Scales

I actually like playing scales.  There is a satisfaction in knowing all of them and improvement is very rapid. I want to be able to play all the major scales and then some other modes, like dominant lydian in a few keys. I think it will improve both my jazz and classical playing.

Recording

I watched some youtube videos to see how to connect my keyboard to my computer.  It seemed complicated. Then I read the manual and it just said use a USB cable. I was about to go and buy one when I remembered that I had one hooked up to my printer. I took that off and hooked up my keyboard, and it worked. I recorded myself using "garage band" and the sound was not that of my own keyboard, but of this program's "steinway grand." It sounds pretty good. I recorded a few songs and they sound fine. I didn't even have to do multiple takes. What was in my brain pretty much came out the way I wanted it to. There are some minor imperfections, but I don't really care as long as the overall concept comes through.

So something I thought of as difficult turned out not to be so. I had been getting in my own way.

One thing is a kind of dumb self-doubt. We worry so much about being good enough, but that isn't usually even the question.  I read a book by McClure and was thinking, this is not at all my cup of tea, but I'm sure that this opinion is largely beside the point for McClure himself. Not only would he not care about my opinion, but he really shouldn't care. Where would it get him to know that from a mentality like mine, his work cannot really fully speak. He already knows this, not because of me, but because many people probably don't dig it and writing for them would be pointless.

Dept politics

I can't blog about it in detail because I do not blog anonymously, but my department is going through a political crisis now. There was a particularly contentious meeting I walked out of the other day. The feeling among some is that a colleague should be shamed and publicly ostracized. I do not believe this is a good idea moving forward. This will not be a punishment for this colleague, as people think, but for the group as a whole, which will no longer be able to function collectively.

Patterns of Resonance

I post more when I am working more steadily on research because I am at my computer and generating ideas. Coming up with one idea in a day is actually quite good. A few days ago I came up with the phrase "patterns of resonance," by which I mean tendencies traversing a large number of literary works.

Today I thought of something I haven't been able to name yet, but it is the extra something emerging from a text in its musical setting. The "value added." This is analogous to what occurs in the "domestic residue" (Venuti) of a translation. I got the image in my mind of a dried flower re-releasing its aroma.

***

A person in my circle of acquaintances is an artist. Up to a certain point, I hadn't had many one on one conversations with him, but on one occasion I started to talk to him about literature. He knew some of the beat writers from having been close to Wm. Burroughs who lived in Lawrence, and has read a whole lot of poetry by Ed Dorn or Robt. Creeley, what have you. The other people in our group don't really have this kind of interest, so it is kind of interesting that I can talk to WP about this stuff.  Yesterday he brought me some very rare books from the period of American lit.  We talked about Ted Berrigan too.

***

Today I repeated the exercise of singing the note at the middle of my range first thing in the morning. It was F#3 this time. It is never very far from that G3. !


***

When I am working on a book I regain that feeling of having something to say, of not being a bum. I have that utter self-confidence I once had, and lost, and regained again, and lost....

***

Musical Meaning

I think musical meaning is contextual.  It is meaning for someone particular at a particular time. The meaning of a piece of music is whatever the listener says it is, simplistically speaking. [This is true even if we have an internationalist view of meaning: we still have to posit a listener reconstructing an intention. It still has to be a meaning for someone.] It is pointless to invest too much in one's own interpretations, or to argue that others' interpretations are not valid ones.

The meaning of music directly tied to a literary text will be an extension of the meaning of the text. In other words, since literary meanings are much more directly semantic, they will strongly condition the reception of the musical meaning, providing a set of cues. We can talk about this musical meaning in tension with the meaning of the words of the text, but in that case we will talk about the setting as being inappropriate to the text, not vice-versa.

Other degrees of canonicity

Being "best of category" or best-known representative of a national literature.  Cervantes for Spain. Shakespeare. Goethe, Dante. Or of a century: Lorca for twentieth century Spain.

Celan, for being the best-known European poet of post-war period. Baudelaire for being, well, Baudelaire.

The founders of disciplines or whole schools of literature. Borges.

My Memory

A few days ago I began to read a novel by Paul Bowles that I picked up at a used bookstore. In the prologue, an American man identified only by his last name is at the house of some Moroccans he knows well, in Fez. It is the mid-fifties of the last century. It is midnight and his hosts insists on hiring him a guide to get back to his hotel. There is an argument here, because he doesn't think he needs a guide, but they insist and hire a Berber man, paying him in advance. The streets are very dark and they take a circuitous route. Everything is focalized through the American man's consciousness, but in third person. He tries to take out a flashlight, but the Berber guide thinks it makes up too much noise. There is a discussion of the "Moslem mind" and two perspectives, one minoritizing and one universalizing. The minoritizing perspective is that Westerners will never understand the complications of the Eastern mind. The universalizing perspective is that people are the same everywhere, with just different rituals and gestures. The narrator refers to the minoritizing perspective as hypocritical. There is reference to another Western man, "Moss," who is English. There is a long discussion of how the American man can find his way in the dark very easily through a process almost like echolation, by listening to the echoes of own footprints and to the sound of water flowing in the river. There is obviously something different about tonight, when the city is darker than usual. There is an air of danger here, because of the darkness and what seems the excessive paranoia of the guard.

They get to the hotel. The Berber disappears as the hotel watchman appears quicker than usual. The watchman tells a lie, saying that he wasn't waiting close to the door. There is a narrative digression about lying.  Moss summons the American to his room, and when the door opens, there is another stranger there along with Moss... He wishes he hadn't come to Moss's room.  

***

I read this text carefully, reading the first paragraphs of the book several times and reflecting on everything I read, looking for tropes that I might recognize from other literary works. In short, I read it like a professor. Now I could come in to a class and teach this text easily, without even looking at a it, because I retained all of it. This is just a summary of some important things, but I remember more than this. I would have to look up again the proper names, (Denham?) which have escaped me, except for "Moss." I could do the same with a text of literary theory.  Things jump out at me and I take them to be significant.