Dream of Wallace Stevens Convention

 I was at a Wallace Stevens Convention, though Wallace Stevens didn't come up very much. I was in bed with a woman, but it wasn't sexual at all; those were just the sleeping arrangements. We were back to back. She told me about a citation to my book, in a book called Discourses of Modernity or something like that. 

A dream

 I was taking a dog for a walk but without a leash. When another dog approached us, I lifted up ours in my arms and crossed a street. The dog berated me, saying "bad dog, bad dog" and "bad Prince of Hearts!" Apparently "Prince of Hearts" was my name as far at the dog was concerned.  I told someone about this, but was more surprised by my new name than by the fact that the dog could talk.  

Paradox?

 I got an email from someone who's done a project of setting Spanish poetry to music.  It should be exciting to have them come here. But they want to invite themselves here, have us pay $2000 and hotel / flights, and they feature versions of LGM and Fernando Valverde.  We pay our keynote speaker every year $600, someone we invite, not someone inviting themselves.  

So my own prejudice against LGM wins out? It would be an event my students might enjoy, since I am teaching a course on the topic.  But I listened to the singer and I didn't like him, either.  Do I dislike a lot of the cantautores, or a lot of what they do? Indeed.  

Nutcracker

 We went to a concert this evening featuring Ellington / Srayhorn version of the Nutcracker.  I was thinking of Johnny Hodges and Russell Procope, etc...  as the students were reproducing their parts. The young woman playing the clarinet (Procope's parts) was particularly adept. 

I don't like the original Nutcracker that much, because it is overplayed.  Obviously, though, it had to exist first for the jazz version to come about, much later.  

Typos

 Perloff would spell Harry Mathews name as "Matthews" in more than one book of hers.  In one book I referred to A.R. Ammons as "A.A. Ammons." The pattern might be that a writer one has read a little of, but not devoted attention to, might slip through with a mismemorized name. Perloff mentioned Harry's work, but didn't devote a chapter to him ever. Same with me and Ammons. I once wrote "Zukovsky," but not in print. If people told you they didn't like "Ashberry" or "Alan Ginzburg" you knew they hadn't given them a chance. 

We were taught that people who referred to The Wasteland or Finnegan's Wake were unreliable. Those are classic shibboleths, and a little unfair.  

A normal amount of error, then, is to be expected. Most Matthews are Matthews, not Mathews. There are more Matthews than Mayhews, and I've gotten Mathew / Matthews as misspelling or mispronunciation of my name as well. 

Don't say "but..."

I'm sure there are many people who deserve to be murdered, if we wanted to be a society like that. People say, "I disapprove of murder, but ..." [some justification of the murder]. The but takes away the initial statement. It's like saying, "I'm not sexist, but those women, you know..."  

Once you say it's fine to murder the CEO of a health insurance company, then you could murder archbishops who have covered up child sexual abuse. They are also evil. Then you could draw up lists of other names, and categories of people. 

I've been against the death penalty for many years, because the state sanctioning of killing is pernicious in multiple ways, which you probably know about if you have thought about and researched this issue. Random vigilante killing is something that is thankfully quite rare. It is also pernicious. 

Politicians preserve a badly organized health care insurance system. Those who vote for those politicians are to blame for that. So we are collectively to blame. I'm sure I am the part owner of corrupt corporations, as well. 

What if

 What if the course itself were the destination, and not a step toward some published research, indefinitely deferred? There is more that I can do by teaching the material than by publishing small fragments of it here or there, where maybe nobody will pay it much heed. 

Messiah

I'm singing Messiah tonight as part of the fact/staff choir.  It should be a nice concert.  We have a chamber orchestra and soloists from the voice faculty. Yesterday I went to Vespers, an almost 2 hour concert of holiday music.  

Anyway, at rehearsal I was taking conscious note of the fact that strong metrical beats in the text fall on the 1 or the 3 of the musical measures. This is a banal fact of text setting, so well known that few people even take the time to articulate it. I would say this: everyone would notice an instance in which this rule was not followed. It would sound wrong and jarring.  It would, in fact, be like accenting the wrong syllables while speaking.  

"O thou that tellest good tidings to Zion"  That one's in 3/4 time.  The emboldened syllables fall on the 1.   A lot of the libretto is from Isaiah, with a bit of Luke and Malachi thrown in.  The language doesn't have to be metrical: you can just squeeze the unstressed syllables between the strong beat however you want.   Another kind of obvious thing: you don't need a lot of words. The entire libretto is a few pages long, though the piece would last 3 hours (?). (We are only doing part 1). Mostly, we just repeat the lines over and over again.  Vocal music doesn't have to be wordy. **** I was also listening to some social poetry sung by Paco Ibáñez.  "La poesía es un arma cargada de futuro."  Some of it is super awkward to sing.  "Maldigo la poesía concebida como un lujo cultural por los neutrales."  Ouch.  It's bad poetry in the first place, and it also isn't "cantabile."  The songwriter hasn't constructed a very tuneful melody for it, but uses a kind of lilting, up and down, recitative style.  You can sing prose (Isaiah) but not prosaic poetry of this sort. It's the tone, the string of 3 or 4 unaccented syllables that are difficult to cram in between the beats, the passive voice, the crudity of the sentiment, the Marxist jargon.  "I curse poetry conceived of as a cultural luxury by the neutral ones."   *** So the rules of vocal setting so far:  alignment of beats / no enjambment / wordiness is awkward: a little text goes a long way.  Now I realize why I am a bad lyricist:  I was trying to write words to melodies with a lot of notes.

Converging interests / Jeepers creepers

My two main interests are in prosody and in the musical setting of texts.  Actually, these are the same interest, but stretching out with two diverging paths.  

***

Jeeper creepers where'd you get those peepers / jeepers creepers where'd you get those eyes

If you listen to that song you will find beat one of the eight-measure phrase like this:

Jeepers 

creepers 

where'd you get those 

peepers 

Jeepers 

creepers 

where'd you get those 

eyes

But the one can be displaced by a half beat, coming on the AND of ONE.  That's what happens in the third and seven measures here. The singer might also phrase it so that the accent doesn't fall exactly on the one, in the second measure, for example.  

The poetic meter is trochaic: you can see that if you find the secondary stress on the word get.  

Jeepers Creepers (Remastered 1998)

There is no enjambment in song

 I  had a significant idea last night: there is no enjambment in song. 

With the necessary qualifications. In other words, the syntactic phrase does not continue into another musical phrase (in the normal course of events). When it does, I perceive it as a mistake, or as something jarring, at the very least.  See this version of Claudio poems "Siempre será mi amigo..."  He just stops at the end of a line and awkwardly starts again, with no sense of the continuity of the syntax.  "verdadera ... amistad."  True / friendship. In spoken recitation, this would require a very brief pause, if anything.  

So instead of saying "there is no enjambment" you might say, "there shouldn't be enjambment" in song. Of  course, that is assuming one wants a decently defensible prosody in text setting. 

***

On of the most insightful things I've read on musical prosody (the pairing of music and words) is by Sondheim, in the introduction to his collected lyrics. Not because I share his opinions, or even like, particularly, his songs, but because he has worked out a philosophy of what he wants to do, what works and doesn't, with admirable clarity. You can see his perspective immediately, and he speaks authoritatively. It provides a jumping off point for any other ideas one might have. 

Hemingway died when he was 61, I am 64.

 

The song course

 What do I need to do to get ready for this new song course?

First I should write this blog post. This post will show how much work I've done already, even though I feel I'm at the very beginning of the planning process. One thing I did was to make the poster.   

See how many students are enrolled (18!). Some have studied with me in the past.  

