(9)

Danzy Senna. Symptomatic. 2004. 213 pp.

I'd read her Caucasia before. This one is tauter in its pacing; it seems like it's going to be a little light-weight at first, but picks up steam at exactly the right place.

Senna is the daughter of poet / novelist Fanny Howe. You can see the influence there.

When I am not concentrating quite as well, at the end of a writing session for example, I will write some "placeholder sentences." These serve to mark the place in the text where the real sentences will go later on. Here, for example, is a transition placeholder I wrote this morning:

I began this chapter by looking at translation theory, but I have not looked at translations themselves. I am more interested in the overall transformation of Lorca's work into its relation to the American cultural paradigm than in individual versions of Lorca's poetry. However, those are also worth a look.

This is enough information for the Jonathan of tomorrow to use to write some better prose. I'll usually put those kinds of sentences in brackets to signal to myself that they are simply notes to myself. I'll even write "[insert sentence about x here]." Toward the beginning of my writing this morning I was writing sentences at the "penultimate level," that is, decent scholarly prose that might need to be rewritten only a few more times before going into the final, pre-copyediting phase. For me, a sentence won't really get into penultimate form on the first try unless I am really on my game. The beauty of it is that a day's writing will include sentences of all types, as well as revisions that bring the sentences up one level. Once the whole chapter is more or less in antepenultimate form, then I can bring it up to penultimate form and then to pre-copyediting final form.

I often don't know what I'm going to say before I start a chapter. I have some notions about things, of course, but they are not necessarily the ones that will end up in the final version. So research and writing are not separate activities for me. The organization is up for grabs too. I let the material organize itself. This means that a chapter will sometimes split into two, or that a single section of a chapter will expand at the expense of something else. I'll invariably find a better argument than the one I started with. For example, I first was going to say women in the 50s were not that interested in Lorca. That's kind of a non-starter. Women were interested, but interest in Lorca tended to be marked for gender--the masculine gender. That's a little better. There was a Jewish Lorca, but not one marked for Jewishness per se. Whereas the gay male and African American Lorcas were marked as such.

•••


I was writing about Bob Kaufman yesterday. I knew that Maria Damon, whom I went to graduate school with, wrote a chapter on Kaufman in her book The Dark End of the Street, which I had read several years ago. Then I found a quote from this book that exactly reinforced an argument I had made in another section of the same chapter. It cemented the connection between two parts of my argument, in a way almost too good to be true. That happens a lot when you are on to a really good subject you know a lot about. There is another quote in a biography of Miles Davis that just nails my argument for me. It's better sometimes when someone else makes your case for you. You can say, "hey, it's not just me making this crazy argument..." There's kind of an authority there, even if the other person is just a person pretty much like you, just writing a book about something.

There's never been anything I wrote before that drew on everything I know to such an extent. Usually I have the sense of writing only a fraction of what I know, but in this case being a serious aficionado of Miles Davis (for example) seems wholly relevant to my project. Read the book to find out why!

(8)

Virginia Woolf. Jacob's Room. 1922. 176 pp.

This one is elliptical in a not especially useful way. It's got some beautiful passages of prose, but to what end? This is no To the Lighthouse.

I was used to the Gidon Kremer recording of the Bach unaccompanied violin pieces. Well that is on my computer in Kansas and inaccessible to me. So I checked out the Perlman set from the library, put it on my lap-top.

And of course, I am finding the Perlman unlistenable. I don't know whether it's because I have them in my head already differently, or whether it's just that vibrato, that cloying tone. The fourth movement of the Partita One came up on my private radio station and it seemed way too fast. It seemed like he saw his task as one of getting through all the notes in order before supper. Or maybe he confused it with the cadenza of a 19th century concerto, as one of the amazon reviewers suggested.

And Bach's leading me back to Zukofsky, not suprisingly.

The last chapter (really the second in the order of things, but the last to be written) includes American exceptionalism. The Beat Generation. Gay Lorca. Black Lorca. Jewish Lorca. The jazz / flamenco parallelism. Ralph Ellison. Bob Kaufman. Norman Mailer. Translation theory. The duende. And the kitchen sink, of course.

(7)

Penelope Fitzgerald. The Book Shop. 1978. 123 pp.

