I was recently told I was a good dancer. I can't do dance steps or ballroom dances, but just dancing the way people do freestyle. I have reason to think the compliment was sincere, since it came from two separate people who, though they might want to be in my favor, aren't given to gratuitous compliments. My partner doesn't say I'm good at things that I'm clearly bad at, and the other person, her cousin, can be a bit hyperbolic and eager to please, but wouldn't invent something totally off the wall. Even discounting it a bit, I think there some element of truth there.
Being told that caused a shift in my thinking. I wanted to think it was true, so I decided to make it true (if it isn't already), and approach dance in a different way than I have before, practicing at home and learning to do specific things I want to do. I'm thinking of my body in a different way to, as an instrument as it were. I've been getting down to what I want to weigh, which is about 160lb, from 165. I can also be thinking about clothes in a different way, thinking about the way the clothes fit the body instead of just whether I like the color of the shirt.
It's similar to what I do with music. Once again, I know that my piano teacher would never tell me something was good when it wasn't. But since praise can be constructive too, in the sense that you will want to repeat that experience, do what got you the praise once again. For this to work, though, you have to trust the praise as earned, and think self-consciously about what you did right.
***
I was thinking that, say, if you wanted to write a graphic novel or become a good hip hop dancer, you could probably do it. [Or substitute whatever you want here.] If you have had the idea of doing it, then you can. You wouldn't get the idea if you had never read a graphic novel and didn't like the form. If you didn't have ideas about what you liked and didn't like, and the kind of approach that was attractive to you. You might be insecure about your drawing or your narrative ideas, or have any number of the typical self-doubts that people have. But actually, you can do it.
***
The principle that "you can do anything" does not apply to competition. You can run a marathon, let's assume, but I can't tell you that you will win a marathon or tennis tournament or dance contest or concerto competition, or that your book will win a prize. That's simply because other people can also achieve anything they want, not just you. I can tell you you can bake a pie, but not that it will win the pie bake off.
***
The first step in achieving results in competitive activities is to be very proficient at very basic skills, and knowing exactly how good the competition is. For publishing articles, for example, you have to realize that even graduate students can be struggling with basic high-school level skills, like writing well-formed paragraphs or having an introduction that fulfills all its rhetorical functions. I refereed an article by a very well-known scholar that had a clunky title, like "Theme and Structure in ..." I accepted the article but made him change the title. It was published and made a substantial contribution to Lorca studies.
Friday, August 31, 2018
All in Green
Let's look at Joan Baez's version of "All in Green Went my Love Riding." It's a poem by E.E. Cummings, and this version can be found on he album Baptism which also includes some spoken word versions of James Joyce and Lorca, among other things.
The first idea would that this takes a bit of "literary culture" into the realm of "popular culture." That's not a wrong way of looking at it at all, but let's think about it a little longer.
A second idea: there is a "literary turn" in folk music itself. Bob Dylan's fans think of him as a poet, and Leonard Cohen is also a self-defined poet who turns to music rather than staying in the purely literary world.
Concept albums like Baptism are kind of middle-brow in tone, aren't they? They aren't designed to have top-40 hits.
And then there's Cummings. He is the modernist poet for ordinary readers or for adolescents. This particular poem is well-known, maybe better known that its popularizing performance itself. From this perspective both the poem and the song seem kind of middle brow to me, and in similar ways even. The poem is brilliant for what it is, though the music, for my taste, is not. For one thing, the rhythm of the poem is ignored in the setting. I hear the rhythm of the poem in my head as
ALL in GREEN WENT my love RIding / INto the SILver DAWN / ON a great HORSE of GOLD
Of course "folk music" itself is kind of middle-brow in this sense. It is not actual folklore music, but an adaptation of it for particular audiences at a particular juncture in time. What makes it middle-brow is its secondariness with respect to the original, and its populist rejection of the increasing harmonic complexity of modern jazz, a music for cognoscenti like flamenco is.
(The poem has a thumping meter but a sophisticated and imaginative use of the meter, similar to what Stevens does in "Sea Surface Full of Clouds," where you rewrite the same text repeatedly but substitute words in each instance. There ought to be a word for that form.)
The first idea would that this takes a bit of "literary culture" into the realm of "popular culture." That's not a wrong way of looking at it at all, but let's think about it a little longer.
A second idea: there is a "literary turn" in folk music itself. Bob Dylan's fans think of him as a poet, and Leonard Cohen is also a self-defined poet who turns to music rather than staying in the purely literary world.
Concept albums like Baptism are kind of middle-brow in tone, aren't they? They aren't designed to have top-40 hits.
And then there's Cummings. He is the modernist poet for ordinary readers or for adolescents. This particular poem is well-known, maybe better known that its popularizing performance itself. From this perspective both the poem and the song seem kind of middle brow to me, and in similar ways even. The poem is brilliant for what it is, though the music, for my taste, is not. For one thing, the rhythm of the poem is ignored in the setting. I hear the rhythm of the poem in my head as
ALL in GREEN WENT my love RIding / INto the SILver DAWN / ON a great HORSE of GOLD
Of course "folk music" itself is kind of middle-brow in this sense. It is not actual folklore music, but an adaptation of it for particular audiences at a particular juncture in time. What makes it middle-brow is its secondariness with respect to the original, and its populist rejection of the increasing harmonic complexity of modern jazz, a music for cognoscenti like flamenco is.
(The poem has a thumping meter but a sophisticated and imaginative use of the meter, similar to what Stevens does in "Sea Surface Full of Clouds," where you rewrite the same text repeatedly but substitute words in each instance. There ought to be a word for that form.)
Keynote
Well I got invited to give a keynote for a Lorca conference in February in Madrid. They want me to talk about "Los estudios lorquianos en Estados Unidos." Which is just about ideal for me.
Wednesday, August 29, 2018
15 Minutes
I can't give a conference paper any more. I need to play 12-18 minutes of music, so giving a 20 minute talk doesn't make sense. Or 15, as I have seen in some conferences recently. Seriously? You want me to travel and have someone pay for that, and lodging, and I will speak for 15 minutes? I am not particularly long-winded, though more so than I used to be, but I need 50 minutes minimum nowadays. I wonder what musicologists do? Or maybe they can refer to music that their audience already knows so they don't have to play it.
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