Product

I like putting emphasis on producing a finished product. If we emphasize process too much, then we lose sight of the goal. Take the finished product you want to see, imagine it in your mind, then reverse-engineer it. The process you need is a way of getting there. All those "shitty first drafts" and "rough drafts" should be invisible to the reader of the final product.

Writing as Product, not Process

I envision writing as a product, not a process. I think an over-emphasis on the process itself is damaging in that it prevents us from envisioning the final product that we are aiming for. I call this the translators fallacy: suppose the translator goes back and forth between the words "vertigo" and "dizziness" a half-dozen times, finally settling on "dizziness." The translator can write a beautiful essay explaining the process, but ultimately the reader of the translation only has the final result, one work of the other. It doesn't matter if a sentence is revised many times if the end-result is not better.

There should be, I feel, a base-line first-draft style that is serviceable and produced with some degree of fluency. Revisions of style might still be laborious, but they will make something good even better.

Musicking

 I'm reading Christopher Small's Musicking. I"m pretty sure I'm allergic to this kind of writing, which actually tells me nothing that I do not already know. It's pretty much how we are supposed to feel about music, that it is a process rather than a product, that the Western tradition reifies it in often unhelpful ways.  I just happen to hate every sentence of it.  

For example, a parenthetical aside: "there is evidence that many of the early producers of sound films deliberately used classically trained musicians to compose music so as to enhance the social prestige of their product." This seems reasonable enough, but on closer examination it collapses. Almost everyone who could have or would have composed music for films in this period was "classically trained" in the trivial sense. It is not easy to compose a film score without such training, in the absence of later electronics generated by computers. Even Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn didn't write a jazz soundtrack for a full length feature until 1959.  

The "deliberately" sounds off to me, as does the implied motive. Maybe the movie producers simply had no different or better ideas of what kind of music to use. I even dislike the phrase "there is evidence" in this context. It lends almost too much weight to the insight, which otherwise might seem banal. 

Value Judgments

Everything we do in the humanities entails a value judgment.  Sometimes these value judgments are covert, and sometimes overt. The values can be cultural, political, aesthetic. By writing on a particular author or topic, we are conferring some value: this is something especially worthy of paying attention to.

Many arguments are framed in terms of legitimization and hierarchy. For example, I heard a keynote at the MACHL by Ignacio Sánchez Prado last week that argued for the legitimization of Mexican literature in relation to schemes of Comparative Literature that privilege German and French. He wanted Mexican literature studied as a whole, rather than piecemeal (picking out a few authors out of context). He had valid points, but it was an argument about academic politics in the US, essentially. If arguments get reduced to questions of legitimization, then a self-reflexive tone creeps in to the debate.   The humanities become about justifying their own existence as such. But, I would point out, we can only justify their own existence by being humanities, not mere proxies for other kinds of hierarchies.

***

Hence my resistance to anti-elitism. It seems to me that what the elitism / anti elitism debate does is to frame the question of legitimization in wretched ways.

So (position 1) the elite cultural product is better (elitism) because it is elite. That is, oriented toward a smaller, more selective, more educated group of people.

Or: because elitism is bad, this kind of product is to be denigrated. Anything popular (anti-elitist) is good simply by virtue of resisting elitism.

It is easy to see the crudeness of this thinking. An elite poem could be bad in its own way, because it could require a vast amount of literary culture to understand but still be quite bad in other ways.

A popular song could be good because it is good (not because it is popular). In other words, the value of the poem / song has no relation to the social value given to it by elitists (or elites) and anti-elites.

Ortega y Gasset praised the avant-garde because it was elitist, and thus had the useful function of separating the elite from his dreaded masses. He even says at one point in his essay that he isn't actually fond of this form of art, that it has not produced much of artistic value yet.

What I'm suggesting here is that aesthetic value is actually a more progressive and subtle instrument to use than the superimposition of political values onto the aesthetic.



***

On the bad poetry front, I've purchased a used copy of a Rod McKuen book. I'm planning an hommage.

Product

Here are some posts of mine in which I argue that we should emphasize product, and productivity, over process. (At least the first two posts.)

