Comparative

 One of the most puzzling critique of my work has been the idea that I shouldn't have positive knowledge about Lorca to judge translations of him.  My expertise is treated as a handicap: "That Mayhew thinks there is a 'real' Lorca!" My efforts to present a reasonable view of what Lorca is about is treated as professional dogmatism of some kind. 

But translation is inherently comparative: we look at two things side by side. If item A is unknowable, in some existential sense, then why isn't item B also unknowable? How can we compare anything to anything?  

My position was that I knew Lorca, and also knew American poetics. I understand what Spicer is about, or O'Hara, or Koch, or Creeley. It was putting these two knowledges together that made AL a valuable project. You not only have to know Creeley, but know what makes him different from O'Hara; you have to know Sorrentino's sarcasm as well as Ginsberg's exuberant sense of humor. For example, if you just thought O'Hara wrote casual "lunch poems" and wasn't a serious artist, you wouldn't understand his cagey engagement with FGL.    

I go out of my way carefully to present my view of Lorca as simply the best one I can muster, provisional.  "If Lorca is a modernist poet... then ..."  But however provisional, contingent, apologetic, or qualified, there must be some view. The poet being translated cannot be a tabula rasa. Otherwise, literally nothing happens. 

Of course, I can be wrong about Lorca!  I have been wrong.  But you have to say why I am wrong, and why your view is better.  You have to beat me in the argument. Which you won't do unless your name is Andrew Anderson or Christopher Maurer, etc...   

(It's even an argument from authority. The authority comes from the receipts you have, not from the identity of the person who has the receipts in their file.)     

Reading in anthologies

 I remember the revelation of reading the Complete Works of a certain poet. [Wallace Stevens]. I was maybe 14 or 15.  Anyway, reading in an anthology gives a false impression. You find that the poems are more uneven in the complete works. Some fall flat; some are dull or incomprehensible (especially if you are 14); some good ones never get into the anthology. It seems as though the anthologists only read other anthologies and choose the same ones out of inertia. (Can an anthology be plagiarized?) Even the weaker poems provide satisfaction, and make the ones you like stand out even more. The dullness is part of the over all experience of finding out for yourself what is interesting, and finding out what poetry is really about: a process of large numbers of failures punctuated with tenuous and temporary successes.  

Also, books of poems are works of art in their own right. They have organizing principles. Who would know that Lorca's "La guitarra" is part of a sequence of poems, and that this sequence of poems in its turn is part of a book of poems? The anthology does not give you that information. Even your professor might not know this, using an anthology of poems selected by someone else. 

Many people, even famous people, in my own field I have heard say over the years: Oh, I don't really like / read / understand poetry.  It's odd to me because I would not have gone into the field to read modern Spanish novels. Nothing wrong with the modern Spanish novel, but I wouldn't have felt compelled to go into the field from reading Azorín, Gabriel Miró, Benet, Marsé, Laforet, or even Goytisolo. My late colleague Bob Spires asked me in the intrerview: why don't you study fiction?  I had no great response, but now I would say: all of you are already doing that.   

Progressive guide to language

 Justice vocabulary.   

This guide discourages us from using terms like "multicultural" and even "diverse." Then do all the DEI offices have to change their names? Sheesh.  The Orwellian euphemizing and sanitizing of language is exhausting and also deeply confusing, and I'm sure that things will change in the next 10 minutes, so that BIPOC (replacing BAME?) will be replaced by some other term. Look, nobody is in favor of overtly offensive language, like the n- word or its equivalent for other groups, but, for example, I know Indians, and they call themselves that (not "native Americans."). The guide encourages us to use the language that members of a group actually use about themselves, but then turns around and forbids that very same language.  I could forbid "Latinx" since that is not how people self-identify (typically). This double-standard runs throughout the guide. 

We cannot say "immature" or "childish" because that is agist.  We cannot say "child pornography," but rather  "child abuse content."  !!!  Who benefits from this change in terminology?  Do blind people object to colloquial expressions like "turn a blind eye," or is this just a conspiracy to make people tongue-tied and unable to object to things. If you are suffering from "famine," do you object to the word "famine"?  

At certain points, the guide says that a word is forbidden, except in reference to a person who uses it of themselves.  So we cannot talk about a "victim," but a "victim" can refer to self as such. Deeply confusing.  

The words "alcoholic" and "addict" are also on the list of words that should not be used. But that is what the 12-step people use in self-reference. This is not a guide based on the preferences of groups, but on the preferences of activists who purport to speak for the groups themselves.  