This was a delightfully droll book about a a woman opening and then being forced to close a book store in a water-logged Suffolk town in 1959. Another novel, Lolita, is almost a character in the book.

By coincidence this book, like The Sea, The Sea is also from 1978, written by an Englishwoman, and takes place in an old, damp British house on the seacoast.

The recommendation comes by way of Jordan.

I couldn't face the computer yesterday so I did my 2 hours work on the project in the library, with just books and a pen and notebook. I was reading Michael Magee's book on American pragmatism, Ellison, jazz, Frank O'Hara, and Emerson, since I was making a point that piggy-backed on his overall argument to some extent. (You know the book I mean, I'm sure--Emancipating Pragmatism: Emerson, Jazz, and Experimental Writing (Modern & Contemporary Poetics Series))

Of course, the writing today went even faster and better than normal. I had more to say after taking the day off. So taking the SMT of the day is to take a "change of pace day" without interrupting continuity. A change of pace day means no computer for me. For you it might mean using the computer instead of writing long-hand, or opening up a new document and writing random notes that don't form part of the chapter you are writing. I personally feel the need of momentum, so I hesitate to take a day off completely, but there are many things that can be done if you feel you can't face the chapter you are writing on any particular day.

Another good tactic is to write emails to scholarly acquaintances with specific questions during part of your writing time. I try not to abuse the patience of any one individual, but I've found that usually people like to be consulted a bit. They know they will get their name in my acknowledgements. And who reads those except to find YOUR OWN NAME?

I have my "purchased" music on random rotation. It's like my own private radio station. Let's see what it gives me, out of the 304 songs I have there.

1. Mozart's "dissonance" quartet, first movement. Emerson String Quartet. Very nice. I've played this 15 times apparently. You'll probably think I manipulated the results just to make myself look good.

2. Ornette Coleman. "Song X." From the Sound Grammar album. If there were a Nobel prize for music... I liked the original Song X Album back in the 80s.

3. A Sarabande from the Bach Cello Suites. #6. I'll have to get back to blogging through those.

4. Lee Konitz: "Mean to Me" (take 4). He's a purer improviser than even Ornette. I wonder who this bass player is.

5. "Think of One." Sonny Rollins, from the Prestige Profiles. With Monk on the piano. I must like saxophone players! There's a nice trombone solo too.

6. Stan Getz playing "Four," which I believe Miles Davis wrote. I love Stan Getz, except the bossa nova stuff gets overplayed. This is off the West Coast Jazz album, with Stan Levey on piano and Shelly Manne drums. His tenor sounds like an alto compared to Rollins. Conte Candoli plays trumpet on this. I had this playing in my car for a month.

7. Rollins again. "Nishi," off the recent "Sonny Please" album, his best in years. I've never really noticed this guitar solo before. My wife Akiko has played this album in her car and ipod probably 100 times. Julia's played along to it.

8. "Just one of those things." Sinatra, off "Songs for Young Lovers."

9. Goldberg Variations (#3) played by Simone Dinnerstein. I found out about this recording through my friend Bob Basil's webpage (basil.ca) and have been listening for quite a few weeks obsessively She plays with such a sense of calm. When I have this on in my car I am still alert, but also transported to another place. Listening to Gould, on the other hand, makes me nervous...

10. "Can't We Be Friends." Off the "In the Wee Small Hours of the Night" album. Sinatra's finest.

Two sinatras, two Rollins, four or five saxophones, two Bachs.

I need suggestions for novels / novelists for the 100 novels project. Anything's fair game, but I don't want to re-read too much or read the kind of thing I normally do ("poet" novels). I want novel novels.

(6)

Iris Murdoch. The Sea, Sea. 1978.

Cringeworthy exposition for 80 pages before anything happens: "I will now describe the physical appearance of this character." "I will now tell you what happened next." That kind of thing. The narrator whose diary we are reading is not supposed to be a professional novelist, but a little bit of this clumsiness would have gone a long way to suggest this. He is supposed to a playwright.

The plot and characters also provoke embarrassment from the reader. The arrogant cluelessness of the self-involved narrator-protagonist. The contrived plot-twists. I've never felt such vergüenza ajena reading a novel. It sucks you in and repels you at the same time.