Bialosky

Here is another likely source for a passage in Bialosky's book--one not noted by Logan:

The poem describes a person who is wealthy, well educated, mannerly, and admired by the people in his town. 

The song "Richard Cory", written by Paul Simon and recorded by Simon & Garfunkel for their second studio album, Sounds of Silence, was based on this poem. 

 At his death, many critics^[who?] considered Robinson the greatest poet in the United States. He is now best remembered for his short poems characterizing various residents of Tilbury Town, which was based on his hometown, Gardiner, Maine. A quiet, introverted man, Robinson never married and became legendary for his reclusiveness.  (wikipedia entry on "Richard Cory.") 

Bialosky writes:

The poem describes a wealthy, educated gentleman who is admired by his community. 

It is no wonder that the poem endures nearly a century after it first appeared, adapted into a song by Paul Simon, and that its maker, Edgar Arlington Robinson--himself a quiet, introspective, reclusive man--was considered one of the greatest poets in America at the time of his death.  

I suspect that there are many other passages in her book that are cribbed from wikipedia, beyond what Logan found. This is a borderline case that might not qualify as full-blown plagiarism. What interests me here is the general badness of the scholarship. She states that a poem published in the 1890s is a product of "the Great Depression" and says that the poem has lasted nearly a century after its appearance!  She calls the poem a ballad (it is not).

Encylopedias are sources of first resort. We go there first if we don't know anything. Then we find better sources.  And seriously, if you cannot do a simply summary of a poem without echoing this banal wiki, you shouldn't be writing about poetry.  Almost everything of substance in her comments on this poem is taken from the first thing you might google about this poem, including the Simon and Garfunkel song.

Rhythm

in prose is related to the illusion of fluency. A lot of stylistic revisions I make have the aim of fixing unwanted rhythmic hiccups, interruptions of the flow. Once again, the process of writing (how you achieve that flow) is less important than the product, or having achieved that fluency at the end. Unfortunately, few of us are fluent writers in early drafts.

Take that paragraph above, which is basically written on the fly. It's fine for a blog post, but wouldn't really cut it in one of my books. Almost no prose is as well-written rhythmically as poetry. That would be an impossible standard. Of course most poetry doesn't achieve that standard either.

I'm writing something in Spanish now to give as a talk later this month. The rhythm of Spanish prose is quite different because the information structure of sentences is more flexible and sentences tend to be longer, with more seemingly unimportant material in the beginning of sentences, so this makes me conscious of having to achieve a different sort of flow in my writing.

Postnational

I found a book Reading Iberia: Theory / History / Identity (Peter Lang 2007) edited by Helena Buffery, Stuart Davis, and Kirsty Hooper. Hooper's own contribution to this volume is a study of "New Cartographies of Galician Studies: From Literary Nationalism to Postnational Readings." Hooper, a scholar at Liverpool, is one of the main scholars of Galicia who isn't Galician. She is a very good scholar, writing clearly and lucidly.

Hooper talks about how Galician studies itself is bound up in the project of cultural nationalism. A previous scholar, González-Millán, "despite his critique ... still sees the objective of Galician studies as the institutionalization of a Galician national literature (albeit more critically understood) and the creation of a literary canon (albeit one that is now more nuanced)" (128). What she proposes in her conclusion is a "transnational" approach, "focusing attention ... to cultural expressions rising from the newly reformed formations that transcend the nation-state and are instead transnational, intercultural or deterritorialized" (136). If I were a scholar of Galicia I would take this same approach, I think. You would look for voices repressed within Galician culture, for diaspora voices, for non-Galicians writing in Galicia, and for everything else that unsettles the institution.

Needless to say, this new conception corresponds to the ideology of contemporary literary and cultural scholarship itself, with its hunger for everything liminal, interstitial, deterritorialized, trans-, post-, and inter-. Galician studies would not even exist in the first place without the first impulse to institutionalize and canonize. It is the product of nationalism. The search for a more critical approach within this field, then, cannot really go so far as to dissolve the field itself as an object of study.

