Progressive guide to language

 Justice vocabulary.   

This guide discourages us from using terms like "multicultural" and even "diverse." Then do all the DEI offices have to change their names? Sheesh.  The Orwellian euphemizing and sanitizing of language is exhausting and also deeply confusing, and I'm sure that things will change in the next 10 minutes, so that BIPOC (replacing BAME?) will be replaced by some other term. Look, nobody is in favor of overtly offensive language, like the n- word or its equivalent for other groups, but, for example, I know Indians, and they call themselves that (not "native Americans."). The guide encourages us to use the language that members of a group actually use about themselves, but then turns around and forbids that very same language.  I could forbid "Latinx" since that is not how people self-identify (typically). This double-standard runs throughout the guide. 

We cannot say "immature" or "childish" because that is agist.  We cannot say "child pornography," but rather  "child abuse content."  !!!  Who benefits from this change in terminology?  Do blind people object to colloquial expressions like "turn a blind eye," or is this just a conspiracy to make people tongue-tied and unable to object to things. If you are suffering from "famine," do you object to the word "famine"?  

At certain points, the guide says that a word is forbidden, except in reference to a person who uses it of themselves.  So we cannot talk about a "victim," but a "victim" can refer to self as such. Deeply confusing.  

The words "alcoholic" and "addict" are also on the list of words that should not be used. But that is what the 12-step people use in self-reference. This is not a guide based on the preferences of groups, but on the preferences of activists who purport to speak for the groups themselves.  

Could we make the case the euphemism, while not overly evil in all cases, is put in the service of evil in many cases?  With great intentions, of course.  

  

An obvious thing

 A very obvious thing, but Cortázar in a long, long interview talks about the fact that literary writing is not "higher" than other forms of writing, in register, but more exact, stylistically fine-tuned, so that Roberto Arlt's tales of street life in Buenos Aires are written in the exact language they require, being colloquial in this particular instance, but different depending on each writer and the particular world vision. So Cortázar himself does not want to publish anything that isn't exactly right. 

I was thinking of this yesterday, in relation to a Bob Dylan song. It is exactly the language that we would have used in real life in the 1970s or 1960s, like "It's such a drag." 

DEI training

 I took the DEI training today. It was mostly bland, inoffensive, and well-intentioned. There were a few instances of compelled speech, where you had to guess correctly the answer they wanted you to have. The guessing is pretty easy.  The little scenarios seemed contrived to be both obvious and fairly inoffensive. There were little trigger warning [content warnings], etc... It was the product of a private consultant, that comes up with these trainings for large institutions:  Vector Solutions.

Hand speed

 I'm doing a thing where I play one metronome tick a day more than the previous day, while playing triplets and 16ths over chord changes to Autumn Leaves. So I am at 118, and so the triplets are going by at 354, and sixteenth notes at 472.  I'm going to have to slow down the sixteenths and start over at about 100, because they aren't well controlled.  The idea is to gradually increase finger speed, but also mental speed, since you have to be able to decide what to play as well as moving your fingers.  At lower speeds, I would find myself jumping ahead of the metronome, but now the triplets feel like they are a nice velocity. The ideal is to be locked in and relaxed. If I get up to the high 100s, then I will be at 500-600 notes per second--and beyond. It is not just to be fast, but to be clean and articulate at whatever the tempo is.  [I got this exercise from a video by Dave Frank.]  

I'm also learning Waltz for Debbie off a transcription I purchased. This is practice for voicing, or playing different voices at the same time or alternating with various degrees of touch.  Extraordinarily challenging.  

March

 I'm keeping a verse journal in March inspired by Creeley's book Hello, a journal he kept while traveling in 1975 or so.  What I like about this Creeley book is that many people reading might not think it adds up to very much. I myself think that sometimes when I read it. It has many nice moments in it, but it is not loading every rift with ore.  If you edited it and only got the nice bits, you would lose a lot. This, I think, was what the late poet Charles Simic missed about Creeley. I won't even defend Creeley against you if that is not your thing.  Berryman thought he was dull, but really Creeley offers a different quality of emotion from what Berryman was going after. He (Berryman) also thought Wallace Stevens was cold, but I think that is based on an inability to respond to a certain register of affect.  It is like thinking Koch is funny, or O'Hara is casual, or Ashbery is abstruse.  It is not wrong, but it doesn't really get to the thing that you are trying to get at.  

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Vallejo and Hernández both wrote Civil War poetry, in España, aparta de mí este cáliz and Viento del pueblo. Both are great poets, but Vallejo manages to write propaganda poetry that is also great, whereas Hernández falls into rhetorical propaganda, as in his sonnet in honor of the international soldier fallen in Spain.  Vallejo imagines wild scenarios, like the bombing of a cemetery bringing the dead to life again.    

My next class

My next graduate course will be on adaptation, translation, reception. I will be acting department Chair in the Fall, so there is that.  It will merge the concept of a Lorca class focussing on things derived from Lorca (songs, plays, cartoons, translations) and the "interartistic approaches to literature course," which I gave before, but without as strong a focus.  

Reception:  reception often occurs through adaptation. For example, every performance of a play is, in a sense, an adaptation of it. 

Translation.  Translation is also, always, an adaptation. We think of adaptation as novel to film, for example, but that is just case, and not necessarily the paradigm.  

PART ONE: theoretical introduction

PART TWO: canonical authors have a reception; they are canonical because of their reception, including numbers of adaptations.  Example of Lorca. 

PART THREE: Translation theory as applied to Lorca. Apocryphal translation. 

PART FOUR: Ekphrasis and illustration. Visual inspiration for literature, and visual illustration of literature (before and after). Buster Keaton.  

PART FIVE: Dramaturgy.  

PART SIX: Song settings.  

PART SEVEN: Novelizations and films. Plays about Lorca.   

March poem journal

 What if you already knew how to write?

Then you could keep a journal

and not worry too much 

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