¡Bemsha SWING!

2009-07-03T20:45:00.001-07:00

The winner of the first Apocryphal Lorca giveaway contest is... Vance Maverick. Please send me your mailing address to jmayhew "at" ku.edu I considered giving it to Laura Carter. She can still win another month if she shows up here "in person." Tom Beckett lost some grammar points when he said "tengo mucho hambre" instead of "tengo mucha hambre" or he would have had a better chance.

I will give away a Lorca book each month until the end of 2009 to the person living in the US or Canada who asks the nicest and/or gives me the best reason why s/he is interested in it. My aim is the selfish one of promoting my own book by getting it to as many readers with the most genuine interest in it who might tell a friend about it if they actually like it. Needless to say, I've exhausted my author's copies, and a second batch I purchased, but I can afford to buy one copy of my own book a month at the cheapest internet price for a little while longer.

2009-07-03T12:11:00.000-07:00

If you want to learn to read Ancient Greek or play the guitar, you probably can. Not every thing is in reach for every person, but usually if someone wants to do something of this nature it is possible--at some realistic level of success. Realism itself, though, is kind of a trap, if confused with a pessimistic "know your limits" kind of thinking. Realism means knowing that it takes time and dedication to being good at something, but that time and dedication will produce tangible results. Realism is a certain clarity of thought about how much you really want a particular goal and how much serious time you can devote to it. It means removing purely mental obstacles to see what's actually preventing you from moving forward. For example, it is the thought that "Greek is hard" that might be holding you back, not the hardness of Greek itself. The actual difficulty of the task can be approached, but the idea of difficulty in the abstract is insurmountable.

They say it takes 10,000 hours to achieve mastery in any field of endeavor, but a lot of things are easier than that. Baking pretty decent bread does not take 10,000 hours of practice--or many other normal talents that a lot of people can develop. So the level of "realism" is going to vary as well. Someone who says they could never learn to bake bread is probably wrong. They don't really want to learn badly enough to make it worth their while.

Inherent talent only comes in tangentially to all of this. For example, someone might put in the hours and still not be great. But I can assure you the person will achieve a respectable degree of mediocrity-- which might be enough for their purposes.

2009-07-02T13:28:00.000-07:00

Fuck NPR. This is their ombusman's view:

But no matter how many distinguished groups -- the International Red Cross, the U.N. High Commissioners -- say waterboarding is torture, there are responsible people who say it is not. Former President Bush, former Vice President Cheney, their staff and their supporters obviously believed that waterboarding terrorism suspects was necessary to protect the nation's security.

One can disagree strongly with those beliefs and their actions. But they are due some respect for their views... .

No, sorry, they are not due any respect for their despicable views. Since when does the fact that Dick Cheney hold a view make it automatically respectable? Once the debate is framed as a debate between two positions that reasonable people can disagree about, then the Dick Cheney side automatically wins. You can just "teach the controversy." It's the lazy journalistic thinking that there are two sides to every story that must be given equal weight. I'm sure the creationists and holocaust deniers are taking notes. Once a position gets a toehold of respectability then it's basically won.

This is why the Steve Fullers and Alicia Shepards of the world are worse than the Demskis. People who legitimize the illegitimate under the cover of spurious objectivity.

2009-07-01T12:43:00.000-07:00

I made a half-way decent pico de gallo last week by chopping up four smallish tomatoes with finely chopped onion (one half of a medium), a tiny bit of garlic, a mess of cilantro, two small green serrano chiles, and salt, with a bit of lemon juice.

2009-07-01T09:32:00.000-07:00

To make Kung Pao Chicken for three people I usually take 1 1/2 lbs of boneless chicken breast and slice very thin, soaking it in a mixture of white wine and cornstarch just to coat. I stir fry that separately in small batches and set aside. Then I throw some dried red hot peppers in the wok and stir fry some carrots and celery, diced, and add a onion and red pepper, along with garlic and ginger, when the carrots and celery are almost done. Then I re-add the chicken along with a little more white wine and cornstarch mixture, with a little soy sauce and vinegar. I mix in everything together. Somewhere along the way I will have tossed in a handful of unsalted, roasted peanuts, and made sure the rice is cooking. I drizzle a little sesame oil on top and we're ready to eat.

