fuzzy

Since I can't draw well I tend to use a deliberately fuzzy style.  Then the incompetence seems to be on purpose rather than merely bad.  Once in a while something recognizable emerges.  

 

I found this poem I wrote

 "I speak in the passive voice."

No, that's not quite right. 

One would think rocks would get rough with age,
wouldn't you? An argument not worth having,

Camarón told him, he didn't believe it. 
Spinoza told him, he didn't believe it. 

But what? The thinness of strangers? 
Gruel for thought? 

I slept then woke, the usual order. 
I emerged into the daylight.

That curious unfinished quality there, 
a diagnosis cruel as glass in the pond. 

I slipped into a patter designed to fool,
designed to defer or postpone. 

You didn't deserve my deference,
you claimed, my condescension nor my recipes. 

I replaced your walls with something stronger,
but they would be torn down the next day anyway. 

It was worth it for the look on your face. 
You should have seen yourself squirm! 

I showed you better ways to do things. 
I have small hopes for a better life.

Ha!

 I believe this is me:  

"I once invited a kick-ass speaker to campus to give a talk on academic productivity. He gave tons of useful suggestions that I still use all the time. 

When we were leaving the event, a colleague who’d spent 20 years complaining that she couldn’t go up for promotion because she didn’t know how to get herself together and publish anything drawled, “What a disappointing event. I thought he was going to say something interesting and instead he said we need to write every day.”

Bibliographical Fridays

 I've decided to work on bibliographies on Fridays. So I can write m-th and then catch up on references on Fridays. Otherwise, I would wait to the very end to do my works cited and it would take me forever.  

Fulbright Poems

 I never wanted to go to a foreign place and write poetry based on observations, things that I saw there. That would seem forced to me, and I dislike other poets' travelogue or Fulbright fellowship poems. I dislike things that are picturesque like that, rising from the obligation to report on one's immediate surroundings.  

I was in the Basque Country and elated. I had just taught my last class and was retiring.  Everything in Navarre and the Basque Country was wonderful; I saw some sights and tasted some good pintxos and wines. But the euphoria was really coming from within.  

Brilliance

 I used to enjoy my own "brilliance," the "dance of the intellect" in my own head.  Obviously that is a youthful feeling that could cause me embarrassment now, looking back at it and seeing my past immaturity with clarity. Yet thinking in this way I would be the same old guy who might have looked down at someone like me at the time. My past self does not deserve that condescension! In part because I am still that brilliant young self: that is the basis for my current intellectual maturity, such as it is.  It was a necessary step in my development. Now if I had always been mediocre, perhaps I could have worked steadily and accomplished something, but I think starting off hot was the only path for me.  

3 projects

 Right now I have

Article for Cambridge Companion to Modernism, on FGL.

Article for Oxford Companion to FGl: Lorca in English translation. 

The Musical Legacy of Federico García Lorca.  A book on that topic. 

My plan is working M-F.  on these three things.  

The 2 articles are 8,000 words each. 

The book will be 5 chapters, averaging 10,000 words each. 

That's all I got.