¡Bemsha SWING!

More Henry V

2012-01-29T17:04:00.002-06:00

This is the last one, I promise. For today.

Another Video

2012-01-29T16:44:00.002-06:00

I know it is not my greatest talent. Take it for a first attempt at trying to lose my embarrassment. Hearing it I notice that my interpretation is far too subdued.

Pop Art Shakespeare

2012-01-29T16:18:00.002-06:00

I have been trying to get a fragment of video that will work here and not be too embarrassing. Texts I know very well seem to escape me when I am taping myself. Or I make funny faces at the camera. Many times I perform perfectly until the last line.

More Self-Promotion

2012-01-27T18:02:00.001-06:00

Here's another blog post that mentions my book. Self-promotion is the order to the day.

NEH

2012-01-27T17:57:00.003-06:00

Just found this through googling myself. It is a nice write-up of my Lorca project in the NEH on-line journal.

Memorize the text, not the performance

2012-01-24T10:42:00.003-06:00

When I memorize a text for performance I memorize the words, but I don't develop a single reading or performance of it that I repeat every time. Instead, I let the text speak through me each time. My performances are probably more similar than I realize, but at least in principle I want each one to be fresh in where I slow down or speed up. There is also a difference between a performance in front of people, a recording I make for myself, and the mere repetition of words to myself as I am learning. It is hard to be fully "performative" when I am sitting by myself.

I know some actors, like Brando, did not want to know the text too well. By not knowing the text too well, they could keep a certain freshness. Since I am not an actor, I have other interests, but I too want to have a certain freshness. A performance which is too routine can be deadly. I prefer to improvise the performance even if the text is fixed.

Sports

2012-01-17T09:30:00.002-06:00

While I am not a sports fan per se, I totally get why people love sports.

There is an aesthetic appeal, a beauty and elegance of movement. The physicality of sports relates to that of the performing arts, dance, music, theater, poetry, and even the physicality of painting and sculpture.

Another source of appeal is intellectual, if you can call it that. The analytical breaking down of matchups. To speculate on whether Athens or Sparta is going to be the dominant power in the next few decades is not too different from debating the relative chances of the Niners and the Patriots.

The appeal to group identities, to imagined communities, is also strong. This, to me, is the least appealing aspect of sports, but I do understand the power here.

Now aesthetic uselessness and purity, group allegiance, and a physical competition that is basically a simulacrum of warfare, make up a powerful and dangerous combination. The aestheticization of ritualized violence.

Here's what Williams had to say about it:

The crowd at the ball game
is moved uniformly

by a spirit of uselessness
which delights them—

all the exciting detail
of the chase

and the escape, the error
the flash of genius—

all to no end save beauty
the eternal—

So in detail they, the crowd,
are beautiful

for this
to be warned against

saluted and defied—
It is alive, venomous

it smiles grimly
its words cut—

The flashy female with her
mother, gets it—

The Jew gets it straight— it
is deadly, terrifying—

It is the Inquisition, the
Revolution

It is beauty itself
that lives

day by day in them
idly—

This is
the power of their faces

It is summer, it is the solstice
the crowd is

cheering, the crowd is laughing
in detail

permanently, seriously
without thought

Performance

2012-01-05T09:28:00.002-06:00

2012 will be about performing for me. Improving my performance skills in the poetry reading, the classroom, the academic conference, or wherever else. I've been taping myself a lot to see where I need improvement. I will consult vocal coaches as needed. I'll improve my drumming and singing skills as well.

I feel I am already adequate. Just not good enough. Why be just as good as I am when I could be even better.

Three Kinds of Magic

2012-01-04T13:38:00.003-06:00

Literature is a form of magic. What I mean by this is that it enacts transformations approaching a magical effect. So I distinguish three kind of magic.

Narrative magic. Narrative magic makes the room in which the reader is reading disappear. The reader disappears into this other world, parallel to reality but not identical with it.

Theatrical magic The magic of the theater is to represent through spectacle a reality that goes beyond the dimensions of the stage. It is to "cram within this wooden O the very casques that did affright the air at Agincourt."

Poetic magic. Poetic magic is to cast a magic spell through the sound of the words themselves.

These three forms of magic do not exclude one another and in fact can be found together. Words on the stage can narrate, or cast a verbal spell, etc... The verbal spell might be a kind of story involving narrative magic.

Literary criticism assumes that this magic has a technology, in other words a series of ways of making this magic occur. There is no conflict between the idea of magic and that of technology. At the wizard school, after all, there are classes on potions and spells. Or if we see magic as mere sleight-of-hand there are props and tools as well as technical skills to be mastered. Either way. A dull approach to literature would be one that failed to remember the magical dimension that makes literature exist in the first place.

A fourth kind of magic, I suppose, is the effect of transforming the reader herself into a different person. This is the cumulative effect of reading, the long-term effect of all those magic spells, all those trips out of the room.

I think it follows that literature belongs to readers and not to authors. I am pretty sure I have spent more time with certain poems by Frank O'Hara than he took to write them, and multiply that by the number of his readers. To think that our aim should be to go back and see what was in his mind on that particular day is pretty ridiculous. The author doesn't have access to all those trips out of the room by all potential readers over decades or centuries after the author is deceased.

Hypercanonicity

2011-12-19T09:06:00.003-06:00

I've been doing the experiment of writing in 25-minute segments on my other blog. Here, I 'd like to do something similar, but without writing as fast as I can. I simply want to produce fluent, thoughtful prose for that window of time and see what I come up with.

Andrew has expressed some interest about my concept of hypercanonicity. For me, a hypercanonical author is one who becomes the object of insatiable attention. In Spanish literature, only perhaps Cervantes, Lorca, and Saint John of the Cross rise to that level. Basho, Shakespeare, Rilke, and Dante belong to this category. A hypercanonical writer is translated over and over again. There will be parodies, adaptations, musical settings. Every detail of the writer's life will be significant. Whereas most literary criticism assumes that the writer's life is irrelevant, or of secondary interest at best, hypercanonical authors often have biographical industries devoted to their lives. No "death of the author" here.

His or her works (usually his) become the object of a critical industry, so that an academic could devote his entire career to such a writer.

On one level, the canon is "what is taught" or "what is studied." Not every work in the canon is in the hypercanon, though. Thus, as Andrew pointed out in a comment to another post, the inclusion of additional writers to the canon (in the name of gender equity for example), has little or no effect on the fortunes of hypercanonical authors. They remain central.

Usually, a hypercanonical author defines a national literature, is central to a larger cultural identity, in the way that Cervantes defines Spanishness, or Dante lives within the Italian language. The hypercanonical author also represents the nation to the entire world (to other nations) , as Lorca does.

The implications of this idea are crucial for my project. To study a hypercanonical author is to deal with a huge ideological residue and a huge number of secondary texts, such as translations. I could not have written a book like Apocryphal Lorca about a writer not in this category. There are always linguistic and cultural issues in translation, but the kind of "Lorca effect" i found in US poetry can only result from a writer who has managed to have a huge resonance in two separate cultural spheres.

Of course, the fact that I have derived benefits in my own career from studying Lorca is also significant. People simply care more about hypercanonical authors than about almost any other topic in literary studies. Even people who barely know who Lorca is have responded with more enthusiasm to my projects on him, because they sense that there is something of interest to a wider spectrum of the reading public.

I don't think my concept is all that original, since it is similar to ideas of the "classic" that many other commentators have discussed. I think I can leverage my concept into something relatively novel when I apply it to Lorca.

Well, my time is almost up now. I think I might have a few more ideas about this subject, especially in relation to Foucault's notion of the "author-function." I would argue that the author function is intensified in the case of the "hypercanon." Or that the definition of hypercanonicity is the intensification of the author-function. How should I use my last 39 seconds? Now 27? I wish I knew how to squeeze out a few more good ideas but now my time is done.

Fielding Dawson

2011-12-19T09:04:00.002-06:00

I dreamt I was trying to remember the name of a novelist / short story writer. I finally settled on the name "Fielding Dawson." Dawson, of course, is a real writer, but his work is (presumably) nothing like the work I was reading in my dream, which was more in the David Sedaris genre. I haven't read Dawson, so maybe this dream is a sign that I should remedy this gap.

