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. 

 

A contradiction?

 On the one hand... infinite nuance and fluidity, a reliance on poststructural theory...  

On the other hand, absolute, dogmatic moral certainty.  

I cannot understand how you can have it both ways. 

***

An example of a similar cognitive dissonance might be Mother Teresa. I read that she had doubts about the existence of god, etc... On the other hand, no doubts enter her mind about the Church's teachings on birth control.  

***

We have slogan in our liberal town: keep Lawrence weird.  The same friends of mine who approve of this slogan also think that it is a productive strategy to call Trump and Vance "weird."  Well, can you do that volte-face so quickly and easily? It was explained to me that this is just a different kind of weirdness. On their side, it is evil. On our side, it is cute and quirky. 

Dementia

 My sister died on Sunday. She moved in with my mom 12 or 13 years ago, after the death of her second husband. Shortly after, we were told that she was suffering from semantic dementia. The first symptoms were an inability to remember words, mostly nouns, including proper names. She was still very verbal, but had to express nominal concepts with periphrases. If she couldn't remember the word "bishop" she would say "the important person." She also had lost executive function: think of the ability to cook a meal or even a single dish, and keeping track of the components of that task. She didn't drive any more. She could still play organ, and in fact kept playing in church for several years. They bought her an organ for the house, which she played for several years. Eventually, they sold it back to the vendor where they had gotten it from.  

My mom did fine with care giving in those early years. At some point, early on, Debbie reconnected with her high school / college boyfriend, who still lived in town. (Debbie had lived in other states her entire adult life after college.) Debbie and Norbie married, Norbie with a full consciousness of Debbie's diagnosis and prognosis. They lived between Norbie's mom's house, and my mom's. Now there were two caregivers for Debbie, and they did well. 

Debbie continued to decline, losing the ability to read, for example. She could still talk, but with increasing lack of fluency. Then, Debbie's daughter Janet (JJ or Janet junior, since my mom is also Janet) moved from Utah to live with her mother and grandmother. Now there were three caregivers: Janet, Norbie, and Janet Jr.  They did ok it seemed, but the younger Janet has a chronic fatigue condition with limited ability to maintain her energy. She is a nurse so there is no question that she could have taken care of her mother, if she had had more energy. Norbie is also having health issues. My mom is fine, the healthiest person in the house. 

So a fourth caregiver enters the picture, Blanca, an energetic Mexican woman whom everyone loves. Debbie is declining, losing ability to speak more than "yes" or "no" and to feed herself.  Norbie is declining too, and Janet Jr continues to struggle with her fatigue. Eventually, Debbie loses all ability to function, cannot even stand up by herself. At the beginning of 2024, Norbie calls me and my brother saying he has less than a year to live. He is on hospice (or palliative care) and so is my sister. Blanca has purchased a taco truck in early 2024, and quits to run the truck. Debbie is in and out of the hospital for various things most of the summer. About a week before she died, she started refusing food and liquids, so she died basically of her own volition, such as it was.

I never had the sense that she was not "herself." The dementia was not a loss of self, as some people experience. She was often quite happy, with a beatific smile. I think Blanca leaving was a factor, but she had already outlived the prognosis of five to ten years after diagnosis. She was 67 when she died, so it was almost a normal life span. The last five or six years she had very little ability to do anything, but she had some happy years with Norbie. She was well taken care of, first by Janet I, then by Norbie, Janet II, and Blanca. Every time I saw her, roughly at 1 year intervals, she had lost more. I always thought each year was the last time I would see her.  This time I was correct. 

I thought I had done my grieving already, but such is not the case. I'm doing a Buddhist chant for here every day for 49 days.  Really, it's more for myself. Aside from my mom, she is the person I have known the longest. I have never not known her or had her as part of me, so I feel that a part of me has been torn away.  It's not that I am inconsolable or bitterly angry, just that I feel this as a significant loss. The fact that this was also an end to suffering is also in my mind. Prolonging her life did not make sense either, after so long and agonizing a decline. 

