MayheW

Another curious fact about my last name is that it is the same upside down:

Draw a capital M that looks a little bit like an upside-down W.

Now draw an a that looks like an upside down e.

Now make a y and an h that are pretty much the same shape.

The final e and w should look like upside down a and m.

Finally, turn the word upside down.

There is a special name for a word like this but I don't know what it is. It's even better than a palindrome like Bob or Otto.

Digital Natives

A lot of the internet is text anyway, so you really have to be able to read text very, very well to be a good digital native. The digital environment privileges ease of use (laziness) so that the typical native goes to the easiest source possible first, usually Wikipedia. I even see this laziness in myself when I'm searching fast for information. The quickest route is the route given to you by the system. So the digital native is better at being lazy: this fact alone negates any advantage the young internet user has over Grandpa "Doesn't-Know-How-To-Use-a-Computer." In other words, it is not a system designed to reward skill.

So the most adept internet user is someone who can search as fast as any idiot, but is not herself an idiot.

The Beaches of Northern California

I wrote about a fourth of my new book of poems The Beaches of Northern California last night. Then I realized that it was all a repetition of Borges, Calvino, Sorrentino, Perec... It is amusing enough, but it has been pretty much done already. That doesn't stop other people from writing poetry in tried-and-true modes without any shame. I know better, though.

I still think it's an amusing book. Perhaps I shouldn't expect great things out of ideas that come so easily.

My book of poems Poemas con nombres propios is much more original, but it has no traction, since it was written in Spanish. My Spanish poetic voice is far more distinctive, precisely because the persona is so different from any other literary personality in either language.

Mayhem

Since changing a single letter in my last name produces a word meaning "violent or damaging disorder; chaos" or "the crime of maliciously injuring or maiming someone, originally so as to render the victim defenseless," I have to laugh when students write this word on their papers they are handing in to me.

Blurbs

I have a new book that I came up with recently of imaginary blurbs for books of poetry. The only rule is that there will be as little self-conscious cuteness as possible. They will be, more or less, small short-stories that describe indirectly the invisible speech acts in the imaginary books. I'll have other rules, like no noun, verb, descriptive adjective, or adverb of manner will be repeated between any of the forty blurbs.

A forty-first text will be the blurb describing the other forty, in the same way that each of the forty blurbs imagines a book of forty poems each.

Bullying

I feel less bullied by clear, concise confident prose than by abstract and indirectly didactic writing, writing that tries to extort sentiment from me by dragging me into its melodrama.

***

The problem with accusations of bullying is that they become another tool for the bully.

The Square

I'm writing this article about four authors and their interrelationships. I'm imagining it as a square with four sides and two diagonals, hence six possible relationships:

Umamuno - Lorca
Umanuno - Zambrano (cultural exceptionalism)
Unamuno - Valente (counter-reformation poetics)

Lorca - Zambrano (the poetics of the sacred)
Lorca - Valente (duende and irrationalism)

Zambrano - Valente (poetry and philosophy)

I'll have five sections, not six, though, because I have nothing much to say about Unamuno - Lorca, and I don't want to get redundant. So imagine the square with the top line a wavy one.

I feel that this will be a very good article, but I feel kind of strange that I am writing it at a time where I feel absolutely horrible in many other respects. How can I feel so bad emotionally but still come up with so many ideas? You would think my brain would just shut down completely in sympathy with the rest of me.

(No need to worry; I'll be ok. Unfortunately the details are not shareable on a public forum.)

Signposting Without Signposting

I'm writing my first article in which I systematically suppress all signposting, making the organization so tight that I never need to tell you where I'm going. It will be interesting to see whether anyone that reads it objects to this. More has been going on lately on SMT than here. I'm trying to keep both blog alive and define their function a little better. This is more like a Stupid Motivational Tricks post than a Bemsha Swing one but sometimes I have a hard time knowing which is which.

Philosophy in Italian

I believe in reading in languages I don't fully understand. It stretches the brain a bit. Italian is perfect, since I understand it well enough to understand more or less what's going on, but not enough so that I can relax my concentration. Contrary to what might think, the more abstract and conceptual the subject-matter, the easier it is to understand: "Se la filosofia di un popolo è l'incarnazione del suo modo de essere, non c'è dubbio che la mistica ortodossa è l'essenza ed el vertice dell'anima castigliana..." The hardest texts are those with names of a lot of bird species and everyday household objects. Philosophy is easy, botany is hard (from the linguistic point of view).