Subscribe to Spotify premium.  Create a playlist for the course (empty so far!). I want to make sure the playlist is not too intimidating. Figure out how to search for profiles.  

Check academic calendar:  classes begin Jan. 21. End, May 8.  (Spring break week of March 17.)

Think about guest speakers?  

The overall shape of the course is in my mind, but vaguely.  

Think about musical survey for students:

                      Do you play / sing / read music? (Instruments).  

                       Favorite genres, composers, songwriters, performers. 

                        What else should I ask them?  Open ended question.  

I should create a folder on my desktop of laptop to include everything in the course.  (Done!)  

Found a document I had started a month ago, called "song course plan."

 Background

 

Antecedents:  

French Song  

Folk music movements. 

 

Falla [classical lieder] 

 

Theoretical

Layers of interpretation

Adaptation studies 

Elements of music 

Prosody!  

 

Rubrics

 

             How to listen to a song.  

Rúbrica para escuchar una “canción de autor”

 

La canción es “the sole example of one preexisting art form being imposed upon another. The words of the poem are not adapted, like film scenarios from plays; they remain unaltered while being tampered with” (Ned Rorem, Settling the Score 293). [Not entirely true… you could make a comic book of a poem and keep all the words of the original poem, or use a piece of music as a score for a ballet, without changing anything]. 

 

I. El texto original. ¿De quién es? Analizar el texto como poema. 

 

El poeta / la poeta: resonancia cultural del texto 

Ritmo y versificación / elementos musicales implícitos / explícitos en el texto

 

II. La música. 

 

Estilo y género. Época. Instrumentación. Elementos musicales (rítmicos, melódicos…). Características afectivas (emociones). 

 

III. La relación entre texto y música. 

 

La canción es una interpretación del poema, es decir: nos lleva a percibir el mensaje del poema de un modo determinado. ¿Cuáles son las preguntas que tenemos que formular para juzgar esta interpretación?  

 

1. Emociones de la melodía / instrumentación / ritmo 

 

2. Preeminencia [relativa] de la música y la letra 

 

3. Comparación con otras canciones con letras del mismo poeta. Conexiones reales con el autor original  

 

4. El énfasis en ciertos versos…  

 

5. El contexto de la recepción. El público. 

 

6. Reacciones personales… [me gusta porque /no me gusta porque ]

 

*7. El propósito de la canción. [canción de amor / canción política / homenaje al poeta] 

 

Poets

 

Góngora

Rosalía de Castro

Machado

Lorca

Hernandez

Goytisolo

Valente?

[Neruda?] 

 

Singer-songwriters 

G. Montero

Serrat

Prada

Ibáñez

 

Flamenco 

Camarón

Linares  

Morente

Poveda

Rosalía

 

Projects

 

Songs

Critical essays

Visual projects for those who don't like to write about music.  

Podcast / playlist 

***

What are the basic elements of creating a song from a text? Probably I would say things like this:

An accented syllable will fall on a strong beat in the music (typically).  The song I am listening to at this exact moment has this line:  "I can ONly give you COUNtry walks in SPRINGtime." The capitalized syllables all fall on beat 1.  I bet you can see where the 3 is?  What happens when the metrical accent is displaced?  

This is an obvious example of something everyone knows already even if they don't know they know it. 

What else? Musical phrases are equivalent to lines or stanzas of poetry. There is a general alignment principle.   

  

Dialect coach

Theories of the vernacular won't be written in the vernacular, typically (Dante.) Vernacular and demotic are not words that belong to that category. That is is not even a paradox, however.  To even recognize the vernacular you have to stand outside of that category. I think of The Sopranos and how Gandolfini had a dialect coach, even though he himself was from NJ.  

Generative metrics

 I guess, the generative metrics people care what makes a verse metrical or not, analogously to what makes a sentence grammatical. It doesn't get very far at answering why metrics exists in the first place. One example is the severe downplaying of rhythm in Fabb and Halle. For them, it's almost as though rhythm were an accidental byproduct of meter, rather than the reason it exists in the first place. Fabb even denies that meter is temporal in character.  

I'm looking again at Cureton, Rhythmic Phrasing to see whether that might be applicable.  

Fabb and Halle

 I checked out their book. Meter in Poetry: A New Theory. (Cambridge 2008). It is an excellent book. No discussion of stanza, verse paragraph. A handful of mentions of enjambment, mostly about the possibility of enjambing within the word--certainly interesting, but more of an exception in most poetic traditions.  The theory of meter is the theory of the metrical line, not of the combination of metrical lines into larger prosodic units. There's very little discussion of relation of poetic prosody to speech prosody.  

(Carlos Piera's chapter on Southern Romance meters in this book is very good.)

That is fine.  It allows me to point out that metrics is very good at analyzing lines of poetry individually, but that there needs to be a whole discipline of the prosody of the unit larger than the line. Lineation is so strong a force that every discussion gravitates toward it.  

Why the "Trump is Hitler" rhetoric didn't win the election for Harris

 1. A certain number of people will vote Republican no matter what.  This category is least likely to be swayed by arguments of this sort.  It would be like me (never having voted for a republican in any election for local or state of national office since being able to vote in 1978) being swayed by a "Bernie is a communist" argument, if I were to choose between Bernie Sanders and Mitt Romney.   

2.  We lived under Trump for 4 years.  It didn't feel like Nazi Germany.  Daily life under Trump was not that different from life under Obama or Biden. 

3.  We've always been told that Republicans are fascists, nazis, etc... The idea is that this time the candidate really is Hitler... But the feeling against Reagan, Bush II, etc... was similar. The average person just responds to the "Republicans are fascist" argument like they do to the "democrats are communist" arguments.  It is just viewed as a kind of political hyperbole. (They boy who cried wolf.)  

4. People didn't like Hitler because he was Hitler, not because he was the reincarnation of some other bad guy from another era.  

5. There's a kind of intellectual laziness here. If one candidate is Hitler, then every one should vote for the non-Hitler candidate, obviously. So you don't have to make a case for this other candidate at all! 

It's like being asked to choose between insipid food and poison.  Logically, you should choose the insipid food, rather than the poison, but wouldn't you prefer a tasty meal, that also won't kill you? 

6. It just seems desperate.  

Reading music

For an odd-numbered interval (3, 5, 7, 9), both notes will be on lines, or both on spaces. Two lines or spaces apart is a third, three is a fifth, etc... 

An even-numbered interval will be on a line and space (2,4,6,8,10). A note, an octave up or down from a space, will be on a line., and vice versa.  C on the bass clef and on the treble will be mirror images.  

So intervals will have certain look on the staff.  You can look and see fourths and fifths and thirds intuitively.  

Art Tatum

 I have a book of Tatum transcriptions. I can't play them, aside from a few easier measures here and there, since I don't have impossibly fast fingers, or even medium fast chops, but there are a few revelations. The voice leading is wonderful, with chromatic movement in the left hand. Voicings are full and complex, very cool chords The tune "Moon Glow" has an ending in the A section with quarter note triplets, and Tatum milks the syncopated rhythm for all it's worth. The longer runs are wonderful, though the least playable for me.  Sixteenth notes go by fast at 184 bpm, to be exact, four times that rate. 

My fingers are getting a bit faster, not by doing Tatum runs, but through other exercises. The idea is not to be super fast, but to more comfortable at a moderate tempo.   

Scrambled dream

 These dreams were scrambled. I was sitting in the back row of a comedy award show, squeezed in among famous comics.  They all decided to go to one of the front row, and I felt two women on either side almost on my lap. The comedy show, though, was mostly music.

