2012 will be about performing for me. Improving my performance skills in the poetry reading, the classroom, the academic conference, or wherever else. I've been taping myself a lot to see where I need improvement. I will consult vocal coaches as needed. I'll improve my drumming and singing skills as well.
I feel I am already adequate. Just not good enough. Why be just as good as I am when I could be even better.
05/01/2012
04/01/2012
Three Kinds of Magic
Literature is a form of magic. What I mean by this is that it enacts transformations approaching a magical effect. So I distinguish three kind of magic.
Narrative magic. Narrative magic makes the room in which the reader is reading disappear. The reader disappears into this other world, parallel to reality but not identical with it.
Theatrical magic The magic of the theater is to represent through spectacle a reality that goes beyond the dimensions of the stage. It is to "cram within this wooden O the very casques that did affright the air at Agincourt."
Poetic magic. Poetic magic is to cast a magic spell through the sound of the words themselves.
These three forms of magic do not exclude one another and in fact can be found together. Words on the stage can narrate, or cast a verbal spell, etc... The verbal spell might be a kind of story involving narrative magic.
Literary criticism assumes that this magic has a technology, in other words a series of ways of making this magic occur. There is no conflict between the idea of magic and that of technology. At the wizard school, after all, there are classes on potions and spells. Or if we see magic as mere sleight-of-hand there are props and tools as well as technical skills to be mastered. Either way. A dull approach to literature would be one that failed to remember the magical dimension that makes literature exist in the first place.
A fourth kind of magic, I suppose, is the effect of transforming the reader herself into a different person. This is the cumulative effect of reading, the long-term effect of all those magic spells, all those trips out of the room.
I think it follows that literature belongs to readers and not to authors. I am pretty sure I have spent more time with certain poems by Frank O'Hara than he took to write them, and multiply that by the number of his readers. To think that our aim should be to go back and see what was in his mind on that particular day is pretty ridiculous. The author doesn't have access to all those trips out of the room by all potential readers over decades or centuries after the author is deceased.
Narrative magic. Narrative magic makes the room in which the reader is reading disappear. The reader disappears into this other world, parallel to reality but not identical with it.
Theatrical magic The magic of the theater is to represent through spectacle a reality that goes beyond the dimensions of the stage. It is to "cram within this wooden O the very casques that did affright the air at Agincourt."
Poetic magic. Poetic magic is to cast a magic spell through the sound of the words themselves.
These three forms of magic do not exclude one another and in fact can be found together. Words on the stage can narrate, or cast a verbal spell, etc... The verbal spell might be a kind of story involving narrative magic.
Literary criticism assumes that this magic has a technology, in other words a series of ways of making this magic occur. There is no conflict between the idea of magic and that of technology. At the wizard school, after all, there are classes on potions and spells. Or if we see magic as mere sleight-of-hand there are props and tools as well as technical skills to be mastered. Either way. A dull approach to literature would be one that failed to remember the magical dimension that makes literature exist in the first place.
A fourth kind of magic, I suppose, is the effect of transforming the reader herself into a different person. This is the cumulative effect of reading, the long-term effect of all those magic spells, all those trips out of the room.
I think it follows that literature belongs to readers and not to authors. I am pretty sure I have spent more time with certain poems by Frank O'Hara than he took to write them, and multiply that by the number of his readers. To think that our aim should be to go back and see what was in his mind on that particular day is pretty ridiculous. The author doesn't have access to all those trips out of the room by all potential readers over decades or centuries after the author is deceased.
19/12/2011
Hypercanonicity
I've been doing the experiment of writing in 25-minute segments on my other blog. Here, I 'd like to do something similar, but without writing as fast as I can. I simply want to produce fluent, thoughtful prose for that window of time and see what I come up with.
Andrew has expressed some interest about my concept of hypercanonicity. For me, a hypercanonical author is one who becomes the object of insatiable attention. In Spanish literature, only perhaps Cervantes, Lorca, and Saint John of the Cross rise to that level. Basho, Shakespeare, Rilke, and Dante belong to this category. A hypercanonical writer is translated over and over again. There will be parodies, adaptations, musical settings. Every detail of the writer's life will be significant. Whereas most literary criticism assumes that the writer's life is irrelevant, or of secondary interest at best, hypercanonical authors often have biographical industries devoted to their lives. No "death of the author" here.
