I made the mistake of reading something by Ortega y Gasset yesterday. I wanted to look again at the essay on Andalusia. The idea about the essential laziness of the Andalusian culture is pretty damn intolerable. Ortega is no hero of mine, and neither is Gasset. (That's a joke.) I'm thinking this whole tradition of Spanish philosophy is pretty hard to take, from Unamuno to Zambrano. I know I should like Zambrano, because she is important to a lot of people in the general vicinity of things that I otherwise admire, but I cannot take her either. Her writing, her ideas.

It's interesting (to me at least) how a lot of things I write about, I'm approaching from the posture of irritation and resistance. I actually don't think good criticism can be entirely appreciative. You've got to hate something about the writer you're dealing with, or something in the existing criticism. Take Valente, about whom I've written practically a whole book, if you add up all my chapters and articles. I think he's very important, and I admire a great part of his work and what he stands for; yet I also find him profoundly irritating.

On the other hand, I couldn't spend my life studying Ortega (or Gasset). You have to have a core respect for the object of study.

Scholarly writing has more or less migrated to the SMT blog. I'm moving the best of my previous posts and stupid tricks over there. Substantive posts on literary matters will mostly be at Arcade, in a slightly more formal register. Bemsha II will soon start up: it will be the blog for my jazz course. Very brief observations will be hosted at Facebook, only for my 60 "friends." The original Bemsha Swing will remain open for business too, for other ad hoc blogging projects and as my basic on-line diary and page for advertisements for myself.

Today's SMT is to let your writing neuroses work for you instead of against you. Imagine if you were shadowed by an obnoxious person who was constantly telling you you couldn't do what you wanted when you wanted. You're about to work on something and this person says, sorry, you aren't allowed to work until a half hour after dinner, or when the sky is cloudy, or when you aren't waiting for the plumber, or haven't had an argument with a family member for 24 hours. Pretty soon you would tell this obnoxious bully to get lost. Yet chances are you are already doing this to yourself, with arbitrary and restrictive rules, some of which you probably aren't even conscious of. You feel your best work will be done under ideal conditions.

Those rules are the product of cognitive distortions. What you want to do instead is substitute a new set of neurotic rules that are actually not counter-productive. Go through your current rules and find the one or two that actually helps you. Keep those. Then invent a few more along those lines. I'll give some examples in a subsequent post.

Study Hacks is a good blog about the work part of academic work, whether it be an undergraduate trying to complete a degree or a faculty member. (Hat tip to Jordan Davis.) Many of the principles this blogger enumerates are ones that I have found, independently, to work for me. For example, the distinction between "hard work" and "work that's hard to do."

He (Cal Newport) advises students to become experts in their majors rather than running around doing a thousand different things or taking outlandish course overloads and quadruple concentrations. He has some books on study habits that I haven't read, but if his study tips are the same as those on his blog then I would recommend these books highly.

***

How much work does the academic job take to do? I would say that if you teach six hours a week, you need no more than two hours, on average, for every hour of class, including grading and preparation and consulting with students. Some weeks it will be more, some less. So that's 18 hours for a 2 course load. [For a four-course load it would be 36, but some of the preparation time will be duplicated (multiple sections of the same course) or some of the material will require less preparation (more basic classes) in the kind of institutions with 4/4 loads.] So if you teach 2 courses a semester that's 18 hours a week. If you are actually writing anything during the semester, that leaves 22 hours during the working week, during which you should be able to fit 10 hours of writing and maybe 2 of going to the library. You still have 10 hours left for service assignments, meetings, lectures, dissertation chapters, etc... If you're like me, though, you won't be writing 10 hours a week unless you have an impending deadline or you are on a research grant. If we all wrote 10 hours a week all the time everyone would have 15 books.

Something does not compute. It is actually very hard to keep track of time, since only classes, office hours, and meetings are scheduled, and work takes place in the office, at home, in the library, and in the coffee shop, and any time between dawn and midnight seven days a week. The diffusion of time and space makes things easier in some sense, but less easy in another, since the work expands to fill the time available for it. From the point of view of the non-academic, we are never working, whereas from our point of view, we are always working.

Newport recommends deep focus: highly intense work for short bursts. That's probably the best for academic work. Teaching is intense, and so is writing. If you measure your work in hours, boasting about how many hours you work, you are not really giving your time its proper value at all. Better to count the hours you actually produced something worthwhile.

I recommend treating your academic job as a 9-5 gig, as far as that is possible. Start on Monday doing as much as possible of the week's work on that day. Start priding yourself on efficiency and quality rather than on the quantity of hours or how late you stay up.

