Dream of Obnoxious Lorca

There was a well known language poet in this dream, one whom I know from facebook but am not rl friends with.  We were separated by a large geographical distance but somehow got into a real life conversation. I explained my Lorca and music project to him, and he said: "why do you have to work with such an obnoxious poet?"  In the dream I wasn't offended, but instead connected the remark to certain aspects of Lorca I don't like. It felt very liberating, actually.  I won't name the poet here since I wouldn't attribute that opinion to him, since it was actually coming from a part of my self. Why I wanted to exteriorize it like that is anyone's guess. I guess the Language Poet crowd did not have that romantic impulse that admirers of Lorca have had.

Graeber from CHE

Once, a colleague and I approached the newly appointed director of our university — a man who was clearly keen to make a name for himself — and tried the following. "We have a plan for how you can make yourself famous," we said. "I’m sure you’re aware this university tops the ranks in percentage of lecturers’ time spent in self-assessment exercises. Imagine that you were to announce you’re going to totally reverse this, and embark on a campaign to eliminate unnecessary paperwork and go back to teaching and learning things again. You’d be instantly on the cover of every magazine in Britain!" He replied, "Well, that certainly sounds appealing. Are you willing to come up with a detailed plan for how this would be done?"

It was a very gentle way of saying, "Don’t be ridiculous." If we had tried to write up a plan, the result would have produced more paperwork than we were all already doing. (In British universities, this even has a name: the "forming committees to discuss the problem of too many committees problem."). 

Flaubert

My writing style was influenced by Flaubert's ideal: a fluid, seamless rhythm with nothing wasted; no needless repetition of words. Sentences and paragraphs are shapely, balanced and varied in shape. There are no poetic rhythms, but the rhythm is carefully crafted as verse. I can easily not write that well, if I am not trying very hard. But the effort does pay off. The Dean told me that several of my letters of support (for a recent nomination) praised the grace of my prose. The grant coordinator told me that my grant applications were far better written than almost anyone else's here.

What Can You Do in 2 Hours?

I could learn most of a page of not too difficult piano music.

Referee an article or two.

Read 120 pages of a novel.

Produce a not too bad drawing of something.

Watch a movie.

Walk six miles.

Shop for, cook and eat a meal.

Memorize two short poems.

Write 8 blog posts.

Write an outline of an article I want to write.

Write an abstract for a conference.

Prepare for and teach an 1:15 minute class.

Listen to music for two hours.

There are many things you can do in two hours. We have 8 hours to sleep, so that leaves 8 blocks of two hours. If you work just four hours a day during the summer, you can do two significant work-related things.

Post Title Would Go Here If I had a Good Title for This Post

Here's an idea I want to try: figure out everything I have control over. Everything for which I am the "decision maker." For an adult, this means discretionary spending, what color socks to wear, what to eat, how to spend free time. For a full professor, it also means allocation of effort on different projects, where I want to focus my attention.

This is what we might call the sphere of personal control or autonomy.  The first revelation I am having is that freedom means that I am the decision maker, not someone else, so freedom and control are the same thing in this sphere.

Having a lot of it is good, but then again it is also more difficult because everything must be decided. The next step would be to exercise optimal choices within this sphere.

You might find that there are constraints that operate within what should be the sphere of personal autonomy.  Suppose you fear wearing colorful socks because people will ridicule you. Also, you would prefer to wear $2,000 suits but there are economic constraints. Autonomy is never absolute.

Then there are cases where you can't really control what you eat, though that should be within that sphere. Or you are addicted to opioids. Then that indicates a problem. Any discrepancy in what is ideally autonomous indicates a level of dysfunction. I can choose to skip a crossword puzzle, or decide that I want to never skip one. If I skip one and feel huge anxiety, then I am addicted.

[This exercise leaves out the things that are not under your sphere of autonomy, ever.  For example, other people's private sphere of autonomy.  We're just not worrying about that right now.  

It also leaves out things from a relationship that impinge on autonomy.  In a healthy relationship, you should still have hobbies that the other person has no say about, things you can go off and do alone without worrying about it.]

What I have discovered, then, is that I do have great personal autonomy, but I haven't quite learned to use it optimally. A lot of the anxiety I have is about how to use time, energy, and money.

The first exercise might be to choose something over which to exercise control over in a week. Start with something easy (for you).  See how difficult or easy it actually turns out to be.  Look for the points of tension.

More Musicality

My point is that we don't really know what we are talking about when we are talking about musicality in poetry.  I propose this as an analytic beginning:

We can talk about it literally, in terms of the sound and rhythms of poetry, and its direct connection to music in genres of sung poetry / vocal music.

Music is also one of the main metaphorical systems for talking about poetry. But on closer examination it is never merely a metaphor (except in merely conventional references!) because of these literal connections. What I call "deep musicality" is that connection between the central metaphor and the physical embodiment.

My assumption is that we know a lot about this, but we don't know exactly what it is that we do know, so we have to write down what we know and see where we are at.  I'm not sure yet whether there are four or twelve kinds of things that people mean when they talk about poetry as "musical."

Visual

I think of myself as much more inclined toward music than toward visual art, but this is probably a fallacy, in that it is not really a zero-sum proposition. There was a lot of nonsense about right versus left brain thinking, but really people are not left-brained in the way that people are left handed. You need both hemispheres of the brain to do anything, and the fact that certain areas of the brain have responsibilities of their own is fairly meaningless. There really aren't "visual learners," etc... We are all very visual (those of us with sight) and we all use our sight in more or less the same way. Of course we can train ourselves to make marks on paper that will be two-dimensional representations of 3-d objects.  Some people are better trained to do that than others, or can become trained more quickly.