Dante

 

Dante is pretty rad:  

"But since it is required of any theoretical treatment that it not leave its basis implicit, but declare it openly, so that it may be clear with what its argument is concerned, I say, hastening to deal with the question, that I call 'vernacular language' that which infants acquire from those around them when they first begin to distinguish sounds; or, to put it more succinctly, I declare that vernacular language is that which we learn without any formal instruction, by imitating our nurses. There also exists another kind of language, at one remove from us, which the Romans called gramatica [grammar]. The Greeks and some - but not all - other peoples also have this secondary kind of language. Few, however, achieve complete fluency in it, since knowledge of its rules and theory can only be developed through dedication to a lengthy course of study. Of these two kinds of language, the more noble is the vernacular: first, because it was the language originally used by the human race; second, because the whole world employs it, though with different pronunciations and using different words; and third because it is natural to us, while the other is, in contrast, artificial. And this more noble kind of language is what I intend to discuss."

Translation in the liga de hiedra

 I noticed doing review for a tenure candidate at Harvard that translation is a big thing now. Book length projects that claim that translation is foundational / crucial to peninsular studies. Another tenure candidate at Yale last year had a similar book in the works. I also reviewed a book on this, and another book, pre-publication, on a similar topic. There's my 1st Lorca book which also involved translation heavily. Some people cite me in this regard. These projects can be vastly different from one another, but this is a trend of at least 10 years duration that has not peaked yet.  

Another trend is working on music. There are probably 5 or 6 books by well known literary scholars involving music in the peninsula. 

tl dr

 I was writing a guide to writing for undergraduate Spanish students. Things like don't use the passive voice, write only in the present tense when analyzing literary works. Anyway, as the document got longer, I realized that it could be very, very long, but that the shorter it is, the more useful it is. If it is very long, then the whole point of the assignment would be to follow the guide, and I would be constantly saying, see page 44, instead of page 1 or 2.  

Blank book

 The blank book is terrifying... 

For the dreaming poet, though,

It offers more possibilities

Than all the books already filled in

Felski

 Rita Felski cites me in her recent book Hooked about art and attachment. It was in something I wrote that cited her, so it makes sense that she would agree with me.  I had downloaded a sample of the book on my kindle, and hadn't seen the citation, but a friend of mine pointed it out to me today.  

Courtship

 I found in Burke's Rhetoric of Motives and idea about rhetorical courtship, the dynamic, for example, of the pastoral, with its idealized relation between rich and poor. This applies, I think, to the dynamic of patronage in flamenco practices. There is a complex dynamic of degradation and dignification involved. 

Burke's analysis of Kafka's Castle is really convincing, in relation to this. 

***

In the courtship relation, the vernacular musician wants cultural capital, the classical musician wants authenticity and popularity. What I am calling vernacular modernism Ross call "realism." He probably has his reason for this. I don't have to use the same language. What is important is recognizing this is a main feature of modernist music. 

Everyone probably thinks 12-tone is the modernist movement par excellence. It is probably the most disliked, and composers see it both as intellectually prestigious and a bit academic. I remember when my sister was a music major, there was a dept. without any performance at all!  The anti-conservatory. There were a few musicologists, but the dept. was dominated by 12 tone composers like "Dick Swift." That's a name that stuck with me somehow.  I don't think "atonal" is really the right term. There are still tones, and the avoidance of tonality can only be achieved by a very studious method of avoidance I composed a tone row and it had tonal relationships all over it.  Any three notes in a row are part of some hypothetical chord, even the most dissonant intervals. For example, the tritone is in diminished and dominant seven chords, the minor 2nd is in the major 7th chord (inverted). 

 I supposed I could have tried to make it more random sounding, but then it wouldn't be as musical sounding, so how can you win? 

***

Got rejected for in house humanities center fellowship. I tend to think I am one of the best scholars in the humanities in my university, and that my proposal is groundbreaking.  But it is kind of dumb to invest anything more than a minute of moping about a rejection. I put myself through a lot when I was turned down three times for DP.  What good did it do me?  I'm sure this will never happen now. 

Chiasmus

 I took the phrase vernacular modernism, by which I mean all kinds of folkloric or nationalistic elements in classical music, and turned it around to find the phrase modernist vernaculars, by which I mean vernacular musical idioms that undergo a modernist or avant-garde phase, like modern jazz.  These two phenomena are in dialectical relationship. Well, avant-garde jazz might seem more similar to atonal music, or other forms of unvernacular classical music. In Alex Ross's book The Rest is Noise, Charlie Parker sees Stravinsky in a club where he is playing and quotes from The Rite of Spring in his solo.