¡Bemsha SWING!

23 jul 2005

PROFOUND THOUGHT OF THE DAY: I saw someone shooting baskets at the gym the other day, very awkwardly. Not quite as awkward as I am, but pretty close. (I never learned to shoot a baskeet properly.) Anyway, I was thinking: what is awkwardness anyway? I wouldn't have been able to describe just what about the motion was awkward. Did I already have to be familiar with what a smooth motion looks like to define this other motion as awkward? Or was awkwardness inherent in the motion itself? This seems to be a very basic aesthetic judgment, one that even a little kid could make.

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jwg dijo...: I wonder about this too. Some people have ugly shots. Steve Kerr, for example. However, even with all his idiosyncrasies in his shot, they seem to go in (best three point shooter in NBA history). Watch old clips from the days of the set shot. There was a time when no one shot the jump shot (or, in hokey, the slap shot). Man were those shots ugly/awkward.

Seems to me when you are teaching someone to shoot, you?d tell them to shoot with one hand, keep the elbow in, shoulders over feet, and only use the off hand as a guide. But what do you do when Kerr comes out and can out shoot all of these perfect form shooters? You don?t touch his shot. you leave it. After watching this shot for some time, you begin to trust it, it is still not something you?d teach, but it also ceases to be awkward when you begin to notice how well it works. In mastery and utility there is beauty.; 1:36 a. m.

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Blurbs & Reviews

"Jonathan Mayhew’s new work belongs to a certain class of surprising books: those so obviously necessary once they appear that it apparently required a stroke of genius to come up with the idea for them."

--Daniel Katz

"Jonathan Mayhew's Lorca is less the distinctive Spanish poet, whose murder in 1936 marked the beginning of the Civil War, than he is an American invention. From the 1940s to the end of the century, our poets have invoked Lorca-in translation, of course-as a Romantic, exotic, radical, and, in many cases, gay icon-the poet of mystery and the duende. The Lorca myth, Mayhew argues persuasively, has enriched American lyric, but it has also been an obstacle to a more adequately grounded understanding of Spanish poetry in the 20th century. Apocryphal Lorca is revisionist criticism at its most acute."

-Marjorie Perloff

"Enhanced by copious notes and an excellent bibliography, this book offers a perceptive, intriguing assessment of the Garcia Lorca created by the postwar generation of American poets." (Choice )

"Mayhew is a critic who is at the top of his game; he combines a breadth of knowlege of the field with acute analysis."

--John C. Wilcox, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

"Let me just cut through all the usual, boring book review preliminaries and say the following thing: Jonathan Mayhew has, in Apocryphal Lorca, written an amazing book. "

--Brandon Holmquest, Calque

"The great merit of Mayhew's study is his sustained effort to document and interrogate Lorca's reception, unique among American encounters with foreign literatures in its nature and extent."

--Lawrence Venuti, TLS.

"Se trata de Jonathan Mayhew y su extraordinario estudio Apocryphal Lorca. Translation, Parody, Kitsch. Esta obra se ocupa no de García Lorca sino de cómo los escritores estadounidenses han reinventado a Lorca, desde Spicer y Rothenberg hasta O’Hara y Koch. Asimismo, es una discusión de la Deep Image —¡cuánto hay que desmenuzar de ese capítulo!— y la manera en que la poética norteamericana se ha apropiado de lo lorqueano (o lorcaesco) y del concepto de lo 'otro' que éste representa. Éste es un libro repleto de sutilezas, de tesis, apuntes, datos."

--Heriberto Yépez

"Apocryphal Lorca, sin embargo, es mucho más que un estudio de las vidas posteriores de Lorca en la poesía americana entre principios de los años 50 y 70. También ofrece un acercamiento histórico a la traducción de su obra, descubriendo reseñas de prensa significativas y discurriendo acerca de reconocimientos críticos. El texto es elegante y fresco; el análisis amplio e históricamente específico."

--María Delgado, Revista de Literatura

¡Bemsha SWING!

23 jul 2005

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