Eccentric Flower talk:201007/SF Poetry
From Eccentric Flower
Comments on Eccentric Flower:201007/SF Poetry
And because I can't be content to leave alone the concepts of Klein baby bottles and inflicting poetry on the next generation, I give you this intersection of the two concepts from The Space Child's Mother Goose (recently republished by Purple House Press):
Three jolly sailors from Blaydon-on-Tyne They went to sea in a bottle by Klein. Since the sea was entirely inside the hull The scenery seen was exceedingly dull.
-- 20:20, 28 July 2010 (BST)
Did you go read the source LJ page? Don't mind my ranting. That LJ entry is the important part.
(External URLs I link to are ALWAYS more important than what I have to say about them. One day I'm going to start a staggered system. I'll put in just a bare URL and say, "OK, I'll write my thoughts about this after a quorum of you can prove you read the source link." Or would that be mean?)
Quoted excerpt pertinent to the Klein bottle doggerel (and understand, I am not attacking doggerel per se, I've written quite a lot of it myself):
This has got to be a self-selecting set issue - the short pithy doggerel with semi-optional puns are what everyone writes because they have been taught by the Hard Fanboys that that is the only acceptable format; and that has become the only acceptable format because that's what everyone writes; chicken egg chicken egg chicken egg.
Or, put another way, at this point I think it is safe to say "Why go to the trouble to write a villanelle about interpersonal relationships between clones?" The number of people who would 1) bother reading it 2) appreciate its form 3) actually enjoy it within the SF fan community would approach zero.
-- 21:06, 28 July 2010 (BST)
P.S. You know there are lots of Hard Fanboys, who, even today, raise the old spectre of "Well, Bradbury wasn't really an SF writer, he wrote fantasy," which is gender bigotry code for ... eh, never mind, I'll just get irate, you do the math.
(And I know Bradbury is still alive but he is essentially dead to me now, so he's in past tense. Story for another day.)
-- 21:13, 28 July 2010 (BST)
>And I know Bradbury is still alive but he is essentially dead to me now, so he's in past tense. Story for another day
The surprisingly nasty, semi-coherent Bradbury today is like a different guy than the Bradbury of old. He's been brought down by one of the worst cases of Cranky Old Man I've ever seen.
I respect poetry, and there are certain poems I've quite liked, but I can't say I'm a fan of poetry in general. Too often I find myself wishing the poet had just written prose instead.
-- 21:36, 28 July 2010 (BST)
Yup. As he's aged he's become an extremely nasty man in some respects, but the final straw for me is that when he insists, in the latter day, that Fahrenheit 451 is not about censorship but the evils of television, I simply do not believe him.
I think he believes himself, and has convinced himself that his revisionist spin is real. Too bad. If I don't get to control what interpretations people put on my fiction (and god, I wish I could) then he doesn't get to control what interpretation I put on his.
-- 22:01, 28 July 2010 (BST)
No time to prove that I read the article atm, but, ye gods, some of her mocking poem-snippets are hilarious. Character-voice poetry in their own right.
I don't much like to pull the long bow on gender generalizations
er?
Never mind, I don't disagree.
-- 22:31, 28 July 2010 (BST)
Oh! And I meant to mention that I saw a sticker on somebody's car that reminded me a LOT of the Mouth Organ logo. It was a hand with a mouth in the palm, although the hand was blue and drawn in sort of an edgy, cartoony style, like something from a rock show flyer.
-- 23:01, 28 July 2010 (BST)
I can't stand poetry. You can thank high school for that ("What do you think the poem is about?" "It's about a farmer and a pig." "No you Philistine, it's about the bourgeoisie's hatred, contempt and exploitation of the proletariat! As punishment, read pages 50 through 79 of Alinsky, you bourgeoisie tool you!" "WTF?") In fact, I was turned off a lot of literature in school and loved the fact that science fiction didn't have any of that frou frou poetry in it. Science fiction also tended to be more optimistic in outlook than most fiction (with a few exceptions, like _The Sheep Look Up_, which has to be the scariest book I ever read) and I certainly could relate to, say, _Citizen of the Galaxy_ than I could _Great Expectations_ (Dickens was paid by the word, people! He was a hack!).