Since one of the three people doesn't eat very spicy food, I leave the peppers whole. For the spicy version break open the peppers at the beginning.

2009-07-01T09:23:00.000-07:00

Last night I took about a dozen small red potatoes, cut them into halves or quarters, and boiled them (without peeling them) in lightly salted water to make a potato salad with 1/2 tsp of capers, a small quantity of diced red onion and shredded carrots. The dressing was 2 T of mayo with a clove of garlic crushed into it and some paprika, a negigible amount of vinegar. This accompanied bbq chicken thighs skinned and marinated in pineapple juice, garlic, ginger, and soy sauce--and basted with whole foods chipotle citrus bbq sauce.

2009-06-30T07:54:00.001-07:00

Who wants a copy of Apocryphal Lorca? I will give away one copy to the person with a mailing address in the USA who gives me the best reason (in comments below) why he or she should receive it. Contest closes at 10 p.m., Midwestern time, Friday July 3. I am the final and only arbiter of what the "best reason" is.

2009-06-30T07:14:00.000-07:00

I think I want to write about what Ullán's visual poetry does to the idea of the "speaking voice" or subject of enunciation. I'll argue that his poetry already lacks a strong "voice" of this type. and the extension into visuality increases this tendency.

At the same time, there is no sacrifice of "expression." There is still a strong authorial presence, there's just not a poetic "speaker" in a dramatic situation telling us stuff, or talking to some other imaginary person. There's obviously nothing wrong with this paradigm of a little imaginary person talking to a little imaginary woman or man, or a vase or the western wind--and indirectly to the real reader, with the little imaginary speaker being the implicit voice of the "poet."

I got this idea while mowing the lawn this morning. I say this because of the idea that a lot of hostility to professors comes from the we can mow our lawns any day of the week. I.e.: we don't do enough work.

2009-06-29T08:42:00.000-07:00

As luck would have it, I've been invited to talk about Ullán in Madrid next January.

2009-06-29T07:35:00.000-07:00

If there is a dogma of late modernism in Spain, it is more or less the opposition between an informational use of language and the poetic language, which rejects all use values, whether commercial or ideological. The clearest place to find this dogma is in Gamoneda's book on Valente--since Gamoneda and Valente are the two heroes of this movement and Gamoneda purposely brackets off his own differences from Valente. Gamoneda is great poet but not a great theorist, so his writings have the advantage of presenting the opposition in very understandable, but a bit simplistic, terms.

I don't want to be (simply) the American ideologue of this Spanish movement. That's what I already am, to some extent, but I am more interested in the problems internal to it, its inner contradictions. What interests me particularly is its anti-modernism, that is, its resistance to modernity itself, and where this resistance is most evident is in the return to Spanish mysticism. Olvido García Valdés wrote a very interesting book on Santa Teresa de Ávila, for example--just as Valente devoted much attention to Molinos and San Juan.

2009-06-27T07:16:00.000-07:00

I read Gamoneda's book of lectures on Valente. It's a little disappointing because I didn't learn much new from it. On the other hand, it confirms exactly what I already thought, so that's a good thing: it shows I'm on the right track.

2009-06-26T07:24:00.000-07:00

First Farrah, then Michael Jackson. The icons of the superficial pop culture of my youth are dying off.

2009-06-25T12:52:00.001-07:00

Where I am skeptical about a lot of visual poetry (and where I think Ullán is the exception) is that it doesn't have a strong visual sensibility behind it. It might have a typographer's sensibility (if you're lucky) but not a painter's sensibility.

