Waylon Jennings
Showdown
Max
Perfect Winter
The Secrets Out
Baby
Buddy
Sarita
Baudelaire
Ginger
Jake
Midnight
Buthaynah
Fabby
Rocky
Jack
Sky Rocket
9 may 2011
John Ashbery Poems or Kentucky Derby Horses?
Animal Kingdom
The Skaters
William Byrd
Comma to the Top
Decisive Moment
Girls on the Run
Dialed In
Midnight Interlude
Ice Cream in America
Nehro
A Waltz Dream
Santiva
Shackleford
Weather and Turtles
Toby's Corner
Twice the Appeal
Uncle Mo
About to Move
The Skaters
William Byrd
Comma to the Top
Decisive Moment
Girls on the Run
Dialed In
Midnight Interlude
Ice Cream in America
Nehro
A Waltz Dream
Santiva
Shackleford
Weather and Turtles
Toby's Corner
Twice the Appeal
Uncle Mo
About to Move
Commenters
I have been very fortunate in having very good commenters on my blogs. The top ones, in recent months, and in no particular order of importance, have been Vance Maverick, Clarissa, "Profacero," Thomas, Andrew Shields, and Sarang. Vance Maverick I know very little about, but he has also been known to comment on other, more high-profile blogs like Langauge Log and Crooked Timber, and probably others I do not read. Clarissa and Profacero, like me, are Hispanists. Thomas B, who lives and works in Denmark, runs a blog very similar to Stupid Motivational Tricks, and another parallel to Bemsha Swing. In fact, his blog Research as a Second Language was the inspiration for Stupid Motivational Tricks. Andrew, like me, went to [Graduate {actually he was undergraduate while I was grad}] School at Stanford. He work in Basel in Switzerland, and, like me, loves jazz and poetry. Sarang is a graduate student in physics who also knows a hell of a lot about 17th century British poetry. There is no connection, as far as I know, between any of these six individuals, aside from maybe answering each others' comments. Geographically, they represent a diverse group, if we consider where they live or where they hail from originally. Two have lived in Canada, for example. Only one of them have I seen in the flesh.
You, too, can be a part of this select group. If I've left you out here it is because of quantity, not quality. I haven't had a bad or spam comment on my blogs for quite some time.
You, too, can be a part of this select group. If I've left you out here it is because of quantity, not quality. I haven't had a bad or spam comment on my blogs for quite some time.
6 may 2011
How To Be Feminist Man
Don't.
Ok, that's a little too simplistic. What I mean is that feminism doesn't really need you if your main aim is to prove how feminist you are, to make a spectacle of your guilt or rectitude, or to make women like you or want to sleep with you. Feminists (the female type) don't really like having to placate or take care of the feelings of men who want to be feminists. (Or so I've been told.)
Don't tell women how to be feminists, or that they are too feminist, or not feminists enough. Don't be condescending or dominating. Don't be a "concern troll," rolling out your alleged feminist bona fides in order to then make anti-feminist points. Don't speak for women and treat your contribution as special. Women, especially feminist women, really know how to speak for themselves exceptionally well.
Don't write for other men telling them how to check out women without being too obnoxious. Don't go around trying to prove that there are "good men." Women (surprise!) already know this.
Continue to enjoy your normal manly pursuits. If you like baseball, or bebop music, just enjoy them, even if they are fields dominated by men. You aren't any more or less feminists based on your taste for basketball or Bach. Nor do you have to be interested in things just because you think women are. Who cares?
The main thing is to treat women like you would other human beings. Making an ostensible show about being a feminist means that this is still a novel concept for you. You can speak out on feminist issues, of course, but don't make it about yourself. Encourage and mentor women, the same way you already probably do with men.
Finally, although it may seem obvious, don't sexually insult women just because you think it's safe to do so. Sexually insulting a conservative woman, or a class of conservative women, might seem fine, because those women oppose the feminist agenda. But you are not really hurting those women in particular, but all women. Just don't do it. You don't need to.
Naturally, these are just my opinions. it is my blog, what did you expect? You'll have to figure out an approach that works for you. The two main points are, don't make it about yourself, and don't be a sexist jerk, like many men who claim to be feminists.
