A case of assisted improvisation

The poetry course will be over in a day, so I decided to share my last essay I sent there a week ago.

The task was to write a "random" poem using the method of mesostic and an automated script, and then to do a close reading of it and to express thoughts on the technique used.

There were actually two tasks to choose from with the remaining one being playing with Bernadette Mayer's methods, but I made my decision very quickly for the reasons explained below.

***

I can't resist starting with an explanation of my choice between the two options available for this assignment. It was easier for me than I expected to make this decision when I realised that despite its "technical" feel the "mesostic" method is actually not very different from some tactics we were already introduced to (Tristan Tzara's "How to make a Dadaist poem" being the most obvious example). This recurrence was the first thing to catch my eye and it didn't allow me to dismiss this option thoughtlessly as a curious but (at first glance) not deep enough experiment.

Then the fact John Cage was a composer and his idea of words being liberated from the "forced" meanings to become sort of as musical samples simply left me no other choice. Not being an English native speaker this is exactly how I used and sometimes still do perceive English lyrics in songs when vocals aren't very distinctive, and the strange thing is that it doesn't immediately make them dull or unworthy - they remain quite enjoyable, only in a different way. So due to my weakness I have a privilege to know for sure that the result I received from the automated script wasn't just a chaotic nonsense:

          What
         hAve
          Looking
         aT

          Whole
families sHopping
         aIsles
          The avocados
         aMong
  refrigerAtor
      eyeiNg

I chose WALT WHITMAN as a "spine" for my poem because from the very beginning of the course I was definitely more attracted to Whitmanian bunch. I believe by the way that this first step is very important in mesostic as it is the only part of the process which is entirely up to the creator. While pointing the script to source text is also a conscious decision, there is no control on what exactly would make it into the final poem. While you're free to choose between the undoubtedly different sources - different epochs, schools, genres, authors - it is still possible that the final difference would be next to none if the same words are picked out. Same words taken out of their natural context, much as fish taken out of the water, immediately become the same and lose the name of action.

So it is the "spine" that grants them a new life and essentially defines the new context – or more precisely, you do by choosing that "axis". The whole process of the creation packed in a single concentrated effort - when you accept this idea it suddenly becomes difficult to shout out a "random" name. What could've been easier than that before you became aware of the trick?

I used "A Supermarket in California" as a source because of its direct connection to the spine ("Where are we going, Walt Whitman?") It might be a wrong thing to abuse the randomness in that way but in my opinion it is justified by the created opportunity of receiving an answer to the questions asked in the poem.

I'm satisfied with the result which by the way was the first combination I received. If reviewed as a "foreign song" merely by how words sound it's proportionally weighted with the first shorter stanza composed of shorter words than the longer second one. It also starts with "what" which rhymes with "Walt" creating an intricate connection between the first horizontal and the first vertical words.

In the second stanza I like how the word "shopping" connects the two lines there, being shared between the "families shopping" and "shopping aisles", equally forming two meaningful combinations. There is also meta meaning in it as it is shopping as a process, not as a word, that leads people to aisles in real life.

The geometry of the poem is also nice: not too symmetrical but also not shaky with the counterpoising balanced beams of "families" and "avocados". Poem's "body" has a non-trivial shape resembling a comma, straight for most of its length but curving left at the end. Again an odd meta feeling here: with not a single comma in the whole poem it's still basically a list of independent words, each of them could be followed by one - so forming together a giant comma, they unexpectedly make sense.

But arguably the main purpose of any poem like this is to provoke thoughts on the context defined the spine phrase or name, to shed some light from an unusual angle and to admire the fanciful shadows it forms. Well, it did make me think of Walt Whitman, his poetry and his followers like Allen Ginsberg lost in the supermarket. It wasn't a single distinctive and clear idea, or I’d say not a problem which became clear to me. It was rather lots of unshaped thoughts and emotions, quick associations appearing instantly to burst into new ones like fireworks - bright, enjoyable and unstable.

