I don't believe new year's resolutions should be about giving things up, losing weight, or exercise. Mine are to learn to read Italian better and become (more of) a Duke Ellington expert. Both are within my power to do; neither requires the renunciation of pleasure or the breaking of a bad habit. '09 will be the year of Duke and Italian literature.

Happy new year!

I've renounced combs, hair gel, hair dryers, returning to the hair style (or lack of style) I last had in 1967. My hair now is so short it dries with 15 seconds of a towel. It can stick up all it wants on top because it is too short to make a difference whether is is laying flat or sticking up. No more going to bed with wet hair and waking up with that crumpled look. No more "hat hair."

I did 53 pushups on my second test. Maybe I should have waited another day or so after finishing week 2. Still, that's a gain of about a third over 41, so at this pace I should be able to do 93 after week six.

I tend to rush these things. I'll have to force myself to take a day off before starting the next week.

I've gone through week 2 of the 100 pushups program. I started at 41, so we'll see how I do on the exhaustion test after week 2. I'll take that on Thursday. I'm guessing I'll be able to do about 55 or 60. The third week seems much more intense, starting with sets of 25 instead of 15. The second week was very easy, since I was no longer sore as I was during the whole first week.

Ten Goals, Some More Realistic than Others

1) Publish the book of poetry.

2) Do the same for book of poetry written in Spanish.

3) Become a truly excellent teacher.

4) Become a really good drummer.

5) Become a truly mediocre clarinet player.

6) Find a way of supplementing income (hint: it won't come from 1-5).

7) Learn to fix a flat tire on the bicycle.

8) Job at better university?

9) Saxophone?

10) Publish another scholarly book with U of C P.

Some more personal neurology:

Physical Left handedness. But if you asked me to punt a football I would use right foot for example. (By why would you ask me to do that?) Good balance. I learned easily to ride a unicycle, for example. A good typist, with the location of qwerty keyboard "wired" into my fingers. Bad handwriting, fine motor skills are not highly developed. Poor eye-hand coordination for sports, but good indepedence of 4 limbs playing drumset. In short, an interesting mix of clumsiness and coordination.

Sense of Time Relatively elastic. Good estimation of time (guessing what time it is). But some puzzlement about pace of years and months. I couldn't tell you whether something happened 2 or 4 years ago.

Sense of Direction. Good outside. I don't know where North or South is inside a building, unless it's my own house and I think for a minute.

Toleration of pain. I don't really know. I haven't really been in that much physical pain in my life. I tolerate mild discomfort with no problem. For example, I can work in a cold room if I'm concentrating.

Gustatory. Dislike for blandness. I need hot pepper in my food. I like certain combinations: black pepper with garlic. Cilantro and lime.

I drink coffee with nothing in it, even expresso at times with no sugar. I can't take overly sweet things, I loved smoky and pickled flavors.

I can't stand the texture of confectioner's coconut.

Olfactory Nothing too unusual here. I don't like "chemical" smelling smells as a rule. I don't see myself as oriented toward smells per se, though I'm not indifferent to them.

Sleep. I perceive sleep as a kind of "sweetness." I feel half-conscious and times and can take pleasure in being asleep. Dreams are intense but cannot be recalled usually.

What other categories have I forgotten? If I've left something out, at this point, that probably means it's not as significant to me, or that somehow I don't think of it as part of my neurology: brain + nervous system.

I was reading Oliver Sacks's Musicophilia. That prompted me to want to do a neurological self-portrait. Sacks approaches normal neurology through the abnormal, on the theory that taking something away and seeing what the results look like will give insight into things we take for granted. In principle, normal functioning neurology is just as interesting as the more freakish manifestations, but the extremes clarify the norm. I don't think I'm particularly exceptional; any introspective person could come up with as much detail.

1) General state of mind. Restless, with a need for constant stimulation, with thoughts that never "turn off." A contant internal monologue, with sentences being "written" in the mind's eye. Extreme introspection and self-absorption, at times.