Could we make the case the euphemism, while not overly evil in all cases, is put in the service of evil in many cases?  With great intentions, of course.  

  

Fascist literature

 I never really got the vogue for study Spanish Fascist literature.  I suppose everything must be studied, but the idea that we have to give the Fascist authors their due... well, they usually aren't very good, anyway. None of them is in the top 100 Spanish writers of the 20th century. Plus, they are Fascists. It seems perverse. Most writers are mediocre, of any political persuasion, so let's not give extra credit for being Fascist.   

***

I had to read part of my own book, for research.  I am pretty good. I normally wouldn't read me, but I have to, now, and I agree with this Mayhew fellow. I am pretty funny, too. I found a part where I find a particularly banal poem in an anthology, and I let him hang himself with his own banality.  

Rexroth

 Here is another one:

IV

You ask me what I thought about
Before we were lovers.
The answer is easy.
Before I met you
I didn't have anything to think about.

VII

Making Love with you
Is like drinking sea water.
The more I drink
The thirstier I become,
Until nothing can slake my thirst
But to drink the entire sea.

IX

You wake me,
Part my thighs, and kiss me.
I give you the dew
Of the first morning of the world.

An American poet, Kenneth Rexroth, invented this Japanese woman poet, Marichiko, and published these apocryphal translations of her.  You could criticize this as cultural appropriation, as gender appropriation, or as bad poetry tout court.  Rexroth had translated much Chinese and Japanese poetry, he had paid his dues in a sense. And yet he still came up with this.   

According to Eliot Weinberger, "he gained critical recognition for having conveyed so authentically the feelings of someone of another gender and culture." But how would Weinberger know?  He is not a young Japanese woman getting some cunnilingus, so how could he tell the difference between authentic and inauthentic renderings of this experience?   

What if we saw apocryphal and / or appropriating translation as the norm, and an effort to not appropriate as the exception?  Just as my attempt to write bad poetry can never quite keep up with the actual bad poetry that people love so much.   

Opaque

 I want to book my travel to Spain, and I am sitting here trying to use the travel system set up by my university, and apparently designed by Franz Kafka and George Orwell. There is an hour long video you can watch, a training module that you can access after logging in, but I have no idea how to log on in the first place, etc... Nobody answers the phone.  I've been sitting at my computer for an hour going back and forth to different places.  

The Ukraine Stupidity

 It's not that complex. It's not good to overthink these things.  It's not NATO's fault. It isn't because there were Nazis in Ukraine. Those explanations, offered by far left and far right people, and idiotic centrists, make absolutely no sense. 

I read in the nation that Russian invasion of Ukraine is not real threat to "Europe," but where the hell is Ukraine?  It is in Europe, last time I checked. 

Some on the left want to apologize for Putin, because???  nostalgia for Soviet times?  On the right, because, stick it to Biden? 

 I heard that Chomsky was saying that only Trump was offering a good solution here, Trump, who Chomsky was very recently calling the most evil man ever in the history of the world.   

Rigor (ii)

 Rigor, etymologically, is a kind of stiffness. My rigor would be more like a strong, sinewy, supple feeling instead.  

If we throw out the concept of rigor, what are we sacrificing, exactly?  

*The idea difficult things are worth learning. That worthwhile skills come after a difficult process of mastering them.  

*Problem solving. The student has clear instructions and can follow them. The task is highly structured, ideally. But students can't follow instructions either, it turns out. Even clear instructions turn out to be opaque. And do we want to judge students on ability to follow instructions? I would probably not have had success in a system that valorized instruction following over thinking.  In fact, I did not do well until I got to college and realized my professors wanted me to master the material rather than follow bullshit instructions. 

*You can't any longer say, just give me your best response to this assignment.  The students will blame you for not being clear enough. For example, I gave grad students assignment to analyze a poem. They wanted to list all the rhetorical figures in it. They claimed I had told them to do this, but I had given them a guide to analysis in which the identification of tropes was only a small part.  

*It would be fine to say that at a certain level, rigor is not the point. You wouldn't want to impose it on small children. (Except that small children can work hard too, and certain skills require you to start as a small child to learn them at all, like being a concert pianist.)  Now we even want to infantilize "junior" faculty. Yes, they cannot understand the tenure requirements. At what point do you want to treat people as adults? Someone brought up in a system in which there is no rigor will then complain that the peer evaluators for an article are mean, for wanting to impose standards of freshman composition. The resistance to rigor then doesn't allow me to say there is an exacting standard for those at  the very top. 