Much like what I feel when I listen to music, only this time that was a music of "raw" words, instruments for which I have chosen for the band of the mesostic myself.

Back to school

I'm taking an American poetry course with Coursera the main part of which is writing essays. It's been quite a while since I did anything like that, and needless to say back in the day essays used to come in Russian, so my first results were as miserable as you could expect. They probably still are, but the last week's essay was finally the one I'm not that ashamed to share.

So the task was to compare two versions of William Carlos Williams's "Young Woman at a Window" (1, 2) and decide which one looks "more imagist" and why.

***

"The song sings itself"

According to a famous apocryphal story Michelangelo was once asked how did he know what to cut away. The response was, "It's simple. I just remove everything that doesn't look like David."

Much like Michelangelo's work, the second version of the poem looks like it was stripped of everything that wasn't very necessary to shape the idea. Pretty much everything representing a logical consequence of something already stated has been cut out. As a result, every new line of that version adds something new to the picture which did exist before instead of simply clarifying or detailing presented the previous stanzas. "Nor the merely decorative word".

This becomes clear when two versions are compared line by line. "She sits there" - where else can she sit? What changes if the woman sits "here" and not "there"? Sorry, but "there" has to leave. "While" - not needed, this poem is snapping a moment like a camera, so of course it's "while", no need to state it literally, goodbye and thank you.

Although these were the easy bits and it gets more complicated later. "The child who robs her knows nothing of his theft" - the whole point is gone in the second version, so this time it is not only about removing some obstructive words, this is a complete message being removed. That seems like an important edit yet it doesn't make a new poem, it stays under the same title - that probably means it's still the same and the cut wasn't damaging to the global idea.

This is where another imagism manifesto point comes to mind, particularly "to represent an image" one. From the image poem creates, reader is supposed to get the fact the child changes ("robs") woman's life of something on his or her own. Should it be stated directly, it'd give reader the idea straight away "robbing" them of their own impressions and intellectual work. Everything else in the poem would become nothing more than a frame for that literal statement rendering most of it once again unnecessary.

When the message is removed, all left is an image of a woman crying, holding a child who is interested in something else, "his nose pressed to the glass". He is not focused on the woman at the moment while she has him on her lap and obviously can't ignore him even being extremely disappointed. She is robbed by child having to care about him without receiving much back yet.

The same message is still delivered, only in a gentle way.

The manifesto also defines imagism as something "hard and clear, never blurred nor indefinite." This fits the vision again. While the reader is invited to make their own conclusions, the picture created by the second version of the poem remains crisp. All the major words are nouns with very particular meaning in a focused context: "cheer", "tears", "lap", "child", "nose", "glass". Metaforical interpretation is hardly possible here - the "woman" is the woman and the "child" is the kid, they aren't, say, Nature and Humanity, such a comparison seems very artificial and non-applicable.

Everything is kept simple and the image is clear.

Here is a woman in tears. Her child doesn't hear her.

"Proletarier aller Länder vereinigt Euch!"

From Bloody Foreigners by Robert Winder:

"Amelie Struve [...] also tried to raise charitable relief [for poor German workers in Britain], but was turned down by the Mayor of London [...] She was also opposed by Marx and Engels, who wrote a letter to The Times denouncing such charity on the grounds that it would give more useful exiles (such as themselves) a bad name"

If you google that, this book will be the only source, but still the letter itself could be found: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1850/05/28.htm

Impressive to say the least.

Engineer's insight into management

It's been a while since I posted last time - not because of nothing happening around, more likely because of the opposite. There are too many things to tell about, actually, but they're still in progress and I'd rather tell the results when I'm sure.

I have stumbled upon the NASA ebooks recently and started with a shorter one by Erasmus H. Kloman which provides an unusual angle on two unmanned lunar projects, The Surveyor and The Lunar Orbiter. The unusual part is that it's neither a chronicle nor a popular science - this is the first book on space exploration I read which focuses entirely on project management.