***

I was at a rehearsal, and did not have my car. I asked my friend Joe if he had a car there. He looked surprised and said "yes" in an inexpressive way. Then I asked him for a ride and he said "no" in an equally neutral tone, with no apparent emotion. I was thinking to myself that I would have given Joe a ride if the situation were reversed.  Maybe Joe doesn't like me?  So I began to walk home. I was dressed in a bathrobe and boxer shorts. (Joe had also been oddly dressed.) I was at my home town high school to begin with and was going west, the direction of the sun in the evening, but everything looked unfamiliar, with tall buildings where none had been when I was growing up. When I got home I told my family about a "ballet" rehearsal, though earlier in the dream I had been in the music department, looking for a piano to play in an unused classroom, where our choir had rehearsed. 

***

Other parts of the dream were too scrambled to remember.   

More on the signature

 A metrical signature is like an accent, or a particular qualitative factor that makes a voice recognizable, or combination of features that make a face into a Gestalt.  Since it's qualitative, it can't be measured, exactly, though it might have some statistical tendencies. 

It is interesting that we use "measure" as our idea of verse. That's what meter means. In older metrical treatises the word favored is "numbers." Meter has to be numerical in some way. The number doesn't give the Gestalt, though.  That would be like saying that human faces are all the same, if they have the same basic components, two eyes, below that a nose, ears on the side, etc... 

I've been thinking

 I've been thinking.  Models of literary infinity.  

The monkey theory.  Monkeys typing will produce the works of Shakespeare, if only you let them type long enough! 

Hjemslev's / Chomsky's idea of an infinite number of sentences in a language. 

Borges's Library of Babel, of course.  

Queneau's sonnets (14 to the 10th power, cent mille millards).  http://emusicale.free.fr/HISTOIRE_DES_ARTS/hda-litterature/QUENEAU-cent_mille_milliards_de_poemes/_cent_mille_milliards.php

Now, Borges's model is the letter, not the word. Queneau's unit is the line of poetry. The linguists' model is syntactic, admitting grammatically correct utterances. 

If you controlled for length, and had a finite dictionary, then the sentences in a language would not be infinite, in purely mathematical terms, but they would be practically infinite, in the sense that the numbers would be inconceivably large. After all, if a sonnet with 10 versions of each line is already in the billions... 

It is impossible to answer the question: think of the largest number that you can, because you could always raise that number to the power of itself, and keep doing that infinitely. For example, 1 followed by a hundred zeros is a commonly given example, but you could raise that number to the power of 1 followed by a hundred zeros.  

Suppose you have a limited language. 10 verbs, 20 nouns, 20 adjectives, etc... Two tenses. A limit number of pronouns and other connecting words.  Now you have syntactic rules as well. How many sentences are there of fewer than 20 words?  It would be possible to generate the possibilities mathematically. I'm sure this has been done.  

***

The other idea is that there are a limited number of plots / archetypes in literature. Literature is finite, because human experience is archetypical, not infinite. You could invent a new plot, but it wouldn't be meaningful or satisfying. 

The idea

 The idea is that metrical mastery is not achieved at the level of the single line, but in the construction of larger structures.  It is pretty simple-minded. It would be like looking at musical composition at the level of the phrase instead of the entire composition. Why would you want to do that?  

In my first draft of this article I realize I didn't articulate how important this step is.  

Metrical signatures

 I was thinking of the concept of metrical signatures: the Gestalt of any given poet in terms of metrical preferences or tendencies. What makes that poet sound like him or her self. 

With Claudio, the enjambment of adj / noun is one element of his signature.  I've found it in Baroque poetry, like Quevedo's "postrera / sombra." There is some of it in Góngora.  Góngora seems to be thinking strophically, not line-by-line, even in stanzas without enjambment.  

Another element of his signature would be what you might call awkward syntax in metrical sound forms, or seeming variability and irregularity, with the simultaneous presence of a strong forward pull in the meter.  

This seems to be virgin territory. Sure, there is a lot on prosody, but it tends to be geared toward establishing the basic facts rather than exploring nuances.  

A dream

 This dream.  I was writing something, like an exam, trying to find scratch paper not used by someone else already. I kept running out of paper, because not that many words fit on each sheet. 

My essay was called about a game that I called "academia." I explained that it was a game in which one developed projects, like cataloging every instance of phenomenon X, or memorizing a certain amount of information.  

Here's one

 Cuándo hablaré de ti sin voz de hombre para no acabar nunca, como el río no acaba de contar su pena y tiene dichas ya más palabras que yo mismo. Cuándo estaré bien fuera o bien en lo hondo de lo que alrededor es un camino limitándome, igual que el soto al ave. Pero, ¿seré capaz de repetirlo, capaz de amar dos veces como ahora? Este rayo de sol, que es un sonido en el órgano, vibra con la música de noviembre y refleja sus distintos modos de hacer caer las hojas vivas. Porque no sólo el viento las cae, sino también su gran tarea, sus vislumbres de un otoño esencial. Si encuentra un sitio rastrillado, la nueva siembra crece lejos de antiguos brotes removidos; pero siempre le sube alguna fuerza, alguna sed de aquellos, algún limpio cabeceo que vuelve a dividirse y a dar olor al aire en mil sentidos. Cuándo hablaré de ti sin voz de hombre. Cuándo. Mi boca sólo llega al signo, sólo interpreta muy confusamente. Y es que hay duras verdades de un continuo crecer, hay esperanzas que no logran sobrepasar el tiempo y convertirlo en seca fuente de llanura, como hay terrenos que no filtran el limo.

I've written out the poem as prose, and bolded the rhyming words, which occur every two lines. The rhyme is i/o.  6 of these have punctuation following, and 9 are enjambed. This means that end-rhyme becomes practically internal rhyme.  And difficult to hear, since it occurs every 22 syllables and is assonant (only vowels). The most extreme enjambment is noun-adjective or adjective noun.  distintos / modos // sitio / rastrillado // limpio / cabaceo // continuo / crecer.  4 times!  3 of these with the adjective coming first, which is even more abrupt.  

Sentence length is long, in most cases stretching over multiple lines.  The line is not very often a self-contained unit.  

(Rodríguez Claudio. Antología poética (El libro de bolsillo - Literatura) (Spanish Edition) . Alianza Editorial. Kindle Edition.) 

Free verse and its paradoxes

 There are two ways of looking at free verse. One, is that it should open the door toward greater metrical invention. It is an opportunity.  It is freedom to do something else.  

The other way: theoretically, it ought to lead to that, but in practice, it ends up being kind of dull and uninventive. Why? Because it is also the freedom to do nothing at all (or very little) prosodically.  

Thus, we have double movement: toward innovation, with a first two groups of innovators,  then mere stagnation.  

Part of it is that there is no meaningful way of talking about it. Free verse practitioners tend not to want to talk about technical stuff, in actual linguistic rigor, so it becomes almost a mystique. 

I say this because prosody could be almost the most objective thing there is.  Where the syllables fall and where the accents are. Instead, it becomes mystical and ultra-subjective. 

Unlocking the secret of enjambment

 It is a mystery, because it is quite possible to have a whole tradition in which enjambment never occurs. For example, in many poems of Baudelaire.  Not every line ends with a punctuation mark, but usually there is a pause, and the next line begins with a prepositional phrase, or the predicate of a sentence. If you wrote it out as prose the metrical divisions would still be obvious. Despite the fact that French lacks accent.  

At the other extreme are traditions in which enjambment is the norm, like English blank verse.  The question is to what extent the line of verse coincides with the grammatical unit.  Also, the particular rhetorical effects of enjambment. Is it a poetic device? Is the end stopped line a poetic device, or just a norm? 

