness of phraseology." The English (or Welsh I guess) translator of SJ did so in a religious context, and it seemed that this author did not lend himself to poetic or semi-secularized readings until much later. Yet he was hiding in plain sight, because of his ecclesiastical prominence, having been beatified 75 years after his death or so.

And now I realize I have become an accidental expert in the reception of him, but that I still don't know something very fundamental.  Why was he obscure (obscured) and how did he emerge in reputation to surpass everyone else? Was it Unamuno, maybe?  

Intellectual Curiosity

I won't say intellectual curiosity is the only thing you need, but isn't it the most important?  Worrying about being smart enough is a trap, instead you should cultivate curiosity and recognize your own lapses of curiosity and see how you can learn from them. Scholarship without this quality is easy to spot because it is dull. The writer is never asking himself interesting questions, and is satisfied with dull answers.  We don't really know that much about literature or about the human mind, so the possibilities are endless.

I was wondering recently whether there is another sense, along with the 20 or so with which we are possessed, with the name I would give it being chronoception.  Of course if I google this word I get some results so I am not the first to ask this question or invent this word. But that doesn't matter.

I am also wondering if there is related research into ruthmoception, where the question is not longer duration, but also segmentation and articulation in time. I'll have to go back and read Bergson.    

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Backwards (Bildung 2)

Of course, I've had it exactly backwards. I have been arguing that one needs a scholarly base in order to produce excellent scholarship. This much is true, as far as it goes. Without that formation, Bildung, or culture, it would be hard if not impossible to produce good scholarship.

But scholarship is really the path toward the ultimate goal, which is the Bildung itself. The writing of the work is, itself, the scholarly self-fashioning. The dissertation creates the scholar, not the other way around.

Bildung

I guess I realized that I am really a follower of Gadamer. Even though his name does not appear in Apocryphal Lorca. The more I read him, and about him, the more it resonates with me. My concept of the scholarly base, for example, could be a version of Gadamer's Bildung. Some commentators say that we shouldn't identify this Bildung with any particular German bourgeois educational idea tied to a particular place or time. It is a theoretical concept that transcends its particular horizon, in classic Gadamerian fashion. Bildung is culture, development, formation, transformation, self-fashioning. It is related to the concept of receptivity, or the willingness to grow in response to one's response to the "other." I oppose scholarship that merely follows academic proceduralism to produce technically "acceptable" results (Gerald Graff).

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Its reverse would be "reeducation," or the imposition of false consciousness, the alienation of oneself from one's own work, one's own Bildung.

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Not coincidentally, Clarissa's dissertation was on the Bildungroman. Not a surprising topic for someone with her own Bildung to work on. How did a Ukrainian autistic woman knowing no Spanish get where she is today, a Professor of Spanish in the American mid-west? You couldn't invent a novel with that plot.

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Having a solid formation in graduate school is part of the Bildung, but only part. I realize that this post is a draft for the first lecture of my theory course. Aha! Theory is not about a tool-box of technical terms, but about scholarly Bildung or self-fashioning.

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I realize, too, that my scholarly community this semester consists of the readers of my blog, especially those who comment like Olga, Thomas, Leslie, and, maybe less frequently, Andrew Shields. These people, like me, are involved in transformative scholarly self-fashioning every day. I'm not even going to talk about Wittgenstein's Bilden.

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The way I engage in my own Bildung, every day, is by reading and writing scholarship. So writing this blog is not less important: it is my daily dose self-reflexivity. (As if I wasn't enough meta already!).

Tertulia

One significant part of my scholarly base is a group of people with whom I meet most Thursdays for drinks. It includes some very eminent people, such that I am not by any stretch the most distinguished. It is more social than intellectual, but it is a group with which I can be myself and talk about my research if I want to.

One guy from that group organized a reading group for the summer, in which we are reading Zukofsky's A. I haven't made it to the group yet, but I am going on Monday. Yes, we read difficult modernist poetry for fun over the summer.

Another group that meets on Friday has a slightly different cast to it, with an even larger and more diverse cast of characters (though with some overlap). In both groups there are writers, poets, artists, academics from KU as well as "townies."

You can google the title of this post to see what it refers to. Basically, I need to feel surrounded by other intelligent people as much as humanly possible. Once again, what is not work, per se, but keeps me connected to the sources of my work, is essential.

Follow up on "consumatory"

See this post by Thomas for a follow up on the discussion of scholarship, working hours, and leisure.

He suggests we don't want our creative scholars producing scholarship, teaching, and serving on committees for 60 hours a week. We need to factor in some creative leisure time for the regeneration of the soul and intellect.

