Art Tatum

 I have a book of Tatum transcriptions. I can't play them, aside from a few easier measures here and there, since I don't have impossibly fast fingers, or even medium fast chops, but there are a few revelations. The voice leading is wonderful, with chromatic movement in the left hand. Voicings are full and complex, very cool chords The tune "Moon Glow" has an ending in the A section with quarter note triplets, and Tatum milks the syncopated rhythm for all it's worth. The longer runs are wonderful, though the least playable for me.  Sixteenth notes go by fast at 184 bpm, to be exact, four times that rate. 

My fingers are getting a bit faster, not by doing Tatum runs, but through other exercises. The idea is not to be super fast, but to more comfortable at a moderate tempo.   

Scrambled dream

 These dreams were scrambled. I was sitting in the back row of a comedy award show, squeezed in among famous comics.  They all decided to go to one of the front row, and I felt two women on either side almost on my lap. The comedy show, though, was mostly music.

***

I was at a rehearsal, and did not have my car. I asked my friend Joe if he had a car there. He looked surprised and said "yes" in an inexpressive way. Then I asked him for a ride and he said "no" in an equally neutral tone, with no apparent emotion. I was thinking to myself that I would have given Joe a ride if the situation were reversed.  Maybe Joe doesn't like me?  So I began to walk home. I was dressed in a bathrobe and boxer shorts. (Joe had also been oddly dressed.) I was at my home town high school to begin with and was going west, the direction of the sun in the evening, but everything looked unfamiliar, with tall buildings where none had been when I was growing up. When I got home I told my family about a "ballet" rehearsal, though earlier in the dream I had been in the music department, looking for a piano to play in an unused classroom, where our choir had rehearsed. 

***

Other parts of the dream were too scrambled to remember.   

More on the signature

 A metrical signature is like an accent, or a particular qualitative factor that makes a voice recognizable, or combination of features that make a face into a Gestalt.  Since it's qualitative, it can't be measured, exactly, though it might have some statistical tendencies. 

It is interesting that we use "measure" as our idea of verse. That's what meter means. In older metrical treatises the word favored is "numbers." Meter has to be numerical in some way. The number doesn't give the Gestalt, though.  That would be like saying that human faces are all the same, if they have the same basic components, two eyes, below that a nose, ears on the side, etc... 

I've been thinking

 I've been thinking.  Models of literary infinity.  

The monkey theory.  Monkeys typing will produce the works of Shakespeare, if only you let them type long enough! 

Hjemslev's / Chomsky's idea of an infinite number of sentences in a language. 

Borges's Library of Babel, of course.  

Queneau's sonnets (14 to the 10th power, cent mille millards).  http://emusicale.free.fr/HISTOIRE_DES_ARTS/hda-litterature/QUENEAU-cent_mille_milliards_de_poemes/_cent_mille_milliards.php

Now, Borges's model is the letter, not the word. Queneau's unit is the line of poetry. The linguists' model is syntactic, admitting grammatically correct utterances. 

If you controlled for length, and had a finite dictionary, then the sentences in a language would not be infinite, in purely mathematical terms, but they would be practically infinite, in the sense that the numbers would be inconceivably large. After all, if a sonnet with 10 versions of each line is already in the billions... 

It is impossible to answer the question: think of the largest number that you can, because you could always raise that number to the power of itself, and keep doing that infinitely. For example, 1 followed by a hundred zeros is a commonly given example, but you could raise that number to the power of 1 followed by a hundred zeros.  

Suppose you have a limited language. 10 verbs, 20 nouns, 20 adjectives, etc... Two tenses. A limit number of pronouns and other connecting words.  Now you have syntactic rules as well. How many sentences are there of fewer than 20 words?  It would be possible to generate the possibilities mathematically. I'm sure this has been done.  

***

The other idea is that there are a limited number of plots / archetypes in literature. Literature is finite, because human experience is archetypical, not infinite. You could invent a new plot, but it wouldn't be meaningful or satisfying. 

The idea

 The idea is that metrical mastery is not achieved at the level of the single line, but in the construction of larger structures.  It is pretty simple-minded. It would be like looking at musical composition at the level of the phrase instead of the entire composition. Why would you want to do that?  

In my first draft of this article I realize I didn't articulate how important this step is.  

Metrical signatures

 I was thinking of the concept of metrical signatures: the Gestalt of any given poet in terms of metrical preferences or tendencies. What makes that poet sound like him or her self. 

With Claudio, the enjambment of adj / noun is one element of his signature.  I've found it in Baroque poetry, like Quevedo's "postrera / sombra." There is some of it in Góngora.  Góngora seems to be thinking strophically, not line-by-line, even in stanzas without enjambment.  

Another element of his signature would be what you might call awkward syntax in metrical sound forms, or seeming variability and irregularity, with the simultaneous presence of a strong forward pull in the meter.  

This seems to be virgin territory. Sure, there is a lot on prosody, but it tends to be geared toward establishing the basic facts rather than exploring nuances.  

A dream

 This dream.  I was writing something, like an exam, trying to find scratch paper not used by someone else already. I kept running out of paper, because not that many words fit on each sheet. 

My essay was called about a game that I called "academia." I explained that it was a game in which one developed projects, like cataloging every instance of phenomenon X, or memorizing a certain amount of information.