Dream of Story

I  had written a story with some erotic twist with the title "The Q of the Queue."  I was surprised to see it was ranked #1 on a particular website called *********, since I did not remember having uploaded it there.  I was trying to read the comments on the story, but I couldn't find them. 

Dream of Art Tatum

 A child of mine or younger sibling was playing exact transcriptions of Art Tatum's recording of "Dardenella." I was envious of this. Waking up, I realized that I did know every note of this in my head, even though I cannot play it. 

A combo

 Combine the found ms. trope and the apocryphal translation trope in DQ. That is a powerful device. Does Cervantes also invent the unreliable narrator, when he questions Cide Hamete's perspective? When he says that the Arab author might be lying because he is an Arab? Would that perspective been taken ironically, or at face value, in the 17th century?  

The found manuscript trope

 I was thinking of this with the Quijote, which purports to be a translation of a found manuscript written in Arabic.  Where did this trope come from? Was Cervantes the first to use it?

Well, it is actually a feature of the novels Cervantes was parodying, like Amadís de Gaula. I should have thought of this first. But, by parodying this trope, rather than using it in earnest, Cervantes was the first in using it to highlight rather than diminish fictionality. His is the first metafictional use of the device, then. 

I'm probably wrong about this, since I haven't read Amadís.  

Dream of magical editor

 This dream was quite long and involved, about trying to track down a magical editor, who had the capacity to see your work for what it was and offer just the right comment about it, even in rejection. The editor was also a kind of writing guru, and at the end we were taking a workshop from him. 

(There were other stages in the search. One person who we thought it might be was William Something, and the woman I was working with on the search met with someone of the same name under false pretenses, pretending there was a scholarship opportunity.  It turned out to be someone else of the same name as this editor. At times in the dream, I myself was this woman, or was seeing things from her perspective.)

There were several exercises in the workshop. One was thinking of something disgusting, and then retaining that image in the mind for a few seconds. Mine had to do with chewing gum, something I do find disgusting. At the end of the dream, I was holding forth about how I wanted to pursue insight or intuition in my writing, not style.  That you could never just take all you had learned from past writing and then produce a new poem out of it (a bag of tricks) but had to start afresh with each new poem. Of course, you can use techniques or stylistic devices you've practiced, or used before, but you cannot just rely on those completely.   

Here's my original "Delusions of Mediocrity Poem"

 Delusions of mediocrity 

 

 

I turn 55 in the summer of 2015. My friend the poet Ken Irby dies. 

 

I’ve been to Argentina that summer and start running when I get back. 

 

I am no longer President of the University Senate. 

 

Pet-sitting at my girlfriend’s house while she is on a trip (dog, chickens)

 

I begin to fool around on her electric piano. I’ve heard there’s something

 

called a tri-tone substitution, so I try it out. Also, that you can replace

 

the tonic with the iii chord. Using these simple ideas, I write my first song.

 

I can hardly play piano—lessons as a kid and all that—but I know elementary

 

concepts of music theory (apparently). I write a few more songs 

 

on a cheap keyboard I have in my own apartment. I’m playing every day

 

by now. My songs all sound similar to one another, because I am exploring 

 

a few ideas, but I learn more keys and gradually branch out. My lyrics are 

 

not good. “Like stars emerging on a cloudless night / We got together and

 

it felt so right. / Let’s live a life together, / in sweet harmony.” I struggle to 

 

write down the music using free music notation software. (It’s hard to use

 

that phrase in a poem, isn’t it?). In September I run my first 5k.

 

I go running on campus one day, though, and have asthma attack. In October 

 

my friend loses use of both arms in bicycle accident, temporarily.  

 

I help to nurse her back to health.

 

 I take her 

 

to Davis to celebrate my mom’s 80^th birthday in November, and to Austin

 

in January. My sister has Semantic Dementia and lives in Davis too.

 

She is musician and poet too, but cannot read, or read music, any more. 

 

She has lost many words, especially nouns and proper names. 

 

She does not know my name any more.  

 

Cared for by my mother and by Norbie, she is cheerful. Norbie,

 

her husband, my new brother-in-law, has loved her for years and 

 

pokes gentle fun at me, calling me Professor Mayhew and 

 

exaggerating the importance of my Senate Presidency.       

