Stages of intellectual life

 These are my stages, but yours could vary.  For example, maybe the real intellectual stuff happened only beginning in college.  

1. The first stage is an intense and focussed curiosity, directed toward particular things.  For me, this began around 8 when I became very interested in history.  After a while, I switched my interest to mythology, then to poetry.  I was also questioning the religion I was brought up in, etc...  I was a voracious reader. I was trying to become a poet.  

2. In college, my main focus was language learning. I learned Latin, Greek, bettered my French, a smattering of German, maybe a year? I put some effort into my own poetry, but got bigger rewards for being a scholar. I became fluent in Spanish.  I enjoyed taking classes in many subjects.  

3.  Grad school was a bit of let down. Stanford professors were not always great, or superior to what I had experienced at a state school not devoted particularly to the humanities. I didn't appreciate the political atmosphere.  Now I devoted myself to being "brilliant" in scholarship. Writing the dissertation was a bit slow and painful. It was extremely "brilliant" but in a way I don't relate to now as much.  

4.  Assistant professor: I didn't like the politics of it.  I didn't like the mediocrity of my field.  I wrote another book quickly and got tenure at Ohio State. This second book remains the second most cited of my publications, after the first Lorca book.  

5. Early Associate, at Kansas.  Personally unhappy. I had a lot of projects that did not come to fruition. It took me until 2009 to publish a project I had been doing since around 96.  

6. Late Associate. I hit a gold mine with the first Lorca book, also published in 2009.  My scholarship had some depth to it, not merely "brilliance." Two books came out in 2009, I was promoted and won a major research award.   

7. Early full. Got divorced; puttered around endlessly with the second Lorca book, which appeared in 2018.  

8.  Since 2018.  Puttering away endlessly at the Lorca and music book.  I feel my scholarship has depth, but is slow to appear.  Still "brilliant"?  

Empathy

 They say reading novels would increase your empathy, because you are identifying with other people. That might be true for some people.  But  I am skeptical.  Wouldn't the same thing happen when watching movies or tv?  You are identifying yourself with the people through whom the narrative is focalized.  Are people who watch more tv more empathetic? Or is there some magic to the printed page that makes this kind of identification better?  

What about novelists themselves?  They have had to read a lot of novels by other people to learn how to write.  And they are creating these empathy encouraging fictions. But a lot of novelists are jerks, or even worse. I think they can be as prone to narcissism or self-absorption as anyone else. Take Salinger or Neil Gaiman.  

I have read a lot of fiction.  I don't think that this has helped me become more empathetic.  To the extent that this is one of my traits, it is something that I have worked on self-consciously because it is the right thing to do. If I fail in this regard, it is not because I haven't read enough novels.  

My hypothesis is that while reading, we do identify with the protagonist.  In a sense we want what he or she wants, or we want that for him or her.  But in our own lives we are still the main characters. Fictional identification is not, primarily, a form of "empathy," because we are still taking that "main character" approach. We can rationalize flaws in a fictional character the same way we forgive ourselves for our own foibles.   

Some narratives encourage you to identity with gangsters and criminals.  We want Tony Soprano or Walter White to prevail over their enemies, especially when those enemies are presented to us as more brutal than the shows' protagonists. We can accept extreme violence in fictional worlds if we have dehumanized the enemy enough.  Do we have empathy for orcs, or for Lord Voldemort?  

A more relaxed attitude

 I can take a more relaxed attitude toward writing.  

Generally, I want to be clear, concise, accessible to general reader (even if that reader will never read me), free of jargon. No sign-posting.  

But, since I know I can do all of this, and don't have to worry about it.  I can be wordy if I want, on occasion. I can use judicious sign-posting where appropriate.  Etc... The point is to make the process of writing more relaxed, less stringently rule-bound. Maybe that relaxation is the secret ingredient I am missing?  

Getting things wrong, some examples.

 Perloff and Bernstein calling poems "iambic pentameter" when they are not.  http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001165.html

At the time, I commented:  

The Bernstein example is actually worse, because he is making an argument that depends on the lines quoted being in iambic pentameter, the "meter of the empire." Perloff, who wrote her dissertation on rhyme in Yeats, was probably suffering from a moment of inattention, a momentary lapse such as could occur to any of us. She has many competent scansions in her critical works and is one of the contemporary  critics who pays most attention to form.

Whole disciplines based on sandy gr0und. 

Lazy thinking.

I guess we would have to distinguish between random error at the edge (unavoidable) and systemic error. 

Getting it wrong

 I'm interested in how things are misunderstood, or how mistakes get made.  I think the first thing to consider would be that not understanding reality is the base line.  We really don't know very much in the first place, and are prone to cognitive biases.  

The second thing would be to look at language. We think that language gets us somewhere, but, epistemologically speaking, language is inert. It is only as good as the base line of knowledge. We believe we advance through terminology, but our terms cannot be better than our knowledge.  That's why theological debates seem like pointless semantic exercises that lead us no closer to the truth.  A lot of magical thinking depends on putting a linguistic spin on things. (Language is very good at keeping track of what we do know, though. Definitions are important.)

So we have base line ignorance, and a misguided reliance on language.  

What especially intriguing is error among experts, in the exact area of their expertise, as in the replication crisis in the social sciences.  Error is normal, but there ought to be some gold standard, places in which error becomes exceedingly rare.  

***

In the humanities, our research is almost defined by confirmation bias.  We have an intuition taken from reading a literary text. The intuition is a valid piece of information about our own response to the text. Our next step is to bolster the intuition with confirmation from the same text.  We are in the famed hermeneutic circle.  Contrary to what Gadamer argues, most readers won't allow the text to correct them.  They will instead dig in to their reading. The literary text is made of language, so we create a metalanguage to explain it. The rhetorical strength of our writing then convinces other people of the validity of our interpretation.  All of this is fine.  Some intuitions really are better than others, or at least better argued. 

When a certain Lorca scholar sees the 4 palomas in a poem by Lorca as the four evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, with no apparent evidence.  I want to call that a false form of "knowledge." I want to reject a lot of ways of reading and interpreting, as silly as a podcast claiming that autistic children can do telepathy.  But the only real answer is a kind of epistemic humility: I too am wrong (not always, but ignorance is still the baseline assumption.). 

dream of lecture

 I got out of class in time to hear the last part of a lecture by a young woman from Spain. After the QandA, when people had left, I introduced myself to her and apologized for my lateness. Her hand was warm and damp when we shook hands. We started doing someone called 'michi tichi,' or a comparison of personal tastes, like "me gusta," "te gusta..."  I wondered when I woke up whether michi tichi was real thing (it isn't).  

Dream of creatures

 There were these lizard-like creatures that we were taking care of.  They were furry rather than scaly, and the size of small dogs or cats.  They were clingy, but not cuddly, and we had to watch over them so they wouldn't get too close. A lot of moving from one room to another. I was relieved to wake up and find out that this was a dream and I wasn't responsible for these icky things.