I used to work as project manager myself and while I shifted back to engineering after realising it wasn't my cup of tea for many reasons, I still remember the main thing that used to puzzle me, particularly how to formalise those practices which are best described as "common sense". It works perfectly fine for one person, but with more people involved the conceptions start to blur and when you try to keep them universal and clear you find yourself either repeating something everyone finds obvious and thus useless or something tailored to suit a single specific process only.

Widely speaking, that's my problem with the occupations that rely more on experience and human skills rather than on theory and knowledge - "if you don't have to study to do that, probably anyone could be doing that instead of you". I know that's rude and not always correct, so I'm not making a statement here but sharing my bias to explain why I found that book surprisingly exciting. When something you used to regard as non-technical skill results directly in a success of one complicated tech project, it helps to calibrate your perception of the problem and priorities.

While the author admits that some things can be hardly put into a textbook ("No formal arrangement can replace the dynamic system of personal and informal relations developed by key members of the project team"), the structure of the project and relationships between involved organisations and individuals is still very well demonstrated.

If you relate to project management somehow, you probably should read it.

"Diary of a North London Lad"

I don't really remember how did I stumble upon this book, probably when searching for "North London" randomly. Apparently a self-published one, it is memoires of an "ordinary person", i.e. neither a professional writer nor a celebrity.

I read it really quickly (which, I ought to note, is no longer typical for me as the Internet has shrunk my attention span drastically) mostly because of the coincidental setting as the author grew up not far away from where we now live and used to work not far away as well from where I do. Thanks to that, it helped me to put some things into perspective and also allowed to have a glimpse into the 60s and 70s when, as far as I can see, Britain and London particularly were very different from what they're now with some changed for good and some for the contrary.

With the story being primarily focused on women, cars and theatre, still some small historical details about the British society slip out which are difficult for a foreigner to acquire otherwise. It's not exactly about the book, but again I can't help noticing how has the world has changed in the last, say, 50 or 60 years, it's hard to overestimate. We Russians often regard Western society as something that has been developing continuously but at a steady pace while us were hold in place for so long and then unleashed. In reality, it looks to me that older people in the UK recognise almost as much change in the present society when compared to the times of their youth.

Don't know if that'd be as exciting for someone who doesn't know North London, but despite its indisputably average literary quality, "Diary of a North London Lad" by Tony Shelton was arguably the best book I read this year.

Hogwarts Express platform

With its neighbour St. Pancras hotel recently reopened, King's Cross station is still under reconstruction being prepared for Olympics. The adjacent square is fenced to hide its controversial renovation as well, but this bit is by no doubts awesome:

It could have looked much better without all the scaffolding around, blending with the real environment, but even now everybody's smiling and queuing to take a photo. Clever idea.

Stoke Newington Literary Festival

The second Stoke Newington Literary Festival once again is trying too hard. "When in Rome, do as Romans do" they say, but still I can hardly find words to describe my feelings for cycling section on a literary event (I can also suggest those who coasted comfortably to the meeting on their freewheels instead of pedalling the hell out of their fixies were banned from that meeting).



The writing workshop was probably nothing special for skilled speakers and writers (or should I say bloggers?), more a quiz game than a real study, but it was an unusual experience for us. I mean, an opportunity to listen to random people when they're trying to talk more wittily than in everyday life provides you with an understanding of the level your own jokes and tirades are at.



Also, the atmosphere was very good and you can't demand more from a social event which is not a lecture but a talk.



Another event we attended today was the celebration of Edgar Allan Poe who happened to to attend school here in Stock Newington, thus being the second great writer with a connection to the area after Daniel Defoe.



Unlike Defoe, Poe doesn't have a local pub named after him yet but a bust of him was unveiled today.



There was a moment on that event when I felt a bit awkward. The panel of contemporary authors sharing their own feelings about Poe and his legacy eventually started to discuss if he was a racist or just a man of his times. Predictably, someone mentioned the recent case with Mark Twain's books revision to get the N-words removed. The argument continued for 5 minutes or so, and nobody of the panel members didn't go for any euphemisms in discussion using the very N-word instead.



