Santiago

I'll be in Santiago de Compostela next week for a dissertation defense by a student who came to work with me for a month or two in Kansas a few years ago. She cites 8 or 9 separate books or articles of mine, so you can see why I'm on this particular defense. I'll stay a week past the defense to rest up a bit and see Oviedo for the first time.

Palos

I developed a plan to learn the palos flamencos. I made separate playlists of six separate genres, like malagueñas, tangos, alegrías, using my existing music library. I will listen to them separately over and over again and try to get a feel for each play list. Wikipedia lists 51 palos, but I'm suspecting that only a few are going to be really central. If I can learn 6, then I will be in good shape.

Another Book on Lorca!

It occurred to me to write a third book on Lorca. Why not? I have plenty more to say. The table of contents came to me in a flash:

Lorca--The enigma

The Legend

The Poet

The Thinker

The Dramatist

The Musician

I'll still spend 6 months reading Latin American Poetry before I start this new project, but Lorca is my meal-ticket. I want to be Mr. Lorca. The idea of this book is to define him through six separate approaches. Lorca the musician will offer a different perspective than Lorca the Poet or Lorca the Legend.

Steamed Fish

Last night I bought two rainbow trout at my favorite fish store. I covered them with ample amount of freshly grated ginger, then dipped them in a sauce made from white wine, soy sauce, lemon juice, a pinch of cayenne. I steamed them in a bamboo steamer for about 10 minutes. I washed some baby bok choy and sauteed it with chopped garlic and more ginger, adding a pinch of soy sauce at the last minute. We ate the fish and bok choy with some white rice, then Akiko made a salad of greens from the farmers market, really good tomatoes also from farmers market, cucumbers, avocados, carrots, and fresh mozzarella.

Yet Another Table of Contents

What Lorca Knew: Late Modernist Spanish Poetry and Intellectual History

Preface

PART ONE: Genealogies

1. The Grain of the Voice: Lorca’s “Play and Theory of the Duende”
2. María Zambrano and the Genealogy of Late Modernism
3. Shifting Fortunes: Jorge Guillén and Luis Cernuda

PART TWO: The Ascent of Late Modernism

4. Fragments of a Late Modernity: Samuel Beckett and José Ángel Valente
5 Antonio Gamoneda and the Persistence of Memory
6. What Claudio Knew: The Embodiment of Knowledge

PART THREE: Extensions

7. Blanca Varela and Eduardo Milán: The Spanish American Connection
8. Modernism and Female Subjectivity
9. Poetry and Aphorism (From Antonio Machado to Luis Feria)
10. Verse and Prose (From Juan Ramón Jiménez to Olvido García Valdés)

Afterword

Chapter 8 still needs a better title, as does Chapter 10. In fact, there are only a few chapter titles I am truly happy with. Also, I'd like to find a plural noun for the title of PART TWO. Genealogies, ????, Extensions. It's harder to come up with a word for things in the middle. I've tried words like "ascendencies" and "triumphs" but they don't work very well.

The subtitle of the book itself needs further work. It's really poetics as intellectual history and vice-versa. The subtitle has a lot of work to do: it has to tell the reader that the book is about Spain, about a particular movement (late modernism), and that it approaches poetics from the direction of intellectual history.

I like having 10 chapters rather than fewer but longer ones. I can fit in more ideas that way, addressing the problem from more angles.

From an Old Review

Here is an example from a review I wrote of John Wilcox's book on Spanish women's poetry. John is a friend of mine, and the review was positive, but I found a problem:

When Wilcox affirms that "In their early work Champourcin and Méndez express desire in a way that is distinct from a Guillén or a Lorca" (95), or that "Champourcin's expression of sensuality is distinct from that of her male counterparts" (96), he gives me the momentary impression that he believes that all male writers belong to a monolithic "androcentric" tradition. Without
a more nuanced view of the mainstream tradition, it is difficult to delineate the specificity of women's writing.