It's possible to say that the end-stopped line is limiting, and transcending it is a good thing, without thinking there is anything wrong with Racine or Pope. 

I'm sorry my thinking on this is very murky, but I promise I will come to some clarity at some point. 

Dream of father and aunt

 My aunt had been working for a winery in a significant role.  I argued with my dad that this was inappropriate,  because my aunt had never tasted wine. He argued that this was irrelevant, did a cancer doctor need to have had cancer? Similar nonsensical arguments. I couldn't get him to see my point at all, nor could I understand his, and the argument turned quite heated. I guess you could work as an accountant for a winery without drinking wine, but her role there seemed more crucial. (Of course, both my father and his older sisters are no longer among the living; none of them drank,) 

Dream of a school / movie

 

I was in a school. The headmaster was stern, and fired a teacher for coming late. Then we were sitting at tables. I was a student and listening closely to what he said. I asked at one point if we were going to have classes or whether we were just sitting around talking all day. He said there would be classes. He had some aphorisms, like "Don't wait any longer" or "Do it now." We discussed it and I guessed the meaning was don't procrastinate. Another was about saying the best thing last, and I said that was about "recency." 

I was eager to know what movie we were in, because in this dream I was a participant in a movie, as myself. I wanted to watch the movie later to get all of the headmaster's ideas. There was a sticker on the door that said "Dark Sabbath," but that didn't seem the right genre. I went out the door unto the street and tried to ask people about what movie featured a school and charismatic headmaster. Nobody could tell me.

Toward the end, I realized I had to catch a train or bus in 15 minutes. I started sprinting down the street. A teacher, a woman in uncomfortable shoes, also had to catch the bus. I was wondering whether to slow down my running so we could go together.  Then I realized I was waking up from the dream and didn't have to rush. 

The pedagogical method seemed a good one: talk to people about ideas. Find solid general principles. The dream seemed to last a good part of the night, and I was making a solid effort to learn and to remember what I was being taught.  

Take these successive lines

No está en mí; está en el mundo; está ahi enfrente.

Necesita vivir entre las cosas. 

They are very different in their effect, but both have 11 syllables, metrically, with accents on three, six, and 10: 

No está en mí, está en el mundo; está ahí enfrente. 

Enjambment in Notley

 

Here the lines seem enjambed, but are really not, because the line break acts as a punctuation. 

"I dreamed you brought home a baby / Solid girl, could already walk / In blue corduroy overalls/ Nice and strange, baby to keep close / I hadn't thought of it before..."  

So she only needs punctuation in the middle of the lines. There is some true enjambment later in the poem "door / of building."  

The balance between continuity and the integrity of the line is ideal (for my ear).  

The enjambment paradox

 Enjambment is the main way of going beyond the focus on the single line of verse. Enjambment leads to complexity, etc...

The paradox is that enjambment leads to prose poetry, in which there are no divisions at all. But, then, the effect of enjambment is lost, because the reader doesn't see or hear those divisions any more. 

The metrical paradox

 The paradox I'm trying to get to is this:

 Extremely complex and varied metrical structures, transcending the individual line of poetry, tend toward prose, or the absence of discernible regularity.  

It's only a paradox if we think of prose as not rhythmic, or rhythmically inert.   

Eliot and Johnson on Milton

 ."... I do not think that it is by such means that we gain an appreciation of the peculiar rhythm of a poet. It seems to me also that Milton's verse is especially refractory to yielding up its secrets to examination of the single line. For his verse is not formed in this way. It is the period, the sentence and still more the paragraph, that is the unit of Milton's verse; and emphasis on the line structure is the minimum necessary to provide a counter-pattern to the period structure.

It is only in the period that the wave-length of Milton's verse is to be found : it is his ability to give a perfect and unique pattern to every paragraph, such that the full beauty of the line is found in its context, and his ability to work in larger musical units than many other poets -- that is to me the most conclusive evidence of Milton's supreme mastery. The peculiar feeling, almost a physical sensation of a greatness leap, communicated by Milton's long periods, and by his alone, is impossible to procure from rhymed verse. Indeed, this mastery is most conclusive evidence of his intellectual power, thrul is his grasp of any ideas that lie borrowed or invented.

To be able to control so many words at once is the token of a mind of most exceptional energy.

It is interesting at this point to recall the general observations upon blank verse, which a consideration of Paradise Lost prompted Johnson to make towards the end of his essay.

'The music of the English heroic lines strikes the ear so faintly, that it is easily lost, unless all the syllables of every line co-operate together; this co-operation can only be obtained by the preservation of every verse unmingled with another as a distinct system of sounds; and this distinctness is obtained and preserved by the artifice of rhyme.

The variety of pauses, so much boasted by the lovers of blank verse, changes the measures of an English poet to the periods of a declaimer; and there are only a few skilful and happy readers of Milton, who enable their audience to perceive where the lines end or begin. Blank verse, said an ingenious critic, seems to be verse only to the eye."

The descent beckoned...

 "The descent beckoned, /  as the ascent beckoned."  We know WCW thought he had come to a prosodic breakthrough with this poem, the "variable foot." But the language is oddly abstract. I have affection for the poem despite it not being Williams' best. 

***

Oddly, metrics seems sterile in most applications. For example, I would begin with the idea of a gestalt, and then point out that the final part of a line is going to be more constrained that the beginning, and the accents stronger there. Take the 11 syllable line in Spanish:

(uuuu)  uXuuuXu

Accents can fall on any of the first four syllables, but not on 5, 7, 9, where they would be extrametrical stress clashes. So we could see it as a group of freely organized syllables (4) followed by a more distinctive concluding cadence. Another way of thinking about it that we don't know what it is until it is over, so the ending is going to be more significant than the beginning. 

****

We can think of a collection of lines, or the lines all together adding up to something more, a verse paragraph, where the real mastery comes. Yet if the line itself is devalued too much, then it becomes ... prose. The extreme is JRJ writing out all non-rhyming his poems in prose paragraphs. 

***

I wrote this as an article once and had it rejected because it was too "pedagogical."  

Dull man hobbies

 Here are mine:

birdwatching

piano playing and choral singing 

memorizing poems

running 

crossword puzzles 

enjamb

 I am looking at a recently published book on Spanish versification. It seems solid, but very little discussion of enjambment or metrical structures based on verse paragraphs (not just strophes). In other words, the line is the relevant unit, not the relation between lines.  

***

I composed a tune that has 64 bars, say.  The basic structure is 32, repeated twice. Each of those units is composed of question and answer units of 8 bars, which in turn are based on four measure phrases that also answer each other, etc...  It is a piece that I improvised and recorded.  I am not claiming that is is particularly good, but I am thinking that what this means is that this structure is intuitive to me.  That I could structure my improvisation in that form by knowing what it feels like, as a gestalt.  

Metrical complexity in Don de la ebriedad

 Let's think about the factors of metrical complexity in Don de la ebriedad. 

Stress clashes: siempre la claridad viene del cielo / vida y labor propias 

Enjambment and line internal pauses.  

Frequent elision and syneresis. 

The overall effect is the creation of verse paragraphs, rather than a sequence of end-stopped lines. Generally, the sentences are long; or rather, sentence length is varied. The rhyme is there, but the rhyming words don't always end the syntactic phrase.  

Now, this is not particularly remarkable, except that it is, since Spanish poetry tends more to the end stopped line, and less to the development of longer structures. The exception is the development of the silva in the baroque, where the free combination of lines of seven and eleven create a fluidity that almost rivals English blank verse. 

