More tips on finishing your novel or dissertation

If you are traveling and having a hard time sitting down at the computer, bring a legal pad and just brainstorm for as long as you can. You will keep up the continuity with your project and also refresh yourself by working in a different context/medium. Or print out previous work and bring it along so you can edit it. Don't say it is impossible to work without every single piece of research material on hand.

I find it useful to write in the morning and then at some point in the afternoon have a planning session--away from the computer-- in which I think about what I am going to do the next day and week and jot down a few notes--which I never look at the next day.

If you absolutely must skip a day of work, make sure you don't think about your work AT ALL. Just start a new cycle the next day.

Mayhew's 153rd idea about translation

Once a translation falls within an acceptable range of semantic accuracy, then the main issues remaining to be discussed will have to do with the target language and culture, not the source text and its traditions, etc...

An acceptable range of accuracy could be defined as something reasonably close to the "consensus" translation as defined by the most frequent translation of any given phrase or sentence arrived at by at least half a dozen competent translators. In other words, a translation is faithful if it does not diverge from the norm by more than 5% or so.

After a certain point, any quibbles and arguments have to be considered in relation to the needs and desires of those reading the translation. It won't do any good to evoke one translator's superior knowledge of Chinese, or Russian if the two translations being compared are, semantically, not-all-that-far-apart.

So once a translator is satisfied that the semantic part is present and accounted for, he or she should not go back to the original much.

The alternate view, which I am rejecting at least provisionally, would be that the translator's goal is to get closer and closer to the original, making a version more perfect than the simple consensus view.

Data Laundering

The dryer had some kind of object in it which was making a clanking noise, as though I had left a fingernail clipper or a quarter in my pants pocket. So I opened the dyer and found... a Kingston data drive that I had been missing since coming back from Virginia. Very dry, the one where I store a backup of my entire Lorca book. Doesn't matter, since I have everything backed up on Kingston Data Stick #2.

But I was curious, so I took #2 off the USB port and attached #1 (very clean and dry) to the port. Opened up a Lorca chapter... and my data was still there, seemingly unscathed after having been washed and dried.

Tonight:

Greek Salad: Green leaf lettuce, pitted Calamata olives, red onion, crumbled feta, vinagrette.

Gambas al ajillo: Shrimp sauteed with garlic in olive oil, with a little salt and paprika, a little white wine added in at the end.

To celebrate the completion of another chapter this morning, this one on the shallow image, I took my longest ride today since I was a teenager. 18 miles give or take a few. From my house in Olivette MO to Washington University, around the 7-mile Forest Park bike trail, and back home. My legs do feel like I have biked 18 miles, but I am not particularly tired otherwise. I stopped twice for about 20 mintues each time, once to eat lunch and once for a latte near Wash U before heading home. Perfect biking weather of 50 degrees, wind from the South at about 15 mph.

Harold Bloom seems to be praising Robert Alter's Psalms in the New York Review of Books this week, but actually he is saying that Alter's translations do not hold up to previous translations, that they are the translations of a scholar not a poet. All the lavish praise at the beginning of the review, you know it's not going to end well.

And Harold has been fretting for years about the lack of significant Jewish contribution to American culture? What about Benny Goodman, Stan Getz? Saul Bellow and Philip Roth? Malamud? Harold Arlen and Kenneth Koch? Jerome Rothenberg? Allen Ginsberg? How about Zukofsky? Larry Rivers? I could go on and on though for some strange reason only the names of men are occuring to me right now...

I met two people in one day in Charlottesville who, completely independently of each other, had translated Creeley into Spanish--Pieces in one case and Life and Death in the other. How's that for a convergence? I kept waitng to meet Creeley's third translator. One of these is Marcos Canteli, a grad. student at Duke and friend of Tony Tost. The other, Alan Smith, a friend of my wife's whom I had never met myself and knew only by name as a scholar of 19th century Spanish novel.

My friend the Spanish poet Juan Carlos Mestre was there too. I gave my talk on Lorca and Frank O'Hara.

I'm headed to Charlottesville for an hispanic poetry conference at UVA. I'm hoping my Seinfeld streak is not broken by travel. I'm 99 days into it now. If I can get through this trip I'll be set until December.

I'm about a week from completing this chapter on deep image poetry. I'll have a bit to say about Robert Bly, then about Rothenberg's Lorca Variations.

Bly is on record as saying

"... the younger poets, in failing to attack Merwin, or Rich, or Levertov, or me, or Ginsberg, or Simpson, or Hall, or Ed Dorn, are not doing their job."

