#realacademicbios

The point of #realacademicbios is that academics have real lives, with normal real life problems, that are not present on their academic bios that list their academic accomplishments.

In other words, that academics are human beings.

The problem here is that this only provides a forum for the natural tendency of academics to whine, to moan and groan and make excuses for themselves.

Because, in the first place, everyone has problems, so why are academics' problems so special? Because they work in a university?

Secondly, who would have imagined that simply by working in the university, one was exempt from normal life? That would seem to an academic fantasy. People who post under #realacademicbios are, actually, people who are clinging desperately to that fantasy. Otherwise, their problems would just be the normal problems of life itself.

Thirdly, academia is a place that cares about your accomplishments. I see constantly (lately) the idea that academia should care equally as much about your failures and your inability to get your shit done. So you should have a shadow cv with all your dead-ends, impasses, and rejections. Yes, we all have those, and nobody imagines otherwise. Without those, I would have published three times more. But shouldn't you care about what I've actually contributed?

Three of Four Principles of Translation

In its simplest form, the translation of poetry:

Should be attentive to meaning. It should not mistranslate in explicit ways.

It needs to be good poetry. A bad poem cannot claim to be a good translation of good poem.

More specifically, the peculiar virtues of the original should shine forth in the translation, whatever those virtues happen to be. The stuff that makes the original poem good. So it is poem of verbal wit? Let the translation be so too.

These claims are not extreme in any way, yet somehow I fear I am in the minority.

My plan to translate the Suites has fallen through, since there will be an edition coming out in '17. I want to do something I am calling "Lorca cantabile": an anthology of poems that represent his most singable moments.

Peeve

Here's a common grammar peeve. People who say that you shouldn't use "that" as relative pronoun with people, where "who" would be more appropriate. To which I say:

"He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty."

It was argued to me that this usage is imprecise, because that implied a non-human antecedent. But that is not really true is it? After all, there is no confusion caused. It was argued that the usage was ugly or crude. I disagree, but that's an aesthetic preference. To me it has a slightly archaic flavor.

You can find this usage in titles of songs and movies and books.

Ear worm

When I first started songwriting, my ear worm became much worse. It was my own tunes repeating themselves in my mind. It was not because they were catchy, I think, but because I needed to play them over and over to write them, not to forget them, and to learn to play them fluently. Now, there is usually a song in my head at any given moment, but it doesn't bother me as much.

***

I was the unmusical one in my family. My mom plays and taught piano for years. My sister became a professional musician, my dad was obsessed by music. My brother probably has a similar amount of musicality as I do, but he did a little more when younger than I did.

So because of this dynamic, I probably spent less time with music than I would have, if I had been the "musical one." Families assign roles, and I was supposed to be the smart kid, a role I took over once I got to college. So despite the fact that I took some piano, played clarinet in junior high band, and sang in the choir, and was pretty much obsessed with music, I got to be defined as unmusical. Now I play piano or keyboard every day when not traveling. I've played drums too, but I need the keys to write the songs.


***

You can think of analogies. You turn the faucet on, and the water pours out. Or, a clock is broken, and you take it apart to fix it. You look at what is wrong and how it works, and figure out how to make it work again. Both could be metaphors for writing, but the implications are much different. Writing a song could be improvising a melody on the keyboard, or taking apart a song that's not working and fixing its inner dials. The same for a scholarly article.

Negative Thoughts

My songs are no good. I am wasting time by writing them and am deluded to devote any time at all to them. I will never publish another book or article. I am lazy. My office is a mess. My nomination for Distinguished Professor will come to nothing. I am a bad teacher. I am disorganized and lose things. Nobody cares about what I do: I am an old-faahioned formalist out of step with my field. I have a library book overdue and I don't know where it is. My left ear is clogged with wax. My heating bill is too high this month. I am "privileged" and elitist.

Yes. I am prone to negative thoughts like anyone else. I have no solution to offer you, since I suffer as much as anyone else, if not more.

The only thing I can say, then, is welcome to the club. But notice how the powerful thought itself is. All of this could be true, but most of the suffering comes not from the truth of all of this, but of inflating this into something much more than it is. All negativity is a form of egotism stronger as any arrogance.

I could say: I wrote 8 songs and published 4 books, that's more than you did. Your office is cleaner than mine. So what? You do trendy criticism, but I am still the better scholar. Earwax or the absence of it is trivial... All that is equally true.

A single idea can bring you far...

Songs Happen by Accident

Before dinner I was fooling around and came up with a really simple melodic fragment. It didn't seem to be much. The idea was to have the chords move around a lot with only a few melody notes and create a kind of bluesy feeling, but playing a major seven in the left hand but the first three notes of the corresponding minor scale in the right. After dinner I wrote the rest of the song really quickly. The B section seemed to flow naturally, and the entire song is fairly catchy.

I wasn't planning on writing a song, but it happened. It could not have happened if I weren't at the keyboard, however, which is to base something on the first phrase of the verse of "These Foolish Things." Not the chorus part that is usually sung, but the little introduction part, which is similar to the opening of "I'll Remember April" that I ripped off for my third song.

Against Interpretation

Sontag's classic essay resonates with me, especially her critique of Freudian hermeneutics. I remember first reading this essay and being blown away, because it confirmed my own intuitions about what is important. I am not a great "interpreter" of literature. I am not adept at finding hidden meanings, and any meaning that is hidden seems to me to be a ridiculous imposition of the interpreter. I think I would always get A minuses in English classes as an undergraduate because I was looking for something else, something that I did not yet know how to articulate well.

This is my objection to biography as well. The biography of the artist becomes the source of his meaning. Sontag uses the word "content." This "shadow world" of "meanings" is much less interesting that the art itself.

Sontag interestingly ties the idea of interpretation to that of mimesis. Mimetic theories automatically set up art as an inferior copy of reality, whose value is to tell us something about reality itself.

***

"The task of interpretation is virtually one of translation. The interpreter says, Look, don't you see that X is really -- or, really means -- A? That Y is really B? That Z is really C?"

"Interpretation thus presupposes a discrepancy between the clear meaning of the text and the demands of (later) readers. It seeks to resolve that discrepancy. The situation is that for some reason a text has become unacceptable; yet it cannot be discarded. Interpretation is a radical strategy for conserving an old text, which is thought too precious to repudiate, by revamping it. The interpreter, without actually erasing or rewriting the text, is altering it. But he can't admit to doing this. He claims to be only making it intelligible, by disclosing its true meaning. However far the interpreters alter the text (another notorious example is the Rabbinic and Christian "spiritual" interpretations of the clearly erotic Song of Songs), they must claim to be reading off a sense that is already there."

"The modern style of interpretation excavates, and as it excavates, destroys; it digs "behind" the text, to find a sub-text which is the true one. The most celebrated and influential modern doctrines, those of Marx and Freud, actually amount to elaborate systems of hermeneutics, aggressive and impious theories of interpretation. All observable phenomena are bracketed, in Freud's phrase, as manifest content. This manifest content must be probed and pushed aside to find the true meaning -- the latent content -- beneath."

"In some cultural contexts, interpretation is a liberating act. It is a means of revising, of transvaluing, of escaping the dead past. In other cultural contexts, it is reactionary, impertinent, cowardly, stifling."

"interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art."

"To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world -- in order to set up a shadow world of "meanings.""