Así el deseo. Como el alba, clara   [internal pause] 

desde la cima y cuando se detiene            [rhyme]

tocando con sus luces lo concreto

recién oscura, aunque instantáneamente.  [rhyme] [syneresis] 

Después abre ruidosas palomares   [stress clash] 

y ya es un día más, Oh, las rehenes  [enjambment between adjective and noun!]

palomas de la noche, conteniendo

sus impulsos altísimos. Y siempre... [rhyme] 

Así el deseo. Como el alba, clara desde la cima y cuando se detiene, tocando con sus luces lo concreto, recién oscura, aunque instantáneamente. Después abre ruidosas palomares y ya es un día más... 

There is a kind of sculpted quality to Lorca's lines, like "desnudo torso romano." Claudio Rodríguez doesn't tend to write individual sculpted lines of this type. But Rodríguez excels at the sequence of lines. All the more amazing because he was 17 when he wrote this book. The book bears some signs of youthful inexperience, but overall the mastery of verse is astonishing. 

Rancho gordo

 I bought a package of rancho gordo beans. They are $6 so not cheap (for beans) but it makes a good pot of soup that will last several meals. I saw this brank at my brother's house, who is mostly vegan for health reasons. They were brown, maybe kidney type beans. I first made a sofrito with onions, celery, and garlic. I added other vegetables, like peppers, tomatoes, and various herbs and spices that I thought would go well. A dash of soy sauce and some bullion cubes, and a dash of balsamic vinegar. I cooked the soup about three hours. The broth was rich and flavorful. We ate it with sourdough garlic toast and a salad of arugula, olives, olive oil, parmesan, and more balsamic vinegar. 

Piera

 "Now a heptasyllabic pattern ... will be undistinguishable from the lefthand colon of a Type A hendecasyllable" (p.54 ).  

I've been re-reading Carlos Piera's dissertation.  In my car, I was listening to two version of Lorca's "Cuerpo presente," by Margarita Xirgu and Germaine Montero, both of whom worked in the theater with Lorca. I was able to hear very clearly the pattern of the alexandrine (7 + 7). A few lines were harder to assimilate into the pattern: "los hombres de voz dura," for example. (The stress clash of voz dura.) If you said "aproximadamente" was a 7-syllable line, you wouldn't be wrong, but normally we would have a pattern of two accents, one on six (mandatory) and the other typically on 2, but possibly occuring on 1, 3, or 4 as well. "para que se acostumbre" would be an example from Lorca. The accent on the first syllable is weak because it is a preposition. 

A distinction between lines that reinforce the gestalt of the form and those that don't?  

I'm thinking of project on Lorca's prosody, but I haven't thought it to be very interesting, or yielding of insights that everyone might not have had already. One insight: enjambment only occurs in very short lines. Another: rhyme is frequent in all but a few works. Maybe mastery of classical meters is not that interesting?  

Dream of chess, Beckett, Proust...

I was in a library; I found a suitcase and in it a book titled British Chess.  (I don't play chess in real life but I sometimes try to solve the "checkmate in two moves" puzzles that appear on my Facebook page.) I took it out and went to the desk to check it out, though I knew it was wrong, since the suitcase wasn't mine.  The library employee was giving me the side eye. There was something about the game shown on one page that had held my attention and was to be the basis of some fruitful idea later.  

***

There were a series of misunderstandings about books about Beckett and Proust. I knew I was dreaming so I tried to retain the narrative in my mind, but at the end there was only a book devoted to one of these authors signed by the author, that my father was showing me. 

***

Later, I had a pet python, with large diameter. I was gentle and I had no fear of it, but I resented having to carry it around. 

Sister dream

 There was another sister dream last night.  I was in bed with family, and sister got pushed out on the opposite side where I was. (Next to my brother or daughter?).  She had a black eye from the fall from the bed. Then I remembered she was not alive any more.  

I've had many father dreams after his death, more than 20 years ago. It's not surprising to have dreams about my sister too.  Usually, they are about trying to reconcile myself to their death.  (Unsurprisingly). 

Bullshit

 https://digitalcommons.bau.edu.lb/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1173&context=schbjournal

I'm calling bullshit on this paper.  I can't read it, but the abstract is enough. 

Poetry reciting gun

 There was an instruction sheet on how to recite our poems that was vague; then I saw another section that it didn't matter whether the poems were in published books or not. 

Then apparently there was a huge gun that had to be assembled. I was grateful that a woman member or our team was doing this, quite efficiently.  The result was something like an assault rifle, but larger. Something wasn't quite right with the assembly, however, and she was on the phone with customer service. 

14

 My sister appeared to me in a dream last night as a fourteen-year old girl. She explained to me that this is how I should remember her; I felt myself creating the image of her in my mind, knowing that I was dreaming but also accepting this as a genuine visitation. Her face was similar to that of a particular photo we had used for the funeral, when she was perhaps 18? 

I was weeping and woke up, but woke up still in the dream. The woman sharing my bed was angry with me for crying and waking her, but fortunately I was actually alone, and that part of the story was also within the dream. 

Notley

 I was reading some Notley poems from Early Works that are based on dreams. It occured to me I could write up dreams as poems, but prefer to just accurately write them down without poeticizing them.  Part of what I'm after is the banality and non-coherence of them, so the best ones might be the worst after a manner of speaking. 

***

In choir we are singing "O Taste and See," and thought of the Levertov poem (and book of that title), but the piece we are singing is based on the Bible verse Levertov took for her poem: "O taste and see! the subway bible poster said...."  That is not a dream, just a (not very) interesting experience of finding two works of art based on the same text. 

Instrument

 There was a strange instrument that I brought in to be tuned. It was an electric device played by plucking, but not in standard lute / guitar / mandolin like shapes. They were making fun of me for thinking it needed tuning, and I couldn't seem to get a note out of it, or know where to start. Then I saw that there were fruit shaped items inside of it, like bananas, representing different notes. I still couldn't really play it, and left without paying for the tuning, since we were interrupted by another dream event. 

Now a dog was trying to go through a door. I solved the problem by opening the door, since the dog (a large white one) was theoretically allowed access to these other rooms. 

Gestalt

 It occurred to me that a meter is a gestalt. The word is usually used for visual information. Seeing a face, we don't see individual features, but a face. Of course, we can describe a nose, etc... but those 19th century description of peoples faces feature by feature don't work all that well. 

Faces vary a bit, but fall into the same gestalt. The 11 syllable Spanish line is essentially a shape, not a collection of 11 syllables. 

Here is the most canonical pattern: 

x/xxxx/xxx/x   [accents on 2, 6, 10, evenly spaced]

El dulce lamentar de dos pastores 

Another common pattern: 

xxx/xxx/x/x [accents on 4, 8, 10]

The other patterns are accents on 1 6 10, or 3, 6 10.  

The gestalt is the feel of the meter, not the number of syllables, since we aren't counting them unless we are unsure. Even then, if we are off by a syllable, it shouldn't even matter that much.

Here's one with a stress clash:

Siempre la claridad viene del cielo:  1,6, 7!, 10. It's odd. We hardly ever get stresses on 5,7,9. Notice that there is still a stress on 6. 

The grammar paradox

 The grammar paradox: anyone peeving over grammar is more likely to be incorrect than the bad grammar being corrected. 

Latter days

 Every date by definition is the latest date so far in human history. Nobody thinks of themselves as early folks. Of course to think at all of what position one occupies chronologically is already to think historically. 

Normandy

 I’m coming back from a trip to Normandy. I asked the guy who invited me why I was invited.  He said he had read an article I had published in PMLA on Guillen in the early 90s. He said 20 years ago but it is much more than that. Neither of us remembered what I said in the article though I’m sure I could if you gave me a few minutes. He also invited some of my favorite poets but a bit randomly since he didn’t know that I knew these poets and was friends with them. 

