Solving several problems at once

Suppose there are many problems. I am a bit overweight; I don't exercise. I spend too much time randomly looking at comments on web sites. I binge watch. I look at my stocks too much. My kitchen is messy. Etc... 

Now my idea is this: to solve one problem a day.  The first day I gave up X, the second day Y, the third Z.  Today I cleaned my kitchen and deleted stocks from my "widgets."  I will have to start cleaning the kitchen more, of course. 

Don't do all of this in one day, because it is more satisfying to "stack" them. Make one small change a day. 

It is not a sustainable model, perhaps, because I will ((a) run out of new things to do (b) not be able to keep up with what I have already decided, or backslide.  Problem (a) is negligible, because if I run out of ideas, then that means I will have addressed a lot of problems at that point. The solution for (b) will be to restart (or re-quit for a negative thing.) It's like the old joke: They say it's hard to quit smoking,  but not for me: I've done it a hundred times. 

Connections

 I've playing the connections game from NYT.  There are 16 words, in four categories (four words per category. You guess them one by one, and the game updates if you guess them correctly.  

The first step would be to identify at least 2 categories.  

The words were Marley, Hope, Glen, Hue, Color, Dre, Genre.... etc... 

I saw one category soon:  glen, hollow, dell, dale. 

Then I saw one related to color: shade, hue, color, tone, 

Then, it was obvious that the only Marley I knew was Bob. I remembered Bob Ross was a guy with a PBS painting show. The other two were Bob Dole, the politician, and Bob Hope, the comedian.  

The last category was anagrams of colors: Dre, genre, Gary, lube, for red, green, gray, and blue.  

The secret is not putting in any answers until you have mostly solved in your head. Gary, Glen, Hope, and Dale are first names, for example. Dre and Marley could be part of musician category.  Shade might go with glen or hollow.  Some people try to guess the hardest category first, which involves figuring out all of them and then guessing at what the hardest might be.  

Ways in which Cervantes is metafiction

 1. The work is a parody, so it is automatically metafiction, because of intertextuality.  

2. Breaking the theatrical fourth wall, in DQ's reaction to Maese Pedro's puppet show. 

3. In the second part, commentaries on the 1st part, and critique of the apocryphal Quijote. The printing press in Barcelona. 

4. Discussions of the merits of various literary works. The burning of books at the end of the work. 

5. Interpolated novels. 

6. The found manuscript and translation tropes.  

There are probably other things too, depending on how one wants to slice the pie and define these terms.  

IRISE

 We have had a rebranding.  The acronym is IRISE and each letter represents a value: integrity, respect, innovation, stewardship, excellence. It's hard not to see this language as being kind of empty.  The words are great ones to which we should aspire, but making a list doesn't help the administration negotiate better with our faculty union. It doesn't raise our salaries or our morale. Of course, each word has its own bullet points. For example, under excellence we find this inspiring but somehow uninspiring language that might have been generated by AI:   

• "We are all leaders who engage in, advocate for, and support learning and the advancement of knowledge, skills, and society." 

Riffaterre's joke

I heard a talk by Riffattere, He said this joke was not ambiguous, because the only funny way is to read it is one way, not the other. 

"Bob makes love to his wife every Thursday. So does Bill."   

I was thinking of a variation of this. A man complain to his boss about being depressed. The boss says, when I get depressed, I take the afternoon off, go and have a martini with my wife, and take her to bed. Why don't you try it? I'll give you afternoon off. 

"How did it go?" asks the boss the next day.  Wonderful! says the man. By the way, you have a nice house.  

A joke

 What do you feel about the ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning?  

I'm not intuit.  

Machado

 Cuatro cosas tiene el hombre

que no sirven en la mar:
ancla, gobernalle y remos,
y miedo de naufragar.

Modification

 Invited to Spain in November by André Soria Olmedo to talk about Lorca and flamenco.  So I'm starting my paper now. I realize that I need to be writing toward something in order to write. This is the first time in a while I really really like working. 

Anyway, my idea has been that flamenco and poetry of the canon (like Lorca)  are involved in increasing each other's prestige, reciprocally.  Today I came up with a kind of twist on this: for this to work, the musical setting must appear "natural" in some way (unforced). This means that the listener has to feel a connection between the music and the words, and that the cultural worlds of the original poem and the musical setting cannot be too distant (or be perceived as too distant.) 

Ally McBeal

 I saw an episode of "Ally McBeal" and heard one character remark to the other about how they have had a lot of sexual harassment cases lately. And of course, since the entire premise of the show is to sexualize office politics in a titillating way, the reference becomes "meta." You want to say to the characters: it is the writers' fault!  

The premise of "Murder she wrote" is that the main character will solve a murder that occurs in her vicinity, every week.  This means that the murder rate in her small Maine town is going to be far worse than any big city.  At one point, in an episode that doesn't take place in Cabot Cove, a character remarks about how many murders occur when she is around.  Clearly, once you see Jessica Fletcher, you should get as far away from there as possible! 

My third example is Snoopy's dog house. Why does he sleep on top of the doghouse, rather than inside of it?  He gets rained on or snowed on, but doesn't enter the house itself.  The reason is that we need to see him. Visually, the strip does not work if Snoopy is inside the dog house. So jokes about him getting snowed on and never escaping into his house, are also references to the conventional visual language of the strip itself.   

I guess what I'm trying to get at here, is that a fictional universe will have its own rules, ones established by generic conventions rather than by the way things work in our, non-fictional universe.  I think that's what gets Don Quixote in trouble as well.  

 

Biotherm

 Yesterday I attended a lecture by Andrew Epstein, of Florida State, invited here by English dept. I know him a bit, not super well, but he has an excellent blog on the New York School Poets (Locus Solus) that I read. We talked a bit before and after the lecture.  

Anyway, his talk was on "attention" in poetry, and he used a poem by Bishop about a sandpiper paying close attention to the sand of a beach; then some poems by Rae Armantrout; then a book by Harryette Mullen, one that I happen to like a lot.  The talk was exemplary in the way it constructed an argument with those example.. 

My question was about "Biotherm" by Frank O'Hara, in which attention is paid to many things but in a meandering form. It seemed as though attention was always about being attentive to one thing at a time, not attention as attention in each moment to what might be happening.  Now I want to re-read Biotherm and "Ode to Mike Goldberg's birth (day and other days"), poems in which O'Hara develops this new kind of American long poem, that we see also in Schuyler, in "Freely Espousing" and "The Morning of the Poem."  They are acts of attention as process, not attention as shutting everything else down to pay attention to one thing.  This is kind of impossible anyway.  I sometimes try to listen to a song three times, once for the drums, once for the bass, etc... It is great to try to do this, but I rarely succeed because the drum part is not meant to be listened to like that.  

About Bishop's sandpiper: it seemed to have escaped the poet's mind that the sandpiper is staring at the sand because it is looking for insects and other small creatures to eat.  Its lack of concern for looking at other things (the bigger picture) is not a flaw, but a biological necessity.  It's a wonderful metaphor, but from an anthropomorphic perspective.  

How many genders are there?

 The answer is very simple.  There are as many genders as there are boxes on the form to check.  Inventing a new box does not change the nature of reality. Gender is what is socially recognized as such in any given social context. 

If you think having more boxes to check is better, it might turn out that after a certain point having a lot is not so great after all.  The binary tends to slip back in anyway, because gender is a way of socially acknowledging something that is rather binary in the first place. Even the non-binary ends up recognizing their binary, because we don't talk about non-binary rocks.  

I have no problem with social construction of reality... but then it ends up being biologically essentialist in the most naive sense.