Vowel

 If you think of the word "said," it is more or less that Spanish word "sed."  What we call the short e as in "bed" is the vowel of "ved."  What we don't want is the dipthong of "say."  In English, the short e tends to followed by a consonant. 

'

Small differences

 Ensayo in Spanish doesn't carry the connotation of brevity. There are essays of 300 pages. 

Antología is used for selected poems by a single author, not merely for anthologies of several poets. 

Narrativa is use to mean prose fiction, what in English we would merely call fiction. Ficción is used much less, though the word does exist, as in the title of Borges's Ficciones. Definition 2 of narrativa is "Género literario constituido por la novela, la novela corta y el cuento."

Green beans

Farmers market green beans:

Green beans (handful)

1 smallish tomato 

Garlic (1 clove)

Thai Basil (enough!)

Olive oil (use your judgment)

1 small hot pepper (but it wasn't very hot...)

Salt & pepper (to taste)

Splash of red wine (optional)

I boiled the beans for a while, drained, then sautéed everything in olive oil.  Ate with leftover sausage and potato from previous night.  Every recipe, however minimalist in intention, ends up having 8 or 9 ingredients. 

Job in my field

 Job in my field at U I got my PhD from. Assistant Prof, but with salary advertised at more than I make now as full, with five books published and 36 years of experience, etc... Sure, the cost of living is astronomical there, but still, it would be nice to make six figures before I retire.  

The new theory

 The new theory of the duende is that Lorca was tongue in cheek when he said that everywhere in Spain people talked about flamenco "having" duende.  The word  itself existed before, but Lorca himself invented this new flamenco meaning / usage of the term.  

Evidence for this is that there is no usage attested before Lorca's own lecture. I just bought a book, a new translation of the lecture, by Maurer, with notes by José Javier León, who came up with this new research.  

It is very strange, to be sure. Lorca invented something, that was not true when he spoke, but became true later on through his own influence. We've all had this backward. The other explanation would be that this usage was new in Lorca's time, that he picked up on it and popularized it. We can't prove that nobody said "eso tiene duende" before Lorca gave his lecture. We do know, though, that nobody wrote down this phrase before Lorca.  

***

This got me thinking, that because something is strange does not mean we shouldn't believe it. In other words, the truth does not care about the structure of our thinking.  The "truth is stranger than fiction" trope exists for a reason.  A novelist has to invent something plausible, or verisimilar, something that corresponds with our ideas about how things are. But the truth itself has no obligation to be verisimilar. 

It reminds me of the idea that "facts have a liberal bias." Well, no they don't.  Any ideology will generate cognitive dissonance. It is just easier to see when it is not your ideology.   

I was watching a documentary on scientology. Of course, the theology of this is absurd. But all theology is absurd from the perspective of anyone who doesn't subscribe to that particular theology.  Credo quia absurdum est, I think is the relevant dictum.  

 

sour grapes

 I used to wonder why the fox couldn't reach the grapes, which are usually low to the ground.  In Argentina recently I realized that vines can be very far off the ground indeed.  

Argentina

 Argentina is the country I have spent the most number of weeks (excluding US and Spain!). A total of about 3 months in three separate years. I don't know what #4 is, maybe Italy.  Anyway, I found this quote in a book on the contemporary political situation.

Esto sí es algo distintivo del peronismo y del radicalismo en sus orígenes. Es la construcción de una narrativa de superioridad moral. Cualquier narrativa de superioridad moral es excluyente, porque te permite ser parte del grupo que se autopercibe como moralmente superior mientras estés de acuerdo con ello y te excluye como moralmente inferior en la medida en que seas crítico. El peronismo lo tuvo en sus orígenes, y el kirchnerismo lo ha recuperado: eso le da mucha fuerza a una narrativa poco pluralista, que implica que todos los demás grupos están en un error.

