About the title

In the first post I didn't get around to explaining the name of this blog.  The first word, blijdschap, means "joy" in Dutch.  My grandfather taught me the term, using it on at least one occasion as a nickname for me, because my middle name is Joy.  The second word is the Spanish for "Madrilenian"; hence, "Madrilenian joy."  Or maybe "Joy in Madrid."  Take it however you like.

I like the idea of having what I write here come from a place of jubilation.  That's what I hope to record and share with whoever reads this: wonder, delight, joy.

Sculpting in Mist

So, I'm about to move to Madrid for a ten-month stay, on a grant that will allow me to work on (and, if all goes well, complete) my doctoral dissertation, which focuses on the relationship between Miguel de Unamuno and several younger Spanish poets and critics who were writing in the 1920s.  I'll be doing my work in several archives around Madrid (La Biblioteca Nacional de España and the Residencia de Estudiantes, primarily) as well as at the Casa Museo Unamuno in Salamanca.  While I do this, however, I plan to take advantage, as much as I can, of the vibrant cultural life of Madrid, and do some traveling around Spain and maybe elsewhere.  This blog will be my digital notebook and travelogue--a place to record my non-work-related thoughts (although some references to my work may slip in; when you're writing a dissertation on some level you're always thinking about your subject matter--or at least that's what I've found).

I don't want to define the aims of this space too strictly.  The abundance of exhibitions, cinema, live music, etc., in Madrid is what prompted me to start a blog.  (I was in the city teaching in a study abroad program for seven weeks this summer, and I found myself wanting to write about the events I attended.  I'll write about some of them in a future post.)  But while my interests tend to gravitate toward art and culture, these  topics usually expand onto other questions: questions about religion, politics, language...  I study literature because literature, or art in general, I think, gives us a sense of a wider world, offers us a new vision of the world and invites us to make some sense of it, or offers one way of making sense of it.  You might say that this last part is also what a good critic does.  This blog will be my small, piecemeal effort to contribute to that critical task, in a less formal way than in my dissertation.

Unamuno writes about this in a poem that I've translated into English, "Credo Poético" ["Poetic Creed," published in Image 65 (Spring 2010), p. 22].  I've taken the title of this post from there.  In this poem, Unamuno presents art, and poetry in particular, as this effort to make our various and changing experience concrete, to clarify it and give it tangible form:

               Let us strap down, with truths found

               in spirit, the core of forms so prone to shift.

               ........................

               Now then, let us sculpt the mist.

This blog is an experiment in this kind of sculpting, making a concrete record of what I see and do in the upcoming year.  Of course, "concrete" here means "digital," which is not actually a tangible form.  (Hmm, there's a connection there between Unamuno's mist and Apple's iCloud, I think.)  But it's an approximation.  I think that's what Unamuno is getting at in the poem.

[photo: Façade of the University of Salamanca, located next door to the Casa Museo Unamuno]