I could, in a Platonic sense—in the proper sense of the word, deriving from Plato—I could concede, or even concur, that that might be true. What I could not accept is that Ratzinger could know and not me. That he had the right to interpret it. Who is this Herr Ratzinger? By what right does he arbitrate it? Do these people want power in this world or the next? It’s always this world. That’s how religion strikes me as absolutely material, nothing to do with the spiritual or after-existence. They want power now and they’re very wise to. When else would you want to have power?

Bullet Points While Driving

*Lorca anticipates the Américo Castro cultural theory [quotes to support that]. That is why he can become multicultural hero for US poetics.

*Modernity is the big problem in Spanish cultural history, yet a special issue of a journal about "recalcitrant modernities" slights modernist writing itself. The only major writer who appears is Blasco Ibáñez, with all due respect not a modernist at at all. There is a huge gap in relating modernity to modernism. Jo Labanyi's and Helen Graham's Spanish Cultural Studies: The Struggle for Modernity barely touches on poetry at all. That is where Spanish writers were most modern, and most successfully. Of course I can understand studying things outside the canon, but hello, is the modern of modernity related at all to the modern of modernism? I think so. You have to go beyond Ortega y Gasset, who thought Andalusian culture was just backward, vegetative.

*The modernity debate takes place in the field of 19th century literature and culture, much more than in my own field (20th). That is because prose fiction is so dominant in that period.

*The romanticism of Lorca himself explains why the response to him in the US is also romantic. Ginsberg and Duncan are just big romantic poets. This is obvious, like most of what I'm saying.

*Modernism can be traced to

a) romanticism
b) French symbolism and Flaubert
c) historical avant-garde

A lot depends on this particular choice. Of course, I favor the layered approach myself. I like shifting the perspective whenever it needs shifting.

The Project is Bigger than Me

I feel this way, that the project has a mind of its own. I'm just the person the project is using to get itself written. When an idea decides it needs me, who am I to say no? If I listen hard enough, I will know what I need to do. I look at material, and say "that needs to go there." I feel myself making objective decisions about what belongs where. When I view my project like this, my habitual laziness disappears too.

Here's a Good Quote to Ponder

"People say endlessly that one wants to be a heavy hitter because one wants prestige and perks but I disagree utterly with these vapid souls; it is about what one is happy doing."

Of course a little recognition and prestige is nice, but really it is very little or nothing during any particular day or month. The perks are mostly getting to do more of what you're already doing. You do research, and the reward is another research grant or just time off to do more of the same. But the work is there every day with its own rewards.

Antin on Bloom

David Antin is awkward to quote because of his typography, but here are some phrases I will use from title lecture of what it means to be avant-garde:

"but from harold bloom you dont get the sense that theres anything funny about casting allegorical epics with a set of of entities that have names like orc and urthona and oothoon..."
(48)

"now whats extraordinary is not blooms seedy freudianism ... but the object of a struggle / a poetical style or perhaps poetical content / in any case a poetical product / that bloom sees as a kind of commodity over which there is a copyright dispute // this is quite extraordinary and very funny" (49)

Guidebooks

My facebook friend Robert Archambeau posted the following:

Publishers keep sending me these little guidebooks to critical theory, hoping I'll use them in my literary theory seminar. But I just can't get behind the idea of having students read little chapters on Structuralism or New Criticism or whatever, instead of having them read actual essays by Roland Barthes or Cleanth Brooks. I mean, would you have the students in your poetry class read a guidebook with chapters on Elliptical Verse or The Movement, but not read any John Ashbery or Philip Larkin?

That accords perfectly with my sense that there are "primary texts" of theory. Just last night, a social scientist friend of mine said he preferred to read other people's digests of theory, rather than the original texts. Of course, I objected strenuously. My exact words were "no, no, no, no, no, no, no!" I hope he was not offended.

This came after we were talking about how we discover new things each time we read a text. If you are reading a secondary text, you aren't going to discover anything new in the primary text that the commentator did not see. You are also missing the stylistic values, the rhetorical slippages, and other literary qualities.

Anachronism

Anachronism is a rupture in time or chronology. Two events which are simultaneous in time, but belong to separate periods. Or an event that happens sooner or later than it should. Modernism studies invites examination of anachronisms, because the idea of a modernism contained neatly within 1910-1939 doesn't really work.

Belatedness is essential to modernity. Yeats felt that modern poetry was already a third wave:

Shakespearean fish swam the sea, far away from land;
Romantic fish swam in nets coming to the hand;
What are all those fish that lie gasping on the strand?

Qtd. in Mayhew

Silver thought that, since Spain didn't have the proper kind of romanticism, the poetry of Cernuda was a restitution (Ruin and Restitution). What happens, then, is that Cernuda is out of synch with contemporary European poetry (Breton, Trakl, Eliot?). His poetry is doing the cultural work that some other poet should have done 100 years before. That may be the case, but then literary history is shot to hell, because things don't line up they way you would want them to.

You have to have chronology before you have achronology.

My first scholarly citation was when I was 11 years old. My father was talking about modernization or something at the dinner table, and I said something to the effect that it was different to modernize in a world already modern. I'll have to find the actual quote, because it is a bit better than this, but that was the basic idea.

"We are born young into a world already old." I forgot who said that. "What do make of a diminished thing" (Frost).

This is more interesting than a world in which synchronicity is not a problem. It creates more opportunities for me to say interesting things, at least.

It is anachronistic to think that Spain's cultural destiny is still determined by the "morada vital" that ceased to exist in 1492 (and actually much before that).

I should read Nietzsche on history, next.