Ok, that's a little too simplistic. What I mean is that feminism doesn't really need you if your main aim is to prove how feminist you are, to make a spectacle of your guilt or rectitude, or to make women like you or want to sleep with you. Feminists (the female type) don't really like having to placate or take care of the feelings of men who want to be feminists. (Or so I've been told.)
Don't tell women how to be feminists, or that they are too feminist, or not feminists enough. Don't be condescending or dominating. Don't be a "concern troll," rolling out your alleged feminist bona fides in order to then make anti-feminist points. Don't speak for women and treat your contribution as special. Women, especially feminist women, really know how to speak for themselves exceptionally well.
Don't write for other men telling them how to check out women without being too obnoxious. Don't go around trying to prove that there are "good men." Women (surprise!) already know this.
Continue to enjoy your normal manly pursuits. If you like baseball, or bebop music, just enjoy them, even if they are fields dominated by men. You aren't any more or less feminists based on your taste for basketball or Bach. Nor do you have to be interested in things just because you think women are. Who cares?
The main thing is to treat women like you would other human beings. Making an ostensible show about being a feminist means that this is still a novel concept for you. You can speak out on feminist issues, of course, but don't make it about yourself. Encourage and mentor women, the same way you already probably do with men.
Finally, although it may seem obvious, don't sexually insult women just because you think it's safe to do so. Sexually insulting a conservative woman, or a class of conservative women, might seem fine, because those women oppose the feminist agenda. But you are not really hurting those women in particular, but all women. Just don't do it. You don't need to.
Naturally, these are just my opinions. it is my blog, what did you expect? You'll have to figure out an approach that works for you. The two main points are, don't make it about yourself, and don't be a sexist jerk, like many men who claim to be feminists.
5 may 2011
Between Hirsch and Graff
I dislike both Hirsch and Graff (not the men, whom I've never met, but their ideas), Graff for his contentlessness, Hirsch for the opposite reason.
Graff advocates for a kind of contentless argumentation, saying that what you are talking about doesn't really matter as long as you can formulate an acadically well-formed essay.
Hirsch has argued that this contentlessness has had ill effects on American education. You can teach critical thinking skill until you're blue in the face but if you don't actually know anything, those won't take you very far.
So I should like Hirsch, but I find those dictionaries of cultural literacy insufferable. It turn out that the content you are supposed to know is completely trivialized.
Graff advocates for a kind of contentless argumentation, saying that what you are talking about doesn't really matter as long as you can formulate an acadically well-formed essay.
Hirsch has argued that this contentlessness has had ill effects on American education. You can teach critical thinking skill until you're blue in the face but if you don't actually know anything, those won't take you very far.
So I should like Hirsch, but I find those dictionaries of cultural literacy insufferable. It turn out that the content you are supposed to know is completely trivialized.
4 may 2011
Old Table of Contents
I found an old table of contents from Dec. of 09. It made me realize that 18 months is a long time, and how much progress I've made on this project. I hardly recognize anything in this older plan.
Chapter 1: Modernity and its Discontents
Chapter 2: Spanish Modernism and the Paradoxes of Literary History
Chapter 3: Contemporary Spanish Poetry: Late Modernism and the Cutlural Logic of Anachronism
Chapter 4: Alternate Models: Machado, Jiménez, Cernuda
Chapter 5: Play and Theory of Lorca's Duende: Nation and Performance
Apocryphal Postscript
Appendix: Glossary of the Duende
3rd Batch of Feldman Notes
I gave an exam today, so naturally I came up with a lot of ideas while the students were writing.
Let's look at Feldman's approach to musical elements.
In articulation, he emphasizes decay over attack:
In dynamics, soft rather than loud. And very, very soft, ppp.
In tempo, slow rather than fast. He liked the tempo of about 60bpm.
In structure, development, his music is static rather than directional. There is little or no narrative or movement forward.
In rhythm, duration rather than ictus.
In the construction of phrases, isolated notes or clusters rather than linear phrases.
In musical gesture, nuance rather than bombast.
