I have a piece missing from my self. I am sure a lot of people feel the same way. I know others don't: their self is complete. They could feel happy, or unhappy, in particular situations, but their self is basically a complete entity. In the same way, I can feel happy, or have good day, but that doesn't mean I am a complete person.
You can try to fill the missing piece with drugs, alcohol, work, religion, or a relationship; any one of a number of things. That will not really fill the gap, though. The gap is in you (or me, in this case), so nobody or nothing else can fill it up. People have names for the cause of this gap: the patriarchy, capitalism... Those things may be bad, but they are not the cause of the hole.
I have no idea of why I feel this way, but I almost always have felt so. I cannot even complain about it, because I'm assuming the a certain percentage of people walking around on the street are in exactly the same position as I am. In fact, it gives me some satisfaction to let you all know that this is the way I feel. I will no longer pretend to be a complete person.
You may feel the same way but give a different label to the experience. My particular name for it is this, but you might must feel that something is wrong with you.
Wednesday, October 8, 2014
Tuesday, October 7, 2014
The talk continues
The ideological roots of neopopularism can be found in the German romantics, who translated Spanish romances a century before Menéndez Pidal. The larger context for Lorca’s recuperation of folk music and poetry is a movement in European (and American) culture that inserts folk traditions into elite forms of poetry and music. In this talk I want to concentrate on the musical part of this legacy. Significant composers who form part of this tradition include Rimsky-Korsakov, Isaac Albéniz, Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, Manuel de Falla, Igor Stravinski, and Bela Bartok. On the other side of the Atlantic, Charles Ives, Aaron Copland, Duke Ellington, George Crumb, and Osvaldo Golijov exemplify this phenomenon.
Lorca, I would argue, is a pivotal figure in this movement. Since Bizet’s Carmen, Lalo’s Symphonie Espagnole, and Rimsky-Korsakov’s 1887 Cappricio Espagnol (and works by Albéniz in the 1880s), Spanish music has represented a certain “folkloric” element in European classical music. Debussy and Ravel paid homage to Spain. Lorca loved Debussy’s music and collaborated with Falla. Three of his major lectures, “Arquitectura del cante jondo,” “Las canciones de cuna españolas,” and “Juego y teoría del duende,” are treatments of traditional forms of Spanish song, although the duende lecture is much more than that. In one of the chapters of my book in progess, What Lorca Knew, I compare Lorca’s duende to Roland Barthes’s “grain of the voice,” which also treats the problem of musical performance in a nationalist context.
Musical settings and adaptations of Lorca’s poetry and theater abound: I can think of no other other modern poet in any language who has inspired as diverse a range of composers and performers. The explanation of the quantity and variety of Lorquian music is double. As we have seen, Lorca’s literary achievement is already intertwined with musical expression and with traditions of musical folklorism. Secondly, adaptations of Lorca are numerous and varied in general, spanning poetry, theater, and the visual arts: we would expect the musicians to get into the act as well.
Time will not permit an adequate survey of Lorca’s musical legacy: the playlist I initially developed for this talk lasted twenty-three minutes, longer than I have for my entire presentation. Instead, I want to put forward a very simple idea:
Lorca, I would argue, is a pivotal figure in this movement. Since Bizet’s Carmen, Lalo’s Symphonie Espagnole, and Rimsky-Korsakov’s 1887 Cappricio Espagnol (and works by Albéniz in the 1880s), Spanish music has represented a certain “folkloric” element in European classical music. Debussy and Ravel paid homage to Spain. Lorca loved Debussy’s music and collaborated with Falla. Three of his major lectures, “Arquitectura del cante jondo,” “Las canciones de cuna españolas,” and “Juego y teoría del duende,” are treatments of traditional forms of Spanish song, although the duende lecture is much more than that. In one of the chapters of my book in progess, What Lorca Knew, I compare Lorca’s duende to Roland Barthes’s “grain of the voice,” which also treats the problem of musical performance in a nationalist context.
Musical settings and adaptations of Lorca’s poetry and theater abound: I can think of no other other modern poet in any language who has inspired as diverse a range of composers and performers. The explanation of the quantity and variety of Lorquian music is double. As we have seen, Lorca’s literary achievement is already intertwined with musical expression and with traditions of musical folklorism. Secondly, adaptations of Lorca are numerous and varied in general, spanning poetry, theater, and the visual arts: we would expect the musicians to get into the act as well.