***

I remember at a poetry reading in New York several years ago a guy I was talking to pointed out another guy: "See that guy, he came and gave a really bad lecture on visual poetry. He started off with very basic definitions and insulted our intelligence." Then, about 10 minutes later I found myself in a conversation with guy #2, who pointed out guy #2 to me across the room. "See that guy over there? I went to give a lecture on visual poetry and that guy insulted me..."

2009-06-25T10:47:00.000-07:00

This is a similar text to the one I'm talking about in the post below.

2009-06-25T10:08:00.000-07:00

Ullán, I'm coming to realize now, is a really key figure of Spanish culture of the past 40 years. I'm thinking I do need a chapter on him--or at least a good part of a chapter.

Collaborated with artists: Miró, Tàpies, Chillida, etc...

One of the only major poets who experimented in visual poetry.

Early translator in Spain of Jabès. Valente himself comes to Jabès through Ullán.

Knew María Zambrano; his poetry was admired by Octavio Paz.

Friend of Miguel Casado...

A significant career in journalism, in a country where the cultural supplements of newspapers have an importance they don't have in the US.

Yet Ullán never won the major awards and prizes. In a literary world where such prizes really are a driving force, and come almost automatically to writers with a certain longevity, he was not the one raking in all those awards. Perhaps it's better that way, because it makes us realize that prizes recognize value rather than creating it.

i feel horrible about not writing about him when he was alive. I was always too intimidated by his work, I suppose.

One of my favorite poems by Ullán is a sonnet, consisting of 14 lines of hieorglyphics of his own invention. There is a rhyme scheme of the Petrarchan sonnet-- ABBAABBACDCDCD--since the characters that end the lines recur in that order. Some are mimetic images--a fish, a bird, etc... Other glyphs are more abstract, but still highly expressive, hand drawn or maybe stenciled with real craftsmanship. It's visual poetry of the highest order, because it's not just conceptual: the written signs are dense and meaningful, and recur in a classic form, that of the sonnet.

***

If you google "Mayhew" with "García Montero," as I did last night, you will see that several people disagree with my most notorious position. This doesn't bother me. In the first place, if your work has a polemical edge, then people are bound to disagree. Protesting that is like protesting the fact that the player on the other side of the net is hitting the ball back at you. Once a critical position is a virtual consensus, then the issue is a closed one. Secondly, it's me they're disagreeing with. That is, I'm the one defining the terms of the debate. Thirdly, I am still right; I still have the stronger arguments on my side as far as I'm concerned. My position has always been that I could be mistaken, but you'll have to show me how. Fourthly: I don't take it personally if someone doesn't agree with me, even when their responses take on a personal or insulting tone (which is rare in any case). When I read that "Mayhew" says this or that, it almost seems like a different person to me. Seeing my own name in print has always done that to me.

Crítica poética y contracrítica: Resumen de premios en los últimos meses

2009-06-24T14:36:00.000-07:00

This is really depressing. I'm glad now that I wrote a book "contra García Montero. Crítica poética y contracrítica: Resumen de premios en los últimos meses. I didn't even know all this shit when I first decided to take on LGM.

Basically, a good number of the panels for all the prizes have him or his cronies on the jury. The winning books are predictably mediocre.

2009-06-24T14:13:00.000-07:00

I've been fooling around with the outline of my project. This is what it looks like today. Two asterisks mean a finished chapter, one means a chapter begun. I've decided not to write only about Ullán and Núñez but to write a more panoramic chatper about poets of the late 60s / early 70s. That really should be a book of its own. What the critics have neglected is scandalous.

