More bad design

 A crock pot with locking lid. But the instructions say you do not lock the lid while cooking, since the lid might crack. Presumably the lid is only for taking the pot to a potluck, but if you don't read the instructions... 

A carpet cleaner in a spray bottle. You will inevitably want to spray down onto the stain on your carpet, but the bottle only sprays if held vertically (spraying horizontally and not straight down). 

You cannot use every slot in a power strip / surge protector thing because of issues with the shape of the plugs, angles of adaptors.  There should be larger spaces between the outlets. 

The lightbulb in an oven is attached by screws. You need to unscrew it with screwdriver to change it instead of just changing lightbulb.  

There should be a charging basket. You just place all your devices in the basket, at no special angle, and they will charge.  Instead, each item has its own proprietary charger and must be plugged in.  

A pair of scissors comes in a package of hard plastic that can only be opened safely with ...  a pair of scissors.  

A website for graduate admissions that is cumbersome to use, and doesn't permit you to download files. 

Once standard features, like headphone jacks or places for cd, no longer appear in new generations of computers, phones. 

A menu on a computer program that includes endless options that I do not need. There ought be be a way to customize the menus. I only "insert" page numbers, comments, and page breaks in Microsoft word.  

A diversity training on line that doesn't work without modifying setting on browser in some unspecified way.  

Bad Readers

 Bad readers take things too literally-- or else they try to make something into a wild allegory about something else. They are literal-minded when they should be thinking of figurative language, but they also don't realize it when the poem is naming something very basic. 

According to one critic, the "cuatro palomas" of a certain Lorca poem are the four gospels.  Why? because there are four of them. Nothing else in the poem justifies that, but everything must be made into a symbol of something else.  

So symbol-mongering and literal-mindedness are not opposites: they are both the same mentality, with the same inability to distinguish between the literal and the metaphorical.  

I had to order the book about the "hechos reales." I hope a good article can come out of it.  I reject the idea that "Paca la Coja" from the province of Almería is the "real bride" of Bodas de sangre.  I don't even see it as Lorca transforming some sordid reality into poetry. That's a pretty vulgar theory of literature.  It would be like talking about Wallace Stevens's "real blackbirds."  

Banally, yes, writers do take things from what they know, experience, and think about, but they are creators of fictions. 

  

Another howler

 The Criada in Bernarda Alba is complaining about sexual abuse by Bernarda's husband, who has just died. When the other characters enter, she puts on a false display of grief. The author of the book on Lorca in real life interprets this as a sincere expression of grief, when it is clearly staged for the benefit of Bernarda. This is not even a subtle effect.  

If you don't understand metaphor and irony, you have no business here.  

Matadores

There is pretty funny mistake pointed out in the review cited above. The author of the book on Lorca's "real life" inspiration talks about Leonardo's family being "matadores." The author of the book thinks that this means bullfighters, when in context it means simply "killers." Leonardo's family members have killed the father and older brother of the Bridegroom's family.  Since this is a crucial part of the plot, it is hard to see how you can trust someone who doesn't understand the play itself. In the "real life" incident behind BdS, there is not a family feud like this in the first place. I'm thinking of writing something about literalism in Lorca interpretation. But then I would have to get this fucking book. 

"en Bodas de sangre, a la madre del Novio se le envenena el alma al enterarse de que Leonardo, antiguo novio de la prometida de su único hijo, pertenece a la familia de 'los matadores' (o sea, de los asesinos) de su marido y de su primogénito, en tanto que Caballero parece entenderlo en clave taurina, cuando escribe que era 'miembro de una familia de matadores, elemento costumbrista, casi cliché desde entonces'"

Languages

 Once I wanted to do an MFA workshop on translation here, but, aside from other bureaucratic problems, it turned out that not enough students knew any languages.  Universities are eliminating many languages, and turning classics into "classical studies" with no Greek or Latin. 

***

I've been reading Lydia Davis's essay (part 2), mostly on translation. She also talks about learning some Spanish and Dutch, etc... She has some really great observations about translation in general, and about Proust in particular.  Her essays confirm to me her brilliance over all as a writer. It's not just the same banal thing every translator says. It is a very pragmatic approach, not theoretical in the sense you might be thinking, but not naive or unintelligent either. Her approach to learning Spanish was to read Tom Sawyer, in Spanish. This is an approach I use sometimes: choose a fairly simple or straightforward text in the language you want to learn, and just read without looking up words in the dictionary. It's better to read 100 pages without understanding every single word than to decipher 10 pages completely, with perfect understanding of every word.  

***

You could say most people don't need languages, and you could have education narrowly tailored to what people need. You had an idea of classical education, then, an idea of liberal education with at least some second language as part of it, then an idea of liberal education with nothing particularly difficult left in it.  For a PhD, you used to need a language because scholarship was done in languages other than English, but that is less and less true. Scientists don't need German any more.  

Imagination

"... creo que los panoramas literarios en los que la pulsión inventiva o imaginativa es la predominante producen mejores obras que aquellos donde la creación entendida en un sentido mínimo estrecha hasta la asfixia las posibilidades, generando una estética reconocible y normalizadora."

--Vicente Luis Mora

Here is a book about how Lorca was inspired by real life:  Lorca: basado en hechos reales (Los sucesos que inspiraron sus obras)

https://elpais.com/babelia/2022-01-05/lorca-basado-en-hechos-reales-lo-que-el-poeta-transporto-de-la-vida-a-la-literatura.html?ssm=FB_CM_BABE&fbclid=IwAR2Gn5Ib9eC0sp49of-DPOeq7eb8joV7WPV6XW_H92p2YTfbaWKvvdWNx9w#Echobox=1641367567

I don't know why people don't understand that literature is fictive.  

More collab

 In scientific fields collaboration is the norm. There are distinct roles aside from the principal investigator, like, I suppose, the person who does the stats, everyone who performs the experiments physically.  

In the humanities, the model is much more that you do your own work. There is no lab; there may be a working group. It is much more the model of the arts, where one person writes a symphony or a novel (typically). You don't imagine Proust writing a novel with a friend of his. There are collaborative poem, but they tend to be lighter in nature, and often fail even then.   

***

I had an idea for an article / chapter when I was still lying in bed, before arising. "Lorca's Musical Theater." I could be my next Lorca lecture. The idea is to look at the music in the book Las canciones del teatro de Federico García Lorca and then branch out from there, with the thesis being that this music makes its way into films, other musical works, etc..., or is transformed /rewritten in various ways that have not emerged in the scholarship.  This would be ideal for collaboration with musicologist.  

I sent a trumpet fanfare from the book to my daughter to be recorded. She said it would be playable, though it is strangely notated.  That might be a good addition when I'm giving a lecture. It is a "toque de trompeta floreada y comiquísima." [ornate and very comic]