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).