Dozens or hundreds?

I came up with a phrase that is germane to the question of audience. I want to put myself in the position of making my work accessible to "hundreds of people rather than dozens." Even "dozens" could be overoptimistic in some contexts, but I think the idea is clear enough. You don't have to be thinking about thousands of readers, but about hundreds.

The context is whether to include technical discussions of music in the book. To write for musicologists would be to write for dozens, considering that the subsection of musicologists interested in this particular topic would be extremely small. Among people in my own field, there are more potential readers. If not hundreds, at least scores.

Plagiarism or intertextuality

Plagiarism or intertextuality? 

Black bodies swing in the southern breeze
Children cut from stomachs hanging
Blood on the roots, blood on the leaves

Protests walk through tired cities
No justice no peace for the world seeing
Black bodies swing in the southern breeze

From their twisted mouth, I heard them plead
“My hands are up, stop shooting”
Blood on his hands blood on his sleeves

Scent of magnolias fresh and sweet
From the sun rotting, from trees dropping
Black bodies sing in the southern breeze

Strange bodied fruit on strange bloody trees
No more weeping, no more wailing
Blood on the roots blood on the leaves

A time to be born, a time for dying
A time to plant, a time to be freed
Black bodies swing in the southern breeze
Blood on the roots blood on the leaves

The original poem is this: 

Southern trees bear strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant south,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh,
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.

I guess the Billie Holiday song is so well known that I would call it an overt homage. But on the other hand, not having at least an overt indication of the source of the most powerful lines is bad, since someone could read the poem without knowing anything at all about the original and never be the wiser. And the updating of a poem about lynching to a poem about BLM has to do something more, transform the text a little more. The parts not found in the original poem are very badly written in comparison with the power of the original text.  

Bridging the Gap

I can write a talk fluently, and the words just come flowing out. I have something to say so I just write it down. For example, I compiled in a few hours a good portion of a talk I will give later this year, about 2,000 words, or a third of the talk. It should be that easy to write a talk like that, especially if, like me, you think a talk should be spoken language rather than the reading aloud of written language.

It should also be easy to write a blog post. It shouldn't be harder than writing an email to a friend. Registers of discourse (formality or informality) and stylistic refinement can be adjusted, if the email has to be worded in a particular way for tone, but let's say that there will be a baseline in which you can just write, the way you can just talk if called upon to do so.

To write a chapter of a book, though, is painstaking work, much slower than these other forms of writing. This shows that, in some sense, what is preventing you from writing more fluidly in real time is a kind of block caused by the expectations of the genre in which you are working. You should just be able to write as fast as you can think, and worry about levels of academic formality at a later stage.

People who are stuck writing need to write on a blog, or in an email to a colleague.  Of course, there will be times in which the search for a very precise expression will slow down the process, but that won't be  the case for most paragraphs.

The Next Talk

My next talk after Madrid will be at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette, invited by a frequent commenter to this blog. My topic will be "Cultural Geographies of Lorca: From Translation to Musical Adaptation."  These talks always help me clarify my ideas by presenting them to a new group of people. I have given several hour-long talks about Lorca, at Iowa City, Harvard, Córdoba, Tallahassee, and the one coming up next month in Madrid. It almost isn't worth it to me any more to talk about Lorca for 20 minutes, especially since I have to play musical examples for at least 12 minutes.   

Age

Age is wasted on the agèd.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Drink is wasted on the drunk.
Nah.  Not really.

Waste is wasted on waste.
May be.

[The singers continue to improvise on this theme]. 

Safety

A new journal for which I just reviewed an article proposes to be a "safe space."  It's hard to know what that means. As this discourse filters into new spaces it loses some of its meaning.

A book on images for blind people

Mitchell, in an interview said that his Iconology is a book about "what you would imagine pictures were if you couldn't see them, but could just hear what people said about them."

It would be an interesting question to put the word music in this sentence.