Chapter 7

2011-12-16T09:51:00.003-06:00

The final chapter will reopen the can of worms that is kitsch. The entire book is oriented toward "uses of Lorca." Implicitly or explicitly, I will always think that my uses of Lorca are better than those of others. That's what having a critical perspective means.

So that's the outline of the book. All the work I've been doing it over the past few days has been on this very blog. If I force myself to explain what the chapters are about, then I realize what they are about, even if I haven't thought about it very much.

Chapter 6

2011-12-16T09:43:00.003-06:00

Chapter six is on the gay or queer Lorca. Returning to the idea of whether biography in itself has much explanatory power, and wondering why queer theory in the 90s didn't have more impact on Lorca studies, or had its impact very late. I could argue that the queer Lorca remains undiscovered still. I was working on a book at one time (mid 90s) on gay poets in Spain, but the project ended up being a series of articles instead, mainly because I didn't quite know what to do with Lorca. A friend of mine, Enrique Álvarez, ended up writing a book that covers a lot of the ground I would have covered, and quite excellently, but I still feel I have something to say about Lorca. I just realized, while writing this post, that this was "una asignatura pendiente" [unfinished business] in my own scholarly trajectory.

Chapter 5

2011-12-16T09:36:00.002-06:00

Chapter 5 is on Lorca and flamenco. What interests me here is the way in which Lorca has been so enthusiastically adopted into contemporary Flamenco music. There is a link to the idea of a performative poetics, explained in Chapter 4, and to a later chapter on Lorca and kitsch. I'm going to have to adjust the order of the chapters at some point to make the argument of the entire book seamless.

Chapter 4

2011-12-15T13:57:00.002-06:00

Chapter 4, "Cuerpo presente: una poética performativa" develops the idea that Lorca's poetics is a performative one, with all that that implies. The title comes from a section from Lorca's "Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías." The idea of the presence of the body is key here, because performance requires the body on some level. I'll be building off some astute insights from the Lorca critic Roberta Quance and doing a close reading of the Duende lecture.

Chapter 3

2011-12-14T10:54:00.002-06:00

Chapter 3 of "modelo para armar" is about Lorca's influence on Valente and Gamoneda. I will be borrowing a bit from an article I published in Spanish. The title is "la ansiedad de una influencia." My argument is that these poets do not acknowledge Lorca enough, especially Valente. I argue that poets like Lorca and Vallejo present a model of fractured subjectivity, unlike, say Juan Ramón Jiménez with his confidence in the power of language to create an autonomous verbal reality. Valente wants to acknowledge Jiménez but not Lorca, the stronger and more radical model. He (Valente) also puts Neruda over Vallejo, or reads Vallejo in a narrower way. This chapter is going to kick ass.

Chapter 2

2011-12-14T10:50:00.002-06:00

Chapter 2 will be on Lorca as a poetic thinker and a modernist poet. It will repeat some of the argument of "Was Lorca a Poetic Thinker" but will also consider his mature work of the 1930s in relation to my concepts of "late modernism."

Vendler vs. Dove

2011-12-09T13:31:00.002-06:00

What I find remarkable about Vendler's review of Dove's anthology in the NYRB is the racial animus. It's fine to include Billy Collins or Mary Oliver, poets of negligible aesthetic category, but not a figure as historically significant as Baraka? It is fine to include a mediocrity like Pinsky, but not a significant black modernist like Tolson? A thoroughly unsdistinguished poet like William Stafford is fine, but let's make sure there's not too many black poets! That seems to be the logic behind Vendler's review, which comes back repeatedly to (what she feels is) the overrepresentation of poets from minority groups. Nobody worries about the overrepresentation of mediocre white guys, as usual.

I could criticize Dove's anthology on numerous inclusions and exclusions. Anybody could play that game. No Coolidge? No Irby? Gregory Orr is there but not David Shapiro? Is Alice Notley there? It's a kind of stupid game, in the end, but the way Vendler plays it is particularly inept, devoting special attention to how Dove describes or represents the work of black poets and movements.

Ironically, Vendler is the most high-powered poet to ever champion Dove's own poetry. I guess that's an alliance that is definitively broken.

Chapter I

2011-12-09T11:00:00.003-06:00

Chapter One, "Modelo para armar" is an introduction that argues for the necessity of contemporary theory for the study of Lorca. Specifically, I argue for the idea of Foucault's "author function" instead of approaches based on the "life and works" paradigm. In other words, Lorca's biography does not explain his work or its importance, or has very limited explanatory power.

Why? A biography is simply a narrative and interpretive framework that is constructed like any other such framework. It provides one kind of context (among other possible contexts) for interpretation. All interpretation takes place within a context (no context free interpretation) so the idea is not that a particular biographical detail is not (potentially) explanatory, but that this is simply a choice of one context among many. Secondly, the biographical detail does not come with its own interpretation already attached. A fact is not an interpretation of this fact.

Another reason for wanting to use modern theory to interpret Lorca is that modern theory is the theorization of avant-garde poetics itself. To use a life and works paradigm is to be on a level lower, less sophisticated, than that of Lorca himself.

I'm not in favor of theoretical readings of Lorca that apply theories to his poetry or drama. I am not proposing theoretical applications as much as readings informed by the insights learned from theory.

Ok. That's all I got for that chapter so far. I find that if I ask myself what the chapter will say I already know, but I have to first ask.

Lorca: modelo para armar [yet another table of contents]

2011-12-09T10:39:00.004-06:00

1. Modelo para armar
2. Los años 30: caminos hacia la modernidad tardía
3. Lorca, Valente y Gamoneda: la ansiedad de una influencia
4. Cuerpo presente: una poética performativa
5. Lorca y el flamenco
6. Aportaciones de la teoría queer
7. Lorca y sus apócrifos: entre Motherwell y Strayhorn

I didn't want all the chapters to have "Lorca" in the title. I've also rearranged the order of the chapters. Chapter 7 obviously needs a better title, but I don't know what the chapter will say yet.

More Followers

2011-12-08T12:18:00.001-06:00

Bemsha Swing needs more followers right away or it is in danger of being overtaken by the upstart blog, Stupid Motivational Tricks. You wouldn't want that to happen, would you?

The Literature Haters

2011-12-08T08:01:00.002-06:00

The joke back in the day was "the Duke English Department: united only in their common hatred of literature." I have often decried the kind of "empty center" of literary studies, the absence of a firm commitment to the object of study itself. I knew people in graduate school who disdained the primary text, whether through an allegiance to high theory or to crude Marxism. My Latin Americanist colleagues talk about feeling guilty for studying and teaching literature. It seems, sometimes, like anything else is going to be more interesting than mere literature.

Like everyone else, I am interested in a wide range of subjects, from music and film to politics. What literature offers, though, is the total package. It is an art form made of words, so it has an extremely significant aesthetic dimension, but is also inscribed in ideology and history. To be a really compelling scholar in this field you have to have erudition and theoretical sophistication as well as an aesthetic sensibility. It require some serious cultural capital.

Another Review

2011-12-07T19:56:00.001-06:00

here...

El libro toma su título del quinto capítulo: “Apocryphal Lorca”, en el cual se estudia la obra, After Lorca (1952) de Robert Creely y especialmente la homónima de Jack Spicer, de 1957. De ésta se nos señala que “no solo es el ejemplo más extendido y complejo de apócrifos lorquianos en cualquier lengua sino un trabajo crucial en su desarrollo como poeta y consecuentemente uno de los más significativos trabajos de poesía estadounidense de posguerra”. Mayhew, que es un estudioso sobrio y mesurado, fundamenta estas elogiosas afirmaciones en tanto indaga en la génesis de la obra. Este capítulo es profundamente interesante, el logro del entendimiento extenso pero minucioso de un fenómeno poético en que confluyen la lengua castellana y la inglesa.

