Yet more...

Poetry foundation on Cummings: 

Cummings decided to become a poet when he was still a child. Between the ages of eight and twenty-two, he wrote a poem a day, exploring many traditional poetic forms. By the time he was in Harvard in 1916, modern poetry had caught his interest. He began to write avant-garde poems in which conventional punctuation and syntax were ignored in favor of a dynamic use of language. 

Bialosky: 

Cummings composed poetry as a child, writing a poem a day from the age of eight until twenty-two. He experimented with form and language to create his unique avant-garde style, sometimes employing invented words, turning nouns into verbs, and avoiding standard use of punctuation and capitalization. 

I would bet that this is one of Bialosky's (unattributed) sources. The language is changed enough so it doesn't seem like plagiarism of language, and the ideas are standard enough (everyone knows that about Cummings). Ironically, the biographical detail here is the most specific thing.    

Bizarro scholarship

The Mediterranean: Adult Education LandmarksP Mayo - The Palgrave International Handbook on Adult and …, 2018... There were experiments in community theatre as the La Barraca (the Shack) project which evenextended its activities to Harlem in New York City and which were directed and led by thenGranada-born law student, Federico Garcia Lorca, one of Andalucía's and Spain's ...

I got that google alert this morning. The Barraca never went to Harlem, let's just say that much. Lorca was a law student at one time, but to identity him as that at the time of La Barraca is bizarre, both mistaken (because he studied law a decade earlier) and entirely irrelevant.  La Barraca was not a "community theatre" group but a traveling one, that brought classic works of Golden age drama to Spanish villages. (I wouldn't translate it as shack, either. Look at a dictionary and find the translation that has most to do with theater in the open air.)

Since I don't have the complete work in front of me I don't want to be too hasty in judging it, but still... Imagine someone citing this as a legitimate scholarly source.  

More...

Poetry foundation on Bishop

Her father died before she was a year old. Her mother suffered through serious bouts of mental instability and was permanently committed to an institution when Elizabeth was only five years old.

Bialosky (p. 162):  

Her father died before she was a year old. After suffering from mental instability, her mother was committed to an institution. Elizabeth Bishop was five.  

 Here is a stream of twenty five words in which three are not present in the original (if we count suffered and suffering as the same word.) Defenders will say that there are only so many ways to state basic biographical facts.  But statistically speaking, the odds are against such a heavy coincidence of language. This is not mentioned in Logan's review, because he only went after some of the most egregious examples of the verbatim borrowing of phrasing. Her defenders point out that most of the borrowing is biographical, and this would bear out that (partial) excuse.  Still, as part of the overall pattern this does not look good.

A modest problem

Poems online are often represented with every line centered on the screen. 

This is incorrect: poems should not be centered on the screen, but reproduced according to their original typography.  I even had a graduate student turn in a paper 

with her poetry quotes centered on the page (each line that is). We must put an end to this for the integrity of the art form. 

Do not center

each line 

of the damned poem.  

Never link to a site that engages in this heinous practice.

This is a modest problem that we can tackle together. Impeaching Trump, ending sexual harassment in among the stars (whether in astronomy or Hollywood) are things I can do very little about.  But I can try to stop people from citing poems incorrectly, and I can promote the wearing of bowler hats.  

A Scam

Suppose you offered free gambling tips for a limited amount of time.  People call in a number and are advised to bet for or against a given team.  The catch: the hotline tells half the people to bet on one team and half on the other.  So if 10,000 people call, then 5,000 will be winners. You can offer them the chance to get another tip. The same thing happens, and half of them are winners, or 2,500. That quarter or so of the original group starts to think this tipline is something special. Then by the time you whittle it down to people who have won six bets in a row or so, they think this gambling advice is golden and will be willing to pay for the previously free tips.  They will buy a subscription to your service.

No matter which team wins, half the people will win their bet any given week.  People who bet on contests where the odds are against them will feel especially lucky.  

Indignant

Here's a fragment of another long poem by Cashberg, written in the mid 50s.  You can see that Ashbery's style of the md-seventies is heavily indebted to Cashberg's:


As we sifted through the hotel archives of past indignations

the white hot edges of them burned through our memory,

though the root causes were forgotten: the way the word demotic

does not belong, itself, to any vernacular, and thus was misunderstood

by those to whom it was directed. They were right to be insulted,

perhaps.  So too, the prize designed for the undiscovered village crank

genius went, as always, to the Princeton professor du jour.  Are you getting this down?

Are you taking notes quickly enough, ma cherie? I thought not.

My sprezzetura was taken as simple carelessness, but to correct the mistake

would have made it all the worse, limping into twilight-burnished

corridors, under cover of stale leaves...





  

Walking bass (ii)

One youtube video showed me how to play walking bass in the piano.  Basically, you can just set a timer for 10 or 15 minutes, and metronome to a slowish tempo, choose a chord progression, and just walk with it until the timer rings. Apply as many concepts as you want to or can. Repeat in a different key or with a different chord progression. You can put a rootless voicing in the right hand, like a 3 and 7 or 3,6,9.

What this video, by Dave Frank, taught me is that a bass line is a melody. Since I can write melodies I can write bass lines.

The amazing thing is that after doing this with a few progressions, I found I could do it my head thinking of very precise notes rather than just vaguely.  I did a 2/5/1 in Bflat and then in C, a blues progression in C, and then a 1/6/2/5. I also wrote a bass line for the A section of "Lulu's Back in Town."

I'm not good at it yet, of course, but I made very rapid progress, from barely being able to play one at all to being able to play one with some fluency. When I don't set a metronome I just continually speed up.

This will provide a different kind of left hand for my playing, as opposed to my usual block chords.