Collaboration

One of my biggest regrets is that I have not collaborated on an article. I can't say that I am committed to collaboration, because the fact I haven't done it means that I am not yet committed to it (yet). The barrier is a lack of imagination, I guess. I would have to come up with the right combination of a project and a collaborator. I would not tolerate an unequal collaboration, or one in which I did the intellectual lifting and someone else did the grunt work. 

The Theory Course

 I'm doing the theory course again. I do classic structuralism, Benveniste, Gadamer, translation theory. I'm doing some Rita Felski, the critique of critique and all that. I have the students choose their own readings. It only took a few hours to update the syllabus, putting the proper dates in for this year. That was my task for the day. 

Interview dream

 We were interviewing a candidate for our position. I asked him a softball question about his research. He did ok with it, but then began to weep. One of our colleagues was trying to quiet a small child; that could have distracted the candidate. Now we were trying to reassure him so he could go on...  

Sleek

 I took my phone out of its case to clean the case. The phone, out of the case, is sleek and attractive, fairly light and not too bulky. Inside its ugly case, the phone is ugly and bulky, and tends to get grime on it from the case itself. 

So I rarely get to enjoy how my phone looks, because, although sleek, it is also very fragile. If not kept in its case, it would break the next time I drop it, in a week or two.  

Design Flaws

 My mom's stovetop.  It is flat and white; any time the stove is used, any residue on the bottom of a pot or pan creates a horrible stain that must be scrubbed. Even an apparently clean bottom will create a stain. 

A rechargeable computer mouse. The cable for recharging goes into the bottom of the mouse; therefore the mouse cannot be used while recharging.  

My computer informs me my disk is full, but there is not a window to open that tells me how much of my disk is full, or where the stuff is that is taking all that room. After a morning of deleting stuff, I don't know how much progress I've made. I delete some more stuff, and now I have less room than before, 4.9 gigabytes instead of 6. 

Dream of student

 There was a fairly intense dream about a grad student presenting his/her work in a way that didn't make sense. The idea was that the four parts of the dissertation could be read in any order: 1234, 4321, 1324, etc... That wasn't the objectionable part of it, but that the dissertation had no content: it wasn't going to be "about" anything at all, and had no title. I was arguing with the student and with a colleague, who thought the plan was fine, and then told me student had pancreatic cancer...  When I woke up, I realized that the student I thought I was dreaming of did have a valid topic... 

Strophe

 Pound point out rather basic things, such as, the strophe exists so that you can repeat the same melody over and over. Imagine setting to music a text not in strophic form; it would have to be through-composed. 

Even more basically, metrical poetry is designed to be sung. The most basic structural device is repetition. That is the basis of rhythm itself. The most important musical notation is this:   ||:      :||