*Then, the standard in rigorous fields will still be rigorous. The Nobel prize in physics still goes to a significant achievement, usually with some degree of "rigor." The abandonment of rigor, then, is hypocritical. We still want to do the best work we can do, and we still respect people who do things well. But we have to be so cautious about our advocacy of any kind of worthwhile achievement. We are implying that those who don't have those achievements are not as good. But we all know they are not as good (at that particular thing at least). 

 

It must be abstract

 The language of humanities bureaucrats is abstract. There is never to be any mention of actual works of art, literature, or philosophy. What takes center stage is the cliché: what it means to live "the good life," for example. Humanities help us to find the meaning of life. Yay!  Humanities skills, as defined in this sort of think piece, are likewise vague, such that they are no longer specifically humanistic. You would want every scientist and social scientist to master "critical thinking," for example. It is arrogant to claim that only humanists know how to think correctly. In my experience, some people in the humanities cannot actually think very well at all. 

So I don't really like the concept of the "humanities" or "the arts" at all. Once you lump these things together the actual content of them seems to dissipate. I love "art" but "the arts" is a term of abstract bureaucracy. 

Speaking of bad poetry

 A year or two I got an essay to review, with the poems so bad that I rejected the article on that factor alone. Or rather, I would have rejected on that alone, but the article also sucked in other ways, predictably enough.  The poems were not even published ones; the author of the article found them in box somewhere in someone else's house. Where the hell are people being trained as scholars? 

La cultura del espectáculo

 I found this book on my shelf by Vargas Llosa, denouncing the banality of contemporary culture. I remember reading it before and hating it, and I thought I had written this post many years ago, but I'm not finding it.

It seems the perfect example of a book that forms part of the very culture it is denouncing. He doesn't ever engage with any aspect of contemporary culture. Novels, films, musical compositions, the visual and performing arts. None of this appears any place in his work. "Culture" is a pure abstraction for him, a stick to beat up aspects of contemporary life he doesn't like. 

 Nor does he do any well-developed essayistic writing: these are all just newspaper articles of the kind that famous authors write in Spain for El País on a daily basis. Of course, his reactionary political stances do not win him any favor with me, but I would have liked to read a reactionary thinker who can at least develop ideas in a more sophisticated way.  

A similar decline has occurred in his novelistic writing. My brother gave me a signed copy of a MVLL novel after he won the Nobel Prize, and it was unreadable. I mean even worse than the Tía Julia and Elogio de la madrastra.  If he represents high culture, then what hope is there? 

Miles to go before I sleep....

 KU and head football coach Les Miles have agreed to part ways. Our football program is horrible in football terms, but also badly administrated. They hired Miles, and it has come out that he was a sexual harrasser at previous job at LSU. He wanted to hire blonde women with large bosoms as student assistants, and had inappropriate contact with some of them to the point where he was prohibited from being in the same room with any of them. Recently, KU football hired an offensive coordinator for about 6 times my salary, where the previous coordinator had made less than half that. All this, when our department has to choose between firing lecturers and still having graduate students. 

No Confidence

 There was a straw poll of no confidence in the chancellor and provost in the faculty senate yesterday. Only 5 voted that they would be ready to vote yes on this (with 20 something voting that they would not). I was listening to the meeting on my computer, am not on the senate now. So that's a non-starter. The senate is institutionally weak anyway. We need to unionize. The Senate is set up to be cooperative with the administration, without any real power, since the KBOR (board of Regents) can set policy unilaterally and give whatever powers it wants to the CEO (the chancellor), including apparently the power to suspend tenure even without declaring a financial exigency. 

Latin American studies will be merged into International Program or Global Studies, or whatever, and thus lose its distinctive mission and identity. This is obviously very bad for Hispanism here, since even though I am personally not a Latin Americanist, I know that Spanish departments thrive when there are strong Latin American interdisciplinary programs. Our own department is a strong component of Lat Am studies, with a critical mass of the faculty. It would be hard to apply for Title VI funds next time around, or recruit faculty to the dept. All humanities research is interdisciplinary now... 

Colorized

 I kind of hate colorized picture of Lorca. Photos originally in black and white and now colorized. I know this is my typical gate-keeping personality coming out, and that it is not a life-and-death issue of any importance, but I feel strangely strong on this.  

Full of Shit

 

This is what I think of the Amanda Gorman kind of poet. Nobody ever gave her a critique of her writing. She spent her whole life in private school and Harvard hearing how great she was. My colleagues on facebook gush about her awful writing. 

But at least we are talking about POETRY!!

 I utterly despise this argument. It's a bad poem, but at least they are talking about POETRY, which is so marginalized that we should be desperate for any crumbs of attention, presumably. 

