The Return to Analysis

I read a review that Marjorie Perloff did of a recent study of Empson, and then I got to thinking that poetic analysis is not so bad after all.  All that great richness of verbal wit, paradox and ambiguity: that is all really great stuff, perhaps.

Really being able to read analytically makes you a kind of master of all kinds of intelligence and critical  thinking. The problem with analysis is that it is done badly, by pointing out the obvious or by trying to make points that are clever but actually incorrect. Instead of close reading, I would suggest deep reading, based on a deeper engagement.

I was in class and telling my students to tell me what the word despojo meant. They would give me the English translation. Then I had to say, when I ask you what a word means, I want you to explain it in Spanish, not give me another word in another language. Secondly, don't give me an equivalent, but explain what it is doing in the text.  Thirdly, look at all the dictionary definitions, not just the first that you find:  

1. m. Acción y efecto de despojar o despojarse.

2. m. Presa o botín del vencedor.

3. m. Vientre, asadura, cabeza y manos de las reses muertas. U. m. en pl. con el mismo significado que en sing.

4. m. Alones, molleja, patas, pescuezo y cabeza de las aves muertas. U. m. en pl. con el mismo significado que en sing.

5. m. Aquello que se ha perdido por el tiempo, por la muerte u otros accidentes. La vida es despojo de la muerte. La hermosura es despojo del tiempo.

6. m. Col. Extracción de los minerales de una vena o filón.

7. m. desus. espolio¹.

8. m. pl. Sobras o residuos. Despojos de la mesa, de la comida.

9. m. pl. Minerales demasiado pobres para ser molidos, que se venden a los lavaderos o propietarios de polveros, los cuales aprovechan el poco metal quecontienen.

10. m. pl. Materiales que se pueden aprovechar de un edificio que se derriba.

11. m. pl. restos mortales.

In the case of the poem we were reading, 2 is the primary meaning, but 5 is also relevant, perhaps 8 and even 7 or 10.  So if you were thinking the spoils of war (despojos), you might also realize that the word spoil is there (something rotten).  If you have the word courtesy, you would be thinking of its origins in the behavior or courtiers.  Even if you throw away some of the definitions as irrelevant, you have to make that decision.

A new microstory

He spent the greater part of each day making a meticulous plan for his activities for the subsequent day.

Microsoft ad on Girls in STEM

That microsoft ad is infuriating. Someone seeing that ad and thinking they have little chance in STEM fields because only 6.7% of women graduate in those fields ignores the fact that women get more STEM degrees then men in biological sciences. You know, like medicine, the field the little girl in the ad wants to study, to find a cure for cancer.

The biggest gap is in engineering and computer science. There is a gap in physics and other hard sciences too, but hardly anyone majors in those in the first place, of either gender.

The 6.7% figure, if not wrong, is meaningless, because psychologically it seems like a deterrent (those are my chances!) while ignoring the higher female college attendance rates (and graduation rates among existing students) in a wide variety of fields, some of them within the STEM rubric. STEM in fact is an arbitrary social construction, taking the scientific fields of the Liberal Arts colleges (chemistry, physics, math, biology) and linking them to the engineering school.

Maypole

I was googling Herrick and found an article that suggested that students did not know what a maypole was, and suggested that they look at source texts in which the word appeared, from some database.

And I was thinking: wouldn't a search from google images or google images give a kind of semantic / visual field that would be much more immediate, showing what a maypole actually looked like?

The article suggested a very laborious approach to something that ought to be intuitive and direct. The author of the article even admits that the other source texts are more opaque than Herrick's poem.  Part of the evocativeness of poetry is in not knowing, exactly, what the referents are.  That vagueness makes it better for the reader, in a way.  Ambergris can seem an almost mythical object.

The article has this very irritating, condescending tone to it.  Contrast to Kenneth Koch's use of the same poem.  Koch seems to think that even little children will grasp the Maypole, something that this other professor thinks is opaque to college students.

2 for 1

I often find myself working on two songs that are virtually mirror images of each other.  One will be a 2-5-1 with a sharp five and sharp 11, the other a 2-5-1 with a similar movement, but the 5 chord will have a 13 and flat 9 instead.  When I first began to write music I was worried about my songs sounding the same, since I used the same ideas (the only ones I had at the time!). Now I realize that working like this makes a lot of sense and is an efficient way for me to develop ideas. I had three or four songs that all contained F maj 7 going to an F min / maj 7.  Now, all my songs could still sound similar to one another in the larger sense, simply because I am working with the ideas that I have for some fairly standard progressions.  I am writing what I can hear and nothing more.

Two Dreams

In the first, I was on some kind of mass transit thing in Buenos Aires. I had to ask the driver where to get out to buy a transit ticket, but he was helping someone in wheel chair.  He tried several places to let her  out, saying: not there, it's a ditch, not there, it's a tunnel.  Then letting the person out, finally, I tried to ask the driver but he didn't know. I wondered why I was speaking English. We got out the same place as the wheel chair woman(I was with someone else, first my daughter and then someone else) and had made some calls. Wayne P showed up with some other friends of ours.  I was still trying with no success to read some kind of transit map.

***

In the second, a  forty-year old man appeared somewhere at the university and we began to talk. When he found out I was in the Humanities, then he made some remark about me being not political.  I said, no, I like to debate politics, as long as you hate Trump like I do. Then he got out some kind of memorial object about his beloved president Reagan. I gave him some speech about how I would love to debate him and be his friend. I said something like, "I don't care that you're wrong, I'm not going to judge you for that." I felt quite sincere and actually thought it would be good to know this person.

Epithet

So consider there are two uses of the adjective:  

The verdant hills of Ireland

A pathetic drunk

A loud-mouthed frat boy

Wise Athena...  

A privileged white dude...  

In these cases the adjective adds information we already associate with the rest of the noun phrase.  So we think of the hills of Ireland as being green,  drunks as being pathetic, etc...  We call this the epithet, and in Spanish, in these cases, we put the adjective before the noun.  

I find this use unsettling, because we can smuggle in a judgment simply with an adjective. If I say "a screaming infant" or a "callow youth," I am making a judgment about an entire category. 

The other uses of the adjective is to distinguish part of the class of nouns from other parts.  So I if I said:

"Contemporary Egyptians knows little about the ancient Egyptians" the adjective is serving that purpose.  In Spanish we put that kind of adjective after the verb. We know this is different because we can omit the epithet and the meaning of the sentence doesn't really change:  

"How I remember the verdant hills of Ireland"

"How I remember the hills of Ireland"

"You are a drunk!"

"You are a pathetic drunk!"  

But if the adjective fulfills the function of distinguishing the meaning is not preserved if the adjective is omitted:  

"I was married to a stingy man" // *"I was married to a man" //. *"The Egyptians know little of the Egyptians." 

There is a technique in which  the poet will put one adjective before and one after:  "rugosa piel inmóvil" (Vicente Aleixandre).  Both adjectives are descriptive, and don't really differ in their function all that much.  It is more of a literary flourish.