FRAGMENTS OF A LATE MODERNITY: The Intellectual Traditions of Modern Spanish Poetry

Introduction: Catching Tigers in Red Weather*

PART ONE: LORCA

1. Lorca and the Paradoxes of Modernity*
2. The Contested Legacy of the Duende*

PART TWO: VALENTE, GAMONEDA, RODRÍGUEZ

3. Jorge Guillén, Luis Cernuda, and the Vicissitudes of Spanish Modernism**
4. From María Zambrano to José Ángel Valente: The Origins of Late Modernism*
5. Fragments of a Late Modernity: Valente and Beckett**
6. The Persistence of Memory: Antonio Gamoneda and the Literary Institutions of Late Modernity**
7. Claudio Rodríguez*

PART THREE: MODERNISM AFTER MODERNISM

8. The novísimos: Modernists or Postmodernists?*
9. The Catalan poetry of Pere Gimferrer
10. Olvido García Valdés*

Conclusion: The Unfinished Business of Modernity

2009-06-23T09:03:00.001-07:00

I'm thinking I should do at least one chapter on Latin American poets who belong to the same general movement of late modernism in Spain--the transatlantic dimension. From Lezama Lima (Cuba) and Octavio Paz (Mexico) to Eduardo Milán (Uruguay) and Blanca Varela (Peru).

Gamoneda wrote an epilogue to Varela's complete poetry in Galaxia Gutenberg. Milán wrote the introduction to García Valdés's poetry in the same collection. Valente, Sánchez Robayna, Milán, and Varela did an anthology together of both peninsular and lat am poetry--also published in Galaxia Gutenberg in Barcelona. So evidently something is going on here on the level of publishing.

***

I'm working at least one hour a day on this project throughout the summer. Now I have twelve potential chapters so something might have to give way. I count time blogging about this project in the one hour. Once I do the one hour then I am free to work longer on it in the bonus zone, or to do other things.

2009-06-23T08:51:00.001-07:00

I find myself using a lot of re- prefixes: re-evaluating, recuperating, restoring, rediscovering. So my book is really about remodernizing modernity, keeping it fresh.

2009-06-23T08:27:00.000-07:00

I feel compelled somehow to include a chapter on the Catalan poetry of Pere Gimferrer in this book. I am still struggling to justify the book to myself. so the more new things I can put in it, the better.

***

The Belgian Hispanist Elsa Dehennin has passed away--noted for her books on Guillén and Salinas. I met her a few years ago in Paris at a conference. There is also a book coming out soon that she edited, which includes an essay I wrote.

2009-06-22T14:59:00.001-07:00

Put another way: 1922-1923 were the years of The Waste Land, Harmonium, Spring & All, Ulysses. That's only 38 / 27 years before The New American Poetry (1960). We are 49 years beyond that. Ginsberg and Williams might seem almost equally distant in time to an 18-year old today.

2009-06-22T14:27:00.000-07:00

Lorca's Poeta en Nueva York was written in 1929-30 and published in 1940. The books of the novísimos were published in the late 60s / early 70s, so about forty yearrs afterwards. We are now in 2009, so that's another forty years. At this distance, modernism and postmodernism often look very similar.

2009-06-22T08:28:00.000-07:00

BALLAD OF THE LITTLE SQUARE

I hate people who say surreal
when they mean unreal

We killed dozens of moths in in sticky little traps
in the pantry and on the piano

I hate these people
hate them with a passion

When things mean other things
instead of themselves

the moths, the traps, the piano
there is no room in the pantry for the tomato paste

I hate people who say surreal
when they mean unreal

You want to forget forgettable things,
Don't you?

Those towns you passed through
Los Angeles with its petulant physicality

I hate these people
hate them with a passion

2009-06-21T19:06:00.000-07:00

Johannes makes some flattering observations on Apocryphal Lorca.

2009-06-20T10:48:00.001-07:00

I got my copies of my other book Twlight of the Avant-Garde yesterday. It's kind of anticlimactic after Apocryphal Lorca. But then I think that parts of this book have been published in Diacritics and Hispanic Review, that this book represents much of my best work between 1996 and about 2005. The $95 price tag means that I will be giving away a lot fewer of TOTAV than copies of AL, which is $45 with a 40% discount.

The Tàpies cover is nice, and they spelled my name right. I found a typo on the first page of the acknowledgments so I am a little hesitant to read the book. Post-publication blues are a bummer.