 

 

In 2016 I play piano every day except when traveling. We go

 

to Austin (as I’ve already mentioned), Tallahassee, and Cuba. Getting back

 

to my songs, I write more, back from Cuba. One uses the chord changes 

 

to “Bemsha Swing,” by Thelonious Monk. Another two use the progression to

 

“Hit the Road Jack,” the so-called “Flamenco cadence.” I have recorded 

 

some songs at the studio in the public library. My playing is terrible, 

 

hesitant, too staccato, dynamically insensitive, but I suffer from “delusions

 

of mediocrity.” The idea that I could play as well as amateurs playing 

 

in local bars and coffee shops. Those guys are actually good though, 

 

and I am not, though writing these songs gives me an odd feeling 

 

that for too long I have blocked myself off from the wellsprings of my own

 

creativity. That sounds awkward in a poem too. It is too explanatory and 

 

discursive. Creativity has become a management consultant buzzword 

 

so all the cool poets now are being deliberately unoriginal. Good thing

 

I’m not one of them. Anyway, my songs are inspired by Bill Evans-type

 

sonorities. They are harmonically complex by now, full of colors I find

 

fascinating. Since I’ve been listening to jazz all my life I seem to have

 

a lot of good ideas for songs. Now I finally understand Lorca’s love of 

 

Debussy and Falla. The nuanced chromaticism of his Suites, so different

 

from stereotypical notions of Lorca as poet of duende and 

 

Andalusian Kitsch.  I set a few Lorca poems to music. 

 

I take voice lessons all spring.  I play in front 

 

of the hardware store where they have a piano where everyone can play.

 

Record heat and humidity render it unplayable, though, by mid-summer.

 

Also, in the student union, where there is a grand piano whose keys also

 

begin to stick. 

 

                        I realize I’ve been playing drums, too, for 20 years but rarely in public,

 

typical for my isolated and bookish existence, typical

 

of all the ways I get in my own way, sabotaging my own 

 

happiness through cowardice and asinine, egotistical stoicism. 

 

 

 

It is summer of 2016 now, as you might have guessed. My short un-

 

successful musical career is almost a year old.  We commemorate a year

 

of Ken’s dying and I offer to play a song called “Elegy for Ken Irby” 

 

at Judy’s house. (I once called it “Italian Movie Theme” before I realized

 

that it was an elegy for him.)  Meanwhile my so-called creativity

 

is at a high point. I don’t even care that my poems are bad 

 

and write bad poems on purpose that everyone loves, including this one

 

that I conceive of in my head this morning as I run five kilometers. 

 

People like my songs too. Between pride and embarrassment, I settle for

 

a kind of homespun enthusiasm, the way anyone should be enthusiastic

 

about their hobbies, things that make them happy to do from day to day. 

 

That seems better than wondering every day whether I am talented

 

or just a fuck-up.  I am happy and in love with life itself, despite

 

intermittent depression that makes it hard to get through the days, 

 

sometimes. I love my friends and family too, some “hid in death’s dateless 

 

night” but most still living, and of course I love Beth, the 

 

woman I wrote those songs for. Life seems uneventful, at times, but is 

 

actually crammed full of events, good, bad, small, momentous, 

 

I realize. I realize that the next year might be eventful too and 

 

decide to keep my radio dials tuned to as many stations 

 

as possible to see what might happen.    

Title

I dislike your inspirational quotes

though I don't dislike you 

I dislike your facile memes

your taste for abstraction and sentimentality 

"creativity" won't save anyone

from desperation and rage

on a bad day 

a song might be written 

a painting painted

it's still a bad day 

 

MO

 It is a silver morning like any other. I am at my desk. Then the phone rings, or someone raps at the door. I am deep in the machinery of my wits. Reluctantly I rise, I answer the phone or I open the door. And the thought which I had in hand, or almost in hand, is gone. Creative work needs solitude. It needs concentration, without interruptions. It needs the whole sky to fly in, and no eye watching until it comes to that certainty which it aspires to, but does not necessarily have at once. Privacy, then. A place apart — to pace, to chew pencils, to scribble and erase and scribble again.

It was Mary Oliver's birthday yesterday. Here is an example of an attitude I don't identify with. If this is your attitude toward creativity, then you will aspire to write that kind of poem, with pretty, pseudo-profound ideas. I mean, solitude is good, but maybe the interruption will bring its own stimulus. And who wants certainty?   

Antennae

 I don't have a name for it, but when there is a particular beat or horn figure in popular music, with associations from television sit-com theme songs, or top 40 songs from a particular epoch, and they are used for setting to music the poetry of Miguel Hernández, there is a bit of a jolt of disjunction. I want to say "no, no, no, that's not right."  

So musical forms have particular meanings, right? If an opera singer is singing "Anda jaleo," in the style she is accustomed to, that has a meaning, an association. You can like, or not like, anything, but some things seems stylistically incompatible.  

It is hard to theorize, because one's personal reactions are getting in the way. Yet those reactions are the antennae that show me that something is wrong.  

A modern prejudice

 A modern prejudice, peculiarly modern, that sees song lyrics and lyric poetry as separate genres, and the setting of a poem to music as an unusual "hybrid" of two separate art forms. Since my prejudice skews in the opposite direction, I sometimes exaggerate the prevalence of the view of song as a unitary art form, of music as song even when instrumental, and of poetry as musical in quite literal ways. 