Dream of getting in trouble

 In this dream, I was leaving an event, and one young woman seemed to be waiting for me when everyone else had walked out.  She walked up and said "Do you want to hang out, maybe go dancing?" I said "Sure," but in a noncommittal way, as if doubting what I had heard. Coming down to the next floor, she appeared again, more vividly. She was ethereal looking and had a fresh face; red hair.  She asked me again and I said yes. Then all of a sudden I was in trouble. She was complaining to her dance teacher about me. 

***

I awoke, and then knew it was a dream. In the next dream, I was this the dance teacher, explaining to her my dream of her student. I didn't want to involve the dance teacher in this, but I ended up doing so. Thankfully, this was a dream too.  

Dream of losing my job

I lost my job (something that isn't going to happen) and my remaining research interests were represented by some small, square cards of various colors.  

Anhedonic

In this dream I exploring the anhedonic principle, arguing that the search for pleasure inevitably led to a search for pain. There was a local meeting or party devoted to this idea, and I had invited some family members, but had given them mistaken directions or address. The locals, however, knew how to get there. I was trying to explain my ideas to some colleagues. 

There were several examples: gastronomy that emphasizes pungent or bitter notes. As I was waking up I thought of others. Sexual proclivities that fetishize conventionally unattractive traits, or the introduction of pain. Ascetic practices, etc... This was kind of muddled in my head as I was half way awake, and I continued to explore this principle and its opposite.  In "bad taste" we often see an interest in things that are merely pretty, or too easily digested. I'm sure I was thinking of Adorno in my dream, in some way, since that's the only place I've seen the word "anhedonic."   

The course design

 I've actually been studying this stuff since 2018.  

Theoretical:  

Basics of music and song setting. For example, music is divided into phrase, and a phrase coincides with a phrase of language. Call and response.  

Historical: 

Movements in classical music that reach out to the vernacular. 

Developments in literary history that make popular poetry prestigious. 

Development of the French and Latin American song. Folk-revivals. 

Record album as unit of consumption.  

Texts: 

Poems by Machado, Jiménez, Lorca... etc.... 

Musicians:  

Falla, Lorca.... all the flamenco performers (Morente); all the singer-songwriters. 

Desajuste

I am going to argue that translation *failure* derives from a mismatch in poetics.  

That is to say, there is a definable poetics in the original text, and a definable "poetics of translation" in the effort to translate it. This can line up, as when a baroque poet translates another in a baroque aesthetic. Or there can be a mismatch.  Suppose a 21st century translator tackles Quevedo and leaves out most of the baroque stuff.  

But, and here it gets interesting, even an American poet of modernist tendencies tackles Lorca, and the seeming similarity of poetics isn't much help, or not as much as you would expect. It would be like Surrey messing up with Petrarch.  

Good to know

"You do not have to report your own incidents of harassment / discrimination / or sexual misconduct, but we encourage you to do so."

***

"No such thing as ovevreporting!" [sic] 

 

Title IX

 We have 16 categories of protection here.  5 of them have to do with race / ethnicity:

race / color / ethnicity /  national origin / ancestry 

4 have to do with sex / gender:

sex / sexual orientation / gender identity / gender expression 

The other 7:  

Age, disability, veteran status, marital status, parental status, genetic information, religion  

Nor making fun of this, but it doesn't seem very well thought out, since some categories overlap considerably.  The acronym  for the office of civil rights and title IX sounds vaguely sinister, like an anagram for orcs and ticks: OCRTIX.  

Dumbed down version of course description, for the flyer

 Professor Jonathan Mayhew

 

Spanish 453: Poets and Singer-songwriters

 

(Spring 2025) 

 

Do you like music? Are you interested in doing original research on a topic that has not received much critical attention in academia? Then this course is for you!

 

 

 

 

 

In this course, we will explore musical versions of poems by major authors like San Juan de la Cruz, Rosalía de Castro, Federico García Lorca, and Pablo Neruda, whose work has been set to music by composers and performers from Spain, Latin America, the US, and across the world. 

 

The course...

 Professor Jonathan Mayhew

Spring Semester, 2025

 

Spanish 453: Twentieth Century Spanish Studies

 

Poets and Singer-songwriters 

 

This course is devoted to musical versions of the work of poetry of canonical figures like San Juan de la Cruz, Rosalía de Castro, Antonio Machado, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Pablo Neruda, Federico García Lorca, and Miguel Hernández. This phenomenon is especially important in flamenco music, but occurs in other genres as well, from classical to pop.  

 

Composers and performers to be studied include Manuel de Falla, Federico García Lorca, Luigi Nono, Germaine Montero, Leonard Cohen, Joan Manuel Serrat, Paco Ibáñez, Amancio Prada, Camarón de la Isla, Enrique and Estrella Morente, Carmen Linares, and Miguel Poveda. 

 

This is a significant topic for three main reasons. (1) In quantitative terms, there is a lot of material to be studied. (2) The poets whose work have been set to music are among the most celebrated figures of twentieth century literature. (3) From a comparative perspective, the work of peninsular musicians can be compared with the Chanson Française [French Song], the Nueva Canción Latinoamericana, and similar movements bridging the gap between canonical literature and popular culture. Since this phenomenon has not received much academic attention to date, the possibilities for original research are promising. 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: 

 

Amancio Prada con el profe; cartel del Concurso de Cante Jondo; piano de Lorca; Camarón de la Isla 

2 Dreams

 I was in a used bookstore.  I was looking for the essay "Everybody's Favorite Protest Novel" by James Baldwin.  I found it very easily, in a book of essays by various authors, right on the page it was supposed to be.  I began to read it, and it was talking about the Spanish poet Jorge Manrique (??).  The book had funny dimensions and looked too small to have its 500+ pages. But I thought it would be good to take with me as reading material on my trip to France.  

***

I was in Paris, but a Paris that looks nothing like real-life Paris. I was trying to get to my hotel, and thought I would walk first before using google maps on my phone.  I somehow knew it was "downhill" from where I was. Some American girls passed by and were singing "They can't take that away from me," "The way you wear your hat..." etc... but with altered lyrics, like "The way you all throw up." I wanted to warn them that people in France might understand English. I passed by a woman dressed in a funny way and with a lot of make up. She started talking to me in French. I couldn't understand, and then she said "vous parlez...?" and I said "anglais."  We had a brief conversation and I was able to get away when someone else came and she started taking to them. 

Now I went through several buildings that seemed to be in descending order in the direction I wanted to go. I got out my phone, and it was know a two inch square shape. I opened google maps and it make the phone look like a watch or industrial steam-punk looking thingie, so I opened another map app, but now could not figure out how to use it... I couldn't  remember the name of my hotel.  

A challenge...

 Dear colleagues,

In Spring 2025, the four of you are each scheduled to teach a 400 level course (X in 8-weeks format).

The College is very keen on enrollments, this year. Officially, 12 students is sufficient enrollment in an undergraduate course, but actually they like to see some 18-20 students.

I am not sure that we will be able to enroll 4 courses but for now we will give it a try.

In order to boost student enrollment, 

1. please come up with a cool course title that will be attractive to students
2. Provide some good-looking visuals and a nice description so that Y can create a flyer and project this on our monitor etc.

You will have to convince students to take your course among many great offerings.

If you could do this before Fall break and send both to me and  Y  that would be great.