I also don't like fantasy, because most of it comes across as second rate Tolkien, and I'm not much a fan of Tolkien to begin with.
About the only poetry I do enjoy is that of Lewis Carroll, and that's because it's nonsense to begin with (and according to Martin Gardner, he improved upon the original poems his stuff was based off).
-- 00:32, 30 July 2010 (BST)
Whoops! Fair enough. You were talking poetry and I went straight to doggerel, but it was cute and I thought you'd enjoy it because you seem to enjoy doggerel. (and then I tried to find a copy of the verse to make sure I was quoting correctly and found a whole page on Klein Bottles, and got rather sidetracked.)
But my point is still a fair one: if you want kids to appreciate poetry and science fiction, you have to start them young. (And doggerel is an easy place to begin, which is why Theodore Geisel did so well for himself.)
No, I had not read the full LJ. I posted my initial responses (because I was under the misapprehension that your ranting was the point), then started at the top of the comments (after an overlong diversion involving Klein bottles and Klein bottle hats whereupon I realized I had to be at the doctor's office (a fifteen-minute trip) in thirteen minutes. Haven't gotten back to it yet, what with One Thing Or Another. Sorry. Life has intervened.
-- 05:37, 30 July 2010 (BST)
and really, while I have an abiding appreciation for poetry, I secretly worry that it's (at least temporarily) dead as a craft. Because nobody's gonna buy it, though everyone wants to write it. I suspect that going to wind up kind of like porn--people will buy the classics, but for the newer stuff they will get their fix for free on the Internet.
-- 05:43, 30 July 2010 (BST)
Thanks for the comment to my comment (even though I can't comment there, so I'm commenting here).
You are right about fantasy. I don't hate all of it, just 99 44/100% of it. I absolutely adore Douglas Adams' Dirk Gently books (more so than the Hitchhikers books) and yes, I am willing to say they're fantasy. There are a few other fantasy books I love (Tea with the Black Dragon ( http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1585861979/conmanlaborat-20) is one; some of the Narnia Chronicles like The Silver Chair and The Magician's Nephew) but over all, most fantasy reads like a cheap Tolkien knockoff.
I never did care for Dune, because of the politics and machinations of aristocratic houses fighting each other. If I want that, I'll read Shakespeare or even Tolkien. I read what Herbert was attempting to do with Dune, ( http://tim.oreilly.com/herbert/ ) but failed with three huge books (in my opinion).
And yes, if someone told me to just enjoy poetry and forget the meaning, I probably would enjoy it today. As it stands, there is very little I like (outside of Carroll), and most of that was written by computer:
Weak with agonies of unstroked ego, He loved physics, Embraced its texts, Cupped hands around the meshwork domes Of vast antennae, Roared erectly into orbit, And screamed his coming On the millimeter waves Of space.
(I especially like the last three lines) (I'm not sure what it says about me that I like computer generated poetry)
And speaking of computer generated doggerel, I actually had this snippet of conversation between myself and RACTER:
Me: Who was that masked man?
RACTER: Bertrand Russell. He's from a factory. Bertrand Russell, that is. That was masked man in a factory. Ah, forever the introvert. From the great void to the future, always in the pink. When I hide in a factory I ride in a warehouse. Did you hear the latest about Khomeini?
-- 01:48, 31 July 2010 (BST)
Rhonda:
Speaking as a SF-oriented reader peer of yours, Ray Bradbury actually wrote approachable characters with emotions and all. It's one of the reasons why I like him so much. And you may recall that he played up poetry in his work (I first learned Sara Teasdale because "There Will Come Soft Rains" is prominent in a story of that name in The Martian Chronicles (which I read at a very tender age).
Asimov Science Fiction Magazine (to which I have subscribed on and off since I was maybe 14) has always included poetry. Sure, some of it is doggerel, and I'm not the world's biggest Bruce Boston fan, but still. Poetry. In a SF magazine. I refuse to believe that I am the only one like me. So there.
Now, having said that, you're talking to someone who's trying to influence the next generation of nerds. So of course my opinion is that if this is the fallout from modern education, we should help fix it (otherwise we're just part of the precipitate). Time to find good SF poetry and impose it on the kids. It can be a baby shower gift along with Klein baby bottles...
-- 19:57, 28 July 2010 (BST)