His or her works (usually his) become the object of a critical industry, so that an academic could devote his entire career to such a writer.
On one level, the canon is "what is taught" or "what is studied." Not every work in the canon is in the hypercanon, though. Thus, as Andrew pointed out in a comment to another post, the inclusion of additional writers to the canon (in the name of gender equity for example), has little or no effect on the fortunes of hypercanonical authors. They remain central.
Usually, a hypercanonical author defines a national literature, is central to a larger cultural identity, in the way that Cervantes defines Spanishness, or Dante lives within the Italian language. The hypercanonical author also represents the nation to the entire world (to other nations) , as Lorca does.
The implications of this idea are crucial for my project. To study a hypercanonical author is to deal with a huge ideological residue and a huge number of secondary texts, such as translations. I could not have written a book like Apocryphal Lorca about a writer not in this category. There are always linguistic and cultural issues in translation, but the kind of "Lorca effect" i found in US poetry can only result from a writer who has managed to have a huge resonance in two separate cultural spheres.
Of course, the fact that I have derived benefits in my own career from studying Lorca is also significant. People simply care more about hypercanonical authors than about almost any other topic in literary studies. Even people who barely know who Lorca is have responded with more enthusiasm to my projects on him, because they sense that there is something of interest to a wider spectrum of the reading public.
I don't think my concept is all that original, since it is similar to ideas of the "classic" that many other commentators have discussed. I think I can leverage my concept into something relatively novel when I apply it to Lorca.
Well, my time is almost up now. I think I might have a few more ideas about this subject, especially in relation to Foucault's notion of the "author-function." I would argue that the author function is intensified in the case of the "hypercanon." Or that the definition of hypercanonicity is the intensification of the author-function. How should I use my last 39 seconds? Now 27? I wish I knew how to squeeze out a few more good ideas but now my time is done.
Andrew has expressed some interest about my concept of hypercanonicity. For me, a hypercanonical author is one who becomes the object of insatiable attention. In Spanish literature, only perhaps Cervantes, Lorca, and Saint John of the Cross rise to that level. Basho, Shakespeare, Rilke, and Dante belong to this category. A hypercanonical writer is translated over and over again. There will be parodies, adaptations, musical settings. Every detail of the writer's life will be significant. Whereas most literary criticism assumes that the writer's life is irrelevant, or of secondary interest at best, hypercanonical authors often have biographical industries devoted to their lives. No "death of the author" here.
His or her works (usually his) become the object of a critical industry, so that an academic could devote his entire career to such a writer.
On one level, the canon is "what is taught" or "what is studied." Not every work in the canon is in the hypercanon, though. Thus, as Andrew pointed out in a comment to another post, the inclusion of additional writers to the canon (in the name of gender equity for example), has little or no effect on the fortunes of hypercanonical authors. They remain central.
Usually, a hypercanonical author defines a national literature, is central to a larger cultural identity, in the way that Cervantes defines Spanishness, or Dante lives within the Italian language. The hypercanonical author also represents the nation to the entire world (to other nations) , as Lorca does.
The implications of this idea are crucial for my project. To study a hypercanonical author is to deal with a huge ideological residue and a huge number of secondary texts, such as translations. I could not have written a book like Apocryphal Lorca about a writer not in this category. There are always linguistic and cultural issues in translation, but the kind of "Lorca effect" i found in US poetry can only result from a writer who has managed to have a huge resonance in two separate cultural spheres.
Of course, the fact that I have derived benefits in my own career from studying Lorca is also significant. People simply care more about hypercanonical authors than about almost any other topic in literary studies. Even people who barely know who Lorca is have responded with more enthusiasm to my projects on him, because they sense that there is something of interest to a wider spectrum of the reading public.
I don't think my concept is all that original, since it is similar to ideas of the "classic" that many other commentators have discussed. I think I can leverage my concept into something relatively novel when I apply it to Lorca.
Well, my time is almost up now. I think I might have a few more ideas about this subject, especially in relation to Foucault's notion of the "author-function." I would argue that the author function is intensified in the case of the "hypercanon." Or that the definition of hypercanonicity is the intensification of the author-function. How should I use my last 39 seconds? Now 27? I wish I knew how to squeeze out a few more good ideas but now my time is done.