In timbre, a kind of ghostly presence rather than the stencil or stereotype of the sound.
In other words, he has a consistent approach to music evident in all of these dimensions, so that if you put loud, fast, articulated, developmental, etc... in one column you would find he avoids all of those things. His music is the anti-bebop.
What I haven't gotten to yet is his approach to melody and harmony. The exam was only an hour and 15 minutes. I would say he that his sequences of short clusters are anti-melodic. He doesn't compose very many tunes that go up and down the scale. Harmonically, the music does not build tonally in the classic style, nor does it follow a 12-tone, serialist technique. What I don't know yet is what it does do.
These are very crude judgments so far. I'm just trying to figure out what I know so far, and it could be that what I know is partially mistaken.
Let's look at Feldman's approach to musical elements.
In articulation, he emphasizes decay over attack:
This is perahps why in my music I am so involved with the decay of each sound, and try to make its attack sourceless. The attack of a sound is not its character. Actually, what we hear is the attack and not the sound. Decay, however, this departing landscape, this expresses where the sound exists in our hearing--leaving us rather than coming toward us.
In dynamics, soft rather than loud. And very, very soft, ppp.
In tempo, slow rather than fast. He liked the tempo of about 60bpm.
In structure, development, his music is static rather than directional. There is little or no narrative or movement forward.
In rhythm, duration rather than ictus.
In the construction of phrases, isolated notes or clusters rather than linear phrases.
In musical gesture, nuance rather than bombast.
In timbre, a kind of ghostly presence rather than the stencil or stereotype of the sound.
In other words, he has a consistent approach to music evident in all of these dimensions, so that if you put loud, fast, articulated, developmental, etc... in one column you would find he avoids all of those things. His music is the anti-bebop.
What I haven't gotten to yet is his approach to melody and harmony. The exam was only an hour and 15 minutes. I would say he that his sequences of short clusters are anti-melodic. He doesn't compose very many tunes that go up and down the scale. Harmonically, the music does not build tonally in the classic style, nor does it follow a 12-tone, serialist technique. What I don't know yet is what it does do.
These are very crude judgments so far. I'm just trying to figure out what I know so far, and it could be that what I know is partially mistaken.
More Feldman Notes
(6) I like that anti-ideological spirit in Feldman. It is not anti-ideological in the cheap postmodern sense--which is just a reinstatement of another ideology. It is not "anything goes." Neither was Frank O'Hara, despite facile readings of him. In contrast, Cage's seeming openness is very ideological, very didactic.
(7) Duration is a key concept. How long something lasts, whether a note or an entire composition. In a comment on the last post, Vance Maverick has noted the extremes of brevity and length in his early and late compositions, respectively. The early sequence "Durations" might hold a key to this concept.
(8) If you didn't know the early pieces were indeterminate, would you think of them that way when you heard them?
(9) I'd like to do an amateur essay on Feldman. Obviously I could do nothing else, lacking the technical ability to do the non-amateur kind. But it would still be about the music, not just about his connections to literary and painterly comrades from Guston to Beckett. I think he was writing music for me, not just for musicologists. Nor do I think of this as "cerebral" music.
(10) Another approach would be a sort of nationalist, Americanist reading. This strain is evident in Feldman's writing, but is it what most interests me? Only very indirectly.
(11) What does Feldman mean for my other writing projects? Will he be roped in for some project in which I can speak from the point of view of the expert academic? Would this be a good or bad thing?
(7) Duration is a key concept. How long something lasts, whether a note or an entire composition. In a comment on the last post, Vance Maverick has noted the extremes of brevity and length in his early and late compositions, respectively. The early sequence "Durations" might hold a key to this concept.
(8) If you didn't know the early pieces were indeterminate, would you think of them that way when you heard them?
(9) I'd like to do an amateur essay on Feldman. Obviously I could do nothing else, lacking the technical ability to do the non-amateur kind. But it would still be about the music, not just about his connections to literary and painterly comrades from Guston to Beckett. I think he was writing music for me, not just for musicologists. Nor do I think of this as "cerebral" music.