What if we took that attitude toward music? A musician as bad a musician as she is a bad poet would be sent back to woodshed some more. 

Why is the praise for bad poetry good for poetry? It is because poetry has the lowest barrier for entrance, everyone is a poet. So identity politics can be all you care about any more. That is the sum total of the art form. Imagine if a white man wrote a poem like that, with those kinds of doggerel techniques. Then is would be seen as a prime instance of white male mediocrity. 

So praise of bad poetry is an instance of contempt for poetry, not of defense for it.  

Book of the Pigments 2

 Some were confined to their homes for months

others thrown into the street

Some suffered extreme solitude

others, forced into the company of gregarious fools

Some sickened and died

others lived in fear 

All were lied to, all menaced 

all broken

Some lamented

others said next to nothing 

Some wrote songs and painted paintings

others did not 

Usually I don't write poems that aren't funny. I also never write poems "about" anything. Except for this one. I think this will be my Covid statement for my evaluation.  

Shitting on values

 I don't post much on politics, because I think many others are more eloquent on the subject. What is most notable about Trump's four years of hell is the way he has shat on the values of his followers. Christianity? The value of military service? Populism? He openly mocks all those things, or pays the most transparently hypocritical allegiance to them. For example, he favors billionaires economically, is personally irreligious and dissolute, and mocks as suckers people who have died or been captured in wars. The wall on the Mexico border is purely symbolic. 

The mistake is to think that people who really have those values will wake up to this fact and reject him. We keep waiting until the right-leaning people rise up en masse and say enough is enough, but that is never going to happen. 

It could be that those values are bogus in the first place. In other words, the followers themselves are just like Trump, with the same underlying contempt for those things. The values are a cynical performative facade and nothing more. That is why the waking up moment never occurs, or occurs only when some official falls out of favor with Trump, or some Republican senator retires and can speak freely.  

Some might hold those values sincerely, and simply be too stupid, uninformed, or insane to realize the cognitive dissonance involved. What I've noticed is a lot of flat-earthism. If you see people who sincerely believe the earth is flat on youtube, you realize there is no argument to be made. It is more important to have a sense of solidarity with a group of like-minded people, than to use common sense and come up with a scientifically informed view. The people who believe the election was stolen are similar. 

essentialism

 There's something I just thought of, though it's a version of things I've considered before:

What if the problem is an extreme version of it-is-whatecver-you-want--it-to-be-ism colliding with old-fashioned essentialism. So on the one hand we have extreme social-constructionism that says we can define reality however we want to. That's great, in theory. But then that gives great power to whoever we assign to the reality construction business. Also, reality doesn't usually abide with our wishes. We want the Trump rallies to spread disease but not the BLM protest, so we only listen to the evidence we like.  

Then we get an extreme form of biological racism, that wants to define everyone by Ancestry.com DNA texts and antiquated classifications (the one drop rule, mulattoes and octaroons and that other out of date garbage. "passing" as white.). Then the individual doesn't get to decide "their" race, after all. We have to have a Nazi-era way of defining ethnicity. The last thing I want to do with a colleague or prospective colleague is to scrutinize their body for ethnic authenticity. "What is your actual parentage," I ask, and I get written up for a micro aggression. 

Bloated

 I don't know if you've noticed this, but there are academic books and dissertations that are so bloated with inessential material that there is little left for the substance. About a year ago I wrote a book review of a 279 page book about the work of 3 Argentine poets.* You would expect that you would learn a lot about these three poets, but in the end you don't. Everything is so laborious in setting up the context, that we don't have a poem cited until page 80 or so. With so much contextualization, we might think that we would know a lot about the poets' lives, or have something concrete to grasp about their approach to poetry, but we really don't. We don't get interesting commentary on the poetry, just a lot of "according to so-and-so..."    

I call this dissertationitis, or inflammation of the dissertation. Students learn to do research and acquire knowledge, but not to catch themselves in the act of coming up with an interesting idea, realizing why it is interesting, and developing it. Instead, it is about being very thorough and showing all the work that has gone into it, with little concern for the reader's attention. There is Theory, but it isn't well integrated. 

In a book of similar length, I could do more with the work of 5 or 6 poets. In fact, I have. Ezra Pound has something in the ABC of Reading about works that don't contain much information on each page. Literary criticism should be condensed, as Pound argued poetry should be. We know the dichtung = condensare etymology is not valid, but the idea behind it is.   

*I've changed some details here to disguise the identity of the book and author, etc... so when I say poets it might be dramatists, etc...