She does keep you guessing about what's going to happen, and the characters' unpleasantness is a kind of tour de force in its own right. I won't be reading any more Murdoch for a while. The Sandcastle was better than this.

Moral of the story: people like to be unhappy. Happiness is a delusion leading to disaster.

The opposite of stretching is being ensconsed in a particular specialty and achieving mastery. That is also valuable. In fact, such a specialist makes the best generalist. You have to have depth in at least one thing. Breadth will come through wanting to understand other things in equal depth, and usually failing at it.

***

When quoting from a secondary source in my own writing this morning, I noticed a clash of styles: "[...] the perspective from which the Beats should be evaluated is from within the myth of American exceptionalism" (John Lardas, The Bop Apocalypse). The insight is essential, or I wouldn't have quoted it, but I would have rewritten that sentence a few more times, eliminating both the passive voice and the overall awkwardness. I'm not saying I never publish a bad sentence, of course, but in this case the quoted sentence stood out from my prose, making my writing look a bit more elegant by contrast. Quoting writers better than myself, or simply different in tone, register, style, might have a similar effect. Quotation, then, serves a stylistic function of alllowing the reader to perceive the distinctiveness of one's own prose.

In writing about poetry, the perceived quality of the poetic excerpts quoted also has an effect. Poetry will almost always produce a stylistic clash with the surounding prose, but if the poetry is perceived to be not very good, it will weaken the argument, even if the argument does not depend on an aesthetic judgment. With very bad prose about poetry, the impression will be that the critical discourse has not come up to the level of the poetry.

When taking issue with another critic, the stylistic contrast becomes doubly significant. One can gain the rhetorical upper hand by quoting awkward or banal sentences, without even pointing out those qualities in the prose of the criticized critic.

I will never be a good enough prose writer to satisfy my own standards. Yet it is because I feel this way that I am a better writer than I would otherwise be.

I like to stretch myself in various ways: reading things I wouldn't normally read, or taking up new hobbies. I feel that the lack of such stretching at previous points in my life led to artificial limits. How many times have you said to yourself: I can't play a musical instrument, learn a foreign language, do math, draw. Things that might seem to be beyond you but really are not in an absolute sense. Even learning to do something badly can be quite instructive, as I learned when I learned to draw just a little bit, and without any real achievement. Now I can picture people's faces after meeting them a few times. Before I learned my very little bit of drawing I couldn't do this.

For example, I am now telling myself-- Well, I could never write anything about music, because I don't have the technical know-how, the ear for harmony, etc... That is a real limit in some sense: I really don't have those capabilities developed to a high degree. What makes it an artificial limit, however, is when the thought of this makes me stop doing something that I might learn something from. I can have "ah-ha" moments even after a middling level of understanding. I could make a serious study of phonology, of harmony, or of Ancient Greek if I really wanted to.

(5)

George Eliot. Adam Bede. 1858.

This is my new favorite novel so far (of the five I've commented on so far.) I haven't finished it yet so I can't give away the ending.

Adam Bede is young, strapping pragmatic country carpenter admired of everyone in a 30 mile radius. He has only two flaws: he loves the vain, superficial and attractive Hetty (infatuated in turn with the dashing young squire Arthur, a well-intentioned person who will never have to face any consequences for his actions) and he beats people up. Methodism, a kind of late 18th-century liberation theology, is sweeping through the countryside. Adam's gentler brother Seth is a Methodist in love with Dinah, an earnest rousing woman preacher meant to be the polar opposite of Hetty.

Eliot, of tolerant spirit, warns the reader not to judge these characters too harshly. I love those Victorian asides to the reader! That earnestness tinged with tolerant irony! That sentimentality in which the author does not quite believe.

Competence, embodied by the eponymous hero, is almost the highest ethical value in sight--aside from tolerance itself. Competence is identified with a pragmatic sense of mathematics, of judging things correctly. The angle is either square or not. So his mistaken judgment of Hetty must have some consequences: here he is off in his calculations.

Murdoch is the same kind of novelist, ceteris paribus, but I am always relieved when I turn back from her to George Eliot. Victorians wrote better Victorian novels than anyone else could later.

Coming soon: Faulkner, more Murdoch.