Self Censorship

Of course everyone always censors themselves constantly.  It would be hard otherwise to even get through a day. There are many times that I see someone I agree with on most things repeat a stupid meme on facebook. I will censor myself because getting in a fight with the person would be even worse. I went to a poetry reading two weeks ago on zoom by someone I like personally. If anyone asks, I will say it was great, even if I have a few misgivings. 

It would be nice not to self-censor, but in what kind of universe would that happen? 

Snare Drum

 I found myself the other night shopping on line for snare drums. I don't play drums, so this might strike you as a bit odd. I do have a set of drums, and some cymbals, so to say I don't play drums is not completely accurate, but it is accurate to say that I rarely play the drums I have. I have never played drums in a band and they are not a solo instrument. I live in an apartment and don't want to disturb anyone else. Playing drums was an idea I had several years ago; I have taken lessons and read books, and I know something about playing them, but not enough to say I am a drummer. 

I am an aficionado of the varied timbres of cymbals, for example, but my hobby lacks any real substance, because the sound of cymbals is only relevant to someone playing them in a musical context, with other musicians. At some point I am thinking of recording a drum track to accompany my singing and piano playing, and putting together an album of my original songs, but I haven't gotten very far with this idea either. In short, drums are one of the several elements of my life that don't add up to much. There a few other things that fulfill a similarly opaque function for me, or perhaps no discernible function at all. I suspect that most other people are not like me in this respect, although I'm sure I am not wholly unique.  

But anyway, I found myself down a YouTube rabbit hole a little while ago, and found a video comparing the sounds of different snare drums, and I went to look at prices on a web site. Soon, ads for snare drums began showing up magically on my facebook page, as well as similar ads on every other website I visited, so I found myself considering different drums, reading their descriptions and specifications. I did not buy one, because I don't need a snare drum: I don't even play the snare drum I do own, not because it is inadequate, but because I do not play drums. Nonetheless, I took a satisfaction in adding an expensive drum to my cart at one of the online retailers, and leaving it in there for a few days without buying it. Even though my mind has been lucid, even though I know perfectly well that I have no real need for this drum, the idea of owning it remains an attractive fantasy to me. I think of entering my credit card information at the website of the drum store, of clicking on a button to buy it, of tracking the shipment every day with great anticipation. When I receive the box with the drum, I will open it and take it out, I can tap it with a drumstick and appreciate its timbre. The only doubt I have is whether the reality of possessing this drum might be, in some sense, superior to this fantasy in any meaningful way. 

Book Proposal

 I decided to work on my book proposal now. The first weeks of class are over; I haven't touched researched since then, so if I get a book proposal written, then I will have to have a sample chapter in corrected form, ready to go.  

I downloaded the Toronto guidelines for book proposals.  Now I will just go down the list in order. 

UTP SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Please include the following in your proposal:

1. A working title

2. An overview of the book

• What is it about? What is its central argument?
• Why have you written this book?
• How does your book compare to others in this field?
• How will it be different?
• If the manuscript is based on a dissertation, please tell us when it was defended and the revisions you have made or propose to make. 

3. Information about intended audience(s)

• If the book is intended for course adoption, please list relevant course titles/departments. If you have information about where such courses are taught, or an idea of enrollment, please include here.
• Is your book for specialists in your field? In a particular area of a larger field?
• Is there a broader general audience?

4. Manuscript information

• Anticipated length including word count.
• Total number of illustrations, figures, and tables (if applicable).
• Anticipated completion date.

5. For edited collections or multi-authored works, please include a description of how the book will be thematically integrated and how the chapters will be linked

6. Table of contents with a brief synopsis of each chapter

7. Curriculum vitae for each author

8. Sample chapter (if available)

Mystic Sonnet

I found this sonnet by a nun, Sor Ana de la Trinidad, ca. 1600 in the ABC. There's an edition of her works that's appeared.  She only wrote 19 sonnets, but this one looks great. I'm still confused by its spatial relations a bit, but it has some great lines. 

 

A la región do anhelas remontado

huye ligero en tu secreto nido,

donde estarás seguro y escondido

de las tormentas de la mar airado,

que siendo el crudo invierno ya pasado

cuando el campo de verde esté vestido,

aunque de mar a mar la mar crecido,

podrás entre las olas ir a nado;

o te traguen o suban hasta el cielo,

quedarás como pluma levantada,

y el tiempo breve pasarás en flores

vestido del color de tus amores;

divisarás tu patria deseada,

si altivo permaneces en tu vuelo.

