A story

 I heard a short story by Sherman Alexie in my car. I think it's called "The Door." 

A man is a film editor. He is editing a semi-pornographic film at home in the middle of the day. Someone knocks on the door, he doesn't answer, and then he hears glass break in the basement. He grabs his son's metal little-league metal baseball bat. It is small but metal. He goes down, confronts the black teen burglar, who charges him. The man swings the bat and kills the teen. 

He isn't charged with murder, but is vilified in the press as white man killing a black teen. But he is not white, but a registered Spokane Indian! He protests about this misidentification, gets vilified more. Also is vilified for editing porno film! Now for the first time he is uneasy around blacks. 

Of course it is not a light-hearted story, but it is not humorless either. It is intersectional in all the right ways, mostly in the way the character, who narrates in the first person, has a high opinion of himself. He thinks of himself as a savior figure by editing the film to minimize the exploitation of the young woman performing in it, but it ends up being far worse. The bat is brilliant detail. It is small, but at the same time powerful. 

The initial point is that in film editing, you don't need to show someone entering into a room through a door, because it people are already inside, you can surmise they entered through a door. But yet this unimportant detail can be important after all: an unanswered knock on the door has its own consequences.  

The Bluest Eye (Toni Morrison)

 I listened to the author read this book on Audible.  She is a very good reader of her own work, as is Sherman Alexie, whose book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian I also listened too. 

The main character in The Bluest Eye is mostly passive victim, and hence the plot of the novel is inherently weak on some level,  though the novel compensates for that in other ways. It is mostly about black racism against other blacks, and against themselves. There are a lot of virtuoso passages and heavy doses of didacticism. She is good at character and setting, and cultural observation. 

The Alexie novel features a very pro-active protagonist who takes action to change his life by going to a white school just outside the edge of the reservation.  The antagonists are mostly other Indians, who resent him for leaving the reservation (and beat him up a lot before he leaves). I listened after to some interviews with the author, and then I realized that it was supposed to be a young adult novel.  Well, obviously, but I wasn't thinking about that while listening. It is very funny and very well-written, in the Bildungsroman tradition.  The narrative tension comes from the fact that he is at odds with his best friend, and is able to achieve things by entering the white world. It's pretty obvious that the protagonist is the author himself, lightly fictionalized.  

Subtlety is fine, but sometimes you want someone just to say things openly, and to have some Subject Matter.  I have not particular investment now in being high brow in fiction reading.   

I'm reading a Sciascia novel in Italian, El giorno della civetta. There is a mafia killing in Sicily and a police captain solving it. I can read a page and understand nothing, read another page and get almost everything, so I have to circle back a lot. I guess the owl is nocturnal, so day-break is not a good time for it?  It's from a line from Henry VI.   

fuzzy

Since I can't draw well I tend to use a deliberately fuzzy style.  Then the incompetence seems to be on purpose rather than merely bad.  Once in a while something recognizable emerges.  

 

I found this poem I wrote

 "I speak in the passive voice."

No, that's not quite right. 

One would think rocks would get rough with age,
wouldn't you? An argument not worth having,

Camarón told him, he didn't believe it. 
Spinoza told him, he didn't believe it. 

But what? The thinness of strangers? 
Gruel for thought? 

I slept then woke, the usual order. 
I emerged into the daylight.

That curious unfinished quality there, 
a diagnosis cruel as glass in the pond. 

I slipped into a patter designed to fool,
designed to defer or postpone. 

You didn't deserve my deference,
you claimed, my condescension nor my recipes. 

I replaced your walls with something stronger,
but they would be torn down the next day anyway. 

It was worth it for the look on your face. 
You should have seen yourself squirm! 

I showed you better ways to do things. 
I have small hopes for a better life.

Ha!

 I believe this is me:  

"I once invited a kick-ass speaker to campus to give a talk on academic productivity. He gave tons of useful suggestions that I still use all the time. 

When we were leaving the event, a colleague who’d spent 20 years complaining that she couldn’t go up for promotion because she didn’t know how to get herself together and publish anything drawled, “What a disappointing event. I thought he was going to say something interesting and instead he said we need to write every day.”

Bibliographical Fridays

 I've decided to work on bibliographies on Fridays. So I can write m-th and then catch up on references on Fridays. Otherwise, I would wait to the very end to do my works cited and it would take me forever.  