Modelo para armar

2011-12-07T14:40:00.002-06:00

1. Lorca: modelo para armar
2. Lorca en el pensamiento poético español del siglo XX
3. Neopopularismo y vanguardia: la discutida modernidad de Lorca
4. ¿Un Lorca “queer”?
5. Los años 30: caminos hacia la modernidad tardía
6. Cuerpo presente: una poética performativa
7. Lorca y el flamenco
8. Lorca, Valente y Gamoneda: la ansiedad de una influencia
9. Lorca y sus apócrifos: entre Motherwell y Strayhorn

I think 3 and 5 might have to be one chapter. I'm not sure yet. The critical problems to be discussed, in order, are the relevance of poststructuralist criticism to Lorca (why we should approach Lorca as modern critics rather than as "life and works" positivists"), Lorca himself as a poetic thinker, the apparent or real dichotomy between Lorca as neopopularist or folklorist and as an avant-garde poet, Lorca and queer theory, why hasn't it been done more?, Lorca as a modernist poet, in relation to other modernist poets of other nations (where does he fit into literary history?), his 'performative poetics," his relation to flamenco, his influence on Valente and Gamoneda, and a revision of the ideas of apocryphal or kitsch Lorcas. Whew, I have my work cut out for me. Arrogantly enough, I think I can write this book and do it well. Not only that, only I could write it. Not only that, but the book sprang into my head almost fully armed, and when I sit down to write it the words simply flow out of me.

A New Chapter

2011-12-07T14:25:00.003-06:00

I added a new chapter to the plan of my book in Spanish on Lorca. I realized that I was missing a chapter on "queer Lorca," so to speak. That would have been a pretty conspicuous absence.

I don't want to do another book on Lorca that analyzes Bodas de sangre, or Romancero gitano, all over again. There are enough books that take his poetic or theatrical works and devote chapters to them. Rather, what I want to do is a book about critical problems in Lorca criticism. Honestly, I don't think I could come up with a new interpretation of Yerma. Well, I could, but its novelty would not be sufficient to justify it. There are diminishing returns to the interpretation of canonical works. On the other hand, I am very confident that I have a lot to say about Lorca from many angles of vision.

Kitsch, Adorno, and Greenberg (and Mayhew's Lorca)

2011-12-06T10:08:00.003-06:00

I guess I am going to have to tackle Clement Greenberg on modernism and kitsch, along with Benjamin on mechanical reproduction and Adorno on jazz, in my essay (chapter) on Lorca and kitsch. I am going to bring in some flamenco too, making an argument about flamenco re-appropriations of Lorca, in Enrique Morente, for example.

Two arguments I want to avoid making: that kitsch is simply "bad taste," that it can be dismissed. That modernist dismissals of kitsch are simply wrong because of their elitism, etc... Both of those arguments are too easy for me. I'm interested in how a mass or popular art becomes a highbrow artform.

I have to find a third argument there somewhere. I am rather excited about finding a perspective that builds on Apocryphal Lorca but that does not simply repeat that argument. In that book, kitsch was simply the logical extreme of simplistic American readings of Lorca. Now my perspective is a little more nuanced, since I will no longer be holding up the non-kitsch readings as superior.

So I guess those 120 hours of listening to flamenco podcasts was "work." I feel much less lazy now.

***

The last chapter of a book should be the first chapter of your next book.

Trilogy

2011-12-03T14:39:00.002-06:00

My Lorquian trilogy will consist of Apocryphal Lorca, What Lorca Knew, and Lorca: modelo para armar.

The first studies Lorca's "afterlife" in the US. The second will situate Lorquian poetics alongside the late modernism of Zambrano and Valente (among other things).

The third will be a compendium, in Spanish, of my latest thinking about Lorca. My only doubt, now, is whether there is enough Lorca in What Lorca Knew to justify the title. It is such a great title, I have to use it, but maybe I should take out one of the unwritten chapters and put in something about Lorca instead?

When I say "my only doubt" I realize that that sounds rather arrogant. Today, however, I am in a very self-confident mood, so all my usual doubts are not at the forefront of my mind.

I had wanted to do a kind of updating of Apocryphal Lorca, just a brief chapter called something like "Lorca and Kitsch Revisited." If I did that, then I would be able to increase the Lorca quotient of the second book enough to justify the title. I wouldn't want the reader to pick up the book and feel defrauded by the fact that only one out of ten chapters are about Lorca! Now 20% is enough, I think.

Crudely put, the argument would be that Lorca to Lorquian Kitsch is as modernism to postmodernism. I know even mentioning postmodernism nowadays is cringe-worthy, so I hope you understand I am speaking in shorthand.

Musical Criticism

2011-12-02T08:56:00.001-06:00

Here is an excellent post by a wonderful composer and music critic--a post with rich implications for literary criticism.

Mustache or Not?

2011-12-01T14:18:00.003-06:00

Time to vote: Mustache or no mustache? What is your preferred look for one of your favorite bloggers?

Bus Mindfulness Meditation

2011-12-01T10:42:00.002-06:00

Here is a bit of "creative writing" for the day:

As you are waiting for the bus, direct your attention to the sensations in your body, beginning with your breathing. Just be aware that you are breathing. Do not close your eyes or shut yourself off from the outside world. If something annoys you, just accept that feeling of annoyance. When your bus arrives focus your attention on climbing the steps carefully and finding a seat on it. When you are settled in, keep your eyes open and become aware, once again, of your breathing. After a few breaths, look around you and take note of what you see and hear. Simply be attentive to what is around you, without judging it or dwelling too long on any particular object of attention. There may be smells worthy of note. Direct your attention to the sensation in your body, your feet on the floor of the bus, or how the seat feels. Make no particular effort to be relaxed or calm, just make not of what you are feeling and perceiving. Now do a brief scan of the thoughts in your mind. Just make note of what is there. When your bus arrives at your stop, make sure you collect all your belongings and dismount carefully from the bus, thanking the driver as you step off.

Morton Feldman

2011-11-30T10:46:00.002-06:00

Here is the second poem I have written this morning. This too, is unlike anything I have ever written, though it bears some relation to "Page of Prose" and "The Complete Sentence Game."

This is a poem called "Morton Feldman." I hope you like it. My original plan was to write a series of poems using titles from Feldman's music, like "Rothko Chapel," "For Frank O'Hara," "The Viola in My Life," or "Crippled Symmetries." I would use these titles and write to his music. But how could I write to his music? Dancing to music I understand, although I do not do it well. There is a relation between the musical pulse and the movement of feet and body. Most people understand this relationship. Writing to music is something different from that. I could write about the music, I suppose, but what would be the point of that? Assuming I have something to say about this music, I would probably not use a poem to say it. This poem least of all. So in place of the series of poems written to titles of Feldman's music, I have written this explanation of how I could not write these poems.

I hope you have enjoyed my poem "Morton Feldman."

Frank O'Hara and Me

2011-11-30T08:21:00.002-06:00

Here is a poem I composed in my head as I was trying to get out of bed this morning. Once I showered and shaved and dressed, I wrote it down in this blog post. It is unlike any poem I have ever written.

Frank O'Hara and Me

I have outlived Frank O'Hara by eleven years,
Lorca by thirteen.
Spicer, too, dead at forty.
Fiercely devoted to them, I am unlike them,
less talent, drinking less, not gay,
with a daughter who plays Mahler.
Their work flows through me
like Mahler through Julia's trumpet,
"the inexorable product of my own time"?
A time that is also mine.

Monotone

2011-11-29T10:12:00.003-06:00

I went to a reading the other night in which a woman read a short-story in an invariant voice. It wasn't technically a monotone because there was some variation of pitch, but it was the same variation of pitch and the same tempo throughout. Every sentence got equal weight. It was deadly.

The other reader seemed to go on too long reading his undistinguished poetry. I don't think you should use the phrase "in terms of" in a poem unless you are being ironically prosy in a John Ashbery mode. I don't think you should introduce a poem by saying that it is going to go over the audience's head. I don't even think he meant that to be insulting.

I guess I don't really like readings that much aside from the social aspect. Egoistically, I like reading myself rather than listening to other people, unless they are actually better writers and readers than I am.

I often record myself and listen critically to what I hear. I have a tendency to drop words and to fall into a predictable intonational pattern, among other numerous flaws. I am not saying that I am the perfect reader, but I am still a whole lot better than a lot of readers I hear.

My Book For Free

2011-11-25T10:33:00.003-06:00

Here is a link for the open access version of my "other" book.

Of course, I was staring at the page for ten minutes trying to figure out how to download the book before I realized that I had to click on the PDF reader icon.