2) Visuality. I'm not an exceptionally strong visualizer. I cannot always bring up a mental image of a person's face if I don't know them well. I respond emotionally to visual images, but less so than to music. With images that I feel specially drawn to, I feel a sense of "nourishment" emanting directly out of the surface. Ansel Adams and Phililp [UPDATE: I MEANT MARK OF COURSE] Rothko produce this effect in me. I am strongly drawn to rhythmic, "dancing imagery" as well as to calming, horizontal images.

3) Speech/language. I'm bilingual, with different modes of speech in either language. Ideas seem to flow better in Spanish, both in writing and in oral production. It took me a long time to feel I was very articulate; I'm not verbally facile. Obsessed with crosswords; very interested in issues of phonology and to a less extent with linguistics generally. I love language.

4) Memory, concentration. I have strong recall of words, making memorization easy. I can make my memories of the past more vivid by concentrating. Memory responds to effort. Bad memory for proper names and for the names of musical composiitons, even those I know well.

5) Music. Combination of modest talent and immoderate obsession similar to my father's. Physical craving for particular kinds of music. My emotional sense of things is that music is the most important aspect of human experience. A feeling of being "wired" for different kinds of music. Obsesssion with complicated polyrhythms. Maybe interest in poetry is just a subcategory of my general musicophilia. I would definitely be a musician if my talent matched my interest.

6) Sense of body, touch. I feel the basic sense of being conscious and aware of my own body to be centered in the taste of my own mouth. Secondarily in the gut. A sense of surprise at looking myself at the mirror. I don't hold an image of what I look like in my own head. My body can feel differently, strong or in shape or skinny or flabby, depending on mood.

Emotions are felt as physical sensations. General "aetheticism" manifested in tactile form too.

7) Intellectuality/sense of self. A feeling that I'm "wired," neurologically, to certain styles of thinking. Especially drawn to polemics, contradictions, points of contention. I don't feel tied to intellectual positions as much as to styles of thinking. I frequently have the feeling that "I've been myself for quite some time. I'm tired of this; why can't I be someone else?"

Interest in qualia, qualitative sense of "being alive." Frequent sense of awe at reality itself.

8) Odds and ends. Very mild synaesthesia. Frequent deja-vu and "earworms." Relation or fascination to certain object, like cymbals and other musical instruments, writing instruments. Toleration for mess and chaos, addiction to caffeine.

There's probably more, if I went into gustatory sensations, smells; relation to weather, other people, sexuality, etc... It's an interesting excercise to link all these things together. For me, these are the things that make me recognize myself.

The qualitative defines personal experience, its distinctness. One reason that I know that I am still I is that I can listen to Art Tatum play "Nice Work if You Can Get It" and recognize my previous experience in it. It's almost like opening a door to the self and seeing that the self is still there. (I listened to this maybe 400 times when I was 14.) I cannot get that qualitative experience out of something I listened to for the first time at 30, with the same intensity at least. The qualitative (timbre) is what makes things recognizable as themselves.

I feel especially drawn to things that were happening around the time I was born, or just before or after. Everything I end up being interested in falls into that 1947-1967 window. Which means in practical terms that the writers and musicians I most love were born between 1920 and 1940, or might as well have been born then. (Shapiro the child prodigy is younger but already writing poems when I was born, so he qualifies.) I wrote my first book on a Spanish poet born in '34, and have been mostly interested in that group of poets. It's the generation of yr parents, sd the Freudian.

Just to give 1926 as an example, we have Miles, Coltrane, Ginsberg, O'Hara, and Creeley who are born that year. Not to mention my favorite modern composer Morton Feldman.

I was never as fascinated by the generation born in the 40s or 50s. I came of age when the good stuff was disappearing from the culture in favor of a cruder aesthetic. I'll give some of it my grudging admiration, but really I don't have the same personal investment in it.

Going back to generation born in the 1880s: that's another source of fascination for me, but it is not as immediate. I could be Creeley, in some sense, but not Wallace Stevens.

Timbres are auditory odors.