Again, as I am not a native speaker that could be just me and okay in the given context, but still to me that was quite a dissonance with all that lefty social problems agenda.

It might seem like I am only grumbling but actually I liked the festival as I liked the first one a year ago. I really do value events taking place outside of the Central London in so-called villages that bear their own local spirit and this for sure wasn't the worst one. Next year I will be visiting (and complaining!) as well, and it's a shame I'm working tomorrow and so will miss the last day and the closure.

Before the BoB

From The Right Of The Line by John Terraine:

On the contrary, there was an influential body of opinion which would have liked nothing better than to abolish military aircraft altogether. Notable among these in 1931 was Stanley Baldwin, Lord President of the Council, and soon to be Prime Minister for the third time, and Sir Maurice Hankey, Secretary of the Cabinet and of the Committee of Imperial Defence [...] "it would be worth a lot to get rid of submarines and aircraft (which I have advocated for a long time)"

That is the question

In school, I had problems remembering correct Shakespeare's surname spelling. I always tried to make it more logical and harder to forget - well, you know, Shakespear is the one who shakes his spear (uhm, celebrating his victory in a fight where he used the spear to win, probably?). Anyway, that was pretty easy but the closing "e" was lost from the pattern, generating mistakes.

But yesterday I discovered that my way to spell it wasn't so wrong:



Then, I was able to search for both spellings to unveil the reason of those variant readings:

Elizabethan spelling was very erratic by twentieth-century standards, though it was not (as is sometimes stated) totally without rules. Even the simplest proper names were spelled a variety of ways, but we can at least look at the range of different spellings used for a given name and see what patterns emerge.

Oh, that was exactly my dream on Grammar lessons!

Reasoning fail

Meet Mr. Robert Stevenson, a well-known civil engineer. Yesterday I saw a picture of him in the National Portrait Gallery and got suspicious immediately about the ebook I had downloaded a while ago and hasn't read yet.

The roots of my suspicion were in the fact of that autobiographic book having a self-explaining title Records of a Family of Engineers, stating Robert Louis Stevenson as an author. Of course I had an idea that an autobiography with that title much more likely belongs to an engineer than to a writer, who could be placed on the web page instead of him by mistake (because of him being more famous) - so I was glad to discover a kind of mishmash with names.

How naïve. The author of The Treasure Island turned out to be Robert Stevenson's grandson. His father was an engineer too, so that was the right and simplest reason of giving such a title to his autobiography.

"The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo"

A day or two ago I had finally finished the first book of that hyped Larsson's trilogy.

It maybe explains something about modern culture, when in the same story the negativity of some filthy character is emphasized (in addition to other facts) with a scene of him having sex with an underage girl - and only a page or two later, appearance of the positive character is described by mentioning among other epithets her "childlike breasts".

I was rather thrilled with the plot on the middle of the story, but the outcome was weak. Also, almost all the characters are flat and hence, predictable. Especially Salander is nothing more than a stereotype fair of a "vigilante girl" type: black leather, tattoos, tough childhood, autistic-but-talented (and talented in hacking computers, of course) etc.

Still, this book makes great introduction into Swedish way of life, laws and customs (well, at least for a person like me who had never been to Scandinavia). Summarizing: not a must, but probably you won't regret.

Better late than never

What I'm going to write about is rather obvious, I reckon, but I had my fun investigating this.

Today, I came across the Nedroid Comics post quoting familiar verse about an omniscient mirror: "Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?"

I rushed to search engines to discover that this phrase belongs to Snow White famous cartoon. Then, I became curious about its connection with the fairy-tale by Pushkin. That's why I had started apologising - I had never realised that those two stories are almost similar before. Dwarfs or knights, not a big difference, but had I never have such an idea until today. Shame on me.

