10 Footnotes to Apocryphal Lorca (3): Hughes and Intersectionality

3. I did deal with Langston Hughes a bit in one of my chapters, but inadequately. What was missing was the intermediate step, someone who had already "queered" him so that I could make the argument that his interest in Lorca was as a fellow gay writer. I didn't want to make this argument, because it would have been overstretching a bit, from my posture of epistemological skepticism. In other words, I could guess that this is behind some of Hughes's interest in Lorca, but I didn't have enough evidence. It seems clear that Lorca's influence in the US is intersectional (to use a popular term). That is, someone who taps into several dimensions of identity politics at once.

10 Footnotes to Apocryphal Lorca (2): Strayhorn

2. I discovered that Billy Strayhorn had done music for a Lorca play when I was doing reading for a course on jazz that was going to teach, shortly after submitting the final copy-edited and proof-read ms. to the publisher. I read two biographies of Strayhorn. The idea was to take me out of Lorca and into something else. I couldn't have known that I should have been reading about Strayhorn while working on my Lorca book. Once again, the lesson is kind of intellectual humility. Something relatively close to me (jazz, and all things Duke Ellington and Strayhorn) that had enclosed a Lorca reference that escaped my attention. Once again, this discovery confirmed a central thesis of the book: the interest of gay and black intellectuals in Lorca.

10 Footnotes to Apocryphal Lorca (1)

1. One of my chapters dealt with Creeley's "After Lorca" and Spicer's After Lorca but I missed Padgett's "After Lorca." One of my ideas was that New York School poets were the unheralded champions of Lorca, and I had chapters on O'Hara and Koch. I am a great admirer of Padgett, since my high school days, and yet this poem escaped my attention until yesterday, literally, when I was leafing through a copy of his collected poems that I had had since the summer. None of my New York School contacts told me about it; they probably never remembered it existed. I got it for my birthday in August. It is not an extraordinary poem for all of you, maybe, but it demonstrates a nice parodic vein in American Lorquismo. It's got that nice silly repetition vibe going on.

The lesson is a bit of epistemological humility. The new things I discover in the American reception of Lorca are things that are close to me, but that had escaped my attention. I find them when I am not looking for them, but pursuing other interests.

Waltz

A young girl about 15 was playing "Waltz for Debbie" perfectly on the piano. I went around to see whether she had sheet music but she was playing from memory / ear. I felt jealousy.

11

There was a woman who declared herself 1/11 related to Lorca. Her claim was disproven. I was some how involved in this process. The dream went on for quite some time, and morphed into one in which I was at an artist's colony of some kind, but it wasn't clear what my talent was supposed to be.

Short i

I dreamed of reading a scholarly article in which it was demonstrated that the vowel sound of big would make your eyelid itch. This was just one of the points, the only one I remember now, but the idea was that language was connected to the body in verifiable ways. I actually felt my left eyelid itch.

Voicings

So you would basically never play a C major triad chord. CEG. You would normally play a 7th, and maybe some other chord extensions, like the 9th, the 11th, and the 13th. You can leave out the C itself, for a rootless voicing, and the G, which is the fifth. So a C major & chord might be E, B, D, F#, and A, in other words, only one of the notes of the C major triad. You can play 4ths and 6ths too. A fifth can be flatted, an 11th augmented.

You can strip down the voicing, only playing the root and the 3rd or 7th. You can spread it out, playing the root and the 7th at the bottom, and color notes on the top.

But still, you would never play a simplistic triad.

If I could hear this as simply as I hear an iambic pentameter, that would be great.