Dreams

 We have two lives: waking life and dream life

In dream life we take the accoutrements of real life,

the houses and people, but mostly the psychological gunk 

and re-write it into ritual dramas or films 

Everyone in the drama is the self: the priest

the sacrificial scapegoat, helper or enemy 

the drama doesn't need a plot, beginning or end 

just enough conflict or anxiety

never in short supply!  

For me dreaming cleanses, rinses out

some of that psychological gunk 

I read somewhere that that is its biological function 

In waking life we try to remember these filmscripts

write them down if we do remember 

though many don't remember or care to write

we interpret the fuck out of them

use them to write poems, plays, and other film scripts 

We can prettify them, straighten them out

 or keep them messy

I like the the messy option 

They are realer than real life because they 

are psychologically real

pure products of the mind and everything is mind 

possibly 

We interpret the bejesus out of these scripts 

whatever we write down and remember 

I have a PhD in this and teach others to do this 

then fall asleep again the next night  

The Poetry Hierarchy

 I just began to read a poem by Alice Notley called PUT SOME OBSCENELY CONCRETE NOUNS BACK IN YOUR POEMS.  The first section of the poem is this:

the house is full of 

garbage is on fire,

a new house made 

of blonde wood. The 

father our teacher is sleeping.

Wake him up and tell him,

get a bucket, I 

say to small children. 

I was trying 

to clean up the pizza boxes 

and crumpled pages of typing when

the outside corner of the house

caught on fire again.

Everyone knows a lot of obscenely concrete nouns, so it should be easy to write with them. That just makes the poem automatically have something the reader can visualize. That being said, people fail to do this, or deliberately don't, for some very good reason, I suppose. You don't have to even do very much with this concrete language, you don't even need a large or very elaborate vocabulary. Here there are only a few surprising turns of phrase, like "blonde wood."  

Most people can't do much with the sound of words; this is very difficult. You either try too hard to make something happen, or not hard enough. It takes a musical intelligence not many people have. 

What not as many people have is a distinctive attitude toward everything, a distinctive reason why this is being told to us. I take this to be a narrative of a dream (considering most of the poems in the book do this). The relationships of the characters is hazy. The male figure is the father, "our teacher" (who is us?) and the children might be his children. She doesn't ruin the effect by putting quotation marks around the dialogue. The two things wrong, the garbage and fire, seem to compete for her attention, even though the fire is more urgent. The tense of the narration changes to past at the end... 

So, the poetry hierarchy is: concrete language ought to be easy (but isn't); prosody ought to be hard (and it is), a distinctive attitude is why we even care about it in the first place. And the other elements of the poem have to be in harmony with that attitude. We don't need a lot of word play, unless it is a poet who goes in that direction. 

This short poem (or section of a poem) is perfect in its own way, but without seeming gemlike in the way a lyric from another century would. Think of how many ways it could have been ruined. 

The Film Hierarchy

 I watch a lot of B movies on Netflix, a lot of low budget things, or movies with stars in them that are vanity projects and not very good, in various ways. 

This leads me to my theory of the movie hierarchy.  

It isn't hard to have pretty people in the movie; that's a given. It isn't hard to have beautiful scenery or nice cinematic effects. There are plenty of editors and directors who know the basic cinematic language of conventional film. The music can be fine, too. There are enough people who can create music that will serve its proper cinematic function. (An exception was LALA land, a movie about jazz that had almost no good jazz in it.) So at the minimum we will have something to look at and something to listen to.  

Next comes acting. This will be of more variable quality. There are enough good enough actors to go around for the secondary roles, but there could be casting problems, or the typical wooden performances by big name actors like Nicholas Cage or Keanu Reeves.

But the rarest talent in cinema is writing and plotting. The screenplay can be weak along several dimensions, in its narrative structure and/or its dialogue, which can be so bad that it doesn't give the actors enough to work with. So a bad movie is usually bad not in its musical score or art design, but in its screenplay, directing, or acting, or some combination of these. A solid or brilliant screenplay will give the actors something to work with.