Blakey's Bass Drum

I remember several years ago listening to something on the radio and thinking to myself. Hmm, Art Blakey on drums and Paul Chambers on bass. I have never heard that particular combination before. My next thought was that I had become a half-way decent listener. Sure, Blakey and Chambers are pretty distinctive sounds, but still...

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There's a 1951 recording of Blakey with Miles Davis, with kind of bad recording quality, where Blakey's right foot really has a powerful impact, like being punched in the gut. He tuned his drums to a looser tension than most other drummers of his generation, getting a distinctive sound not as genteel as that of others. That overall sound, together with his signature crescendo press roll on the snare, give him away.

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He's the drummer, too, on Monk's Blue Note recordings. He seems to have a natural affinity with Monk and Powell. I like various versions of his Messengers too, but there's something tiring about Hard Bop after a while.

The 30s

The 30s are becoming a point of convergence for this (k)new book I'm writing. Lorca's duende lecture, his Diván del Tamarit, the earliest writing of María Zambrano, date from this decade, when modernism in its historic phase was ending and something else was taking its place. This something else is what I call late modernism, the long aftermath of the modernist movement. I'd say we are still in this aftermath.

The Great Rectangle

Who would my rectangle be?

Lorca / Monk / Frank O'Hara would be the three sides of my triangle.

1st two paragraphs of What Lorca Knew

In my reflections about Spanish poetry over the past decade or so, I have been increasingly interested in two paradoxical developments. The first is the predominance of modernism at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Why should a movement that reached its historical apogee in the first decades of the twenty-first century enjoy a second flowering almost a hundred years later? The second paradox is that the most intellectually developed form of late Spanish modernism, that of José Ángel Valente, has its roots in Spanish mysticism of the counter-reformation period, and in other intellectual developments that seem decidedly unmodern, or, at the very least, ambivalent toward modernity. The common element in these two developments is the historical anachronism by which Spanish modernity gets displaced—deferred until the close of the twentieth century or superimposed on the sixteenth.

This persistent anachronism gives the late modern movement in Spanish poetry an uncertain and problematic identity. I have dealt with this problem previously, in a book published in 2009, The Twlight of the Avant-Garde: Spanish Poetry 1980-2000, but there my emphasis was on the rivalry between Valente’s school and the resolutely anti-modern school of Luis García Montero and the “poetry of experience.” This polemic, which dominated discussions of Spanish poetry in the 1990s and the first few years of the twenty-first century, no longer seems as relevant to me as it once did. Late modernism has not only survived but flourished since 2000. Signs of this ascendency include the canonization of Antonio Gamoneda, the publication of Las ínsulas extrañas, and the increasing amount of first-rate scholarship on the philosophy of María Zambrano.

Title

I have a new title for book #5:

What Lorca (K)new: Spanish Poetry and Intellectual History

Quel est votre avis?

Seances and Confucianism

Do we have to take Yeats séances and Pound's Confucianism at the same level of seriousness? To me they are both symptoms of modernist weirdness, eccentricity.

Classic Prose

2011 will be the year I finish my fifth book on Spanish poetry, What Lorca Knew. I have five chapters to write, but I am confident I will be able to write this much. I have a new approach to writing, based on a combination of my previous approach and the idea of "classic prose" developed by Mark Turner and his collaborator. For more about that approach you can follow my posts on Stupid Motivational Tricks.

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All writing styles are based on enabling fictions. The romantic poet has certain beliefs about language that enables him to write an ode on a Grecian Urn. Those beliefs might be unfounded ones, but they make the ode possible. It makes no sense to argue with the fiction.

Happy Birthday

Happy Birthday to the lovely Akiko Tsuchiya.

Soup

I make a few soups quite well:

A Boatman's stew: cod, various vegetables (onion, garlic, tomatoes, celery, potatoes), parsley, white wine, olive oil, salt, a dash of cayenne.

Caldo Gallego: a beef soup bone, a smoked ham hock, potatoes, turnip greens.

Polenta and spinach: Chicken broth, polenta, garlic, spinach.

Squash: butternut or acorn, pureed with potatoes, salt and pepper and a few other things.

Once you know how to make a soup, there is no recipe. There is just soup.

The Family Business

My dad was a college professor. Two out of three of my mom's brothers have the PhD, as does my brother, my wife, and her late father. Another uncle on my father's side, married to his oldest sister, was also a professor with a PhD (my late uncle Frank). Some of these people are professors, some have entered other areas of life (research, consulting).

In short, the fact that I am what I am is a fairly predictable for the men in my family. Since I was bookish even as a small child, it wasn't that difficult for me to excel once I entered the university. It was like going into the family business.

Loss

We recently lost two members of our family to complications from Parkinson's Disease. My father-in-law, Mizuki, died on December 24. He was a prominent oceanographer with a great sense of humor. I never knew him to complain about his health, even when he was very ill. He loved opera, but his real loves were his family and the sea.

My uncle Frank Laycock passed away shortly after the New Year. He had been a professor of psychology at Oberlin College before his retirement. He was a sweet and gentle man, so slow to anger that I never actually witnessed him become angry. Speaking in a quiet voice, he commanded immense respect. Frank exemplified the word avuncular as few uncles do.

The world is poorer with these losses, my world in particular.

Anachronism

Anachronism is always interesting because it triggers a displacement or superimposition of temporal planes. I dislike it when it suggests a false parallelism. Street gangs in 1950s New York are not equivalent to Italian clans of the 16th century.

We are always anachronistic when thinking about the past--by definition. We belong to a different time. The language of Li Po and Tu Fu doesn't have native speakers anymore.

2011

I vow not to write bad prose this year. I am going to raise my standards even higher.

Happy New Year

Converting some vinyl to mp3s, hearing some music for the first time, records I bought just before my record player was destroyed in the fire; Herb Levy sent me mix-cd of good stuff, and I bought a lot of itunes stuff with gift certificates I got from Christmas. I'm overwhelmed with new music, which is a good way to begin the year.