Working at least two hours a day for four months (122 days in this case) did produce five chapters of a book plus an introduction, leaving me three chapters and a conclusion to go. And I still have December left. My concentration got better over the course of the August-November period, so I can actually get more accomplished in a shorter amount of time.

I know most people don't have two hours a day for four or five months straight. I'm very lucky to have an NEH Fellowship this year. If you are on the tenure track or tenured at a research university, you are actually supposed to be working 40% of your active working time on research (where I work at least). So even if you only worked a 40 hour week (you'll be doing much more usually), that amounts to sixteen hours a week. So what I'm suggesting is a 14 hours minimum: two hours seven days a week, which is two hours less than sixteen. But I'm assuming that you do that through the summer too, not just during your 9-month appointment.

The problem with the school year is that service, supposedly 20%, takes up more than eight hours a week. and teaching, another 40% takes more than sixteen, assuming I am in class six hours and reading for class, preparing, grading, and dealing with the students for more than 10 hours each week.

In addition, I personally need several hours a day for reading, thinking, blogging, etc... that has nothing to do with research, teaching, or service in any MEASURABLE way. I need to read the New York Review of Books, poetry outside my "field," Andrew Shields' and Joseph Duemer's blog, etc... I need to read things in my field even if I will never do "research" on them or use them in my teaching. Not wasted time at all but time that is not counted as "productive." If I hadn't been doing that kind of "work" I would never have written the book on Lorca, because I wouldn't have had that idea without letting my mind wander for hours wherever it wants to. I'm sure every other academic in the world feels the same need.

So when I get back to "work" after my lazy year, I'm going to have to readjust my system a bit. I've always been bad at time management because I've never known where work ends and where the thinking, reading, "idle' time starts.

Is tautology objectionable because it is uninformative or because it is fallacious?

Now I'm starting a chapter called "Lorca par lui-même." As of now I have a lot of paragraphs most of which seem to be repetitions of each other. I was apparently writing down my ideas in the document without realizing that I already written the same ideas in a different form.

The idea is sketch out my own ideas about Lorca before I talk about " Lorca and..." in the rest of the book.

I always liked the illusory sense given by that French series "Rimbaud p-l-m," "Racine p-l-m." etc... That illusory sense of getting the author in the author's own words. Barthes played with that when he himself wrote a book called "Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes." There may even be a book called "Lorca par lui-meme." I'll have to check amazon.fr.

"Selected works" are just as tendentious as critical studies. They impose a certain agenda.

I need a little arrogance--as a necessary fiction--in order to write. Being genuinely excited by my own ideas. I need to get in the mind frame of thinking that I'm terribly intelligent in order to make the ideas flow. (Call it the Coleman Hawkins effect.) Then if the results actually do turn out well, all the better. The alternative is that it won't get written at all. I can't write from a position of non-confidence because the prose won't come out that way. It not only won't turn out well, it won't exist in the first place.

Revision entails a similar attitude. I see something very inadequate I've written, and I know that I can revise it into something much better. In fact, I can even be arrogant about my ability to see how bad something is I've done the day before.

These comments are in reference to critical prose, not the writing of poetry which is something a bit different.

The indifferent wind ran through the Aeolian saw-blades of the former mill-town. Thick wet mud left only a few roads passable in the surrounding countryside. Big-boned, intrepid Anna braved narrow gravel passageways to deliver firewood and sarcastic cheer to the acne-scarred denizens of Acacia Country. They bought their guitar magazines and treatises on apophatic theology in the convenience store run by the unenigmatic Miles. Taking off her gloves, Anna answered his muttered greeting with a withering look--there was no other kind of "look" in the county, no other kind of "greeting" for that matter.

Artificial owls, an ineffective deterrent to English Sparrows, guarded garages and carports. A stranger finding himself unexpectedly in these environs might well be struck by the material and aesthetic impoverishment of the population. Garden-gnomes, rusted pickups, the aforementioned plastic owls, the aforementioned guitar magazines, seemed designed by some callous creator to present the image of a non-too-genteel indigence. Or maybe not... The marijuana farms, the artisanal distilleries, the mountain bike trails (when the mud dries out enough to make them usable), narrate a different account, for the more astute oberver, attuned to the allusive repartee of those browsing the wares in Miles' establishment. Two or three weeks suffices to gain a superficial appreciation of the difficulty of the problem. It was three or four months after my own arrival, in fact, that I realized ...

I had a Creeleyesque idea the other day which is that I can only inhabit a single day. I can inhabit another day at some other time, but only one at a time. It was a strange perception in its obviousness. Everybody knows this, so to picture it as an epiphany seems odd, but it felt like that to me.

Now I don't feel this way about, say, an hour, or a minute, or a week or month or year. It is the day that is the temporal dwelling place, the time that can be inhabited at one stretch. Maybe that's what makes it untrivial.

Why does it seem Creeleyesque to me? It seems to me that that is what he is constrantly trying to get at. That "phenomenological" sense of being aware of being alive in a certain frame.

Tonight I made a pretty decent chicken curry by putting in the blender a clove of garlic, about the same amount of ginger (if ginger came in cloves...), a small onion, 4 oz. of tomato sauce, a red bell pepper, some ground cumin and garam masala, sauteeing the resulting paste in some oil and butter, and then adding a little water, some cut-up boneless pieces of chicken and a small container of plain yogurt. Salt to taste and cook until the chicken is done. It would be good with about a quarter teaspoon of cayenne pepper or even more but I didn't add it because I was trying to reproduce a restaurant dish that my daughter had liked which was quite mild. I didn't need to put as much water as I did. The sauce was thin but the leftovers should be fine.