Time will not permit an adequate survey of Lorca’s musical legacy: the playlist I initially developed for this talk lasted twenty-three minutes, longer than I have for my entire presentation. Instead, I want to put forward a very simple idea:
Beginnings of a talk
Lorca’s Musical Legacy: From Strayhorn to Golijov
I have heard otherwise intelligent and well-educated people in Spain express the opinion that “Lorca es un poeta folklórico.” You, too, might have heard this sentence, or something like it. If you have, then you know don’t mean it in a good way: it is almost always said in a disapproving tone—a facile way of dismissing Lorca by confusing him with both with the sources of his inspiration and with a partial explanation for his “popularity.” The back cover of one recent book on Lorca promises to rescue him “del asfixiante folclorismo en que se ha visto encerrado por una crítica miope y malintencionda.” Even some of his admirers, then, think that his neopopularism remains a negative factor in his legacy.
It is not self-evident, though, that “folklore” should be such a term of insult. In the nineteenth and twentieth century music and literature, the recuperation of folk traditions is an enormous source of intellectual ferment and vitality. The first Spanish folklorist was Antonio Machado y Álvarez, the father of poets Antonio and Manuel. Writers of the famed “generation” of these two poets, of course, were committed to a project of national regeneration that included an interest in “national traditions”—although it was not limited to folklore per se. Menéndez Pidal’s research on anonymous poetic traditions, Antonio Machado’s “Tierra de Alvargonzález,” and Manuel’s Cante hondo are some prominent examples. The neopopulist poetry of Lorca and Alberti continues this tradition, which culminates in Miguel Hernández’s Romancero y cancionero de ausencias.
The ideological roots of neopopularism can be found in the German romantics, who translated Spanish romances a century before Menéndez Pidal. The larger context for Lorca’s recuperation of folk music and poetry is a movement in European (and American) culture that inserts folk traditions into elite forms of poetry and music. In this talk I want to concentrate on the musical part of this legacy. Significant composers who form part of this tradition include Rimsky-Korsakov, Isaac Albéniz, Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, Manuel de Falla, Igor Stravinski, and Bela Bartok. On the other side of the Atlantic, Charles Ives, Aaron Copland, Duke Ellington, George Crumb, and Osvaldo Golijov exemplify this phenomenon.
Lorca, I would argue, is a pivotal figure in this movement. Since Rimsky-Korsakov’s 1887 Cappricio Espagnol (and works by Albéniz in the same decade), Spanish music has represented ...
I have heard otherwise intelligent and well-educated people in Spain express the opinion that “Lorca es un poeta folklórico.” You, too, might have heard this sentence, or something like it. If you have, then you know don’t mean it in a good way: it is almost always said in a disapproving tone—a facile way of dismissing Lorca by confusing him with both with the sources of his inspiration and with a partial explanation for his “popularity.” The back cover of one recent book on Lorca promises to rescue him “del asfixiante folclorismo en que se ha visto encerrado por una crítica miope y malintencionda.” Even some of his admirers, then, think that his neopopularism remains a negative factor in his legacy.
It is not self-evident, though, that “folklore” should be such a term of insult. In the nineteenth and twentieth century music and literature, the recuperation of folk traditions is an enormous source of intellectual ferment and vitality. The first Spanish folklorist was Antonio Machado y Álvarez, the father of poets Antonio and Manuel. Writers of the famed “generation” of these two poets, of course, were committed to a project of national regeneration that included an interest in “national traditions”—although it was not limited to folklore per se. Menéndez Pidal’s research on anonymous poetic traditions, Antonio Machado’s “Tierra de Alvargonzález,” and Manuel’s Cante hondo are some prominent examples. The neopopulist poetry of Lorca and Alberti continues this tradition, which culminates in Miguel Hernández’s Romancero y cancionero de ausencias.