So, both those stories are based on Brothers Grimm tale. Still, in that particular case, Disney's cartoon is quoted most probably - English translations of Grimm's tale that I had managed to find, are of another meter and use "looking glass" term instead of "mirror":

"Looking-glass, Looking-glass, on the wall, who in this land is the fairest of all?"

Bonus: Brutal heavy metal fans doing their own research on the rhyme. Maybe I don't have to be so ashamed.

Global cooling

Turning back to Frankenstein, I came accross the fact that this book was started at year 1816 which was memorable enough to earn its own name, Year Without a Summer.

Can't help sharing this link with all those climate scandals and contexts.

By the way, speaking about climate, here is a footer of email that I've received recently:



"Okay, we all are trying to be green, but hey, you're cutting corners off!"

"Zombies are red, vampires are blue"

That feverish vampires fiction renaissance that we're observing all over the world made me to read Bram Stoker's Dracula for the first time. Need to confess, I'm proceeding with Frankenstein now and alrealy have something to discuss.

Many years ago I was introduced a great criterion in fiction literature (so-called "Wells/Verne" one). It is based on the fictional details role in the plot - if author's main intension is to describe something unusual, with characters and events to form frame for some invented idea to shine and to demonstrate all its facets, then this is "Jules Verne's book". On the other hand, if mythical or science fictional background just forms a field for characters of the story to act on, to demonstrate spectacular reactions and emotions then you classify it as "H.G. Wells' book".

In these terms, Dracula is definitely of Verne's type while Frankenstein is strictly of Wells' one. I was rather astonished to realize that monster creation procedure was only a single paragraph long:

It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.

I mean, that's all, no joke. After Dracula, verbose laboratory interior descriptions, dreadfully vivid monster's appearance epithets and numerous blood-chilling cries and yellings were expected! But instead of it the book is full of dialogs and emotions, and the main idea is not about creation process visualization but outcasted being's tragedy - while Stoker's characters' way is straight and bright, there are no hesitation in what to consider evil or heroic and undead creatures' impious tricks and physiology are explained in details.

At the same time Frankenstein, despite of having literary bar raised, fails in narrative. Probably the main reason is that Mary Shelley started it being only 18 and lacking some writer's practice. Also, while she is issuing tougher challenges for the reader, implementation of those questions is not always smart. For my money, Frankenstein is much more dull comparing to Dracula, being nevertheless, unlike to Stoker's fiction story, much more real "story" than "fiction", undoubtedly.

Slowpoking

Reading through Dracula I came across a familiar phrase:

I got him on the subject of the legends, and he went off at once into a sort of sermon. I must try to remember it and put it down.

"It be all fool-talk, lock, stock, and barrel, that's what it be and nowt else. These bans an' wafts an' boh-ghosts an' bar-guests an' bogles an' all anent them is only fit to set bairns an' dizzy women a'belderin'. They be nowt but air-blebs. [...]"

My shame, I wasn't awared of that famous film title being a persistent sentence.

Sorry, bookworming again

From The Practice and Science of Drawing, 1913:

But while in science observation is made much more effective by the use of mechanical instruments in registering facts, the facts with which art deals, being those of feeling, can only be recorded by the feeling instrument—man, and are entirely missed by any mechanically devised substitutes.

While art is still opposing other activities here, please note that the author is trying to put it into a rational coordiate system with an explanation of an artist being a recorder for feelings, a complex recording device, not yet studied thoroughly but probably would sometime. No references to divine intervention and that pathetic stuff: the nature of many things and processes is unknown but there must be an explanation, and meanwhile we can give them names (i.e. Harmony, Beauty, Rhythm) and use them as black boxes knowing input and output.

[...] beauty is, strictly speaking, a state of mind rather than an attribute of certain objects, although certain things have the power of inducting it more than others

What a lovely Victorian era echo, badly missed nowdays.

Additional terms

Reading The Abolition Of Slavery (you can get this free ebook in Mobipocket format) revealed an interesting fact about US history, concerning the procedure of slaves emansipation. This procedure was difficult to perform without facing a contradiction with existing legislation (as the Congress initially refused to interfere with the institution of slavery).