It's possible that I'm just a bit smarter than you and so my advice won't transfer. Newport, however, offers similar principles to everyone who looks at his blog or buys his books. He believes good students are just like anyone else, but have learned how to channel their energies more effectively. I'd say it's even more important to work in this way if you're not smart, since efficiency becomes all the more important. Honestly, though, a lot of what we call being smart is simply putting these principles in action in the first place.

As you age you lose some mental quickness, sheer speed. You can also become less open to new possibilities, more set in your intellectual habits, and less quick at learning new material. It is quite possible that I was more brilliant twenty years ago. I look back at my first book and wonder how I could have been as smart as the person who wrote that.

On the other hand, you can gain erudition and experience, become smarter in other ways. In fact, if you aren't doing this then you will have only the negative effects of the slowing down process without the added benefits. Imagine if you could play competitive tennis at a high level up to the age of 60. You would have an edge in experience and knowledge. If your physical decay was only slight, then you would beat everyone else. In scholarship, the equivalent of 25 in tennis is probably about 45: that's the age when your mental faculties haven't atrophied yet, but you've gained a lot of experience / knowledge. The good thing is that you can actually keep some of that mental flexibility and acuity and even increase some capacities that don't depend wholly on sheer speed and memory.

Here's a radical idea. Have only one project at a time. (On the website of my former colleague I notice there are about 5 projects s/h/e has been doing in the last five to ten years, with zero books published.) Work on that project all the time. ( Don't wait for a block of two or three hours or the perfect atmospheric conditions.) Don't work on anything else substantial until you have finished that one thing. Right now, for me, it's my MLA talk. If I work on it a little today, a little tomorrow, and so on I can finish it by a week from today. Then I can do my syllabi for next semester, then my talk on Ullán for Madrid in January, and finally my critical edition. January all I will have to do is teach my courses and go to Madrid. After that I will write my book Lorca and Modernity, taking on absolutely no other projects, even book reviews.

I've been thinking a bit about academic work and the question of efficiency. There are two views that are somewhat misguided, in my view. The general public thinks that university professors hardly work at all. A few hours of teaching a week, summers off... You get the idea. The average faculty member, in defense against this kind of thinking, will emphasize how many hours s/h/e works--60, 70 a week? The mistake on both parts is to think of academic work in terms of hours rather than in terms of work accomplished. Think of it this way: we are evaluated by teaching evaluations and by scholarly productivity, not by the number of hours worked. If I publish more than you do, and in better journals and presses, then I don't really care that you are working 50 to my 30 hours.

I had a colleague at a previous institution who was always harried and over-worked. I'm sure this person did a lot, but what exactly was the result? How come her book was never actually completed?

The real problem is that the most time-consuming things are also the least compensated, falling outside of the teaching / research paradigm. Editing a journal, for example, is extremely time-consuming, yet won't get you promoted.

I have three relatively short writing projects: MLA talk in Philly about Paul Blackburn (see you there); intro to a critical edition I want to do; talk in Madrid in January about Ullán. I've decided to try a different method of working. I have Tuesday, Thursday, Sunday, and the following Tuesday more or less free. Tomorrow, Tuesday, I am going to see how much I can get done on Ullán. Thursday I will devote to Blackburn, and Sunday to the critical preface. Tuesday I will back to Ullán. In other words, every free day I will work on one of these projects in rotating fashion, for the rest of November or until I finish them all. This is not how I usually work, but I don't want to get bogged down on any one thing. The idea is to devote one day to try to get as much as possible of one single task done. In other words, I can probably do about 80% of any of these projects given one free day, so I'll need about 6 days in toto.

I'm in a bit a of a lull. I could be writing my fifth book as fast as possible, but I don't want to rush it at this point. I have to write an MLA talk on Paul Blackburn, a talk on Ullán to give in January in Madrid, and to complete a large departmental paperwork task that I cannot even talk about beyond that. Giving myself a break from writing is actually excruciating, since I am happiest when most productive.

I would really love to undertake some collaborative work. The one problem with scholarly writing is that it's rather isolating. It would be fun to write an article with someone else for a change. But who? And what exactly would be the interchange?

I'm going to do a really major article on Lorca's duende lecture, which is going to be the centerpiece of book 5. In fact, here as I think of it, I really need to do another book about Lorca instead of rewriting book #3.

It would include the following:

Preface, Introduction.