[emphasis added]

So quite literally, HE'S ASKING FOR IT. Though I've decided to blunt my attack somewhat. It isn't the main focus of my book.

Then I'll have to find a way of finessing the JR issue.

Don't forget too that Creeley was also a fan of me:

Two blogs I value indeed:

http://thirdfactory.net
http://jonathanmayhew.blogspot.com

Just when I thought of Creeley as sentimental I come across

"Between what was
and what might be
still seems to be
a life"

or

"Gods one would have
hauled out like props"

or

"When the world has become a pestilence..."

"the ridiculous small places
of the patient hates"

"Oh dull edge of prospect"

or maybe

"Shuddering racket of
air conditioner's colder

than imagined winter.."

A rigorously unsentimental view of life, really. Not every poem is of the "magnitude" of Creeley's "major" early lyrics, the ones everyone knows.

But part of that is a sense of limitation, of measure. There are no easy epiphanies to be had.

Anyway, Creeley turns the idea of being "major" on its head, as in the poem "EPIC"

"Wanting to tell
a story,
like hell's simple invention, or
some neat recovery

of the state of grace,
I can recall lace curtains,
people I think I remember,
Mrs. Curley's face."

What is the yardstick? Can Creeley's Minimus Poems be "greater" than Olson's Maximus? Isn't funny how greatness implies a sense of scale, of sheer size? Like Creeley's poem for Berrigan that does acknowledge that size and scale of a different kind of writer...

What's the rap on Creeley?: domestic, trivial, self-indulgent, dull, no "images," or uninteresting ones, weak sense of narrative, stuttering, strained, limited and minimalistic--too "theoretical," too involved with the sense of writing itself. Yet each of many separate instances gives the lie to all that.

Today I'm making a Boatman's Stew.

Boil some water, and while the water boils

Take some cod (1/2 pound per person) and lay it in the bottom of a different saucepan.

Add to the pot with a the fish: a bay leaf, some salt and pepper, a little white wine, a T of olive oil, cayenne pepper to taste

some chopped celery, tomatoes, onion, garlic, bell peppers, parsley, a smallish potato, etc...

With all of the above there in your pot, with the cod at the bottom, pour the boiling water over it till everthing is covered and switch it to the burner that is already hot from boiling your water. Cook 45-60 minutes over medium heat. There will be a tasty broth filled with fish and whatever else you put into it.

This dish cannot fail with high quality ingredients.

Eat with a little fresh bread.

I wrote a letter to The New York Review of Books about the Simic / Creeley review. Very moderate in tone. It basically says "I'd love to show Simic my 400 pages of Creeley." I doubt they will publish it because they get "thousands of letters."

***

Certain of us need the Creeleyesque. Sometimes for me it's an actual physical craving I get on occasion for that particular tone, that "insistence," to use a word he himself might use. It's a language that without him would not exist, an idiolect. For me, unoriginal poet, it's a useful register to be able to call upon. Creeleytude, Creeleytas.

***

Certain others are Creeley skeptics, the way I am a Duncan skeptic. The skeptics say that it is dull (Berryman), that there's nothing there. There's probably nothing to be done--in the sense that a justification not immanent to the work itself will not convince. It is an immanent sort of thing. The Creeley skeptics are not less cultivated, less intelligent, or less anything else. They are just less in need of what Creeley offers. It's there in just a few words, recognizable

"Most explicit--
the sense of trap"

This woman, tonight, read every line of her poetry with the exact same (monotonous) intonation and (loud) volume, whatever nuance or emotional tone the line should have had, way too loud into a microphone, in a high-pitched screech. (Did I mention she was LOUD?) Stephen Schroeder and I were sitting in the back listening to this. The thing was, the poems themselves were very good, if you listened through the reading, not to the reading. They were funny. The other two readers I'd prefer not to comment on. At least Ms. Screecher had good poems.

I hate poetry readings.

It takes Ron about 4,000 words to twist around what should have been a positive--The Hat is a good magazine, good poems and poets, clearly defined editorial agenda--into a negative. With some misdirection about fonts (what's a "san seraph" by the way? I've never heard of that category of fonts! something to do with a lack of angels?), the lack of contributor notes, alphabetial order, etc.., a little slight of hand, he ends up with the conclusion that the strength of the magazine is really a weakness. Ok... if you so say so.

I'm totally biased, of course, since I am a Hat contributor. I think it's pound-for-pound about the best publication that's out there. That's the only criterion that matters. The more you overthink it, the less clear you will be on that.