The solution was found in putting this civil problem under the war jurisdiction, as Congress had limited war authority and the powers of war were limitated by the laws of the nations only. And according to the war powers slaves belonging to an enemy were regarded as belligerents first of all (for they had supported enemy's economy with their labour).

So, Southern slaves were being first taken as captives and then set free as a prisoners of war. Released captive is a free man, so it resulted to slaves in loosing their previous status. More exactly, not loosing but becoming free people in addition, which was enough to prevent masters from reclaiming their property back.

What has drawn my attention in this story is how it was necessary to become a prisoner first in order to become free.

Continuing to discover Gutenberg Project

Just finished Pygmalion. Lively and vivid at the beginning, it almost bored me by the end - and this, as I can suppose, is not the book's fault but mine.

Still, what I really don't like in literature is when hypothetical and knowingly simplified actions are taking place at the hard-nosed, realistic sceneries. I mean all those real steet names, Mr. H.G. Wells appearing at the final essay and other details that make too much contrast with purely theatrical characters bearing one strain each.

Internet is jumpy today, time to read

Having finished The Importance of Being Earnest, I am still dissapointed a bit with this great reading.

The thing is that I was inspired by this quotes collection when I started, but the book proved to be no more than a quotes collection itself - a merrymaking vaudeville. The plot exists only to let the author have an opportunity of making a display of his witness - which, I must admit, is very worthwile though - and being impressed with a remarkable number of biting quotes I expected something deeper and more dramatic, like Woe from Wit.

Also, it may be a problem with my language taste but I find rather cheap rhyming Ernest and Earnest. See, it's like Wild Wilde, geez.

Detaching a sticky note

Turning back to Bruce Sterling post I want to share my thought for the points it explains. The first challenge mentioned is the most interesting:

Literature is language-based and national; contemporary society is globalizing and polyglot.

Word! When I started to read in the original books in English source language I realized that the difference between author’s text and translation matters at any rate or even can be of critical significance.

No, it is not a snobbish thing - you see, often translator is more talented than the one being translated and some books that were among my favourites in Russian I believe to be rather dull in English. But the trick is that even the positive difference can’t be totally ignored and that’s the reason to consider it a problem.

And the real problem is that – as to me - I do not know any foreign language enough to read books except English a bit (skill posessed nowadays by many). And a really huge amount of literature is stuck in its own language and culture and can be known through translations only – and as I revealed for myself translated book may be even better but it will not be the same book.

To understand what it really matters for literature just imagine that you are unable to get any records by your favourite group and you can listen only to the cover versions. And for the literature it is a great everyday problem, with a handicap for the authors lucky enough to have English or Spanish or other popular language as their native one.

And here we do face a challenge that is brand new and did not existed before because not so long ago there were few connections with other cultures. So, there was a possibility to be fully satisfied with the products of your own culture because they explained everything that you would ever have a chance to see in your life. Now they can’t.

And some points that I disagree on:

Vernacular means of everyday communication — cellphones, social networks, streaming video — are moving into areas where printed text cannot follow.

Not a challenge. All this stuff can be described easily with text as railways and airplanes before. Literature is a way to describe, not a thing that needs describing. Text remains text, is it embossed or printed or displayed, you name it.

Intellectual property systems failing.

The time humanity lived without intellectual property laws is much longer than the time we have them, and literature still exists. An even if it is really a challenge, it is not a challenge for literature only but for all intellectual products.

Barriers to publication entry have crashed, enabling huge torrent of subliterary and/or nonliterary textual expression.

Same as above, how did literature manage to survive Gutenberg? Also, these challenges are connected because ‘barrier crushing’ shows that the lacking of old property system is not an obstacle for new narratives to come. They are green but I think it is a question of time for them to ripe. And I am almost sure there will be a phenomenon of freeware classic-formed literature, I mean books written as free of charge primordially.

***
I will proceed later with other source article points but your opinion on the listed above will be appreciated.