Di Marco, Laura. Juicio al peronismo (Spanish Edition) (p. 312). SUDAMERICANA. Kindle Edition. 

This is quoted from Aníbal Pérez-Liñán. What kills discussion faster than the idea that a question makes you a bad person by definition?   

Past tense used as past participle?

 "I done it" is substandard English.  The more common error is "I have did it" or "I have went..."  "I would've went..." etc... This is the exact opposite, and it is very common.  

Take sing / sung / sang.  We know sing is the present, sang the past, and sung the past participle.  It is very common to hear "I have sang" instead of the correcter "I have sung..."  So much so that it almost doesn't sound wrong any more.  

But "I sung it good" is clearly stigmatized.  

Crews

 Crews died. I enjoyed his polemics in the pages of The New York Review of Books. The way he answered critics was masterful. I went back and read today his exchange on alien abductions. It is a master class in critical thinking.  

He single-handedly (not really, there were others too) took down Freud. His last book on Freud from 2017 was tiresome, and I couldn't get through the whole thing. It just was too relentless and long, though for that reason it is utterly convincing.  I just didn't need more convincing at that point.  

I began by rooting for the Freudians to be able to answer Crews with better arguments. Surely, there had to be some better arguments, but no, apparently not.  

Walsh

 I don't really get Walsh's "Lorca in English" Book.  It's just like, a more pedestrian version of what I had already done in Apocryphal Lorca! I think I behaved ethically in not reviewing it for the press. Nor will I write a review (as I have refused also to do reviews of Noel Valis's book). At some point, I am too close to the subject matter to be fair.  

Walsh is generous with me, and only disagrees with my critique of Bly, which he calls vitriolic and personal.  But he doesn't actually defend Bly by citing his actual translations.  

farmer's market eggs

 I didn't feel like going to the store, so for dinner I had two fried eggs with everything sautéed I had from my weekly vegetable subscription: onion, red potato, basil, onion, carrot. A hot pepper from the garden where I am house sitting. Nine ingredients, counting the salt and olive oil. It takes a lot of stuff to make a minimalist meal, just like my nada pasta.  10 if you count the beer I drank.  I couldn't include berries, cucumbers, and apples.  

[The eggs are part of the subscription too; house where I am pet / house sitting has chickens, but they don't lay anymore.] 

Comparative

 One of the most puzzling critique of my work has been the idea that I shouldn't have positive knowledge about Lorca to judge translations of him.  My expertise is treated as a handicap: "That Mayhew thinks there is a 'real' Lorca!" My efforts to present a reasonable view of what Lorca is about is treated as professional dogmatism of some kind. 

But translation is inherently comparative: we look at two things side by side. If item A is unknowable, in some existential sense, then why isn't item B also unknowable? How can we compare anything to anything?  

My position was that I knew Lorca, and also knew American poetics. I understand what Spicer is about, or O'Hara, or Koch, or Creeley. It was putting these two knowledges together that made AL a valuable project. You not only have to know Creeley, but know what makes him different from O'Hara; you have to know Sorrentino's sarcasm as well as Ginsberg's exuberant sense of humor. For example, if you just thought O'Hara wrote casual "lunch poems" and wasn't a serious artist, you wouldn't understand his cagey engagement with FGL.    

I go out of my way carefully to present my view of Lorca as simply the best one I can muster, provisional.  "If Lorca is a modernist poet... then ..."  But however provisional, contingent, apologetic, or qualified, there must be some view. The poet being translated cannot be a tabula rasa. Otherwise, literally nothing happens. 

Of course, I can be wrong about Lorca!  I have been wrong.  But you have to say why I am wrong, and why your view is better.  You have to beat me in the argument. Which you won't do unless your name is Andrew Anderson or Christopher Maurer, etc...   

(It's even an argument from authority. The authority comes from the receipts you have, not from the identity of the person who has the receipts in their file.)     

