Dream of Emily

 I was going to introduce a lecture on Emily D. by an eminent critic like Marjorie Perloff. The lines that were to be analyzed were "Tell the truth but tell it slant / Success in circuit lies."  In my dream the lines appeared exactly correct,  but there were other perhaps non Dickinson phrases in my mind as well.  

drums

 I played drums for years  but was never in a band. It was kind of pointless from one point of view. But I love drumming and drums, cymbals. I love the fact that drummers are obsessed with cymbals and snare sounds. The sound of a good Zildjian Constantinople  is just divine, even though you might not be able to hear it in context, always. 

I am also rhythmically obsessed, and learned complex polyrhythms, like five against four. It is part of my ear-worm / prosody obsession. Neurologically, I am just wired that way. 

Also, just the ability to play bass drum with right foot, high hat with left, ride cymbal with right hand, and snare and toms with left, well, it is just a cool thing to do.  

Dream

 My father and I were driving to get some Dim Sum. I realized that he was dead (more than 20 years) and was worried about his driving, but he seemed to be doing fine. I had confidence in him. I suspected it was a dream, so I felt safe. We got to the restaurant and there weren't that many places to sit. We were at some kind of bench without a real table there.  

Morae

Haiku are not measured in syllables, but in morae. For example, a long syllable counts as 2 morae, or a consonantal ending (n). It is really a quantitative meter, not a syllabic one. 

Japanese words tend to be polysyllabic, so there's that too. And the syllables are typically lighter being consonant vowel, consonant vowel.  

What this means is that the 17 syllable haiku in English has zero to do with Japanese haiku, prosodically speaking. 

Of course, it could work on its own terms, though generally syllabic forms don't work very well in English, because nobody can hear seven syllables in English.  

Haiku

 A moth landed

on the wine bottle

doing no harm

Another version of outline

Preface

1. Lorca the musical intellectual 

2. Lorca and Flamenco (I):  1921-1931

3. Canciones españolas antiguas 

[this will include a tradition of Spanish vernacular art song] 

4. Germaine Montero

5. Singer-songwriters

6. Lorca and Flamenco (II): From Camarón to Poveda

Conclusion: Postmodernism and Middle-brow culture 

Dream of home movie

 We were watching a dvd and at the end we found an old home movie, that began with me as a kid making a spectacular prat-fall on the front porch of a house. Other family members came to comfort me in a theatrical way. I decided it must have been some play I had written and convinced my family to film. My mom did not appear so I thought she must have been the one filming.  Toward the end, my father appeared in a Victorian costume, with a top hat.  Then there was a scene with my baby brother. 

I took a lot of convincing myself that it was a dream. I analyzed it quite a a bit while half asleep.