I. Huge, major essay on Lorca's duende article. "Lorca's performative poetics."

II. ???

III. Section on Lorca and contemporary Spanish poetry. Influence on Valente and Gamoneda. The way Lorca is present/absent from Spanish poetry after Lorca.

IV. Postscript to Apocryphal Lorca. A kind of follow-up on Lorca and translation / reception theory. Answer to my critics?

Where the question marks are would inserted some other reading of Lorca's poetry, from an angle yet to be determined, or the piece that would make this a book rather than just a series of unrelated essays. So I have three ideas, which I already know how to pursue more or less, along with a general direction: Lorca in performance / reception. Dynamic readings of him.

Maybe I'm not in a lull after all. This blog post has been very productive.

Just as you should have an organized work space, you should also design your time, develop a time design for your work. I know that I am vastly inefficient in some respects, but still manage to get things done. If you are relatively inefficient, then even a modest change can be significant. If you are already 98% efficient, on the other hand, changes are less likely to make a difference. What I'm suggested here is that you change from your 20% efficiency rate to about a 40%.

My basic time design is to pre-crastinate on Sunday evening. (pre = before; cras = tomorrow). I make a list of things to do Monday morning, and then, if I can, I do a few things before Monday morning. Then, Monday, I do as many things as early in the morning as I can. I teach on Monday till 5:20, so I just fill the day with useful tasks as much as possible and don't do anything productive after 5. Tuesday, I work until about noon. Then, I do another pretty intense day on Wed. Thursday, Friday, Sat., I do specific tasks, read and reflect on things, but don't put in solid whole days of work. Then I begin again on Sunday.

A few general principles:

Efficient work is oriented toward tasks rather than time. What is better: working 2 hours and getting five things done, or working 7 hours and getting about 3 or for 4 things done? Since tasks expand to fill the time alloted, it is better to allot less time rather than more to any particular set of tasks.

Ever notice how service is worse in a restaurant when it's not busy? Being more busy increases efficiency. Your server will bring you the food faster if she has 10 tables full of customers. Of course, this principle only works up to a certain point. With 30 tables you will never get fed.

If I get an article to review I tend to do it right away. I open the envelope and start reading the article. The next day, first thing, I write up the review. The more tasks that can be handled that way the better. The explanation is a rather obvious one: you lose time by having to refresh your memory and approach the task three or four separate times over the space of a month. You also clear mental space by not having as many things hanging over you, and save time by not having to keep track of extra tasks.

Many things are quite dull. Filling out a conflict of interest form, ordering a parking sticker, etc... I do dull tasks like that as quickly as possible.

Laziness is the friend of efficiency. Inefficient work is much harder to do, because time and energy is wasted on avoiding work. The fact that I am lazy, then, makes me want to be more efficient.

Here's my new outline. The problem I was having was the feeling that I was writing pretty much the same book as I just published. To avoid that, I've taken out some chapters that I've already written or are about to publish as articles, that are too similar to what I've already done, and de-emphasized Valente, who was a dominating presence up to this point. Material from various half-begun chapters will go into chapter 1, which will do double duty as an intro of sorts. Since I've already written 2 and 3, I can work pretty much chronologically, after i finish the Spanish version of the Ullán paper. PART ONE deals with literary-historical issues and has more to do with my previous book, The Twlight of the Avant-Garde. PART TWO deals more with actual poetics/poetry, taking Lorca's duende article as a theory of poetic performance, moving on to a translation from a paper in Spanish I've written on Claudio Rodríguez, and adding the chapter on OGV.

Of course, I'm anticipating that all this will change a few more times before I'm done, probably in the direction of even less overlap with previous work. Articles already published can be a kind of crutch, in that I don't have to start the new project from scratch. Once I come up with a few more ideas I won't necessarily need to reprint this work.

The other alternative is to just go back to being "article guy" again, instead of "book guy." The book, though, provides a way of structuring my work, even if it doesn't ultimately become a book.

Fragments of a Late Modernity: Spanish Poetry from García Lorca to García Valdés



Preface
Acknowledgements

PART ONE: Fragments

1. A Map of Modernism
2. The Persistence of Memory: Antonio Gamoneda and the Literary Institutions of Late Modernity**
3. Fragments of a Late Modernity: Valente and Beckett**

PART TWO: Performances

4. Performative Poetics: Lorca's Duende
5. Claudio Rodríguez: "Manuscrito de una respiración" **
6. José-Carlos Ullán: Performativity and the Visual Text
7. Olvido García Valdés: [Interesting Subtitle]

Conclusion: The Unfinished Business of Modernity

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.