Fielding Dawson
I dreamt I was trying to remember the name of a novelist / short story writer. I finally settled on the name "Fielding Dawson." Dawson, of course, is a real writer, but his work is (presumably) nothing like the work I was reading in my dream, which was more in the David Sedaris genre. I haven't read Dawson, so maybe this dream is a sign that I should remedy this gap.
16/12/2011
Chapter 7
The final chapter will reopen the can of worms that is kitsch. The entire book is oriented toward "uses of Lorca." Implicitly or explicitly, I will always think that my uses of Lorca are better than those of others. That's what having a critical perspective means.
So that's the outline of the book. All the work I've been doing it over the past few days has been on this very blog. If I force myself to explain what the chapters are about, then I realize what they are about, even if I haven't thought about it very much.
So that's the outline of the book. All the work I've been doing it over the past few days has been on this very blog. If I force myself to explain what the chapters are about, then I realize what they are about, even if I haven't thought about it very much.
Chapter 6
Chapter six is on the gay or queer Lorca. Returning to the idea of whether biography in itself has much explanatory power, and wondering why queer theory in the 90s didn't have more impact on Lorca studies, or had its impact very late. I could argue that the queer Lorca remains undiscovered still. I was working on a book at one time (mid 90s) on gay poets in Spain, but the project ended up being a series of articles instead, mainly because I didn't quite know what to do with Lorca. A friend of mine, Enrique Álvarez, ended up writing a book that covers a lot of the ground I would have covered, and quite excellently, but I still feel I have something to say about Lorca. I just realized, while writing this post, that this was "una asignatura pendiente" [unfinished business] in my own scholarly trajectory.
Chapter 5
Chapter 5 is on Lorca and flamenco. What interests me here is the way in which Lorca has been so enthusiastically adopted into contemporary Flamenco music. There is a link to the idea of a performative poetics, explained in Chapter 4, and to a later chapter on Lorca and kitsch. I'm going to have to adjust the order of the chapters at some point to make the argument of the entire book seamless.
15/12/2011
Chapter 4
Chapter 4, "Cuerpo presente: una poética performativa" develops the idea that Lorca's poetics is a performative one, with all that that implies. The title comes from a section from Lorca's "Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías." The idea of the presence of the body is key here, because performance requires the body on some level. I'll be building off some astute insights from the Lorca critic Roberta Quance and doing a close reading of the Duende lecture.
14/12/2011
Chapter 3
Chapter 3 of "modelo para armar" is about Lorca's influence on Valente and Gamoneda. I will be borrowing a bit from an article I published in Spanish. The title is "la ansiedad de una influencia." My argument is that these poets do not acknowledge Lorca enough, especially Valente. I argue that poets like Lorca and Vallejo present a model of fractured subjectivity, unlike, say Juan Ramón Jiménez with his confidence in the power of language to create an autonomous verbal reality. Valente wants to acknowledge Jiménez but not Lorca, the stronger and more radical model. He (Valente) also puts Neruda over Vallejo, or reads Vallejo in a narrower way. This chapter is going to kick ass.
Chapter 2
Chapter 2 will be on Lorca as a poetic thinker and a modernist poet. It will repeat some of the argument of "Was Lorca a Poetic Thinker" but will also consider his mature work of the 1930s in relation to my concepts of "late modernism."
09/12/2011
Vendler vs. Dove
What I find remarkable about Vendler's review of Dove's anthology in the NYRB is the racial animus. It's fine to include Billy Collins or Mary Oliver, poets of negligible aesthetic category, but not a figure as historically significant as Baraka? It is fine to include a mediocrity like Pinsky, but not a significant black modernist like Tolson? A thoroughly unsdistinguished poet like William Stafford is fine, but let's make sure there's not too many black poets! That seems to be the logic behind Vendler's review, which comes back repeatedly to (what she feels is) the overrepresentation of poets from minority groups. Nobody worries about the overrepresentation of mediocre white guys, as usual.