***

Within exceptionalist thought, the norm is at once the obscure object of desire and fearsome specter of an Institution and a Canon. It is Galician, Catalan, and Basque nationalism that is putting extraordinary pressure on "Hispanic" studies from one direction. The other pressure comes from the internal contradictions of the field. The critique comes from Resina, from the angle of Catalan nationalism, from Silver, with his commitment to the Basques, and internally from people like Elena Delgado, etc... A third area of pressure is from Latin America, which is also part of the field but exposes the field's internalized colonialism. Let me add that I think that this pressure on Hispanism is almost entirely a good thing. Not that I agree with every individual position taken, but that a more critical attitude is needed in general. Where my question arises is how far a critique can go without threatening the institution from which we derive our own paychecks.

Underarm

When I was a little kid, I was very confused by deodorant ads I would see on tv. They talked about underarms, but what they represented typically was an actor applying the product to his or her forearm, close to the inside of the wrist. I think I knew that the place it would be applied would be the armpit, not the forearm, but these commercials created a kind of ambiguity in my mind... They used the term underarm, rather than armpit, so the forearm could also be seen as a kind "underarm."

So the theoretical exercise here is to finish the simile...

"Just as when I was a kid, I was confused by ... So, too, now, I .... " That is your job for the comment section.

Stochastic

Stochastic is a word whose meaning is veiled for me

I've looked it up before, but it does no good

I know the definition will never "stick"

I imagine it as something thick, dark, and mysterious

Legerdemain as well, it might be the protocol for an arcane ritual?

Are these really even words, or the product of my own dreams?

Others know words, their meaning and origins

I must be content with their penumbra

Visual II

Obviously I'm no artist, but I kind of like this one, the product of my first day of this project. Some crumpled up paper on a coffee table, or, on another scale, an abstract sculpture?

Literary

I have been thinking about why the most literary century of music is the nineteenth. It would seem that this is when music becomes more "absolute," more divorced from its origins in singing. Absolute conception of music lead to a disparaging of program music, etc...  We have Schopenhauer's exaltation of music without text.

But this is the same period where literary-musical relations get much richer, in fact. The art song as we know comes to fruition right here, with Schubert. This is the century when opera flourishes, as well. For all the disparaging of program music, we have Berlioz... The "tone poem" gets invented at the end of this period. The genre of the mélodie gets invented in France.

There was art song before romanticism, or course, and opera, and vocal music in the liturgical setting.  Music was mostly vocal before the baroque, in some sense. There were madrigals. But the great literariness of music is the product of a period that also features seemingly anti-literary conceptions.

Even Schonberg, I read yesterday, needed the narrative movement of an opera to structure a larger composition. So this dependence on the literary persists through modernism. The literariness of music in the age of madrigals seems like a different thing to me.

So maybe the divorce of music from poetry is what makes this possible? We have to think of poetry as something unsonglike first, before we can set it to music again? That would be the key to everything. I feel like I have made a major breakthrough in my thinking. Lorca is set to music in a period in which there is no natural relation between poetry and music: this connection must be re-forged in new ways, even though he is steeped in one of the oldest art song traditions in Europe, that of Spain.

***

Also, I woke up to find out I got a raise of 3 large bills. That is rare in my university, and took some special pleading by my chair to the dean. We have a chair from another department this year, and no other previous chair has done this for me. They have done other significant things for me, like proposing me for awards and DP, but have not been able to get me this much (almost 5%).

A Summer Writing Project

[This post is by Thomas Basbøll.]

While Jonathan is in Buenos Aires, he has kindly let me use his blog to do a little meta-reflection on a writing project of mine over at my own blog, Research as a Second Language.

The idea is to write a paper in strict adherence to my own rules, both in terms of product and process. Accordingly, the paper will consist of exactly 40 paragraphs: 3 for the introduction, 5 for background, 5 for theory, 5 for method, 15 for analysis, 5 for implications, and 2 for conclusion. Each paragraph will consist of at least six sentences and at most 200 words. On the process side, I will write one paragraph a day for forty days, 27 minutes at a time, always between 6:30 and 6:57, leaving me 3 minutes for blog-technical matters before posting at 7:00 AM (Copenhagen time). Since the paper will be a defense of the idea that "knowing something" for academic purposes is precisely the ability to produce such paragraphs, I'll really be putting my prose where my mouth is on this one. I'm hoping I come out of it with my dignity intact. Let's see.