300 Pounds

2011-11-17T10:41:00.004-06:00

My book, not my book on Lorca but my other book, will be available on an open access site at something called JISC in the UK. This is good for me, since I get a small sum of money and also get more readers for my book, which was priced out of the range of any normal academic. I'll let you know when it's up there.

The good thing is that this book was overshadowed by my Lorca book, so this allows the playing field to be leveled a bit. Even in my own mind, I was not giving myself as much credit for this book, which included some really kick-ass studies of contemporary Spanish poetry. Simply because the same year I kicked a little more ass in another book.

Critical Thinking Exercise

2011-11-17T09:46:00.000-06:00

This post from a while back had me thinking about a common statistic reported in the media and on blogs about the life-expectancy of former NFL players and the danger of getting decaf[?] espresso in the late afternoon.

Studies have shown that 80.4% of of statistics are highly misleading if not false.

Carbon Free?

2011-11-17T08:43:00.002-06:00

There's one kind of expensive Scandinavian notebook I like to use that advertises itself as "carbon free." I wondered at first what the paper was made out of, because I think it's pretty hard to make paper without using some sort of material that has carbon in it. Maybe it was plastic? But isn't that made from petroleum, an organic product too? It didn't seem like the paper was made from rock or glass, or other sorts of mineral or inorganic material.

Of course I realized after a few seconds or minutes that they meant that the paper was produced in a way that didn't burn any carbon-based fuels, not that it didn't contain, itself, any carbon. My literal-mindedness again.

Crash Blossoms

2011-11-15T10:41:00.001-06:00

Language log sex quiz crash blossom

Kitsch

2011-11-15T08:35:00.002-06:00

I thought of a pretty good idea to write an article about kitsch, a concept that has a strategic place in the title of my book Apocryphal Lorca: Translation, Parody, Kitsch, but that requires further development.

The elements of kitsch are secondhandness, but also a nostalgia for origins. Take the tin-pan alley song "The Birth of the Blues." It is not a blues song itself, but a pop song in another form that is about the blues. Specifically, about its origin or birth:

Oh, they say some people long ago
Were searching for a diffrent tune
One that they could croon
As only they can

They only had the rhythm
They started swaying to and fro
They didn't know just what to use
That is how the blues really began

They heard the breeze in the trees
Singing weird melodies
And they made that the start, the start of the blues

And from a jail came the wail
Of a down-hearted frail
And they played that
As part of the blues

From a whippoorwill
Way up on a hill
They took a new note
Pushed it through a horn
Until it was worn
Into a blue note

And then they nursed it
They rehearsed it
And then sent out that news
That the Southland gave birth to the blues

The secondhandness and the evocation of origins are in tension. The endless repetition of the song, the numerous versions by Sinatra, Armstrong, Sammy Davis Jr, and Crosby, add layers of kitschiness to it. There are other non-blues songs about the blues, like "Lady Sings the Blues" and "Blues in the Night," or maybe even "Mood Indigo."

That's an easily identifiable case. But what about a real blues song that becomes kitschified? Or what if there is no origin there at all? The search for origins itself gives rise to secondhandness. What if Lorca is already kitsch, and the kitschification of him is simply a logical next step?

To condemn kitsch is to commit oneself to some notion of the non-kitsch, the authentic, yet the search for the authentic is already part of the mechanism of kitsch. I feel I'm reinventing deconstruction here. You know, one of those aporias.

Even though it's misinterpretation, mistranslation all the way down, I still feel that there is an aesthetic judgment to be made. Some aesthetic appropriations breathe new life into the original material. Mingus's music, for example ("Better get hit in your soul"). Some of Ellington's reinterpretation of folkloric materials.

Whenever you feel embarrassment, or that something is in "bad taste," then something interesting is going on. I find the lyrics to "The Birth of the Blues" intensely distasteful.

So my essay would have two parts, one on Lorca and one on jazz. I plan to make this my traveling piece, so I could give it various places where I am invited to speak, Iowa and Belfast for example.

The Complete Sentence Game

2011-11-08T10:12:00.002-06:00

It occurs to me that The Complete Sentence Game could be an entire book, at least of chap-book length. I tend to think in terms of short, chap-book works of poetry, like The Thelonious Monk Fake Book. Maybe 20-30 pages. Aren't those much more readable than the typical 60 pages format for a book of verse? What perverse publisher or tenure committee thought that one up?

Pop Art?

2011-11-07T14:15:00.000-06:00

Irby

2011-11-07T10:36:00.002-06:00

I spent all of Saturday at the Ken Irby celebration. Pierre Joris, Lyn Hejinian, and Ben Friedlander flew in for it, giving talks about Ken's work, along with local luminaries Denise Low and Joe Harrington. Megan Kaminsky and Billy Joe Harris did the emceeing and organizing. The five poets (Lyn, Pierre, Ben, Denise, Joe) also gave a reading, and Ken himself gave a masterful performance to conclude the daytime events. Then we went out to eat and finally had a reception at Billy joe and Susan's house. My role in the celebration was minimal, as the designated introducer of Pierre Joris. It was great for me to be able to meet Lyn Hejinian and Ben Friedlander in person as well.

When I arrived at Kansas more than 15 years ago, Ken Irby was not even on the tenure track. Inexplicably, I did not even meet him until I had been here a few years and decided to organize the poetics seminar. Now he is being promoted, very belatedly, to full professor at the age of 75.

Ken told me he liked my reading the other night. This was great (for me), because Ken is a wonderful reader of poetry, one of the best I've ever heard in person. In fact, I'm trying to think if I know of anyone who reads poetry any better than that. I am listenable, but not in that league at all.

Ur-Proverbs

2011-11-03T10:13:00.002-05:00

In class yesterday we talked about ur-proverbs. The students had never seen the prefix ur- so that took a while to explain.

An ur-proverb would be a sort of "proverb-behind-the-proverb." We came up with several:

The individual is defined by the social group with which s/he is identified.

Life is unfair. Powerful people will have their way.

Older people are wiser.

Pragmatic intelligence (shrewdness) is extremely valuable.

People behave in predictable ways.

Cello

2011-11-03T09:21:00.003-05:00

I was walking down the street and a woman approached me and said: "you have a good chance of getting the violoncello seat in the orchestra now. There has been a lot of attrition." I tried to tell her I didn't play the cello. She had confused me with someone else.

Flarf!

2011-11-02T10:24:00.001-05:00

The flarf orchestra has landed.

Jackie McLean

2011-11-02T09:10:00.003-05:00

Jackie McLean is perhaps the major saxophonist I know the least. I can situate him somewhere close to Cannonball Adderley or Art Pepper, with those long flowing phrases. He has a distinctive sound. For whatever reason, I haven't made a concerted study of his work yet. Now I'm able to do so because I have the spotify service on my computer.

Not My Musics

2011-11-01T14:31:00.001-05:00

Disco, Country and Western, rancheras (or Mexican music generally), metal, grand opera, and zarzuela are not my musics. New Age and electronica, trance, etc... are not my music, nor is hip hop. Renaissance music is not to my taste, generally speaking. I despise Dixieland revival music. I don't like folk songs or military marches much.

Within this general category of "not my music," it's obvious that there is some good music that I might even enjoy hypothetically, but I simply have too many musics that I need to be listening to instead. I do use the radio program "Music From the Hearts of Space" as a sleep aid on Sunday night. I set it real low and go to bed at 11, and set my stereo to shut off exactly at 12. This New Age music program is very relaxing, but I don't use it for listening purposes.

My Musics

2011-10-31T09:45:00.003-05:00

I am interested to some degree in about five main kinds of music.

(1) Jazz, basically all of it from the beginning through the present day. Within the jazz tradition, I have many sub-interests, but my main love is everything from Lester Young to the death of Coltrane.

(2) Everything known as "classical" music from Baroque to Morton Feldman. Here my erudition is not as extensive, so I am always happy to hear new things. I rarely dislike any canonical composer, but my main love is J.S. Bach.

(3) If I could play in a band, however, I would play conga in a salsa band. My 3rd kind of music is anything Afro-Cuban. I can play a bembe or tumbao, or a martillo on bongos. I love the polyrhythmic complexity of this music.

(4) I also am developing my knowledge of Flamenco. I am pretty familiar now with the canon of La Niña de los Peines through Miguel Poveda.