Thanks, 

Ω

Dream of cooking course

 I was in college again. It wasn't clear why, since I am, in fact, a college graduate. I was questioning that myself, in the dram. My age in this context is undetermined: I am just myself at whatever age I am in my own mind.. One of the courses I was taking was in cooking, but involved field trips and my transportation was not guaranteed. I began to worry about my grades, but felt like I didn't need all A's during my second college career.  My vagueness in retelling this dream responds to the vagueness of the dream itself. 

Dream of a tattoo

 A grad student considering our program had a tattoo of poem on his back, that somehow another person, a young woman also applying, was responsible for. 

An Imaginary Friend

 A friend was staying at my house (my mom's house). He had gotten there a day before I did. He was a youngish or middle-aged guy who was into poetry. Nobody seemed to question his presence there: he was my friend. He had some books with him; one a translation of Robert Desnos. He read me some poems from this book and they weren't bad, though they didn't resemble actual Desnos poems at all. (Not that I know his poems well!).  

It occured to me at some point that we hadn't really hung out very much in the past, in real life, and thus our friendship was really starting then. I was on the verge once of asking him how we had met. We were going to go some event in a Barnes & Nobles later in the evening...   

When I woke up from this dream, I had no idea who this person was. The dream was very vivid and full of real-feeling details, but this person does not exist in real life. I understood this immediately upon waking up, with some wistfulness.  

When not hanging out with my imaginary friend, I was with relatives. We were talking and I realized they didn't know that Mona Jo had died (my aunt).  These relatives, though, were also composite or imaginary figures, not my actual relatives.  

Bumper sticker

 I saw a bumper sticker in my apt complex this morning:  "What would Mary Shelley do?"

and I thought

"Marry Shelley." 

6th or 7th?

 On Facebook someone was talking about completing their sixth decade. They were 69.  I didn't say anything, but you are ten when you complete your first decade, and 70 when you complete your seventh.  I am in my 7th decade now, at 64.  I really don't know how this person was 11 years off.  Perhaps it is because your 60s seem like number 6, so your 70s (your 8th decade) would begin at age 70.  

A Dream

 I was considering dating a younger Japanese American woman. (Not a real person in real life.) Then I questioned myself for being so arrogant for thinking she would want me. Why was I so confident? But really I did not mind being confident. Then I realized it would not be fair to her. Maybe she would want children? Then I woke up.  

Dream of being accused

 I was accused of murder. I was sitting on a lawn of some sort, where the trial was taking place. I had no idea whom they thought I had killed. It gradually came out that I had done so as a medical student, by operating incorrectly on a patient. I was thinking that I was not criminally culpable for this. When I woke up, I knew it was a false accusation because... I have never been a medical student.  In the dream itself, I never questioned this, though I certainly didn't feel "guilty."  

Constraints

 Constraints limit freedom but generate invention. So, for example, if I had to translate a poem into English without using the letter e, I would be obliged to find inventive solutions instead of translating as I normally would.  

"Let the bride awake

the day of her wedding"

Most of these words have an e.  

Now, let's consider a more normal case: translating a sonnet into a sonnet.  Here the constraint is formal and metrical.  Lines will be metrical, and there will be a rhyme scheme.  I'm still trying to translate the semantic content.  These constraints will generate more semantic slippage. It is unlikely that a literal translation will automatically fall into metrical form! 

For many centuries in the English-speaking world, verse translations were almost always governed by metrical constraints: sonnets became sonnets, romances became ballads.  

This, I would argue, is the main driver of verse translation, not what Venuti says, the translator's invisibility.  

Retirado en la paz de estos desiertos, con pocos, pero doctos libros juntos, vivo en conversación con los difuntos y escucho con mis ojos a los muertos. Si no siempre entendidos, siempre abiertos, o enmiendan, o fecundan mis asuntos; y en músicos callados contrapuntos al sueño de la vida hablan despiertos. Las grandes almas que la muerte ausenta, de injurias de los años, vengadora, libra, ¡oh gran don Josef!, docta la emprenta. En fuga irrevocable huye la hora; pero aquella el mejor cálculo cuenta que en la lección y estudios nos mejora.

Plateau

 My piano playing is at a plateau.  When I thought about why this was so, the answer was clear: I practice the same way every time, so I am reinforcing everything I am doing now including whatever bad habits I might have. I might get slightly better at what I can already do over time, but there is not really any improvement.  

So yesterday, I practiced what I normally would, for 30 minutes. 

Today, I will do something different. I think I will play blues in Db.  I never do that, so it should stretch myself somewhat.  

[update: a plateau is not a bad thing.  When I switched back from the unfamiliar blues to what I normally would play I noticed an immediate gain in fluency. The Blues was noticeably stiffer. The good thing about a plateau is that it is stable. Still, the stretch is important as well.  I can alternate between plateau days and stretch days.] 

Dream of Monk

There was a jazz club where you could visit the past. I went in and noticed it was Monk playing in the corner. I went there to see what he was playing, something that would give me rare insight, I thought. He was playing these chromatic or whole tone runs very fast.  I tried to get my phone out so I could take pictures of it. There was sheet music with titles I didn't recognize.  I was invisible at first to the people there, but then people started saying "excuse me" to get by me. I went out into the street and explained to someone there about the magical nightclub where you could visit the Five Spot of yore. They disbelieved me or didn't care and the dream morphed into something else I don't remember.  

Religion

 I went to two funerals on my trip to California. We buried my sister on Friday. She had chosen her funeral program (the music) while she was still lucid, about 10 or 11 years ago.  

On Monday, my brother, mom, and I drove to Palo Alto for the service for my aunt Mona Jo, in an architecturally similar Mormon church there. I had been in that church for a service for Orval (husband of Mona Jo and brother to my mom, twelve years ago). We sang one of the same hymns, "All Creatures Great and Small."  My four Ellsworth cousins (son and daughters of Mona Jo and Orval) had driven to Davis for my sister's service as well.  There were also four cousins from one of my mom's sisters, Dorothy. Dorothy is seven years older than I am and my youngest cousins could the age of my children, if I had had children young. 

Anyway, most people there at both funerals were processing the deaths through a religious mind set--one I don't share. My sister was also deeply religious, and spent her entire professional life as a church musician, or "minister of music." Her husband Norbie had also converted to mormonism, fairly recently in fact. Mona Jo, from all evidence, was also religious. 

Though I don't have that framework, I tend to believe that we are all processing our grief in analogous ways. In other words, it doesn't make any difference. It is still a loss. We can all have our little rationalizations, like 'she's in a better place.'  Or, in my case, 'her suffering is over.'  

Deborah Mayhew Memorial

Trader Joes & Cousins

 My daughter works at a Traders Joes in MD.  I talked to her today on the phone and asked her to recommend some prepared food from there. (I am in Davis, CA for my sister's (and my aunt's) funeral, so I am here with my mother, brother, brother-in-law, and niece,) Eight of my cousins came for my sister's service!  

***

 I walked to our local TJs and picked up some frozen veggie gyoza and the vegan Korean rice balls my daughter recommended. My brother is mostly vegan so it was a good call. My niece made some squash. We have all just been scavenging from the fridge so it was good that I did this, even if my initial motive was selfish: to have something different and more savory  to eat tonight. We still have "Mormon funeral potatoes" in the fridge. 

Tomorrow, we drive to Palo Alto for my aunt's memorial service. I will see multiple cousins, including two more who couldn't come for my sister's on Friday.   

***

My family is religious.  I am not. Everything is filtered through that lens for them, but not for me. My sister planned her whole funeral while she was still able, with the exact hymns she wanted. Its made me think I should do that too. I know I want "Lonely Woman" and "Monk's Mood." I don't want a fucking "Celebration of Life"; I want everyone to be very sad, disconsolate. 