I've already written the first three paragraphs, following my own advice about their content: first the world, then the science, then the paper. Next week will be devoted to unpacking the first paragraph into a five-paragraph "background" section. My key sentences for this section are already discernible in that first paragraph:

§4. Universities are supposed to produce and distribute—or, if you prefer, create and conserve—knowledge in society.
§5. "Academic" or "scientific" knowledge provides a gold standard for knowing in general.
§6. Research practices suggest it is the sort of thing that can be discussed by the faculty at conferences and in journal articles.
§7. Teaching practices suggest it is the sort of thing that can be imparted to students in classrooms and textbooks, and tested in written examinations.
§8. "Scholarship" implies school-like conditions and school implies leisure. ("Greek scholastes meant 'one who lives at ease.'")

There it is, then. I've got my work cut out for me. Two and a half hours of it, to be precise.

The origin of parody

 For me, parody arises as I read a poet and then begin to think in phrases that are reminiscent of that poet's style. Then the next poem that occurs to me will fall into that particular cadence. The humor will be secondary, a product of the distance between my imitation and the object being imitated. I can play up this distance, for more comic effect, or simply let this distance be what it is.  There is nothing disrespectful about parody, in the way I practice it. I love Bronk's work, and have been reading it since the late 1980s, I would guess. Even the things I recognize as being not conventionally good as poems elicit my appreciation--for example the excessive use of abstraction or the flatness of tone. What I like is his ability to get away with it, or to play by his own rules. 

I also don't mind being derivative. Why not take all the world offers to you?     

SIGHTINGS

I see cardinal visit backyard feeder 

or in the field, a flash of red among other wild birds.

One sighting is not better than another.  

DERIVATIVE 

These poems are derivative--

imitations of another's work,

more or less good at being that, but nothing more. 

Why not take all the world offers you? 

Tasks vs. Time

Measuring work by time instead of by tasks accomplished is a major trap. It is relatively easy to see why this is so, but not so easy to correct the perception. After all, tasks do require time to be completed. More time spent productively will result in more work. The problem comes in the fact that nobody knows what an "hour's work" is supposed to look like. Is it a paragraph? A few random thoughts in one's head after having read something? A stack of papers graded? An hour-long seminar discussion? An hour's work could result in any one of these end-products. On the other hand, I do know what a paragraph looks like, an article, a book. I care about the product, not the process. Some hours are "better" than others.

If I could crack the nut of task management I wouldn't even need time management! Unless the key to task management is an especially savvy understanding of time itself?

Trabajo, labor, obra

These three words means "work." Trabajo is effort, sweat. Labor is craftmanship, work as value. Obra is the work as product, oeuvre. When you think about your "work," what are you really thinking about? For me it's mostly the second term, labor. The obra is just evidence of previous labor. With trabajo there is too much evidence on the sheer effort involved. Ay qué trabajo me cuesta / quererte como te quiero.

If they furlough us, as they keep threatening to do, they cannot effect labor or obra, only trabajo.

There is no foreignizing translation

Translation goes from A to B.  We think of it as directional, source and target, etc...  We call A foreign and B domestic. 

Foreign is a relational term. A is only "foreign" in relation to B, not intrinsically. In the same way, B is "foreign" in relation to A.  The "foreign" element of translation only exists as a by-product of translation itself. It is produced by the process, not by the "foreignness" of the text itself. What we call a foreignizing translation is one that domesticates in other ways. 

I think we shouldn't use "domestic" either, except in its purely denotative sense. Domestic as familiar, tame, a bit boring.  

The thesaurus gives this range of synonyms for foreign in this sense:  "unfamiliar, unknown, unheard of, strange, alien, exotic, outlandish, odd, peculiar, curious, bizarre, weird, queer, funny; novel, new." It is easy to see the problem here.  We need a term without those connotations, like "second" in "second language acquisition." Lack of familiarity is simply that.   