Pretentiousness

I hate pretention

I tell myself

but do I? 

In other people, sure

I root it out in myself

too, won't say certain words

the pretentious ones

but is that enough?   

More revisions

If think of revising as "polishing," then are you thinking the poem as a shiny metal object or a pair of shoes? What if you chose another metaphor, like "weathering," exposing the poem to the elements to make it look a bit weather beaten? My point is that we have a choice of how to think of it. You are not stuck with one metaphor, "polishing."

I don't revise much, and a friend said yeah, but that's because you write those Frank O'Hara type poems. Thanks a lot, friend. I realized that you can't make a fetish out of not revising. The way you originally thought to phrase something might be quirky, and you might like that quality of quirkiness, so you keep that phrasing. Or not. You could just write the poem down from memory again and there would be changes. "I know I said I don't revise much but it is also true: / nothing remains the same." 

I am working on poems that just change shape as I add more things to them. I could sit down and write, repeating things (imperfectly) from memory from previous versions. Long poems would seem to work from accretion. Material is added, but also some layers of sediment are compacted or eroded, though a "weathering" process.   

2nd epilogue to "Delusions of Mediocrity"

I think it is Oscar Pettiford playing bass

on this album of Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh.

Later I'll look it up, and change it if I am wrong. 

I had this LP as a kid 

and studied the liner notes with a certain earnestness; 

the song is called "Don't Squawk." 

When the song came on I was reading 

sound of wave in channel 

by Stephen Ratcliffe, and earlier today

I was reading his book about Campion and song

in a coffee shop, after reading a few weeks ago

his letters to and from New York School poet Barbara Guest. 

I am thinking of my poem recently completed

called "Delusions of Mediocrity," and wondering

if I can keep up this vein of flat writing

any more. This diary of uninteresting things

happening, but written in dull language too! But

people liked my poem, the one about how bacon

makes a noise that I didn't quite fathom 

and other things of equal banality;  

other things, too, my distaste for epiphanies  

and phrases like "man's search for meaning," 

redolent of a time when I was young

and people actually talked like that.  

 

Lirio or limo?

 There's a line from a Lorca sonnet: "en doble lirio de caliente espuma."  Early edition had "limo" [slime] instead of "lirio" lily.  We can visualize how the ri can look like an m.  Double lily of hot foam [semen?].  Or double slime [silt] of hot foam? I prefer lirio here. The poet is taking about a lot of white things, like snow, lilies, whiteness itself [blancura]. Limo is more like mud, usually, not white.  

There is a whole poetic trope of white on white, or black on black. Riffaterre talks about it.  

Epilogue

 I was wondering about the sizzle of bacon

but that is just the sound that kind of thing makes

no more mysterious than any other

just like green plants reflects light

that looks green to us

that's our name for that kind of chromatic "sizzle" in our brains

I was hearing people's "vocal fry"

and "up talk" on the radio 

then some nasal person being interviewed too

and judging them for those qualities 

in their voices

I probably shouldn't do that

even if I don't like it 

it will be ok 

it's like judging the odors of herbs when I come in the house

Blue Note

 The guy who did all the iconic Blue Note covers was not a fan of jazz. Somehow that doesn't bother me. 

Chile

 Chilean voters emphatically rejected an ultra-progressive constitution, enumerating 100 rights. The constitution was drafted in a process in which conservative voices were not needed. So now Chile is stuck with its Pinochet-era constitution.  80% of Chileans voted in an earlier election (2 years ago) that they want a new constitution, but this is not exactly what they wanted, I guess. Maybe a run-of-mill centrist constitution would be better than either the Pinochet constitution or the pie-in-the-sky progressive wish list. All the great stuff in the rejected document, the abortion rights and recognition of indigenous rights, will now have to wait until they can get their act together.  

Delusions of Mediocrity

 I remember when I wrote my poem

"Delusions of Mediocrity." It was rejected by several

fine magazines. It was part of my "bad poem" project

so the editors were not wrong. They could have realized 

that it was bad-on-purpose, not bad because I couldn't do 

any better--or not--but it didn't matter. They were

right either way.

                  I don't care anyway for

"fine writing" or lyric epiphanies, and have poor

powers of observation. I can't carry a notebook around

and observe interesting things. That's 

not how my mind works. Mostly in poems, I've found,

the interesting things in life don't fit, they get left out

along with the boring stuff that holds everything together.

For example, I suffered from horrible "earworm" as a kid, with

the line from a translation of Breton, "Jersey Guernsey 

in sombre and illustrious weather." And with the opening of 

Pound's "Seafarer": "May I for my own self / song's truth reckon /

journey's jargon." The suffering was intense 

and persistent, but I had nobody to complain to

since it was of my own doing. (Now this example,

I don't know if it is interesting or dull,

or whether it belongs in this poem at all.) 