Obviously, Guillén and Lorca do not express desire in the same way, and not merely because Guillén is heterosexual. Do Concha Méndez and Ernestina Champourcin express desire differently from Lorca? (yes) From Guillén (yes). Do they express desire and sensuality differently from each other? Quite possibly yes. Wouldn't be also be likely to find the same ample spectrum of attitudes among women poets as we do among male? If men are not the same as other men, they cannot be the same as women either. But women cannot be the same as women either. So called "difference feminism" creates two monoliths at odds with each other, rather that two overlapping groups with great internal variety.

Feminist Criticism

Thirty years ago, Myra Jehlen wrote:

Feminist thinking is really rethinking, an examination of the way certain assumptions about women and the female character enter into the fundamental assumptions that organize all our thinking. For instance, assumptions such as the one that makes intuition and reason opposite terms parallel to female and male may have axiomatic force in our culture, but they are precisely what feminists need to question-or be reduced to checking the arithmetic, when the issue lies in the calculus.

("Archimedes and the Paradox of Feminist Criticism" Signs 1981).
Yet I still read feminist criticism today that identifies woman with nature and intuition, that accepts the old dichotomies and essentialisms at face value. I read an article recently that wanted to make philosophy and poetry parallel to male and female.

Nuestro Flamenco

The Spanish radio program "Nuestro flamenco," to which I listen to religiously on podcast, features a section devoted to listener questions. I wrote one in, about how to learn to distinguish between different palos or styles, and they answered my question in the program of 6/22, recommending the 12-disk box set "Enciclopedia de los estilos flamencos." I was very moved to hear my name mentioned and my question answered so respectfully, with three or four musical selections. I never expected the program to answer my question in particular.

Trilogy

(277)

Much of H.D.'s Trilogy is quite extraordinary. "When in the company of the Gods / I loved and was loved, // never was my mind stirred / to such rapture..." I can forgive all the "filling," all the parts necessary for it to be a long poem.

Bathos

There is a particular effect obtained, usually unwittingly, when a very high powered style is used to describe a trivial object. Some critics have noticed this in the later poetry of Jorge Guillén, when the high modernist style is used to talk about stereo speakers in a picnic. I've noticed this in Derek Walcott, when he goes on and on about a Swiss waitress's blond hair. This is a classic effect of parody, in which any high style can be brought down simply by applying it to a low object. It becomes self-parody when the writer doesn't quite realize the disjunction.

Sans Serif

I dreamed a book of mine came out in a sans serif type face. I was not too happy, since I much prefer serifs, but I told myself that my other book that year would be coming out in a better font.

Studies Show...

Whenever anyone says "studies show..." just ask them what studies they are. The phrase "studies show' is about as valid as the phrase "people say..."

Of course, there are good studies and very well-documented conclusions, and a portion of what "people say" about them is valid. There is overwhelming evidence that smoking causes cancer.

The results of any recent study cited in the media to show that children are dumber than they used to be, however, are likely to be distorted. The media are always looking for such stories so they will interpret the results that way if at all possible.

Bullshit Fields (18)

Educational Testing and Psychometrics.

Here we have media reports on how little kids know about history, but the testing organization marks right answers wrong and throws out easy questions, preferring those that distinguish very good students from not so good ones. You can't use a test designed to discriminate as a measure to evaluate the proficiency of the group as a whole. Those are two contradictory aims.

Bullshit Fields (17)

Social Science

Social science, in general, is bullshit. Thou shalt not commit a social science, said Auden. The problem with social science is that can prove anything it wants to. If medical trials sponsored by drug companies are mostly bullshit, what about studies that demonstrate very narrow or very obvious results? Social science does not have the solidity of the physical sciences, but it also lacks, typically, the hermeneutic sophistication of the Humanities at their best. Quantitative social science itself constructs the data that it then subjects to analysis, in a circular way. Ethnography is suspicious because it places the Western anthropologist in a position of understanding a culture through a very suspect methodology. I don't understand my own culture in the slightest. I don't think a Martian could come and spend 9 months here and understand a thing.

I think a lot of social science is very interesting and valid, but I often feel that it is just a guy, or a gal, trying to explain things in the best possible way, just like anyone else who is not a "scientist.'