Opera

This is not a dream, though it has a dream-like flavor in my memory. The Mormon church in the nineteenth century believed in socialism as a matter of principle, and there was a small town run as a communal experiment. Someone had written an opera or musical play of some kind about this town, and we were going to put it on. (Some people in the church, including my older sister.) I would have been 14, let's say, at the time, though I cannot place the date or my exact age with any accuracy. I auditioned for the main part, reading through the part for quite a while. It had notes that were at the top of my range and difficult to reach. Most of it was in a kind of recitative style. There weren't arias that I remember. I got the part, but the composer wanted to charge a certain sum of money for the rights to put it on, so it didn't happen. I was disappointed when my sister told me, but nobody ever mentioned it again. It wasn't that there was a reason for not talking about it, but simply that there was no reason to talk about it. I wasn't disappointed enough to brood about it, and probably nobody else cared more than I did.

What makes this memory peculiar is that it is the memory of something that did not happen. There have been entire decades when I simply did not think about it at all, and it is only recently that I remembered it again, when I was thinking about all the times I have sung or performed music. I think it is a genuine memory because the experiment with Mormon socialism is a historical fact, and too oddly specific to be a spurious product of my imagination. The only thing that would bring things full circle would be to find the opera, somehow, or to see if my mom remembers something about it.

Tape recorder

 I extended the method a bit by improvising into the tape recorder, just talking out loud for 10 minutes. I can use that tomorrow to begin writing. By "tape recorder" I mean phone, in the voice memo app. Knowing me, I won't even listen to it, but just try to remember what I said. Same difference. Knowing the recording is there is enough.  My speech is halting, not at all fluent. All the better. 

Improvisation is how we have conversations in real life. We don't script them because we don't know what the other person will say and there will always be uncertainty.  

***

I came up with this idea for an article on translation as the poet's workshop.  I'm sure others have thought of this but here it is:

Translating is the best way of becoming a poet, or working on one's poetic acumen. 

The history of translation bears this out. The history of translation is not an insistence on the translator's "invisibility," as Venuti argues.  

In the first place, there is a close reading of the original text in all its dimensions. Prosodical, semantic, aesthetic, cultural. Every word of the text is relevant, even the and and. In some sense those little function words are crucial, as Ron Padgett says.  

Secondly, there is the composition of a new text, where the poet practices writing poetry. Once again, with all the dimensions of poetic craft.  

Thirdly, there is a reflection on the relation between A and B, the reading part of translation and the writing part. 

It doesn't matter whether anyone thinks the translation is bad or good, from the perspective of this workshopping mentality.  The learning takes place no matter what because the end product is not the poem, but the poet. Seemingly bad results are more interesting. Why did they occur? If you can figure out why, then there is probably something to reflect on.  

***

Chinese poetry has highly developed prosodic rules. It is constrained worse than Mallarmé or Oulipo. Translation of Chinese poetry into English is almost free verse, and the image is supreme. Logopeia, which may or may not be present, depending on the poet, is effaced in translation itself.  So we get Charles Simic effect: no musicality, no attention to language, only the image or metaphor. 

Free verse works in two contradictory ways: it is a technical innovation, and highly crafted... or else it is simply prose broken into lines. Few readers are confident enough to reach judgment, because the translator's free verse is unlikely to be like that of Ezra Pound's, but cannot be dismissed either, because the translator might be thinking about sound, or not as the case might be. 

Contemporary readers cannot tolerate translations into metrical verse or rhyme. Yet that was standard practice for centuries. Venuti treats that as the same as free verse translation: an emphasis on fluency and transparency.  

A Way Of Talking To One Another

Everyone has their own pet ideas and fetishes. Cada loco con su tema. Different Strokes for different folks. To each his own. One man's meat is another man's poison. De gustibus non est disputandum. There is an ur-Proverb that goes like this: "People are different from one another." Another ur-Proverb is "You are to be defined by the people you are with." Arrímate a los buenos y serás uno de ellos. Birds of a feather flock together. No con quien naces sino con quien paces. So put them together and you will have groups of people thinking in different ways but in groups of like-minded folks.

My emphasis on metanarratives is a way of placing people's particular obsessions in contact with one another. It helps that metanarratives are all about how one thing is different from something else, but that structurally they obey certain laws.

You'd expect modernization to run rough-shod over national differences. Indeed. Yet these national differences are themselves the product of a modern discourse, as well as a reaction to modernization.