Julia was volunteering at the library. While waiting for her I pulled a book off the shelf by Stanley Cavell. Now Cavell should interest me because of the Wittgensteinian angle, but I had a hard time with his writing, because he isn't very concise. In 40 pages that I read i barely got the sense of what it was all supposed to be about. There was a lot of wordy transitioning and something terribly important sounding that he never quite got around to articulating. He likes to refer at length to other writings of his which presumably explain all this better. I know he admires Wittgenstein, Emerson, Thoreau, Jane Austen, and classic movies, but what is the damned point of it all? Are we just supposed to admire him for admiring all these things?

There are some suggestive ideas, maybe at the ratio of one per 10 pages. The comparison between Austen and Nietzche...

Valente is very, very closely identified with the study of Spanish mysticism, especially Miguel de Molinos and san Juan de la Cruz. Since I've always known this, it's taken a while for the full implications to sink in. Valente criticism just tends to echo Valente's own positions, so there's a problem, or a series of problems, here that hasn't quite been resolved. What does it mean for a basically secular intellectual to be so invested in mysticism? In other words, there is nothing in Valente's writing that makes any more or less secular person reject it: everything is framed just so. The reader doesn't even know the confessional status of the authorial voice. Of course, we take the side of the mystic, Molinos, against the Inquisition that sentenced and imprisoned him, the side of heterodoxy against orthodoxy, but presumably a reader would do that whether he or she was agnostic or a Catholic believer--or the believer in any other creed for that matter. So Valente gets to have it both ways. He gets to be the modern secularized intellectual and the champion of mysticism.

My second idea for the day is this: Valente's poetic theory / combined with Claudio Rodríguez's poetry. Rodríguez is known as a dumb poet rather than a smart poet like Valente (Julián Jiménez Heffernan makes this distinction--questioning if of course). A dumb poet is someone like Lorca or Rodríguez, that is, a poet without a theory of poetry. A smart poet is someone like Valente, who develops the theory of what he's going to do and then does it exactly like that. My idea is that Valente's theory--developed mostly on the basis of María Zambrano's philosophy--predicts and explains Rodríguez's poetry. But that Valente tended to ignore the existence of Claudio, after an early review praising Claudio with some reservations. Claudio's poetry, in fact, is a better exemplification of Valente's theory than Valente's own poetry.

***

This lightbulb went off in my head yesterday evening. The lightbulb flash should happen to you when you are working on a project, maybe an average of once or twice every day. This is when an idea falls into place, the "aha" moment. You should notice when this happens. It calls for a brief moment of self-congratulation. Most of the work of writing does not consist of light-bulb flashes.

Kenneth Koch had the concept of the "happiness base" and the "poetry base." The happiness base, for example, consists of all the elements supportive of happiness, like good health and relationships, a good attitude toward life, enough material comforts, etc...

Today, I'd like to consider the "scholarship base." This consists of things like your "cultural capital," the excellence of your training and education, your knowledge base, your access to a good library (plus the quality of your personal scholarly library), your ongoing activities and participation in networks of other scholars, and the momentum from previous scholarly projects: unused ideas and knowledge, logical next steps in your scholarly trajectory. A lot of the "work" we do serves simply to maintain the scholarly base, and thus is work that doesn't lead directly to publication. Nevertheless, an excellent base makes everything else far easier. I think of the base as about 75%, with the actual writing being the remaining quarter. Some refer to this as the iceberg theory. We are judged by what is above the surface of the water, but the iceberg itself is mostly submerged.

For example, suppose a teacher at a liberal arts college who doesn't get any research done during the academic year has the summer off. Probably the whole summer could be devoted simply to restoring the base to decent shape, without any articles being written. At the end of the summer, it is time to go back to teaching again. You wouldn't expect more than one article to be written every one to three summers on such a schedule. An active researcher at a Research One university with an excellent scholarship base might write one to two articles, on average, in that same summer, finishing up one begun during the Academic Year and writing another from scratch. If you are already doing research it is easy to keep doing it.

That some researchers in very good institutions do not produce very much shows how difficult it really is to sustain a research program over the long stretch.

One of those "duh" moments last night. My topic is "late modernism," and I suddenly put that together with the fact that Zambrano, born in 1904, published (or re-published) many books in the 1980s, and some even posthumously. The main frame-work for her reception, then, is the exact period I am studying.