Fulbright Poems

 I never wanted to go to a foreign place and write poetry based on observations, things that I saw there. That would seem forced to me, and I dislike other poets' travelogue or Fulbright fellowship poems. I dislike things that are picturesque like that, rising from the obligation to report on one's immediate surroundings.  

I was in the Basque Country and elated. I had just taught my last class and was retiring.  Everything in Navarre and the Basque Country was wonderful; I saw some sights and tasted some good pintxos and wines. But the euphoria was really coming from within.  

Brilliance

 I used to enjoy my own "brilliance," the "dance of the intellect" in my own head.  Obviously that is a youthful feeling that could cause me embarrassment now, looking back at it and seeing my past immaturity with clarity. Yet thinking in this way I would be the same old guy who might have looked down at someone like me at the time. My past self does not deserve that condescension! In part because I am still that brilliant young self: that is the basis for my current intellectual maturity, such as it is.  It was a necessary step in my development. Now if I had always been mediocre, perhaps I could have worked steadily and accomplished something, but I think starting off hot was the only path for me.  

3 projects

 Right now I have

Article for Cambridge Companion to Modernism, on FGL.

Article for Oxford Companion to FGl: Lorca in English translation. 

The Musical Legacy of Federico García Lorca.  A book on that topic. 

My plan is working M-F.  on these three things.  

The 2 articles are 8,000 words each. 

The book will be 5 chapters, averaging 10,000 words each. 

That's all I got. 

Fussy writing, pretentious writing, fancy writing

 

Fussy writing is done with an eye to not make a mistake. A fussy writer might distinguish between continual and continuous, maybe. There is nothing wrong with a little bit of fussiness, but some writers think in terms of shibboleths.  "I will never use the word thus or hence," they might think. I don't use these words very much, but I don't want to mostly be on the defensive when I'm writing.  Most of the customary shibboleths are kind of stupid. Avoiding them won't make me a good writer; they are more like talismans that I think might offer some protection against the accusations of not being a careful writer.  We were taught to write "Lorca, however...." instead of "However, Lorca...."  What's important is being able to choose, though. 

Pretentious writing: I am adopting a pose, "interrogating the conditions of ..."  The jargon itself is the point: it me you in the club with others who share that vocabulary. It's not even fussy, doesn't rise to that level, because it isn't attuned to fine distinctions or the avoidance of mistakes. 

What I like right now is fancy writing. What I mean is that each word is the right one, the sentences are balanced and flowing.  I don't repeat that many words, because each paragraph brings me something new where the words will be different. I can avoid pretentiousness, not worry about fussiness. 

Setting your own standard

 I like to begin with things that I can control; things that I don't have to ask permission to do. Now that I am Professor Emeritus my degree of freedom is complete. There is no job review any more. 

The first freedom in academic research is in the choice of topic. I can choose any topic that I want, and take any possible approach. I cannot control how interested other people are, or how my work will be received. I can think about things outside of my control, but I cannot change them. My topic happens to be "Lorca and Music," and I am studying the poet's musical activities and posthumous legacy. 

After that, one thing under my control is the standards I set for myself. How clear do I want my writing to be? How tightly organized? What amount of knowledge of the raw subject matter is necessary? How granular is my approach? How interesting or original do I want my scholarship to be? 

I can also ask more specific questions. Do I want sign-posting, jargon? How do I balance granularity of knowledge with the capacity to communicate to audience who doesn't have that degree of interest in minutiae, while at the same time being rigorously accurate? 

Most people will say they want all of this! This is great, but there is a usefulness also in making all of this explicit and intentional. Write it out as a list. Prioritize your goals. For example, some papers will not be as original: they will present interesting synthesis of knowledge already available.  

(Probably if your standard is high, then you will get further in the review process for publishing articles. If a journal has a 5% acceptance rate, you want to be in top 10% in quality to give yourself a good chance of getting a "revise and resubmit." You don't hear people complaining about papers because the language is not vague enough, or the organization is too coherent. Usually, reviewers will respond warmly to competence.)  

The next freedom is the freedom to live up to your own standards. For example, at one point I taught myself to write better. At another stage, I taught myself to write better again. I did research to improve my granular knowledge of the subject matter. Articles I wrote that were not up to my own standard were rejected. Some were up the standard of the field, in that they were published, but possibly mediocre from my own perspective. 

Envisioning the standard is the main step. That will allow you to figure out how to achieve it.  Without the standards in place in your mind, though, you will be lost.