(5) Would you like to guess what my 5th music is? That's right: classic R&B and Soul, with some neo-soul thrown in.

These are listed in approximate order of my knowledge and level of interest. If I had to list a 6th, it would be classic rock, including things that I half listened to when I was in college. Steely Dan and Fleetwood Mac were big back then.

So you understand my problem. There is only one of me and six kind of music I want to be listening to at any given time. I am lucky I never developed an interest in opera or bluegrass.

Hancock

2011-10-31T09:27:00.002-05:00

Herbie Hancock started off with a lengthy version of Wayne Shorter's "Footprints" on acoustic piano. Then he played a lengthy version of his own "Dolphin Dance," one of his most beautiful tunes. He gradually switched from acoustic piano to his electronic gear, so that by the end of the night he was mostly playing electronics, jamming to his prerecorded grooves. He played "Canteloupe Island" and the audience ate it up. At the end he was playing a keyboard strapped around his neck with which he could get guitar-like effects by manipulating some buttons with his left hand. I kind of went into a trance during the whole concert.

Hispanic Issues: What Lorca Knew

2011-10-30T16:14:00.002-05:00

My article, "What Lorca Knew" is now available on line at Hispanic Issues On Line.

I haven't read the rest of the issue yet, so I don't know what the other contributors have to say.

HH

2011-10-30T10:56:00.002-05:00

I'm going to see Herbie Hancock this evening at the Lied center here in Kansas. I try not to miss any visit by a "historic" figure like this. He played with the great second Miles Davis quartet of the 60s (with Shorter, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams). He also played on classic Shorter albums and with other members of this group on "Empyrean Isles," one of the greatest jazz albums of all time. He was on the ground floor of the fusion movement which also developed, mostly, out of the same cauldron of the Miles Davis groups of the 60s. It probably doesn't matter that I don't love every thing he's done, since he's Herbie Friggin Hancock.

Reading

2011-10-28T13:09:00.002-05:00

My poetry reading went over very well. I haven't given a reading in a long time, and some of my Lawrence friends have never actually seen me read in public. I read two of my Gelman translations, then played the Complete Sentence game before an audience for the first time. The Beaches of California series got some laughs. Then I read some of the Thelonious Monk sequence, "After Michael Palmer," and "Mayhew's Mood." Not explaining anything let me read more poems that I would have otherwise. I realized I am actually a pretty good performer. I could really feel the audience with me. It didn't hurt that a third of the audience consisted of close friends.

The other poet, Cheryl Tallant, was also a good reader, so overall it was a great evening. I might have been allergic to the bookstore cats because I woke up at 2:30 a.m. with allergy attack.

Solace

2011-10-27T14:25:00.002-05:00

This is an interesting comment thread. To what poetry to turn to in search of solace? After reflecting about it for few moments, I discovered that the answer for me was Robert Creeley. Notice that this is a different question from who is your favorite poet, or the one who has influenced your own poetry the most, etc... What poet do you turn to in times of need?

Don't Explain

2011-10-27T10:55:00.004-05:00

Poets, don't explain your poetry in your poetry reading. Just read the damn poems. Nobody cares how or why you wrote them, or when or where. If the poem needs an explanation, you haven't written it well enough. If it needs an anecdote, then put the anecdote in the poem itself. If your explanation is better, more engaging, more interesting, than the poem, then your poem is no good anyway. Toss it.

Today in my reading my plan is to read some translations of Juan Gelman, selections from "The Beaches of Northern California" and "The Thelonious Monk Fake Book," and "After Michael Palmer." I might do "The Complete Sentence Game" too, which is a poem that is improvised and takes a different shape every time.

More Than Cool Reason

2011-10-26T10:59:00.003-05:00

I am using More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor by Lakoff and Turner, in class today, but re-reading it this morning I realize that what I think is very easy reading might be challenging for undergraduates. It is a very good book, written in a highly accessible style. The concluding chapter deals with the interpretation of proverbs in terms of four main concepts, Grice's maxim of quantity, the 'Great Chain of Being," the "GENERIC IS SPECIFIC" metaphor and the folk belief in the nature of things. Easy stuff, for me, but it won't be for them.

How Good A Poet Am I?

2011-10-25T11:03:00.002-05:00

A kind of question like this cannot be answered. In other words, for oneself, in judging one's own poetry, there is no way of knowing. The exception is someone really, really good, like Frank O'Hara, who knew he was good in a more absolute way. I think Keats knew he had done it, for example. You cannot depend on friends either, because they will tell you your poetry is fine. One mystery is how poets who began to write crappy poetry in their youth still somehow knew that they had it.

The doubt about whether you are good enough is psychologically intolerable, because most people view talent as a kind of absolute "it" that one either has or doesn't. My own solution is not to be a "professional poet" whose ego depends on how good I am. I believe I am a better poet than you are, but this claim has no real consequences. I don't have to ride the wave of my poet's ego.

Replacement Poetry

2011-10-25T10:53:00.003-05:00

I realized that a lot of the poetry I will read on Thursday at the "big tent" follows the procedure of replacing text with other text, whether through translation, erasure, or using titles taken from other sources and reinterpreting them completely, as I do in my masterpiece, The Thelonious Monk Fake Book.

I have a harder time writing without some pretext, some spur, some organizing principle. The poem "Mayhew's Mood" is an exception, aside from the title that refers to "Monk's Mood" and "Parker's Mood." The organizing principle there is simply that of a diary of emotional states.

Sea Surface Full of Clouds (ii)

2011-10-20T16:45:00.004-05:00

When i was very young I looked at book that Harold Bloom had just published on Wallace Stevens. Of course, I looked up what he said about "Sea Surface Full of Clouds," and of course he dismissed the poem in a kind of high-handed way, as "the famous and overrated set piece of 1924." The most experimental side of this great modernist poet interested Bloom not at all. So I developed a dislike for Harold Bloom at that point. If he couldn't tell me something interesting about this poem, then I no longer trusted him. Of course, I was probably 20, so what did I know? It was a kind of arrogant position for me to take. On the other hand, I wasn't about to bow down to some critical authority either. At what point was I going to have opinions of my own, if not right then?

Irby

2011-10-20T14:31:00.001-05:00

See here for information on the Ken Irby celebration at the University of Kansas.

Sea Surface Full of Clouds

2011-10-20T11:03:00.002-05:00

One of my favorite poems of all time is "Sea Surface Full of Clouds," by Wallace Stevens. Each section of the poem is the same poem, essentially, with different elements substituted in certain slots. For example, the word chocolate will get a different adjective each time: "rosy chocolate," "chop-house chocolate." I've often wanted to write a poem like that, and I think I will do it in advance of the big tent reading a week from today at the Raven bookstore here in Lawrence.

Comparative Disadvantage

2011-10-20T10:41:00.003-05:00

I wonder how the bottom 10% of the bottom 1% feel. This 0.1% of the population, tenth of the tenth, is lumped together with the other 9% of the top. But how much does a person in this group have in common with someone in the top 0.1% of the nation? Not very much. On the other hand, the bottom half of the top 2% is safe from the public outcry. Yet they are separated by a very thin line from the bottom half of the top 1%. At least the 1% of these two groups at the margins are almost indistinguishable.

Triangulation

2011-10-19T13:14:00.002-05:00

The course outlined below would allow me to deal with American jazz, soul, and poetry; Spanish poetry and music; and Afro-Cuban music and poetry. Really, it would allow me to draw on many things of interest to me. It would be like Miles meets Lorca.

Ida y vuelta

2011-10-19T10:41:00.002-05:00

I've been a bit under the weather of late but when I come back, like today, I am ready to kick ass again, sharing my brilliance with the world, or the small segment of the world that reads this blog.

My current plan for my next graduate seminar is "Canciones de ida y vuelta: entre el son y el flamenco."

The concept of "ida y vueta" or "round trip," refers at the first level to styles of flamenco with strong Latin American influences, like the "rumba catalana." The course, though, will take into account any kind of "double cross-overs."

I. From Flamenco-influenced poetry to poetry-influenced flamenco.

2. From Spain to Latin America and back, the "cantes de ida y vuelta."

3. From son and rumba to jazz and soul and back again. Dizzy Gillespie, Machito, Ray Barretto.

4. Jazz and flamenco fusions...

etc...