I also cooked up some orange lentils with a little turmeric, black mustard seeds, nappa cabbage, and ginger for a nice soup.

***

The other lentil soup I like involves making a "sofrito" first by sauteeing onions, garlic, and bell peppers in OLIVE OIL in the bottom of a pressure cooker, then adding brown lentils, water, a carrot or two sliced up, and the normal bay leaf, salt, pepper, etc... Pressure cook for 20 minutes, then, when you can open the contraption, add some cut-up baby spinach and cook till that is wilted. It makes a very substantial meal with some bread.

***

Someone in line in the farmer's market told Akiko to cook swiss chard in a little olive oil, chopped garlic, and raisins. That is very easy and we've been eating that lately.

I made a kind of relish last week by sauteeing tiny pieces of fresh poblano peppers with diced onions and a dash of cumin. It is good on burritos. You want to use twice as much poblano pepper as onion. It's one of those "3 ingredient recipes."

***

My recipes never have quantities. I rarely look at a cook book when I am cooking something I basically know how to make.

What ever happened to Conrad Aiken? He won all the awards back in his day. Yesterday I played apophatic bookstore for a spell before falling asleep. I also tried to look at my bookshelf at home when I was a kid, where a copy of the Preludes was almost certainly present. Maybe being born in the 1880s Aiken suffered comparisons with Stevens, Eliot, Williams, Pound, H.D., Moore, Stein, Cummings. There doesn't seem much room for a minor modernist.

To play "apophatic bookstore," you simply close your eyes and visit a bookstore in which you once spent a considerable amount of time but which no longer exists, or which you no longer have access to. You wander up and down the stacks and look for books that you might have once browsed through there. I had very specific images last night of books by Kafka and my first glimpse of Magritte. I have spent a good part of my life in bookstores.

Real insomniacs have already played any game I might invent. Maybe they should be games for aspiring insomniacs.

Alfred A. Knopf himself, personally, rejected Langston Hughes' translation of Romancero gitano (Gypsy Ballads) in the late 1940s. Literary history would have been different if this book was accepted. It finally appeared only as a chapbook by the Beloit Poetry review in the early 1950s. Imagine what impact it would have made as a trade book by a major NY publisher?

I'm working on more games for insomniacs--"The Apophatic Bookstore," "Symphony Orchestra," "Chicken Farm."

"Cento" is one I've used myself. You simply keep a steady stream of famous lines of poetry, or lines you've memorized in the past, going for as long as you can in your mind. You can use single lines, fragments, or whole poems, and break off a fragment whenever you wish and go on to something else.

Unlike "The Complete Sentence Game" Cento is not theoretically infinite. At a certain point you will run out of poetry to recite to yourself in your head. You will never run out of sentences.

"Sentence Fragment" resembles The Complete Sentence Game except you can freely intersperse fragments of sentences. Like this one. Or this one. Make sure you come to a full stop, marking the end of the fragment with a mental period.

Why I am not a Lorquista

I am very bad at interpreting symbols in poetry. For example, today I was reading some articles that explained why Lorca had put in certain animals in a very difficult poem. There were plausible explanations for the langosta, but the explanations seemed equally possible for the langosta as "lobster" and the langosta as "locust." I found myself not caring too much. The more clever the interpretation of the symbol, the more distance traveled between the natural object, its more or less "transparent" sense, and its symbolic interpretation, the less convincing it is. Yet some degree of doing this is necessary to interpret and understand some Lorca poems.

Maybe I am not interested in "symbols" in poetry in the first place. I don't see poetry as a process of encoding ideas in symbols that the reader then must decode. I understand why anyone who is taught that this is what poetry is might grow up to hate poetry.

Maybe that's why I'm not a "real" Lorca scholar. I am not ever confident ever that my particular take on a poetic symbol is the correct one. There are people who are really good at this and come up with convincing, coherent readings. But there are also those who strain credulity.

I finished a chapter on Rothenberg today. I now have the "core" section of the book done: chapters 4-8 on deep image, Creeley/Spicer, O'Hara, Koch, and Rothenberg. Now I will start on the introduction in earnest.

***

I've also been riding my bike for about an hour a day. (Except for today and tomorrow with the rain!) I've ridden most every day since I got the bike on October 1. It hasn't rained much, hasn't been that cold yet either, so I've missed only a few days due to horrific allergic reactions to mold and a brief trip to Virginia. It seems to help the writing quite a bit to also be quite physically active.

Mayhew is almost a caricature of the type! And I don't mean that negatively. It's that dissonant combination of openness and rigor--holding the tension!. Yes--that's what it's all about--holding the tension. He's amazing--such sharply formulated opinions and yet... he doesn't know what he's going to like till he sees it! So that what he likes, you can trust comes, not from abstractions imposed on what he reads, but from what he discovers from his reading, in the reading. To me, that frees me to both listen deeply to his opinions, and at the same time, never feel obliged to be beholden to them--or to believe he would respect anyone who did.

I wish I were as rigorous as Jacob thinks I am. Sometimes I do know what I like or dislike in advance, though I try not to. And for me the openness is the rigor, in a sense. Or the rigor is in the openness. The fighting against one's dogmatic tendencies.

While the praise is a bit over the top, I do feel that this is perceptive comment on the whole; it rings true with me. I've often felt I'm wired differently from a lot of other literary critics, and this comment "pone el dedo en la llaga" [nails it].