                                Meditation cured my earworm

many years later. There are still tunes and phrases 

rattling in the rafters, but I don't fear them

anymore. Perhaps the syndrome is the fear of catchy 

musical and verbal cadences, not the words, 

harmless in themselves.

Regret for the past is pointless, I decided 

in a fit of insomnia last night. Regret implies that 

we can do better now--something far from certain. 

We should "regret" only the present, but try to change it 

at the same time, by making it better, somehow. 

Does that make any sense to you?

                      So much introspection is without value, 

anyway, like keeping score

for a game no longer being played, moving pointless 

mental tokens from one column to another, then never being able

to come up with the same count on successive attempts. 

You get the idea. 

                I spend years introspecting in the wrong way

without gaining much insight into myself or others. 

                                                    Insomnia too 

is a name for something not bad in and of itself. (Sleep

comes as a relief, sure, but we never experience 

that relief, waking up groggy much later.) After all,

insomnia gave birth to this poem, "Delusions of Mediocrity," a second

attempt to write a poem with this brilliant title. 

                                                       Once I read

an article about how not to be a mediocre jazz pianist, but

since "mediocre" means average, then for me 

that would be a vast improvement, right? 

                                    A Chopin waltz 

lies abandoned on the music stand, 

then it is not, as I come back to it again. It is not 

difficult, maybe, but it is unforgiving. Why do my fingers

fly, improvising over "Bemsha Swing" but stumble over themselves

here? Yet I can't play those bebop clichés that sound so good

when other people play them.  

                          I think of my childhood fantasies. 

I wanted to play jazz piano, publish poems 

in magazines (see above), and have a wife who wore lipstick. 

Nothing too ambitious; most of that I've done, though

not exactly in the way I thought it would work out.

None of those things is really what I thought it was

going to be. They are subtly different, but in a way that 

robs them of some portion of their inherent joy

and satisfaction.   

Sometimes I wonder, too, why bacon

sizzles in the pan. I know sound is vibration

but what is vibrating here, the grease? I understand

how a drum makes noise, two drum heads vibrating 

sympathetically and making the air inside 

hum too (when struck with stick), and then

sound waves emanating from there.

                                     The bacon, though,

I do not understand, I'd really like to know, but

it seems dumb to ask.   

 

Song: Some Hypotheses

1. The first model is that the song is a single entity, with words and music essentially inseparable. 

2. Second idea: a single song (words and music together, as in the first model) can be adapted, harmonized, performed, in multiple styles. A folksong becomes a Lied, or is sung in the flamenco style. Every iteration is different, occurs in a new context. A new context of performance/recording and a new context of reception.   

3. A third conception. There is a poetic text, that may or may not have characteristics of the popular song tradition (however that is defined). Someone sets that text to music, in a style that may or may not refer to any particular style associated with that kind of text.  Song is an artistic hybrid, the combination of two artistic media. The music overrides the original text, supplants it. 

4. Should we then view the transformations of (2) as instances of (3)? Changes in the performance / reception of the song introduce a kind of analytic separation into the union of music and words. The song is no longer organically vernacular once it enters into all these other channels of reception.  

I wonder

I wonder what came first, the words or the music? Did someone

"set" the words to music, or was the tune always there? It seems

dumb to ask, but I'd really like to know.

                                            I wonder

why bacon sizzles in the pan. I understand how the drumstick

hits the drum head, causing the air inside the drum

to move, the other dream head vibrating sympathetically 

and the air around the drum carrying the sounds waves, but

I don't know what vibrates in the pan. Is it the grease? 

(I decide not to worry about the "flat' language

of my poems, not to worry about my poor

powers of observation. I hate epiphanies

anyway and "fine writing.") 

                        Why do we need a theory only

of difficult things? Zen cured my ear worm, I might say. 

Tunes still rattle in the rafters, but I don't care about them. 

Other emotions, too, ebb and flow, dread, regret, rancor. 

Joy even. 

        Insomnia is just the fear of insomnia, nobody says they 

have insomnia at 11 in the morning, after all. Earworm is just

the fear of the persistent tune, not the tune itself.    

Revising

Adding: seeing where something is missing, something needs to be expanded.

Subtracting: seeing where you've gone on too long on a topic, or expressed something in too many words.

Reorganizing: seeing where the parts are not in proper order.  

Rewriting: seeing ideas that need to be better expressed. Clearing up confusion. Giving paragraphs a proper shape. Smoothing transitions. 

I get to do another search committee

 I agreed to chair the next search committee, this time for a VAP [visiting asst. prof]. I wanted a small committee, to make it easier to manage, but then we have to have each interest group represented, then they'll probably ask for additional volunteers, so the committee will be half the department once again.