More of a culture course than a literary one... I am redeveloping my handdrumming skills and hope to have them up to a decent level by the time I get to teach this course. I am ok on congas and getting some cajón and bongo chops as well. I know some cáscara and campana rhythms pretty well too.

Cambiaste oro por plata

2011-10-13T23:03:00.002-05:00

You replaced gold with silver.
I replaced the fibers in your clothes.
You ate my plums.
I ruined your make-up.

You rewrote my prose.
I rewrote your prose.
You rewrote my prose.
I rewrote your prose.

Listen to what they're saying.
What they're going around saying.
Listen to it.
Listen to it.

After Michael Palmer (iv)

2011-10-13T19:52:00.003-05:00

This time I won't start with any particular MP poem. Instead, I'll just write a poem as though I were imitating MIchael Palmer.

Your praise! I've kicked the ladder down.
My dive will have to be very precise.

If you could notate that sucker you'd have something.
As it is, you got nothing.

Said the foolish person. But he was right.
A 360 leaves you facing the same way.

Now a 370...
Then the connection was lost.

History

2011-10-13T11:50:00.003-05:00

The first subject that interested me was history. In 3rd grade, I checked out all the books I could carry from my elementary school library and read them all. Naively, I just wanted to know everything that ever happened. Before then I had been a slow student. I could never do the busy work fast, and still can't. Just reading those history books was a revelation. That's the exact moment when I became an intellectual. Interesting that this is about (in other words, exactly) the same time I started to question religion. Just getting a larger perspective makes you question the provincial realities of your own time and place.

The Road To Unbelief

2011-10-13T10:23:00.002-05:00

This will not be a piece about arguments for or against belief, but rather an account of my particular path as I best remember it. I remember thinking the whole thing was a little bit suspect from the beginning, at around 6 or 7, but I attributed this to the fact that I was in the little kids Sunday school, where they were giving me the baby version. I assumed that I would get the full account later on. When I graduated to the general meeting, with adults and children mixed, I was disillusioned. There really was nothing much there. The next step in disillusionment was my baptism and confirmation. You were supposed to feel the holy ghost descend on you, and it didn't happen for me. It seemed to happen for everyone else, as they told it, but for me, nothing.

I read the bible when I was 8 and 9, more or less completely. It was a great story. I really like how the Israelites went to war to reclaim the land promised them. What troubled me, though, was how irrelevant the vast majority of this text was to anything in the modern religion that was supposed to be based on it. I was also troubled that a sin could be something that you merely thought. That seemed very unfair, because "bad thoughts" would pop into my head that I had no control over. I may have had some form of OCD. I really cannot stand to be watched like that. I would still find it intolerable to be judged for private, interior thoughts that are mine alone. I honestly don't see how anyone could tolerate that for one second. The next step was realizing that there were different beliefs. My church was the correct one, according to its members, and all others were wrong. But didn't an accident of birth place most of them in this church? What if none of the denominations were right? What if it was all made up? I read Of Human Bondage around this time. The hero Philip, prays to God to cure his club foot, and nothing happens. There seemed to be a disjunction between a world described in the Bible, where God comes down and converses with people, telling them what to do, and real life as I knew it.

So by the time I was 10 or 11, I was an atheist, as I remain today. I tried to believe in it for a few years, between 10 and 16, with no success. Being who I am, it was impossible to convince myself. The main factors were (1) lack of intellectual depth, even when I had graduated to the adult version (2) actually reading the Bible (3) no visit from Holy Ghost, (4) intolerance of an intrusive deity as thought police, (5) the contingency of having been born into a particular religion, and (6) reading a novel. Of these, probably 3 and 4 had the biggest impact. Later on, I gathered more reasons for not believing, but these were secondary in my case. I didn't have to learn about evolution or cosmology.

***

I remember clearly what it was like to believe as a child, just because your parents or other adults told you something was true. I don't believe any adults really believe like that. A second form of belief, emphasized in my particular religion-of-origin, is a kind of fervent inner conviction, that is supposed to arrive at confirmation, and once again when you read a certain sacred text and pray for this burning in your chest to arrive. This particular form of belief never occurred, for me. A third form might be a kind of "moderate" feeling of comfort that comes with familiarity with ritual. Finally, a fourth modality of belief is apologetics, a set of usually bad arguments. I would have been a great apologist, (if I were a dishonest person) because I am a nonbeliever. I think most apologists are nonbelievers, uncomfortable with their nonbelief, who need to convince themselves through spurious, intellectually dishonest arguments. Scratch an apologist and you will find a liar.

Brain Surgery

2011-10-13T09:22:00.000-05:00

on Elsewhere

The Cleaner

2011-10-12T21:43:00.003-05:00

Samuel L. Jackson stars in this tense thriller (2007) directed by Renny Harlin. Jackson has a business of cleaning up blood stains in houses where someone has been killed. He gets a job, with the catch being that he is unwittingly cleaning up a murder before the police have been there, and presumably set up by some corrupt elements in the police force itself. Eva Mendes is gorgeous in the female lead, but not a good actor. Ed Harris plays Jackson's ex-partner on the police force. A good but not great film. The Freudian symbolism of washing / cleaning is hammered home in an unsubtle way.

Out of Arguments

2011-10-12T11:31:00.003-05:00

I am almost out of arguments. I've left some out, like the argument from design and some weird probabilistic sleight of hand. Either I don't feel like considering those or I don't feel competent. Not that that has ever stopped me.

Clubbed

2011-10-11T21:37:00.002-05:00

Mel Raido stars in this 2008 British film directed by Neil Thompson. He is is beat up by a thug in a bar in front of his children and begins training in a boxing gym. I like films like this with a consistent style. Nothing too high-brow here. The violence, in fact, gets a little much. Still, it's a good little film.

Death Wish / Death Wish 2

2011-10-11T21:31:00.004-05:00

This 1974 Charles Bronson vehicle has a score by Herbie Hancock. Bronson, 'Paul Kersey," plays an architect whose wife and daughter are attacked in their NYC apt. He is a conscientious objector an "bleeding heart liberal" turned vigilante, killing muggers with a few elegant shots.

A few years later, Bronson is living in L.A.. After another crime, in which his house keeper and daughter are killed, he becomes a vigilante once again, hunting down the criminals and shooting some other muggers too.

These low-brow revenge dramas are my guilty pleasure these days. I can't recommend death wish 3 and 4 though.

Landlocked

2011-10-11T12:22:00.002-05:00

Few other forms of artistic expression are as hemmed-in as poetry, with its dependence on extremely sophisticated knowledge of a particular linguistic code. It's not just that you need to know the language, but that you have to know it well, in a nuanced way. It's true that you can be deaf to certain foreign traditions in music, or blind to iconographic traditions, but I think those could be learned much more easily than an entire foreign language.

Novels don't present the same problem, unless they are actually dependent on language. A great many are not (particularly).

Don't bother mentioning translation to me. I've heard of it, in fact. That's not really the solution, but simply another way of naming the problem. By the same token, without poetry, the problems of translation become trivial ones.

Translation of a Religious Poem

2011-10-11T11:39:00.000-05:00

by Luis Feria.

I had not only forgotten this poem, but have no memory of translating it or of the brilliant analysis I did of it.

Big Tent

2011-10-11T11:20:00.006-05:00

I will be reading in this series toward the end of the month. Probably selection from The Beaches of Northern California and AFter Michael Palmer.

Bad Arguments: Nobody Believes It Literally So What's The Big Deal

2011-10-11T11:20:00.004-05:00

This argument states that the atheist's target is a straw-man. Most religious believers believe "moderately" or not at all. They like the incense, or the family values, or whatever and don't trouble themselves with whether it is true, or with nicer points of theology. Theologians, on the other hand, have developed super-sophisticated models in which you don't really have to believe any of it literally. It's all metaphor. Everyone knows you shouldn't take it all that seriously, and it only the earnest and naive atheist who makes the mistake of actually looking at religion as though it were something to believe in. (Oh, and a few "fundamentalists" who are like the atheists in the extremity of their position.)

Do I really have to demolish this argument? It is the classic bait-and-switch. Once you criticize religion, it dissolves into nothing, but once you stop your criticism it rises up again triumphantly.