I could criticize Dove's anthology on numerous inclusions and exclusions. Anybody could play that game. No Coolidge? No Irby? Gregory Orr is there but not David Shapiro? Is Alice Notley there? It's a kind of stupid game, in the end, but the way Vendler plays it is particularly inept, devoting special attention to how Dove describes or represents the work of black poets and movements.
Ironically, Vendler is the most high-powered poet to ever champion Dove's own poetry. I guess that's an alliance that is definitively broken.
I could criticize Dove's anthology on numerous inclusions and exclusions. Anybody could play that game. No Coolidge? No Irby? Gregory Orr is there but not David Shapiro? Is Alice Notley there? It's a kind of stupid game, in the end, but the way Vendler plays it is particularly inept, devoting special attention to how Dove describes or represents the work of black poets and movements.
Ironically, Vendler is the most high-powered poet to ever champion Dove's own poetry. I guess that's an alliance that is definitively broken.
Chapter I
Chapter One, "Modelo para armar" is an introduction that argues for the necessity of contemporary theory for the study of Lorca. Specifically, I argue for the idea of Foucault's "author function" instead of approaches based on the "life and works" paradigm. In other words, Lorca's biography does not explain his work or its importance, or has very limited explanatory power.
Why? A biography is simply a narrative and interpretive framework that is constructed like any other such framework. It provides one kind of context (among other possible contexts) for interpretation. All interpretation takes place within a context (no context free interpretation) so the idea is not that a particular biographical detail is not (potentially) explanatory, but that this is simply a choice of one context among many. Secondly, the biographical detail does not come with its own interpretation already attached. A fact is not an interpretation of this fact.
Another reason for wanting to use modern theory to interpret Lorca is that modern theory is the theorization of avant-garde poetics itself. To use a life and works paradigm is to be on a level lower, less sophisticated, than that of Lorca himself.
I'm not in favor of theoretical readings of Lorca that apply theories to his poetry or drama. I am not proposing theoretical applications as much as readings informed by the insights learned from theory.
Ok. That's all I got for that chapter so far. I find that if I ask myself what the chapter will say I already know, but I have to first ask.
Why? A biography is simply a narrative and interpretive framework that is constructed like any other such framework. It provides one kind of context (among other possible contexts) for interpretation. All interpretation takes place within a context (no context free interpretation) so the idea is not that a particular biographical detail is not (potentially) explanatory, but that this is simply a choice of one context among many. Secondly, the biographical detail does not come with its own interpretation already attached. A fact is not an interpretation of this fact.
Another reason for wanting to use modern theory to interpret Lorca is that modern theory is the theorization of avant-garde poetics itself. To use a life and works paradigm is to be on a level lower, less sophisticated, than that of Lorca himself.
I'm not in favor of theoretical readings of Lorca that apply theories to his poetry or drama. I am not proposing theoretical applications as much as readings informed by the insights learned from theory.
Ok. That's all I got for that chapter so far. I find that if I ask myself what the chapter will say I already know, but I have to first ask.
Lorca: modelo para armar [yet another table of contents]
1. Modelo para armar
2. Los años 30: caminos hacia la modernidad tardía
3. Lorca, Valente y Gamoneda: la ansiedad de una influencia
4. Cuerpo presente: una poética performativa
5. Lorca y el flamenco
6. Aportaciones de la teoría queer
7. Lorca y sus apócrifos: entre Motherwell y Strayhorn
I didn't want all the chapters to have "Lorca" in the title. I've also rearranged the order of the chapters. Chapter 7 obviously needs a better title, but I don't know what the chapter will say yet.
2. Los años 30: caminos hacia la modernidad tardía
3. Lorca, Valente y Gamoneda: la ansiedad de una influencia
4. Cuerpo presente: una poética performativa
5. Lorca y el flamenco
6. Aportaciones de la teoría queer
7. Lorca y sus apócrifos: entre Motherwell y Strayhorn
I didn't want all the chapters to have "Lorca" in the title. I've also rearranged the order of the chapters. Chapter 7 obviously needs a better title, but I don't know what the chapter will say yet.
08/12/2011
More Followers
Bemsha Swing needs more followers right away or it is in danger of being overtaken by the upstart blog, Stupid Motivational Tricks. You wouldn't want that to happen, would you?
Suscribirse a:
Entradas (Atom)