Dreams and Virus update and Yeatts

I read over some other pages of my dreams, dating back to 2013. I am trying to imagine them as a book. There are certainly enough of them, and enough of them are "good enough."  The idea is that they would be prose-poems of a kind, like my unpublished book Beaches of Northern California.

The key would be the selection of them.

***

I talked to the nurse; she said I had to take my temperature. Of course I have no thermometer and I can't buy one without breaking my quarantine. After I hung up I felt sicker than before the call. She said I could have a fever of 100.4 without knowing it. I don't feel feverish, but am quite tired. I either have a mild case of it / or I don't.

***

Of course, people who weren't productive in the first place now have a perfect excuse not to be productive. I'm feeling that I can write as well sick as well. A lot of what I view as my great flowing of creative energy has happened in relatively adverse circumstances.

***

I recreated "The Wild Swans at Coole" when trying to go to sleep two night ago. I was perfect, but I left out the stanza "Unwearied still, lover by lover / they paddle the cold/  companionable streams or climb the air. / Their hearts have not grown old. / Passion or conquest, wander where they will,/  attend upon them still." I know this stanza, but somehow the poem seemed self-sufficient without it.

Fiction

It used to strike me when people thought studying poetry was an unusual thing. So I would get things like "why not study fiction?"  There is no reason not to study fiction if that is your interest, of course, but nobody would ask the question the other way around. Or they would randomly tell me that they had read a poem in the New Yorker. These are professors of literature I am talking about, not people off the street. It would be like telling a film scholar that you had once seen a movie, as though it were an unusual thing to do.

Or, my department was known for poetry because there were two or three people doing it.

This was when the default was prose, and scholars of poetry and drama were seen as unusual. Know, of course, there is no default to prose, because people don't even see themselves as experts in prose fiction, or any other genre of literature. Maybe the default is that they use novels just to have something to hang their ideology on.

I am not a big reader of fiction. I used to read the standard novelists of the day, who were Bellow, Updike, and Roth when I was young.

I was reading a novel in the airbnb in Granada, by Llamazares. I thought the writing was intolerable. There would be things like: "My girlfriend broke up with me; it was one of the worst days of my life." The plot situations were stereotypical, and the characters barely developed. The main character is a painter, but I didn't actually believe he was a painter. He just seemed too shallow.

Dream of Bland Prose

I dreamed I found a book on my shelves by XXXX, a Spanish friend. I began to read it and it had a good deal of French mixed in randomly at the beginning of phrases. I began thinking how insufferably bland the writing was; then I woke up and realized that was my actual opinion of my friend's writing. I had bought several books by him in Spain on this last trip and realized that I didn't really think he had a lot to say in his prose.

DREAM SONGS

I have been reading over my dreams from the past year. Some are quite good, while others are devoid of any literary merit. There would be seem to be two steps:

having the dream, the raw material

the writing of the dream

Obviously, the dream can be well-written--or not. What makes a good dream-text, though, is the raw material, since the writing is something I can do well, if I try. It won't work to write with great skill a dream of no merit.

Or the other theory would be that writing can make anything worth while.  I am not quite sure. I am not careful about writing them well, since I can always revise them for style. The writing cannot improve the raw material, only represent it with more panache.

It's like when Denby says there are two parts to being a dance critic: seeing the dance, and then writing the article. This is quite clear.

What I am after is a particular relation to the dream material. It cannot be overly admiring (of my own dreams!) or self-congratulatory. Yet clearly there is some interest there for me; I must be saying they are worthy listening to.

Surely the value is the sheer bulk, not simply the the "greatest hits."

Lorca

My friend in Granada, one of the major Lorca scholars, was saying; with Lorca, people never seem to realize when the standard has been set. There is a really great production of a play, and then people want to do a worse one....  [paraphrasing].  It's a mystery.

There was a production of "Diálogo del amargo." The text is a short one, so they did it three times, with a different emphasis each time, and with a lot of added material. I was making the point that they wouldn't fuck around with Samuel Beckett in this way. Beckett demanded that his texts be respected. Lorca didn't live long enough for that. The family did what it could, and got criticized, but now everything is fair game. Ian Gibson was there and liked the play, saying that you had to make every Lorca play about historical memory.

But no. The idea of re-purposing all his works to make them about HIS DEATH is the very definition of the Lorca myth.  Paul J. Smith said this years ago.  

You might say that as an expert in creative re-adaptation I shouldn't mind so much... but I do.

This was the last meeting I had in my ill-fated sabbatical in Spain. After that, the country shut down. I went back to Madrid and then flew back to Lawrence.

Prison Dream

I was in a prison movie in this dream. It was clearly a movie so there was no real risk to it. The idea was that we, the prisoners, had collected some weapons, mostly crowbars, and were going to attack the guards. The outcome was clear, that we would lose the battle eventually when enough guards came out, but it was like a game to see what we could do before that happened. We went out, but the guards looked more like maintenance workers, and it was hard to find any to attack.

The dream / movie was part of some other game, a kind of "generation of narrative effects." Its purpose was very clear, though not so much to me now.

je reviens

I need to go back home now.  Spain is basically shut down.