Student

 I had the student do a critique of her own pronunciation skills, using her own podcast.  She really only picked up on a few things,  like putting accents on the wrong syllables of words.  Yes, she does that, but she missed many things, like: 

'

"eye-dentificarr" and "ouchu." 

R in Spanish is either a tap, almost a "d," silent in Andalusian, or rolled. It is never the prolonged errrr of American rhotic English.  The diphthong ou barely exists.  Usually people end up saying Busoño, not Bousoño, for the poet.  

The hilarious thing was a poet with a non-rhotic American accent pronouncing Lo-car for Lorca.  

So anyway, certain things are correctable, on principle.  

The "eye" of identificar is mistake based on orthography and the English cognate. We have the sound in the word "see" that is pretty close to the word "si."  Just say "sea" and making it more clipped and pure, without the slight "uh" that you might have. The diphthong "eye' also exists, in the word "ay."  

Other stuff can be worked: p, k, and t sounds are not aspirated. You can put an ess before p and you will see that the puff of air is minimized.  Now try it without the ess.  

The voiced z intervocalic: doesn't exist.  The sound of zebra is only in words like mismo, but it is barely voiced if at all.  

Try saying eff with your two lips, rather than upper teeth and lower lip.  It is subtly different. It's not something that really creates a new phoneme, but it will get you into the psychological head space you want. 

I watched part of an episode of Velvet, on Netflix.  It seems quite bad, but the accents are canonical Madrid.  You should be able to identify / analyze why this is so.  

The goal is not perfection, but getting to about 85%.  That's a reasonable Spanish-major goal.  

Nada pasta

 The NYT cooking talked about "nada pasta," where you make a minimalist pasta dish with whatever is on hand.  I had some squash and fresh basil, so I sautéed those with olive oil and garlic, added black pepper, some olives, a splash of red wine; then of course, topped it with parmesan.    

So my minimalist dish ended up having 8 ingredients.  It was tasty, but a bit more than nada.  

A revelation

 A student I thought had a bad accent... and it turned out she didn't want to present as someone imitating a native accent--when that is exactly what you have to do.  Once she realized it was ok, I realized that she had the right accent inside of herself--a student otherwise multilingual with English and another native language learned in the home. She ended up showing us (me and the rest of the class) a much better accent IMMEDIATELY.   

I had approached this before as either, some students don't have a good ear, or you just have to explain what the sounds are in Spanish. No I am seeing that this student (and maybe others), is not wanting to sound inauthentic by taking on an accent not their own.  

Shouldn't be a surprise

 I am a peninsular specialist (Spain) but I was thinking last night that Latin American literature is actually more interesting.  I feel no need to be defensive about my field. It would be easier to put together a course in 20th century Latin American literature with Borges and Cortázar, Vallejo and Neruda, Paz, Pizarnik, Bioy Casares, Gelman, García Márquez, Puig, Montejo.  Latin American fiction is clearly better than peninsular. The poetry is comparable, but I'd still give a 60/40 split in favor of Latin America, and even that is evidence of my own investment in Valente. For example, the antipoesía (Parra) is more interesting than Gil de Biedma and Ángel González. Valera and Pizarnik are perhaps more interesting than Valente.  

You wouldn't even have to go to the more second-rate boom writers. Fuentes is still better than Marsé, etc...

It doesn't hurt that I am having these thoughts south of the equator, in BA Argentina.  Two colleagues are leaving, so I will be teaching LAT AM the rest of the my career at least 75%.  

Randomness, disorder, and creativity

Some of my shelves are in order; others are random. Here we see a book by Perloff, a novel by Murakami, Creeley's Words. An orange collection of poetry by Ceravolo over to the left. We have Ashbery, Eigner, Notley, Sapir, a book on Lorca by Honig, Invisible Cities by Calvino, and some other stuff that isn't evident from the photo. The randomness reflects my reading habits as well as my habit of not putting books back where I first found them. The disadvantage is that I don't know always know where my books are, individually. But I would argue that randomness in reading and in shelving creates creative juxtapositions.  I just found a book by Calasso on how to arrange a library.  I will re-read it.  