(10) Another approach would be a sort of nationalist, Americanist reading. This strain is evident in Feldman's writing, but is it what most interests me? Only very indirectly.
(11) What does Feldman mean for my other writing projects? Will he be roped in for some project in which I can speak from the point of view of the expert academic? Would this be a good or bad thing?
3 may 2011
Feldman Notes
One of my persistent obsessions is the music of Morton Feldman. Here's a few things I know.
(1) He liked to give names of instruments or dedications as the titles of his works. "For Frank O'Hara" or "Piano." The other main category of title refers to the process or structure of a piece: "Projection," "Crippled Symmetries." He tends to avoid the names of musical genres in the title--like "Waltz" or "Sonata."
(2) He is a precursor of miminalism, but I find his music quite different from most minimalism. It is hypnotic, but does not depend as much on rhythm. It is more introspective, less facile, more involved with visual and poetics arts.
(3) I like him better than Cage because the music seems less didactic, less theological.
(4) He uses a lot of percussion, but not for rhythmic or bombastic effects; more for timbre and texture.
(5) He was an interesting writer, and his writing still provides the best entrance into his musical world. His writing is interesting even if you don't know his music. In this, he is like Cage, but once again, I am more interested in Fedlman's writing than in Cage's.
(1) He liked to give names of instruments or dedications as the titles of his works. "For Frank O'Hara" or "Piano." The other main category of title refers to the process or structure of a piece: "Projection," "Crippled Symmetries." He tends to avoid the names of musical genres in the title--like "Waltz" or "Sonata."
(2) He is a precursor of miminalism, but I find his music quite different from most minimalism. It is hypnotic, but does not depend as much on rhythm. It is more introspective, less facile, more involved with visual and poetics arts.
(3) I like him better than Cage because the music seems less didactic, less theological.
(4) He uses a lot of percussion, but not for rhythmic or bombastic effects; more for timbre and texture.
(5) He was an interesting writer, and his writing still provides the best entrance into his musical world. His writing is interesting even if you don't know his music. In this, he is like Cage, but once again, I am more interested in Fedlman's writing than in Cage's.
University Scholars
I met with the Honors Program director and Assistant Director today. They seemed open to my idea for the course on Cultural LIteracy. Amazingly, I got this idea before I knew that I could apply to this program to teach it. The same thing happened with my jazz course for the Honors Program.
"Allons enfants"
Mes étudiants n'ont pas reconnu la phrase "Allons enfants de la patrie," citée dans une chanson du "cantautor" Sabina. Est-que ils n'ont jamais vu le filme "Casablanca"? "Allons enfants de la patrie / maldito mayo de París."
2 may 2011
Why I don't Talk About Politics Here (A Couple Reasons)
My political opinions are utterly banal. They are probably your opinions already, unless you are a raving conservative birther idiot or part of the idiot left. There are many political bloggers who are more informed of the granular details of contemporary politics, or more interested in getting into debates about very specific issues. My disgust for any kind of right-wing politics is visceral, but I don't need to reiterate it endlessly on twitter or face book, since it is probably identical to yours. I like to write about other subjects much more. I get upset whenever I actually think about politics for too long.
How to Learn a Language
Here's how I would learn a language.
(1) Exposure to vast amounts of authentic speech. I would listen to hours and hours of oral input. Not (only) language tapes, but authentic material, newscasts, podcasts, anything I could find. I would do that for maybe a month first, without even trying to understand a word of it. I would continue to expose myself to vast amounts of speech during subsequent stages of the process.
(2) Next, I would learn the correspondence between writing and pronunciation. I would learn how to produce the sounds of the language based on the writing system. I would practice reading the language aloud, with a native speaker there in the room to correct me. This gives me the ability to read aloud, even from texts i do not yet understand.
(3) Now I am ready to learn the basic vocabulary, the 300-500 most commonly used words, and to look a bit at the grammar.
(4) Now my approach would be to speak the language with anybody that I could, as much as I could, and to read the easiest books that I could find. Translations of stupid self-help manuals, or of The Harry Potter series. Easy books reinforce the basic vocabulary, the words that are found on every page, while exposing the reader to many unfamiliar words as well.