The ideological roots of neopopularism can be found in the German romantics, who translated Spanish romances a century before Menéndez Pidal. The larger context for Lorca’s recuperation of folk music and poetry is a movement in European (and American) culture that inserts folk traditions into elite forms of poetry and music. In this talk I want to concentrate on the musical part of this legacy. Significant composers who form part of this tradition include Rimsky-Korsakov, Isaac Albéniz, Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, Manuel de Falla, Igor Stravinski, and Bela Bartok. On the other side of the Atlantic, Charles Ives, Aaron Copland, Duke Ellington, George Crumb, and Osvaldo Golijov exemplify this phenomenon.
Lorca, I would argue, is a pivotal figure in this movement. Since Rimsky-Korsakov’s 1887 Cappricio Espagnol (and works by Albéniz in the same decade), Spanish music has represented ...
Monday, October 6, 2014
Personal Pride and Epistemological Humility
You can be as proud as you want to be about how smart you are, how much you know, how well you write. The fundamental attitude to express in scholarship, though, is epistemological humility. In other words, knowledge is fundamentally fragile. There are degrees of certainty, things that can be known without too much doubt and others that can hardly be known or understood at all, and a vast amount of things in the middle.
Two kinds of odious arguments
There are two kinds of arguments that I find distasteful. Both are in wide use among people with whom I am in sympathy with, most of the time, on the academic liberal left.
--With cut-and-dried situations, people who throw endless nuance and irrelevant detail into the mix to try to complicate things unnecessarily. Thus, with a plagiarism case, "everyone does it, where's the line?, students need to plagiarize a little to learn to write, we should look at their intentions, postmodernism, blah, blah, blah." If it's a child pornography case, "the culture is to blame, because women in beer commercials are young; the user of this pornography is hyper-conforming to cultural norms, blah, blah, blah..."
--People who ordinarily would see everything as infinitely nuanced and complicated, and in most other contexts would be inclined use the first kind of argument, turn around and decide that in other situations there is no nuance at all. The answer is clear and self-evident for everyone to see. If you don't agree with them, you are a horrible person.
Both forms of argument are intellectually lazy. You should apply exactly the right amount of nuance to each situation as is required. You shouldn't use nuance to muddy the waters, but to clarify situations.
But, of course, the question is to know what situations need to be complicated and which ones needs to simplified. I think it was the physicist Feynman who advised, "simplify everything to the exact degree necessary, and no further." But nobody knows how to do that very well. That is precisely where the difficult intellectual work is located.
--With cut-and-dried situations, people who throw endless nuance and irrelevant detail into the mix to try to complicate things unnecessarily. Thus, with a plagiarism case, "everyone does it, where's the line?, students need to plagiarize a little to learn to write, we should look at their intentions, postmodernism, blah, blah, blah." If it's a child pornography case, "the culture is to blame, because women in beer commercials are young; the user of this pornography is hyper-conforming to cultural norms, blah, blah, blah..."
--People who ordinarily would see everything as infinitely nuanced and complicated, and in most other contexts would be inclined use the first kind of argument, turn around and decide that in other situations there is no nuance at all. The answer is clear and self-evident for everyone to see. If you don't agree with them, you are a horrible person.
Both forms of argument are intellectually lazy. You should apply exactly the right amount of nuance to each situation as is required. You shouldn't use nuance to muddy the waters, but to clarify situations.
But, of course, the question is to know what situations need to be complicated and which ones needs to simplified. I think it was the physicist Feynman who advised, "simplify everything to the exact degree necessary, and no further." But nobody knows how to do that very well. That is precisely where the difficult intellectual work is located.
Sunday, October 5, 2014
A problem
I'm giving a talk in March with musical examples. Here is my problem: duration of my talk = 20 minutes. Duration of my playlist of musical examples: 23 minutes. I can't talk over the music. A few musical examples are already short. Some I can truncate a few others to a minute or so. Still, even cutting it down to 10 minutes of music gives me only 10 minutes to talk. How long are talks at musicological conferences? (Mine is the Comparative Literature Association).
Maurer
Here's a quote from Chris Maurer I like a lot, from Elpais.es
Me parece poco serio seguir hablando de sus amores oscuros. Y basta ya con la obsesión de la última carta, los últimos días, la última hora, el último amante. Dejemos las etiquetas y el ultimismo.I'll paraphrase that as more or less this:
It seems frivolous to keep talking about [Lorca's] dark loves. We've had enough with this obsession with the last letter, the last days, the last hour, the last lover. Let's call an end to labels and to "ultimisms."
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