I bought a clarinet. Not really sure why, except after my March 31 deadline for the Lorca project come around, it would be nice to start mixing things up a bit. That's probably why!

Do I still know how to play the clarinet? That remains to be seen. When I try to figure out what a melody is, my fingers tend to move about clarinet-style. If I can really play, then I'll probably need a better one than the one I purchased.

The opposite of stretching is being ensconsed in a particular specialty and achieving mastery. That is also valuable. In fact, such a specialist makes the best generalist. You have to have depth in at least one thing. Breadth will come through wanting to understand other things in equal depth, and usually failing at it.

***

When quoting from a secondary source in my own writing this morning, I noticed a clash of styles: "[...] the perspective from which the Beats should be evaluated is from within the myth of American exceptionalism" (John Lardas, The Bop Apocalypse). The insight is essential, or I wouldn't have quoted it, but I would have rewritten that sentence a few more times, eliminating both the passive voice and the overall awkwardness. I'm not saying I never publish a bad sentence, of course, but in this case the quoted sentence stood out from my prose, making my writing look a bit more elegant by contrast. Quoting writers better than myself, or simply different in tone, register, style, might have a similar effect. Quotation, then, serves a stylistic function of alllowing the reader to perceive the distinctiveness of one's own prose.

In writing about poetry, the perceived quality of the poetic excerpts quoted also has an effect. Poetry will almost always produce a stylistic clash with the surounding prose, but if the poetry is perceived to be not very good, it will weaken the argument, even if the argument does not depend on an aesthetic judgment. With very bad prose about poetry, the impression will be that the critical discourse has not come up to the level of the poetry.

When taking issue with another critic, the stylistic contrast becomes doubly significant. One can gain the rhetorical upper hand by quoting awkward or banal sentences, without even pointing out those qualities in the prose of the criticized critic.

I will never be a good enough prose writer to satisfy my own standards. Yet it is because I feel this way that I am a better writer than I would otherwise be.

I like to stretch myself in various ways: reading things I wouldn't normally read, or taking up new hobbies. I feel that the lack of such stretching at previous points in my life led to artificial limits. How many times have you said to yourself: I can't play a musical instrument, learn a foreign language, do math, draw. Things that might seem to be beyond you but really are not in an absolute sense. Even learning to do something badly can be quite instructive, as I learned when I learned to draw just a little bit, and without any real achievement. Now I can picture people's faces after meeting them a few times. Before I learned my very little bit of drawing I couldn't do this.

For example, I am now telling myself-- Well, I could never write anything about music, because I don't have the technical know-how, the ear for harmony, etc... That is a real limit in some sense: I really don't have those capabilities developed to a high degree. What makes it an artificial limit, however, is when the thought of this makes me stop doing something that I might learn something from. I can have "ah-ha" moments even after a middling level of understanding. I could make a serious study of phonology, of harmony, or of Ancient Greek if I really wanted to.

In January I've biked 185 miles and walked 92, so on the average day I walked almost three miles and biked almost six. It's hard not to walk three miles a day just doing errands and walking around the house. My goal was to ride 10 miles a day. For every day I didn't ride, I wanted to walk at least five miles. By that measure I did pretty well.

I've come down from about 164 lbs. around a year ago to about 146 now. You probably wouldn't notice the difference if I had my shirt on. I never looked particularly overweight, since I have a kind of "squarish" frame. I'm not sure where those 18 pounds were lost from exactly. I've never dieted or tried to lose weight per se, never regulated my eating aside from trying to eat things that actually taste good. I just walked five or six miles a day for about eight months until I started riding a bike around town for about an hour (average) a day.

As with the writing two hours a day, my own preferences make things easier. I have no interest in watching television or drinking soda, for example. So I don't have to budget in tv watching tiime to my days or bike an extra few miles to burn off that coke.

At 170 and five-eight I would possibly open myself up to type II diabetes given my family history. And I would have hit 170 by my fiftieth birthday in 2010 on my previous regimen--or lack of.