Here's another shelf that's all Lorca (although it is not all the Lorca material I have, and it is not very well-ordered with respect to itself):      

 

Organization

 So I am disorganized.  I have had a successful career, but would have done more if I had been organized. 

But what if the inefficiency created by disorganization were actually an advantage?  

On the other hand, I am organized when I have to be, or organized *enough* to have had career.  

I can imagine focussing on organization and then suddenly becoming very productive again. 

Imagine having one defect so major that it affects everything else. Like those advice columns where we read that the person's partner is perfect, "I love him/her... except for one small problem..."  which always turns out to be something seriously abusive.  Everything ELSE is fine, so why can't I look past that ONE issue.  

NYC

 The New York poets, O'Hara, Schuyler, Ashbery, Koch, Guest, were very important to me.  Three gay men and then Koch, every bit as much a part of the group, and Guest, who seemed marginal to the rest of them. David Lehman leaves her out of his study of the group. David Shapiro and Ron Padgett leave her out of one of the first two anthologies.  She was accused of being too "precious."  

Then the 2nd generation of these poets. We have Shapiro, Padgett, Berrigan, Ceravolo. These also important to me.  They come out to O'Hara and Koch, but with their own nuances.  

Then, the women associated with this movement: Myles, Notley, Mayer.  Now, some of the same poetic principles found in Berrigan or Padgett get used for other purposes. Think of a poem by Koch, "Some General Instructions," kind of pseudo-Horatian kind of art of living (from the book The Art of Love (1975). When Alice Notley writes a similar poem ("The Prophet" [1981]) of facetious yet serious advice, the result is very different, because she is a different person. The structure is more or less equivalent: advice pulled together in somewhat haphazard ways.  

Of course, gender comes into play. A movement mostly male and influenced by French surrealism and American modernists becomes this wonderful feminist postmodern thing.   

My own taste is not particularly relevant, except that it allows me entry into a tradition because I had already trained myself on it. I am not as open to Ann Waldman, for some reason, and didn't like her performance style when she came here once to read, but I have been fortunate to be a reader of Notley and others proximate to this way of thinking about poetry.  

Oddly satisfying

 I had two library books that had been lost; very difficult to locate among my own books. While cleaning out my bookshelves at home, I found one of them. It is white, very thin (think slender volume of verse) and lacking any print or image on spine or cover. It was at the very bottom right hand side of a bookshelf that I had searched before. I brought it back to the library and they are going to give me my $75 replacement fee back. 

Today, I came into the office on campus, and vowed to find the other one. I did, in about 10 minutes, simply by looking through my main collection of Spanish poetry. It was easy for it to hide from me here, because, as I've always said, the most difficult thing is not finding a needle in a haystack, but finding a piece of hay in a haystack.  I mean, one specific piece of hay. It is easy to find a piece of hay, but not to find the very one you are looking for.  

Dunning

 My local newspaper growing up, the Davis Enterprise, had a column by Bob Dunning, mostly on sports and community news. He is a good writer, with a wonderful sense of humor, and a local presence.  I remember a community tennis tournament in which he was in the finals; he was a good player, but inconsistent, and would smash volleys into the net with some frequency.  Today I learned that the Enterprise fired him, after 55 years, just in an email saying they were letting him go. It is reported that his column, The Wary 1, has the longest run of any column of its type in an American newspaper.     

Local newspapers are like the glue for small towns, and Dunning has been at the center of the paper, through longevity, but also just because he was good from the outset. He now will have a substack.   

Notley on O'Hara

 Alice Notley, writing about Frank O'Hara, says that poetry "exists to communicate with this entity" [a secret self]. "Its thoughts have the shape of speaking, but it doesn't have to explain to itself as much as one does to another person: it doesn't, e.g., think in prose fiction sentences at all. It sees while it thinks, self-observes often, constructs scenarios of triumph out of vulnerability, etc... etc... that it melts in and out of."