There's a lot in Valente that was in Zambrano before: the interest in mysticism, "passivity," the union of poetry and philosophy or "pensamiento," Lezama Lima... He owes as much, if not more, to her as to Cernuda. What kept me from seeing that was my relative unfamiliarity with Zambrano. Of course he's written about her so he wasn't exactly hiding this influence, but for me it was "hiding in plain sight." Zambrano was an exile in Cuba during and after the Spanish civil war, and contributed regularly to Lezama's Orígenes. Valente didn't meet Lezama until 1967. You can see letters where María Z is writing Lezama about this young poet (Valente) who is about to make the trip to Cuba, and then letters afterwards about how happy she is that the two of them got along.

This is significant because there is this religious, mystical strain that comes out of Lezama and Zambrano that gives an interesting twist to Spanish modernism--kind of a de-secularization of Ortega y Gasset. It's interesting for me because as a non-religious type person it provides me with a problem or a source of resistance. I had thought that Valente's religiosity was just a metaphor for poesis, but what if is something more than that?

This is a very inchoate part of my project. I love that word because it means "unformed because in its early stages." A particular kind of formlessness deriving from something not yet having taken shape. That's a cool concept.

I see the first hour of work in any given day as a way of maintaining the project and making minimal progress. Anything after that is the "bonus," where the progress will be substantial. So if I am able to work an hour, that's great. An hour and 45 minutes is like an hour of maintenance and 45 minutes at time-and-a-half. This method allows me to snatch significant moment throughout a busy day just to get up to my hour, and then everything else is just extra.

Progress will seem slow when judged by hours and days, but rapid when judged by months and years.

Words have a power of their own. For example, I found myself using the ridiculous phrase "iron will" about myself, as in "I have an iron will." Obviously I don't, and the phrase sounds silly. Yet somehow that phrase worked for me and allowed me to persevere on a day when it seemed unlikely. Some people derive power out of affirmations of weakness, abjectness, and powerlessness, I've never understood it, but there you go. If that works for you, go for it.

Once in a while something will fall into place: a connection or idea that confirms the direction a project seems to be heading. Today I was reading something on María Zambrano, the Spanish philosopher. I had known, vaguely, that she had been in Cuba and known Lezama Lima, etc... but all of a sudden I realized she had been much more active in Lezama's circle and with the journal Orígenes than I really knew. Now Zambrano, whom I had intuited would play a part in the argument I was constructing, becomes the missing link between Lezama and Valente. Maybe Valente would have known and loved Lezama without Zambrano (I'll have to find out) but I find this connection highly suggestive.

I worry that I am re-writing The Twilight of the Avant-Garde, which will appear in about a month from now. My argument in my new book project is that Lorca needs to be put at the center of Spanish modernism (as he is not, surprisingly, in Spain). Once he is established there, then literary history looks quite different from the story that puts Guillén / Salinas / Alonso at the center of things. The other part of the argument is that high / late modernism in Spain derives from this alternate tradition (Lorca, Zambrano) even when it doesn't acknowledge this filiation openly.

I know you're thinking I should get off the modernist high horse already. But there is also the principle of scholarly writing that you should "dance with the one what brung you." In other words, write out of your strengths. If it works well, do it again.

Memory

The problem of knowing enough to be a good scholar a problem of learning, but of memory. Memory peaks in the early twenties, they say. Yet my memory is actually improving with age. I don't know quite how to explain it. I sometimes scare myself with my memory. I remember specific things I learned in college and where I learned them, certain things I read and pondered over as a child. Maybe it's an illusion, but my memories now seem sharper than they did ten years ago. I inhabit the apophatic bookstore of my own head.

Imagine a woman living in a small town and not leaving very much. She knows everyone in the town and could probably give you an extremely accurate account of the town's history down to very small details. There's a few thousand people to keep track of but that's not a problem because that's what she does. I'm a little like that.

After a while, as you get older, you get more concentrated; what you know, you know even better. You remember things because they are significant to you. I'm not about to forget what Body and Soul sounds like. Ancient Greek, which I learned very quickly once and never used afterwords, is mostly gone.

Nobody is all that good at learning and remembering unmeaningful data. That's what a filing cabinet is good for. (Some people are very good at that in the short term, and can get good grades in undergraduate, and then promptly forget all of it.) But almost everyone is good at remembering things that they are motivated to remember. If you forget something it wasn't that important to you in the first place.

I could probably relearn Greek, or some math I've "forgotten." I remember exactly how I learned Greek, and the structure of the language: I've just forgotten those pesky conjugations, declensions, and vocabulary items.