I finished a chapter on Rothenberg today. I now have the "core" section of the book done: chapters 4-8 on deep image, Creeley/Spicer, O'Hara, Koch, and Rothenberg. Now I will start on the introduction in earnest.

***

I've also been riding my bike for about an hour a day. (Except for today and tomorrow with the rain!) I've ridden most every day since I got the bike on October 1. It hasn't rained much, hasn't been that cold yet either, so I've missed only a few days due to horrific allergic reactions to mold and a brief trip to Virginia. It seems to help the writing quite a bit to also be quite physically active.

To celebrate the completion of another chapter this morning, this one on the shallow image, I took my longest ride today since I was a teenager. 18 miles give or take a few. From my house in Olivette MO to Washington University, around the 7-mile Forest Park bike trail, and back home. My legs do feel like I have biked 18 miles, but I am not particularly tired otherwise. I stopped twice for about 20 mintues each time, once to eat lunch and once for a latte near Wash U before heading home. Perfect biking weather of 50 degrees, wind from the South at about 15 mph.

Around the beginning of 2007, I started walking pretty seriously, trying to get at least five miles a day. One day in the spring I noticed that my abs were a little harder; I had a little more energy. Didn't think much of it. I had gone down from the mid-160s to about 160. October 1st of this year I bought a bicycle and have been riding every day. A bicycle was my main mode of transport from 4th grade through graduate school, so I took right to it, and have been riding every day. Today I went to forest park, rode around about on the path, and came back--probably 15 miles or so. All of a sudden I weigh 150 instead of 160. I'm only walking about 2 miles a day, but biking between 6 and 10. I'm no iron man, but I'm in moderately good shape. I wasn't exhausted after riding for a few hours, up and down some easy to moderate hills with some flat stretches.

Today I made caldo gallego by making a broth with a soup bone, part of a ham-hock, and some salt pork, then adding potatoes, white beans, and turnip greens. I roasted some organic poblano peppers in the oven, which Akiko peeled, and made some chile rellenos by stuffing them with cheese, dipping them in whipped egg whites (with a little of the yolks added back) and frying them. Trader Joe's green tomatillo salsa on top. I can eat well, and pretty much anything I want to. I have low cholesterol and blood-pressure, no health problems to speak of, and good looks too.

Life is good.

I became a specialist in Spanish literature because of "deep image" poetry. Not directly, because it was never my favorite kind of poetry exactly in English, but because of the general climate of interest in Latin American and Spanish poetry during the late 70s, a formative time for me. The Nobel prize went to Vicente Aleixandre in 1977. I wanted to read the stuff in the original, go back to the sources. You know how snobbish I can be, but I was even worse back then.

Now reading Greg Kuzma and the like, I see no connection to Spanish-language poetry at all. The Spanish roots of contemporary American poetry are very shallow, generally speaking and with significant exceptions.

I single out Kuzma because to me, in my memory at least, he is Generic Deep Image Guy of the 70s.

Logically, the Spanish department should be full of me, full of people brought into the field by the ubiquity of Neruda during the 70s. I'm sure there are others, but that's not the typical person in the field in my experience. When I realize this then I know how to make certain adjustments in dealing with people. For example there is Latin American Leftist without a strong interest in literature in the first place. He came into the field for largely political reasons. There the person who majored in Spanish and just kept going, eventually developing an interest in literature, but an interest largely confined to what was taught in the curriculum.

I've gone 35 days now without "breaking the chain." It works better than i could ever have expected.

Two hours a day might not sound like a lot. It's 60 or 62 hours a month as opposed to the 40 hour work week. But actually if you take away lunch and internet browsing time, answering email, waiting around for meetings, etc.. the 40 hour week is much less than that. My two hours is really concentrated work. Work distilled.

Thanks to Seinfeld I have, in the month of August, prepared and mailed my ms. to Liverpool University Press, gathered a few permissions for reprinting poems, written two thousand words on my Chapter on Lorca and the New York poets for my next book, all while doing my 5-6 miles of walking a day. With plenty of free time to spare.