Reading for Style and Structure

[x-posted at SMT]

Choose a scholarly article. The topic is not important. Examine the following elements:

Introduction. How does the author fulfill the tasks necessary for an introduction. (Introducing the topic, framing the critical problem, laying out the steps of the argument, presenting a coherent thesis.) Is the introduction proportional in length to the rest of the article?

Signposting. Is the "signposting" present in the article sufficient? Is the author too obvious in telling the reader where the article is going to go? Is the signposting obtrusive? Or could the article have used even more signposting? ("In the second half of the article, I will turn my attention to...").

Thesis. What is the thesis (main idea) of the article? Is it expressed in one or two sentences? Is it sufficiently specific? Is it the answer to a question that seems significant enough?

Body of the Article. How is the article organized? How do specific subsections and paragraphs support the larger claims of the article? Is it easy to follow the overall thread of the article from one paragraph to the next?

Evidence. What evidence for the varying claims does the article present? Does the evidence come through archival work? Through textual analysis? Through the conclusions of other scholars? What is the relative proportion of these elements?

Conclusion. How does the article end? Does the conclusion merely summarize the contents, or does it provide a wider perspective? Are you convinced of the main argument at the end of the article?

Style. What are the main strengths and weaknesses you find in the style of the article? Look at clarity and grace of expression. Is the writing concise or verbose? Is this a model you would follow in your own writing? Are there stylistic flaws that would have been easy to correct? Do you notice stylistic features that might have been different if the writer was using another language (Spanish vs. English.)? Does the writer use jargon? If so, do you think this is appropriate in this particular case?

Reflection. What else did you notice that does not fit into these categories? What else did you learn from doing this assignment? If you hadn't thought about reading an article in this way, how has your perspective changed? If you already had definite ideas about how to write an article or paper, how has this exercise confirmed or modified your basic approach?

Questions from 2005

These questions had a run in 2005. You can look a the original question and several links to people answering them. Unfortunately some of these are no broken links.

I do not even remember writing these, but I must have.

Pictures from an Exhibition

I have a recording of Claudio Rodríguez reading his poetry. On one track, you can hear "Pictures from an Exhibition" playing faintly in the background. I love Claudio's poetry, and I also am fond of this piece of classical music, but there is no connection here. It feels so random, as the kids say nowadays.

The Twentieth Century

The 20th century really begins with the crisis of modernity, the absurdity of any kind of faith in modernity or progress. (Progress is a 19th century idea.) The Great War really means the failure of European modernity. The entre-deux-guerres period of 1918-1939 sees the rise of Fascism and the failure of the liberal idea when caught between Stalinism on the left and Fascism on the right. It was pretty clear that enlightenment Reason was not going to triumph. María Zambrano saw this pretty clearly. If reason could not prevail in Europe itself, where was it going to prevail?

We still talk about progress and "enlightened" opinion even today. Those are residual values that it doesn't make sense to abandon. Literary modernism, though, views modernity itself as Kafkaesque, whether in Kafka's own works, in existentialism or the theater or the absurd, in surrealism.

Modernity leaves humanity spiritually bereft. We can accept that condition in all of its absurdity, as in Kafka or Beckett. Or, in the case of Unamuno, Eliot, Lezama Lima, or Zambrano (or Robert Duncan), we can look for new/old forms of spirituality.

More Dogma

Dogma cannot be disputed; it admits no argument. If a dogma is replaced by a new, contradictory dogma, then there is no argument for the change: there is simply a new party line that must be adhered to. The justification for dogma is sheer institutional authority. Because some official body (a church, a political party) says so.

Justifications for dogma always come after the fact, they are apologetics aimed to justify whatever the dogma happens to be at the moment. Apologetics are always in bad faith.

I have no authority per se. If I put forward my opinion, I have to back it up with my own reasons. My own colleagues do not agree with me, often. By definition, I cannot be dogmatic. I resent the use of the term to refer to someone with strong, well-justified opinions, who does in fact change his opinions with some frequency.

I've never imposed my agenda on a dissertation student. One wrote sympathetically on a poet whom I had criticized. All I told her to do was to at least acknowledge the debate to which I had contributed. When I review an article, I almost never let a point of substantive disagreement lead me to reject it. The exception is when I feel the writer has misrepresented the terms of the debate.

In class, I don't really care whether a student agrees with me. The problem tends to be with students willing to believe everything I say. That's frightening.