Bad Arguments: Atheists are Extreme

2011-10-11T10:18:00.003-05:00

Are you enjoying this series? I am. I guess no one reads this blog or else I would have a zillion comments.

Today I'd like to address the idea that atheism is "extreme" in the same way the religious fundamentalism is. This is the well-known "extremes meet" kind of argument. As I've stated before, if religion actually has some truth to it, then it should be taken very, very seriously. I mean, if it is really true that Jesus died for our sins, or whatever, that is a hugely important fact about human history. It doesn't make sense to believe it "moderately," or see it as a vague feel-good metaphor that you can take or leave. On the other hand, if it has no truth to it at all, then it is pretty ridiculous and harmful nonsense. It is kind of hard to have a moderate, non-extreme position between those two poles of belief or non-belief. So in a sense, I do agree with the Christian fundamentalists that it truly matters whether you believe or not.

I remember being told by a guy, who heard that I was professor literature, "You must like to read, then." Well, yeah. I almost asked a few ministers I met casually, "Wow, you must be kinda religious to do your job." I thought better of it because I am polite guy.

In my view, however, it is not dogmatic or extreme to refuse to believe in something you really don't have plausible evidence for. The two positions are not symmetrical in that sense. Even a very hard-core in-your-face atheism is still just a non theism, a refusal to buy into what almost everyone else is saying. It only looks extreme because of the huge dominance of religion in modern culture. Most atheists don't even spend a lot of time on atheism per se. It's more like something we don't do rather than something we devote energy to. Atheism is religion in the sense that not collecting stamps is a hobby, someone once said. In other words, it's more of an absence than a presence. It only becomes "extreme" when we actually decide to make a point of it, as in these posts of mine.

Bad Arguments: Christianity is Unique

2011-10-10T11:06:00.002-05:00

This argument, common in apologetics, is that Christianity is unique because it can be historically verified in ways that other religions can not. Appeals to historical documentation and eye-witness accounts bolster the faith of those who need a bit more evidence for their belief. The problem here is that the so-called historical evidence is just tenuous enough that someone investigating it, from a Christian point of view, is likely to go too far and realize that the evidence on the other side is a bit more convincing. Maybe not, but that is a risk. Once you make it make a religion subject to empirical proof, you make it subject to empirical disproof too.

Much of these arguments are the circular, "bible-said-so" kind of thing anyway. It seems awful convenient that the evidence happens to have been collected by those who wanted it all to be true.

I've always maintained that the surest road to disbelief is simply thinking about religion in a serious way, whether subjecting it to the most banal sort of scrutiny, the same you would use to try to figure out anything else, or to serious scholarly inquiry. Start at the beginning. Why does God prefer one kind of sacrifice to another? Why does he choose one group of people over the other? Why does he change his plan millions of years into the game? None of it makes the least amount of sense, and it is kind of amusing to watch brilliant people tying themselves up in knots to explain it.

Recent article on Lorca

2011-10-09T10:45:00.001-05:00

Was Lorca a Poetic Thinker?.

An older post

2011-10-09T09:43:00.001-05:00

with some relevance to my recent ones on religion. and that is also relevant to this recent post by Clarissa.

Bad Arguments: Science Cannot Explain Everything

2011-10-09T08:51:00.002-05:00

The argument from the inadequacy of scientific explanation is laughably weak. First of all, science is in the business of explaining how things work in the natural world. Religion has nothing to say about anything a scientist might want to know. How does a cell divide? How large is the moon? How does gravity work? Only science can provide answers to scientific questions. So the fact that science has not explained any particular thing does not leave a gap for a religious explanation. The "religious" explanation, in fact, is identical to a scientific one, in this case: "we don't know (yet)."

From this perspective, it doesn't really matter whether scientific inquiry has explained 5% of what we might want to know or 95%. Since religion has explained nothing at all about the natural world, it seems illogical to chalk up the other 95% or 5% to a non-existent religious explanation.

I would say, in fact, that religion and science are in completely different businesses. The only reason to talk about them in the same breath is that religion provides one of the only possible motivations for questioning the findings of science. Suppose you thought thunderbolts were thrown by Zeus. A scientific explanation of thunder might make you question your religion so you might get defensive. In the modern world, most people do not even use religion as a source of explanation for almost anything related to the weather, but there are still some areas where religion provides resistance to scientific education.

Bad Arguments:Not Believing in Religion Commits You...

2011-10-08T11:09:00.001-05:00

Not believing in religion commits you to blind adoration of science, or the perfectibility of humanity, etc...

I don't think so.

Science is the best way of gaining knowledge about the natural world. Nothing else even comes close. Certain religious people deny some scientific knowledge for religious reasons. In fact, there are few reasons for denying scientific findings that are not religious or political. All it mean if you aren't religious is that you probably won't question science for non-scientific reasons.

Not believing in religion does not commit you to any given form of humanism or human "progress." You can be non-religious but also quite pessimistic about humanity.

Bad Arguments: Religion is a Practice, Not a Set of Beliefs

2011-10-07T20:58:00.004-05:00

One common "escape clause" I've seen is defining religion as a series of practices rather than a set of beliefs. The idea is that people perform ritual actions and participate in collective activities that make them feel good, but don't really worry about whether deep down any of it's based on any truth. The argument is that only the atheists get held up on the truth claims aspect of all of it.

This would actually be a not-bad argument for many religions and religious practices. Who could object to some harmless rituals? It is a very astute defense of religion, aside from the fact that it concedes a heck of a lot, considering the humongous rhetoric of truthiness that the dominant religion in Western Culture hammers home again and again.

13 Ways

2011-10-07T09:29:00.002-05:00

I woke up the other night and tried to reconstruct "!3 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" in my head. The next morning I tried again. I missed a few sections, the bawds of euphony, icicles filled the long window, and the final part, it was evening all afternoon. And, of course, I didn't get anything in the right order. Is there any poem greater than this?

The Nobel Goes To

2011-10-06T10:36:00.002-05:00

Tranströmer. What was I just saying about giving it to figures who were more relevant in the 1970s, like Varguitas last year? TT was translated by Bly and enjoyed a vogue 35-40 years ago. They probably had more information in Sweden about his health and realized it was now or never for the local hero, but this kind of award just makes literature seem even more irrelevant than it already was.

Steve Jobs and "Structures of Feeling"

2011-10-06T09:19:00.002-05:00

I remember when Jobs left Apple for a while, and the machines became lifeless and dull. They still were still Apples, but they were not, somehow. I think they allowed other people to make computers using their operating system, but they were crappy and did not have the design elements needed to inspire. Their market share fell gradually during this period.

Since I spend most of my day with my mac devices of various sorts, my macbook pro, my ipad, my ipod, my desktop mac, it would be hard to say that anyone else has had more influence on my everyday life and creative habits. The "structures of feeling" (Raymond Williams) of our time flow from a corporation that this man founded.

Bad Arguments: No Religion, No Morality

2011-10-06T08:55:00.000-05:00

If morality is based on religion then why do we reject (or explain away) religious teachings if they conflict with our ethical principles? People always bring their religious codes into conformity with their ethical principles. When they do the opposite, they are reviled as fundamentalist bible-thumpers.

Baseball

2011-10-06T08:41:00.003-05:00

I don't spend hours watching baseball games. I don't have a tv in Kansas, for one thing. Nor do I follow the progress of the regular season. I just don't care enough about any particular team or player. I do like a few things about baseball, though. I totally get the attractions of the sport.

Purity. I like the separation between the game and everyday life, the way it has its own terms that must be respected. This might be true for any game, but I feel it particularly with baseball. Purity is an absolute illusion, but a comforting one.

Situation. I like that, at any moment in the game, there is definable situation. It is the bottom of the seventh. The home team is behind by one run. There are two outs and a runner at first. The count is two and one. The next batter up is a left-handed power hitter... You can even "watch" baseball on the radio, since the situation counts for so much. Football has this situational aspect too, unlike fluid games (soccer, basketball, hockey) in which the situation is always more or less the same: one team has the ball for a while and is trying to score.

Duels. I like the contest between the pitcher and hitters. It is situationally complex, especially if there are base-runners and a secondary duel involving an effort to keep a runner from advancing.