Since I am naturally very good at grammar, I wouldn't need to emphasize it at an early stage. I would maximize my written and spoken input as much as possible, and emphasize prosody and phonology. Once I could read fairly fluently and had a feel for the grammar, I would go back and learn it more formally. It would be important to learn intonation and phonology before I started reading, so that when I read I would be hearing the language correctly in my head. I'm amazed by advanced level students who can't read Spanish aloud in a comprehensible way.
My approach is not backed up by very much specific SLA research that I know about, since I don't really know this field. Nevertheless, i am a successful language learner. I never took a language class in college in which I did not earn an A, and that includes French, German, Latin, Greek, and Spanish. I can also read Italian, Catalan, and Portuguese. My colleague who is a second-language acquisition specialist agrees with me that a lot of input can never be a bad thing. I know little babies learn prosody before any other aspect of a language.
(1) Exposure to vast amounts of authentic speech. I would listen to hours and hours of oral input. Not (only) language tapes, but authentic material, newscasts, podcasts, anything I could find. I would do that for maybe a month first, without even trying to understand a word of it. I would continue to expose myself to vast amounts of speech during subsequent stages of the process.
(2) Next, I would learn the correspondence between writing and pronunciation. I would learn how to produce the sounds of the language based on the writing system. I would practice reading the language aloud, with a native speaker there in the room to correct me. This gives me the ability to read aloud, even from texts i do not yet understand.
(3) Now I am ready to learn the basic vocabulary, the 300-500 most commonly used words, and to look a bit at the grammar.
(4) Now my approach would be to speak the language with anybody that I could, as much as I could, and to read the easiest books that I could find. Translations of stupid self-help manuals, or of The Harry Potter series. Easy books reinforce the basic vocabulary, the words that are found on every page, while exposing the reader to many unfamiliar words as well.
Since I am naturally very good at grammar, I wouldn't need to emphasize it at an early stage. I would maximize my written and spoken input as much as possible, and emphasize prosody and phonology. Once I could read fairly fluently and had a feel for the grammar, I would go back and learn it more formally. It would be important to learn intonation and phonology before I started reading, so that when I read I would be hearing the language correctly in my head. I'm amazed by advanced level students who can't read Spanish aloud in a comprehensible way.
My approach is not backed up by very much specific SLA research that I know about, since I don't really know this field. Nevertheless, i am a successful language learner. I never took a language class in college in which I did not earn an A, and that includes French, German, Latin, Greek, and Spanish. I can also read Italian, Catalan, and Portuguese. My colleague who is a second-language acquisition specialist agrees with me that a lot of input can never be a bad thing. I know little babies learn prosody before any other aspect of a language.
Français
Je poudrais écrire ce blog en Français. Pourquoi pas? Le problème, évidemment, c'est la possibilité de faire plusieurs erreurs. Et quand on dit "possibilité" ... Chaque parole est pleine de risques. Je voudrais écrire en français sans peur, mais c'est impossible.
Poudriai-je expresser mes idées, plus ou moins? Je pense que oui. Avec difficulté, mais je pense que je serai capable de le faire, sans penser en orthographie, en grammaire. Je ne cherche pas la perfection, seulement la compétence. C'est utile pour moi: je voudrais sentir sympathie avec mes étudiants, qui sentent la peur de ne pas savoir écrire bien en espagnol, par exemple. Si je pense en la difficulté de faire cela pour les pauvres...
Autre problème est que mes lecteurs n'entendent pas le français, ou préfèrent ne pas lire mes pensées dans cette langue.
Poudriai-je expresser mes idées, plus ou moins? Je pense que oui. Avec difficulté, mais je pense que je serai capable de le faire, sans penser en orthographie, en grammaire. Je ne cherche pas la perfection, seulement la compétence. C'est utile pour moi: je voudrais sentir sympathie avec mes étudiants, qui sentent la peur de ne pas savoir écrire bien en espagnol, par exemple. Si je pense en la difficulté de faire cela pour les pauvres...
Autre problème est que mes lecteurs n'entendent pas le français, ou préfèrent ne pas lire mes pensées dans cette langue.
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