Republican Chord Changes

In my dream the Republicans had a limited number of arguments, syllogisms almost, expressed in the form of chord progressions. I had figured them out, and was able to see that they began from contradictory premises and thus were refutable. In other words, each one was logically consistent, but the entire set of them wasn't. These chord progressions fell into categories like aesthetic, political, and ???.

As I was waking up I was trying to hold fast to my memory of what they were, since they were present to my mind quite lucidly.  There was nothing imprecise here, though to the lucidity of waking life they might sound vague and I cannot reproduce them.

The re-programming continues

As the re-programming continues, I've put in place another essential element.  I will work five days a week, for at least an hour, on my current project, Things To Do To Poems. It seems like not so much, to have 5 hours in a 40 hour week, to do your actual scholarship (if you can call this anti-textbook scholarship). But that 5 hours is the difference between doing it and not doing it.

Things to do with Poems

Bob mentioned my switching back between two prepositions.  I think I'm going to have to settle on "things to do with poems." I might fudge it by naming one chapter "things to do to poems," even though it sounds a little extreme.

I like the idea of uses for poetry, but as a title it sounds too utilitarian. By uses I don't mean that poetry is secondary to some other function. Take dance music. You might say the function or use of the music is to dance to. Something you do to the music is dance to it. But that doesn't quite express the proper relation between music and dance. Dance music is not a tool, with the relation to the beer bottle as the bottle opener has.

part of the preface

When students only have read a few poems, in exclusively academic contexts, they often approach poetry with what the linguist Geoffrey Pullum (in a different context) has called “nervous cluelessness.” According to Pullum, educated native speakers of English are often so intimidated by misunderstood rules of prescriptive grammar in books like The Elements of Style that they longer trusts their own intuitions about their native language, ending up with “a vague unease instead of a sense of mastery” (Pullum). We hear of students uncertain about their ability to scan a line of poetry because they don’t know which syllables are accented—even though they can speak their native language with infallible accentuation (Ferris). Students who know they are not expert readers read tentatively—unsure, even, of their own basic ability to understand the literal sense of words on the page. They have learned in High School that the denotations of words will be misleading, that the real meaning of the poem is concealed behind a largely irrelevant façade of literal meaning. As a consequence they will sometimes ignore the plain sense completely, even if it is the shortest path to understanding the poem. Since poetry will form a very small part of their education, many students will suffer through a few weeks of poetry analysis before moving on to the more familiar terrain of the novel. Even some English and foreign language professors, with minimal training in poetry themselves, bequeath attitudes of nervous cluelessness to subsquent generations of students.

It gets better

So I figured out I could email myself my chord changes, print them out, or take a screen shot and post them as an image. 

Point and Sing

Here is a brilliant video that exemplifies what I am aspiring to.

Table of Contents

Things to Do To Poems

Preface: The Analytic Residue

I. Apologetics  

II. Things to do to Poems

III. Engagements

IV. Intuitions

V. A Memoir of Reading

[I have decided on "Things to Do With Poems" as the title of the book,which has about 59 pages so far out of a projected 100. I was thinking of

101 Uses for a Dead Poem (after a humor book about dead cats)
How to do things with poems (Like Austin)
Poetry: An Anti-Textbook. (like Lanham's Style: an Antitextbook.

This morning or yesterday at some point  I came up with "Things to Do To Poems."