Canales

 An opera singer, Carla Canales, has an album out, Duende. It is mostly the Canciones españolas antiguas (big surprise!) in her own arrangements, with some interludes. I see from my email that she was in touch with me in 2016 about it. I'm sure I was not much help, because I take a skeptical and complex attitude toward the duende, rather than the usual American romanticization of it. It look from my email trail that Christopher Maurer put her in touch with me.  

Anyway, I am of two minds here. It is kind of like reinventing the wheel: These songs come up so frequently. I am even singing them myself with my voice teacher. Her approach is original, for sure. 

WAFFLE BOOK

 My daughter gave me a book in the form a waffle, unusually shaped. There was a certain order in which it needed to be eaten in order to get the plot in the right configuration. That's what I thought at first, at least. Then it became clear that the actual printed book was found in the middle of waffle in a plastic bag. There were two possible readings of the book, one in the form of a fixed rhythmic pattern like a drum beat. The other I can no longer specify now that I am awake. 

MG

 I saw a book presentation today by Menchu Gutiérrez, on zoom. It made me think a bit. There are writers I have been following for many years, but about whom I have had no conversations with any else. I haven't written about them either, so my experience is rather private. I did meet Menchu at an homage for Ullán several years ago, and she was surprised that I had read all her books, but largely my experience of her has been almost entirely a private one. What is odd about this is that she is one of my favorite novelists and poets, and I suspect she is a favorite of others too, but this experience is less a private one for the others at the presentation, many of whom knew each other.  

Lemonade

A night of lengthy and intense dreams. 

 I was teaching and I asked a question. One kid shrugged his shoulders, and I called him out: "Don't shrug your shoulders; make an observation about the text." The other students applauded me. We were on zoom but I could see all the students, as though they were in classroom.

Then we decided to go for lemonade in a bar across the street. A woman in the class, older than the rest of the students, collected dollars bills from each of us to pay for it. I thought there would be tax so I tried to give her an extra dollar to cover that; she refused. In the bar I was attempting to pour lemonade into a huge plastic baggy on  the floor. Of course, most of it got on the floor and not in the baggy. I wondered how may dollars worth of lemonade I had spilled. An employee come over with a mop to clean up my spill...  

In the department office, there was a table with papers and junk on it. I took it upon myself to clean it up. I felt very virtuous in doing so, because others were standing around unaware of this mess. It seemed as though I wanted their approval. 

***

Dreams do not represent us at our best or our worst, but simply how we actually are in our own self-constructions. I am not better when I am cleaning up a mess than when I am making one. I am not a better teacher when students are applauding me. I am not even a worse one. 

***

Not a dream: I downloaded a dream diary by Nabokov on kindle: really just a sample that I didn't have to pay for. Of course, the sample consisted of all the preliminary material but none of Nabokov's diary. This has happened to me a lot. This is not a "sample" of the book, but simply an arbitrary number of pages at the beginning. In one case the sample was a long table of contents with none of the poem in the book. 

***

The dreamer interprets the dream. Even selecting the details to list, and giving the telling a certain "slant," is interpretive. There is no intention in the dream, in the sense of a conscious desire to say something in particular. There can be intention in the retelling of it. I could want to impress you, or show you my weakness, or skew the interpretation in a particular direction. The dream is not particularly enigmatic; its themes are usually desire and anxiety in the usual combinations.   

La coscienzia de Zeno

 I'm about half way through the Svevo novel. The neurotic narrator is a bit insufferable. There is a long chapter on quitting (not quitting) smoking, another on the death of his father, another on his courtship and wedding; now I am on a chapter on his early married life. The Italian is easy enough, but I am just not a good fiction reader. I get impatient. The novel is supposed to be psychoanalytic: the narrator writes at the insistence of his therapist. For all that, there is not a great amount of self-knowledge, at least in the way I define self-knowledge. His malattia always seems arbitrary. 

Zeno is in love with Ada; she is the only member of the family who doesn't like him. He is a comic figure and she is serious. Finally, when he asks her to marry him, she says no. Then he proposes to the sister; she also says no. Then, the same night, he proposes to the third sister, Augusta, who is already in love with him. Another foppish man marries Ada.

Dream of campus visit

 I was on a campus visit and having a very pleasant experience. The people seemed very interested in me and all I had to do was be myself. Someone mentioned Stan Lombardo and I started bragging about how I knew Stan, that he and Judy ran the Zen Center here. My interlocutor had translated the Aeneid with Stan, he claimed, but it was clear I knew Stan much better. When he started explaining to me what the Aeneid was, I cut him off.  

I was getting progressively excited and was even planning on accepting the job, only wondering about how I would imagine the commute from Kansas to Kentucky. It was obvious that my partner would not move to Kentucky with me. I didn't have many details about the job I was applying to, and thought of asking whether it would be in the English department. 

We were getting in cars to go somewhere else. It wasn't clear what car I was supposed to get in, but someone eventually said to get in the middle back seat of one of them. In the front passenger seat was X, a woman from the Slavic dept. of KU. 

***

As I awoke I realized that I craved the intellectual stimulation of colleagues. I could have this here, where I am, as well, but I don't because I am only on zoom all the time. The elements that were attractive to me were things that are already here: Stan and Judy, other KU faculty... The initials of the school I was at, UK, are the reverse of KU.  (It must have been UK because I had flown into Lexington Airport.)  

Two Dreams of My Book

 I was in a bookstore; I picked up a book that seemed to be mine and put it under my arm. Then it wasn't there anymore. I picked it up again, and it looked like it was in Italian, not by me, but had cited me in the index. 

***

I got my book in the mail. It had no cover, or a brown cover (dust jacket) without any words or images on it. I thought it would be ok since libraries would throw out the dust jacket anyway. But I was going through the hall in my department showing this non-cover to everyone.