Now this surprises me because it is what I think too, but I don't think my (our) conception of poetry is widely held, necessarily. It is specific to New York School poetics. Not that other poetries don't do this in their own way, get in touch with a secret self and channel a kind of stream of consciousness.  It is odd that people misname O'Hara's poetics as a kind of casualness, something easy to achieve even though it is not. Look at how Notley's own prose imitates that tentative search for a definition.  She isn't writing those "prose fiction sentences.'  

The phrase "prose fiction sentences" is hilarious, because I can picture exactly those kind of sentences. Sometimes I narrate my life to myself in those sentences, imitating the cadence of a New Yorker short story, and they could make up an ironical poem.    

I don't know how other people see poetry. Maybe it's a kind of object to be crafted, or a serious message dressed up in poetical garb. Often, people write trying to make something sound like a poem, which is what you have to do, of course, but they go about it in the opposite way.  In other words, it should sound like a poem (not just prose!), but not in a "poetic" way as conventionally conceived, with the shimmering shards of light. Prosaic and colloquial elements enter for their oddness or jarring quality, not just as a default because the writer doesn't know any better.  

??

 Would you do this for $2,500 a semester?  ($5,000 a year).  It seems like a lot of work.  Getting 20 faculty members to come to an event is asking a lot.  You'd be essentially putting an event together every 3 to 4 weeks. To me it seems absurdly over-ambitious, even the pay were twice that.  Maybe I just lack energy.  

Call for Dean’s Fellow for Research Growth

 

Position Description:

 

We are seeking a dynamic and organized individual to join our team as the Dean’s Fellow for Research Growth at the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. This position offers a unique opportunity to spearhead research events aimed at fostering collaboration, innovation, and interdisciplinary dialogue among faculty members. 

 

Further Details:

 

This role centers on convening 12 collaborative and informative research gatherings annually. Each event will revolve around a specific research theme determined in consultation with the College leadership team, Dean's Research Advisory Committee, Chairs and Directors, and feedback from the College faculty. For instance, a meetup could spotlight Artificial Intelligence, drawing interest from faculty across various disciplines within the College and professional schools. Other themes might encompass Ethics, Quantum Technologies, Cancer, and Community-Based Research, among others. These 12 gatherings will cover distinct topics, offering a diverse platform to catalyze research discussions within the College and beyond.

 

The overarching objective is to bring together individuals with shared interests in specific topics or themes, aiming to foster interdisciplinary conversations and collaboration, secure external funding, generate novel research concepts, and co-author publications. Essentially, the aim is to facilitate meaningful connections among researchers working on similar topics across campus, transcending the traditional silos that exist within our academic environment.

 

Key Responsibilities:

 

• Organize and lead 12 research networking events per year (6 per semester), each focusing on a different timely, important, and impactful research theme. 
• Collaborate with College staff to coordinate and facilitate 2-hour meetings for each event.
• Actively identify and invite experts from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, as well as professional schools, including the Medical Campus, relevant to each event's theme.
• Promote events to faculty to ensure a diverse and engaged participation, aiming for at least 20 faculty members in attendance at each event.
• Facilitate introductions and discussions during events, allowing faculty members to showcase their research areas, propose collaboration opportunities, and discuss potential funding avenues.
• Foster an environment conducive to networking, brainstorming, and the exchange of ideas among participants.
• Identify emerging research ideas, areas, and researchers in need of additional engagement, and document those requiring follow-ups by the Dean’s Office. Deliver regular informal updates to the Dean’s leadership team and submit an activity report at the end of each semester.     

Qualifications:

 

• Faculty appointment in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
• Enthusiasm for promoting interdisciplinary collaboration and innovation in research.
• Strong organizational skills.
• Excellent interpersonal and communication skills, with the ability to engage and motivate diverse groups of individual