Excitement against a backdrop of tedium. The normal mood of a game is tense tedium. Most of the players are doing absolutely nothing at any given time, either waiting to bat or standing out in the field waiting for a ball to be hit to them. When something happens, it happens very quickly. Most at-bats end in the failure of the batter. A large percentage of runners are stranded. Scoring is relatively difficult and requires patience.

Nuance, expertise. I like it that the game is opaque or dull to someone without some level of familiarity. I am far from an expert, but I do like those finer points.

More Bad Arguments: Religion Has Done More Harm Than Good To Humankind

2011-10-05T20:41:00.004-05:00

It may be true that religion has done more harm than good. It would be kind of hard to demonstrate a proposition of the magnitude, because religion is so intertwined with other aspects of human life that it is impossible to conceive of a human history without it.

Even if religion has done harm, or even if it is neutral in its effects, it could still be true. Whether a religious doctrine is true or not is independent of whether it is harmful or beneficial to humanity. Usually, though, religious people want to argue for the benefits of religion (even if it cannot be shown to be true). It is equally fallacious to say that religion is true because we want it to be, as we will see tomorrow.

Loory

2011-10-05T17:35:00.003-05:00

I finished the Ben Loory book while my students took an exam. It is every bit as light-weight as a thought it would be. It made me want to write fiction, though, because I know I could do better. My worst ideas are more interesting than this.

More Nobel

2011-10-05T12:41:00.003-05:00

The Nobel prize always looks for the uplifting, "idealistic" factor or the big pay-off in politico-cultural terms, like a writer protesting against an oppressive regime. "Not that there's anything wrong with that." It can't be a prize for the best writer, because there is a kind of grandeur in older ideas of the writer as intellectual serving larger causes. Not to mention the pride of national literatures or the desire to acknowledge that not all writers are Europeans or Americans. All these great motives combine to create a prize that confers enormous symbolic capital. The Nobel prize is liquid Pierre Bourdieu in highly concentrated form. It makes cultural capital visible and also constructs it. reminds us of it.

The problem is that this model of the writer intellectual seems rather dated. A winner like Saramago exemplifies this particular model, but are there many Saramagos left? Hence Bob Dylan as 5 to 1 favorite in this horse race. A cynical popular entertainer who once had a moment of political relevance, five decades ago, would be the perfect winner. If I were betting, though, I'd go with Adonis, because of the tie-in with the Arab spring. (If that's not too obvious.)

How To (Learn To) Scan A Poem

2011-10-05T12:12:00.004-05:00

First, type out the lines as a prose paragraph.. This is a crucial step if you are a beginner, because most people start off by trying to fit the language into what they think the meter should be, instead of actually hearing the language as it is. All of a sudden they start putting stresses in strange, unnatural places.

Now read the paragraph aloud a few times in as natural a way as you can. Make a recording if you want.

Now circle or highlight all the content words. Nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs. Make sure you know which syllable is accented in each of them, if any are unfamiliar. Every content word will have stress on one of its syllables. Listen to your recording and see if you have stressed any of the other words, like pronouns, prepositions. Suppose one like is "He is hiding under the table." There is no question about hiding and table. Did you stress is, under, the? Mark the other words you might have stressed.

By now you will have a good sense of the natural linguistic prosody of the poem. In other words, the way a naturally-speaking native speaker of the language (or competent 2nd-language speaker) would pronounce those sentences. You are almost done and you are miles ahead of almost anyone else.

Now get out the original poem, before you wrote it out in prose. Read it again outloud, naturally. Don't pause at the end of lines (very much) unless there is punctuation, but note where the line breaks are.

Now start to listen to see whether you hear any patterns, and observe whether these pattern happen to coincide with your vague memories of meters. At what point does the pattern you perceive not line up exactly with the stresses you've already determined? Does that make you want to speak the line in a less natural way ? Or does it make you want to ignore the pattern? Find a way of saying the line that makes it sound good without either emphasizing or de-emphasizing the meter.

There, now you are done. If you go any further than you will get severe headaches.

"criterion referenced assessment"

2011-10-05T10:29:00.002-05:00

When I see a phrase like that I want to scream. If someone is working in education, they should not use soul-deadening social science jargon like that.

Flann O'Brien's

2011-10-05T10:16:00.002-05:00

birthday.

The Third Policeman is one my favorite novels of all time. Of course there is also At Swim-Two-Birds, which gave birth to Mulligan Stew. Back when metafiction was all the rage... Sorrentino loved Flann O'Brien, and I did too when I was studying with him.

Dylan

2011-10-05T09:46:00.001-05:00

On parle de Bob Dylan comme un possible prix Nobel de la littérature. Je me comprends pas. Je préfère Lorenz Hart, à vrai dire.

How to Play Rock Beats on a Hand Drum

2011-10-04T21:44:00.003-05:00

I got this book about how to play some standard beats on a hand drum, like a conga or djembe or even a cajón. It is Hip Grooves for Hand Drums by the Dworsky / Sansby husband and wife team, who have penned many a book on hand drumming for the earnest amateur or developing semi-pro.

One way is to alernate hands, rlrl, etc..l and play the bass drum as a bass tone, the snare as a slap, and use tones as fills. You can play either 8th not or 16th note grooves like this, so most of your bass drums on one and three or your snare back-beats on two and four are played with the right hand.

Another way is to play a basic "tumbao" conga pattern and modify it a bit with slaps that also happen to fall on the 2s and 4s. They have some cool 6/8 beats too. So if you wonder what the strange sounds coming out of my office or apartment are, you can stop wondering.

Nobel?

2011-10-04T16:36:00.002-05:00

Is the Nobel prize for Literature still relevant to anyone? I don't remember any winners in the past few years aside from Vargas Llosa, but I'm in a Spanish department so I would notice that. A prize in the first decade of the 21st century doesn't seem that relevant for a writer who made his main contribution in the 60s and 70s. My undergraduate Spanish majors didn't even know he had won the prize two weeks afterwards. When I asked them what writer had just won, they said "Gabriel García Márquez." An obscure writer who wins will just slip back into obscurity after a burst of publicity.

More Bad Arguments-I believe it because it is absurd

2011-10-04T10:30:00.000-05:00

Imagine an argument between two theologians. You are listening to them going back and forth. How do you know which one is right? They can appeal to nothing but the discourse of other theologians. One might have a more cogent interpretation of some other, previous theologian, but there is no way of saying that one is closer to the truth in any absolute sense. They are arguing about something that nobody knows anything about. You can't even say that the one with the most consistent, non self-contradictory argument is gaining the upper hand, because self-contradiction can be a winning move in the game. Credo quia absurdum est.

Bad Arguments--I Know It To Be So

2011-10-03T12:45:00.002-05:00

Arguments for religion, or any particular religious belief, based on deep inner conviction cannot convince any other person who holds other beliefs with equal fervency. Subjective feelings are just that, subjective.

Ivresse du pouvoir

2011-10-03T12:31:00.006-05:00

This 2006 French movie directed by Chabrol, known as "Comedy of Power" in English, stars Isabelle Huppert as a judge investigating corruption in a French corporation. The featured actress is lovely and carries the movie on her back, but the storytelling is dull, preachy, and anticlimactic. The movie also lacks a distinctive visual style. The movie sets a lightly comic tone, without being actually funny in more than a few places. I wonder why French movies are not better than they are?

A French critic agrees with me:

Malheureusement, le film se déroule dans un rythme pépère, sans accroc serait-on tenté de dire. On n’est pas loin, en plus malin peut-être, d'un divertissement d'un dimanche soir où l’on ne saurait pas trop quoi faire. Le tapis se déroule tranquillement, on est gentiment pris par la main, merci, et les petits détails plus ou moins rigolos, sûrement inspirés par des faits réels (cf. les survêtements de Berléand) jalonnent sans souci le métrage. Mouais. Côté mise en scène, c'est aussi le long fleuve tranquille. Les petits mouvements de caméra sans conséquence sont présents quasiment tout le temps, sans que ça change quoi ce soit donc, et les champs / contrechamps, ni jolis ni honteux (plutôt ternes, quoi) se succèdent sans fin. On ne risque pas le bourrage d'yeux, en quelque sorte.

I just realized that Chabrol also directed a movie named "Inspector Bellamy" that I also saw and didn't like.