Each day is held in a different place, so today we went down to an old university building on San Bernardo. The quality has been so-so, so far. People seem to think that a talk consists of a list of things that you go through one by one, rather than an argument that you support through evidence. One of the talks was ok, a most and very complete, competent survey of themes and styles in Libro de poemas. It stood out because the others were not very good. I should be learning things of significance, because although I am a specialist you can always learn. But I haven't been. Extreme specialization leads to a focus on very small, insignificant details. Those details are only imaginatively realized if they are in support of an argument.
I was going to just skip out in the afternoon after my siesta, but as I was leaving the Resi to take a walk someone offered me a share of their taxi ride down to San B., so I got in and went: it was a session of poets reading Lorca poems as well as their own poems, bad Lorca pastiches.
Afterwards, a guy asked me about references for a dissertation he wanted to write on Lorca and theology. He didn't have much ideas about theology or what he wanted to do. I told him to go from the explicit to the implicit, to have a solid base in actually palpable things. Another guy button-holed me to take about something else I wasn't interested in.
Then I went down to Callao and to the Central bookstore. Walking into the poetry room there always gives me a thrill. There is so much, and I felt my elation surge as I entered. Of course, I only bought two books after all that. I've been to 3 bookstores and acquired 6 books, 2 each place.
Tomorrow we stay in the Resi, which means I have still have to take a walk somewhere else. The major Lorca scholar from Granada came today, we had lunch along with other fairly good speaker from today.
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[UPDATE] Dinner with Laura García Lorca, (Lorca's niece) and her husband, the major scholar from Granada. It was great to talk about my project on musical adaptations of Lorca with people who know these things from the inside.
1 comment:
It still trips me out that Laura is in charge of this. I met her when I was 8 and she 11 and she came with Francisco to our pueblo. I had been instructed to play with her but she was too old and famous and preoccupied with behaving well, and she sat in her chair being attentive. She was blond and very Spanish, like the older girls in my school in Madrid.
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