Pound the Romantic

Here is a free idea for you. It would be a good dissertation, if it hasn't been used already. If you choose to use it, all I ask is that you acknowledge me at some point and sign over your first-born child.

Typically, the discourse around Pound is "neo-classicist," emphasizing rationality, etc... In contrast, most of the deconstructionist and Yale-school theorists have championed a neo-Romantic lineage based on Wallace Stevens. See Perloff's "Pound / Stevens: Whose Era?" Your task would be to read Pound against the grain by uncovering his Romantic lineage, which come in the form of his longing for an organic order and in the eccentricity of his cultural syncretism.

Maxims of Adaptation

1. Context matters. The context in which the adaptation (translation, song setting, theatrical performance, film adaption) occurs is never that of the original work. But we can never receive the original work again originally (if it is from another epoch).

2. Medium matters. It makes a difference whether it is film, music, a poem-to-poem translation, etc...

3. The adaptation adds and subtracts. It never transmits the same information. It always leaves something out and adds something new.

I know there should be about five or six maxims, but I don't know what the other ones are yet.

[UPDATE / May 21]:

4. There should be something about some of the information given by the adaptation is trivial. In other words, it is perfectly possible to do a reception / adaptation study and find nothing at all interesting. Put another way, it takes imagination to see the possibilities of this kind of work.

5. The comparison is never two-way, between the original and the adaptation. It is always four way:

The relation between the original work and the original audience

The relation between the adaptation / translation and the audience for this.

Summer

I decided that for next few weeks I need to do the following things every day.

1) Exercise.

2) Write Lorca

3) Clean, organize

4) Play drums or dance or sing

5) Work on Barcelona Lorca course.

If I do an hour of each of these things, then I will be ok. Even four out of five every day, as long as I don't skip the same thing every day.

Notice how two of these things are work and three are things that allows for healthy work to happen.

Asshole

I feel like an asshole. I can't be casually ironic about the value of the academic work I do. I really feel that what we do is more valuable than the things society holds in high esteem, like hitting balls with sticks and getting people to buy shiny things. I could be wrong about this, of course, but I don't think so.