Fritz

 Fritz, my SO's father, will have a memorial service on the same day as my sister.  On Friday. I can't attend both. I will be going tomorrow to be with my own family in California.  

 Fritz liked Monk (something I didn't know before he died), so I recommended that they play "Monk's Mood" and "Reflections" at his celebration of life.  I want "Monk's mood" at my own funeral! I'd also like Ornette's "Lonely Woman" at my own memorial.  

Fritz was a funny guy.  He could crack us up even when his short term memory was mostly gone.  He was a graphic designer, and taught that at KU for many years, while designing books for U of Kansas press. He retired when he got cancer, and also as his field was shifting to computers which he was not as comfortable with.  

Debbie--a eulogy

 Debbie and I were small children together. My first false memory: she fell down some stairs in Cambridge before I was born. I remember my dad and grandfather fixing the stairs going down to our basement in Ann Arbor, Michigan, so this would not happen again. I formed an image of my sister falling and always swore that I remembered it. 

 

When I reached kindergarten age, we walked to Eberwhite Elementary school together with other neighborhood children. She was three years older. We would walk home for lunch and back again for the afternoon, eating tomato soup, spaghettios, tuna or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches—typical fare of the 1960s. She was tall for her age, and I was short, so she seemed quite a bit older than I was. We played together, but often in parallel fashion, with our rival realms of imaginary beings. Hers was a matriarchy presided over by Granny Good Witch. Mine was a kingdom of trolls. Outside, we played “hot potato” and several varieties of tag and “categories” with other kids living nearby. She passed on to me the childhood folklore of our generation: “step on a crack, break your mother’s back,” “eenie meenie miny mo,” and “cross my heart and hope to die, stick a needle in my eye.” Every kid in Michigan ice-skated, so my mom would take us to skate on the pond in the park near our house or at the local rink. 

 

Debbie always took piano lessons. My father had observed her sitting next to the stereo speaker and swaying to the music, at a very early age. By the time we moved to California, she was quite a diligent piano student. She would have been in sixth grade at this point. She had a single-minded focus on music from those years on—something I have observed in my own daughter, from around the same age. Soon, she developed enough facility on the piano to begin organ lessons, having mastered Bach’s two and three part inventions. The organ drew her in. As a teenager she had to convince the bishop to let her have her own keys to the church—the church where we are now meeting to commemorate her life. This demonstrated a certain determination that would become evident later in other aspects of her life. This was a special privilege not automatically conceded to a teenage girl. But she was dead-set on learning to play the organ, and could only do so if she could go to the church to practice every day before school. My mother taught piano lessons, and my father was a fanatical listener of classical music, so Debbie received all the support she needed to pursue music.

 

She also dabbled with other instruments, too: viola, oboe, and recorders of various sizes, from bass to soprano. As a child of the 70s, she liked Joni Mitchell, Simon and Garfunkel, and Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. She was a fan of the “Planet of the Apes” movies and Star Trek, as well as midnight showings of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” at the Varsity Theater. We would watch Saturday Night Live after my parents had gone to sleep, laughing at the antics of John Belushi and Steve Martin. 

 

We were surrounded by extended family: both sets of grandparents were close by, as were our cousins, the Haynes. We would go every Easter to Palo Alto to see my uncle Orval and his family. We did not know how lucky we were to be surrounded by a loving family, nuclear and extended. I had not understood that our move from Michigan to California was coming back home, since I mistakenly believed Michigan to be home. 

 

In her senior year of high school, Debbie began taking the beginning music theory courses in the rigorous music major at UC Davis. This required hours of study, probably as much as all her other courses put together. Many students struggled to pass. For some odd reason, the music major at UCD was geared to composition in the style of Arnold Schoenberg. Playing an instrument was beside the point, though you had to have enough piano skills and theoretical knowledge to transpose (and play) “Bridge Over Troubled Water” in twelve keys. Instead of baby-sitting, as many teen-age girls did, she earned extra money substituting for local church organists. 

 

Debbie was a solid A student at UCD, doing well in every subject and graduating with honors in 1978, when she was barely 21 years old. Ironically, the only B I remember her getting was in a course in musicology. For a course in the English Department, she demonstrated that the “Sirens” chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses did not actually have the structure of a fugue, as most critics had lazily assumed. She was friends with the other music majors, and, of course, was inseparable from Norbie during her college years. One day, Debbie and Norbie came home with Golden Retrievers from the same litter. We kept the female, Tasha, but the male, Oso (Spanish for bear!) was too large for Norbie’s mother to handle, so they had to give him away. We kept Tasha, but she ended up being more my dog than Debbie’s.   

 

In what should have been her junior year, my father noticed that she had accumulated enough credit hours to graduate with honors in three years. (They wouldn’t let her stay any longer, since she had earned her degree.) She left home to begin a PhD program in Musicology at Stony Brook on Long Island. Her real passion, though, was church music. She got her master’s in this from Westminster Choir College in Princeton, New Jersey, then worked a series of church jobs while raising her two children, Janet and James. She ended up in New Jersey, where she would play church on Sunday and at a synagogue on Saturday. Throughout her adult life she continued to develop her talents: organ, harpsichord, and choir directing, music arrangement and composition, creative writing. Church music jobs are not well paid, generally. Not only that, but these jobs took her away from her own church on Sundays: music in the LDS church is an amateur calling and not a paid profession. It could not have been an easy life. 

 

Debbie moved back into our family home here in Davis after the death of her second husband, Wayne. She was still young and vibrant, and seemed relatively healthy. I thought it would be nice to have her take care of my mother in her old age. Nevertheless, it was Debbie, not mom, who needed caregiving. Her condition was first noticeable as an inability to recall certain nouns, including the names of people. I don’t remember her calling me by my name after 2012 or so. She could not understand, any longer, the movement of the hour and minute hands of a clock. She could still play organ, but experienced difficulty performing all the simultaneous tasks that this required, keeping track of pedals, keyboards, and pulling the stops in and out. The decline was slow at first; she had several relatively good years, where she could ride her bike around town and take tennis lessons. 

 

At one point, she reconnected with Norbie Kumagai, after a chance encounter at the pharmacy. After marrying Norbie, her boyfriend from high school and college, the caregiving responsibilities were split between her husband and her mother. Debbie was losing the ability to read, but she liked watching re-runs of Perry Mason and looking at her social media. To express her ideas, she had to use extra words in order to fill in for the vocabulary that she couldn’t retrieve. Nevertheless, she was still quite verbal, talking fast in order to make herself understood. For several years, even with noticeably diminished capacities, she still played organ and directed hymns in church. Until one day she couldn’t any longer. 

 

I would see her every year at Christmas. Her daughter Janet moved in with her mother and grandmother (Janet number 1) to help with her care. Eventually, the family needed professional assistance, and Blanca was hired to take over most of the day-to-day responsibilities. Blanca was the glue that held the family together, not only taking care of Debbie but cooking for the entire family and cleaning the house, all the while being the matriarch of her own clan.   

 

Every year I saw Debbie in Davis, I knew it could be our final farewell. Against all odds, she persisted well beyond her prognosis—they first told us five to ten years after diagnosis. I attribute this to the quality of care and the presence of so many loved ones. Her mother, her daughter, her husband, and her caregiver kept her alive until her body finally could not sustain itself anymore.   

 

It was a cruel disease, but it did not rob Debbie of her spirit. She expressed her contentment through her beatific smile, long after she had lost the ability to express ideas and feelings through words. She was always responsive to music, and the bluetooth speaker was turned on first thing every morning. All in all, she lived a happy and productive life, born into a loving family and surrounded by her loved ones until the very end.