What if someone was a composer of music on the university faculty. I personally wouldn't care whether the composer spent 5, 10, or 20 hours a week actually writing music. There are vastly different personal rhythms involved in work like this. As long as the composer could show that, within a two-year period, music had been written, that would be fine. Maybe the composer needs to do 10 hours a zen meditation a week, or take walks out in nature. We shouldn't really question that.

Now maybe scholars aren't "creative types." Maybe they need more regimentation. If they have teams of researchers and labs and grants, then they need to be held accountable. My own work, though, is much more like the music composer's than like the lab scientist.

Consumatory

This guy has come up with a concept similar to my "scholarly base." In my opinion, this article is on the right track in some ways but flawed in others.

1. The word "consumatory" itself is unfortunate, in my view. It comes from "consume" but also suggests a kinship with "consummate," a word from a different Latin root. (You can see the commentators spell it as "consummatory.") A scholarly base is not, primarily, consuming things, using them up. If this is to be a defense of what professors do, then you don't want to emphasize the passive, consumer-like consumption of knowledge.

2. My concept of the scholarly base is much broader. It does not consist, only or even primarily, of reading other scholarship. For me, it involves reading primary texts of literature and philosophy, or listening to music and looking at art. Only a small part is reading journal articles in my own field. If that's all it is, then it wouldn't take too much time.

3. He emphasizes that scholars in non-research institutions spend a lot of time working on their scholarly base. That is true, but the best way of developing the base is to use it to produce more scholarship. You can't just "consume." If you are keeping up the scholarly base in a serious way, you will get ideas of your own you will want to publish.

Rule #2

Rule 2 is "Cultivate your Scholarly Base." That seems to follow logically from the first rule, which is about the healthy relationship of scholarship to your body and mind.

So maybe rule 1 could be "Use your scholarship to cultivate mental and physical health."

Soirée

I meet with a group of truly brilliant people most Thursdays here in town. A distinguished professor (I mean someone holding that title, but who is also distinguished in the true sense of the word), a small handful of amazing poets and scholars, one the former poet-laureate of the state, one the de facto laureate of the university, an extraordinary translator of the classics, and a few others of not lesser category. I am the only one from my department in this group. Although we don't only talk "poetry shop," I find it extremely valuable to be a part of this group of about eight people, which often turns into an informal seminar of sorts. Nobody is trying to impress anyone else, because we have mutual respect for one another and nobody has anything to prove. On a particular day the conversation might seem relatively banal, but it forms part of my scholarly base.

Further Steps to Happiness / The Network

Another barrier to happiness is the absence, or weakness, of a scholarly network. Working in isolation, thinking that nobody cares about your work, can easily make you unhappy. The way I've solved this problem for myself is through blogging. Honestly, I cannot get enough prolonged contact with good minds through teaching, interacting with colleagues at the office, occasionally seeing people I know at academic conferences, and the odd citation to my work here or there. It's just not enough, even when it's all added up.

I see no problem with blogging, even for people in early stages of a scholarly career, as long as you don't see it as substitute for the sustained attentions of scholarship. You can use twitter, facebook, or linkedin too. The point is to diminish the solitary nature of writing by writing directly for a more immediate audience. Once you have academic publications, make sure they are available online as much as possible. Do what you can to increase your network in RL too, but networking possibilities are greatly expanded through the internet.

The Lab

Imagine a big scientific lab that puts out a lot of publications, some of which are spin-offs of the main agenda of the lab. I've been worried that my publications were duplicating themselves a little too much, but I've decided that I'm fine. There will be a little redundancy and overlap because the corpus I'm working on suggests additional ideas, because books will repeat arguments made in articles, etc... I might write a second article making the same theoretical point, but using other texts, for instance. I feel bad sometimes when I do this, but looking back on previous cases I don't think I'm all that reduplicative.

A single scholar is a like a big laboratory in this respect. This is also why it's easier to publish a lot more if you are already publishing a lot. What is more difficult is going from zero to one, going from publishing nothing (or a very small amount) to publishing a moderate amount. If you are actively engaged in research, you will get extra ideas you won't even be able to use, because you will notice interesting things in other texts you are reading.

Trabajar sin estar trabajando

When I am in Spain (like now) I try not to do any work-work, but I end up discussing ideas with colleagues here, buying books, speaking Spanish, and gaining some mental distance from my projects by seeing what they look like on this side of the Atlantic ocean. They sometimes look very different indeed. I think that if I were even better at taking vacations, my capacity for work would improve by just that much more.