Conclusions

I would advise against the kind of conclusion that is virtually useless to the reader of your book, a summary of the chapters, a mere repetition of an earlier summary of the chapters in a prologue, preface, or introduction. Instead, the conclusion must draw out implications that are not fully spelled out anywhere else.

It is better to have no conclusion at all than one that is a mere placeholder.

As I Was Writing...

As I was writing just now I heard a voice in my head, the voice of a book reviewer who was saying "Mayhew tries to do several, incompatible things in this book, but manages to do none of these things very well. Parts of the book contain some insight, but the project is self-indulgent." I'm sure I will get reviews like this, as I did with AL as well. Even when reviewers are wrong, they are right, to the extent that they are giving their honest viewpoint. I try to imagine myself writing a book that would be airtight, with no possible negative reaction, and I am not at all excited by the prospect. I'd rather be doing what I am doing. Of course, I can anticipate some objections and try to forestall them, but not infinitely.

Maillard

Chantal Maillard has something that I might use as an epigraph.*

Siempre me ha llamado la atención la facilidad con la que reducimos una persona a unos pocos datos. Una persona es una multitud de fragmentos, su vida no es una historia sino un mapa o, mejor, una retícula o rizoma que ofrece itinerarios diversos, cada uno de los cuales daría pie, si lo siguiésemos, a construir una una historia distinta de las otras.

[I've always been struck by the ease with which we reduce a person to a few data points. A person is a proliferation of fragments, her life is not a story but a map or, rather, a reticle or rhizome offering multiple paths, each one of which, if we followed it, would create a story distinct from the others.]

*I used to love epigraphs, but am using them less and less. More than one or three in a book would be excessive.

Faculty Friday / piedra de afilar

My chair started a thing where we share our research over lunch on Fridays. It is wonderful, another "whetstone." Just explaining my project for five minutes to my colleagues made things come into sharper focus.

What's your anti-whetstone?

It could be alcohol. For me, that is a way of shutting my mind down from time to time. Otherwise, the weight of intelligence could be overwhelming.

It could be the ease of not having to struggle very much to have your ideas accepted. You don't have to be sharp because you are in a mediocre environment.

Maybe it's a social thing: you can't be as sharp as you want because that would make it socially uncomfortable for you. It's easier not to be the asshole and just go along with the flow.

The anti-whetstone is what dulls your mind, over the long term.

Whetstone

In my everyday life there is nobody I can talk to who knows more (or even close) about Lorca, contemporary Spanish poetry, or anything else I am supposed to know about, to be a big expert on. When I am in Spain, though, I get to talk to people like José Antonio Llera, Andrés Soria, Carlos Piera, Julián Jiménez Heffernan, Margarita García Candeira, José Manuel Cuesta Abad, Ada Salas, and Jordi Doce. I get to do this in Spanish, too. Of course, I can talk Spanish with my colleagues and students too, but it is not quite the same.

I also got to talk a bit with Attridge and others, too, in Córdoba.

So Spain is my whetstone. Maybe one of my whetstones, because the blog is too; other conferences I might go to. My Thursday tertulia can act like that as well, though the conversation tends to be more social than intellectual there.

Without this one has "one thought less, each year," so to speak. The scholarly base is still there, always, but the sharpening of the mind is something else.

Córdoba

My Córdoba paper went well. The conference was on modernism, mostly in the English-speaking world, with scholars from Spain and other European countries. (Derek Attridge gave the other keynote, on Kafka and Coetzee. He is a very nice man.)

Anyway, I spoke in English and engaged the audience (something not very expected apparently) with my take on Lorca. I spent some time and Granada, and spoke with Andrés Soria, one of the main Spanish critics of Lorca, but really it seems that the place to study Lorca is the US. As always, Spain is energizing for me. I get to remind myself about the continuing existence of the actual country whose literature I study. Apparently the traditional parties are in crisis, with a new political formation "podemos" overtaking them in the polls.

It is warm here; it has been 80 degrees wherever I've gone, even here in Madrid on the 2 of November.