Too much braindump

[petronia]

Reminder to self: acquire poppy! J is right in that they're hard to find, it slipped my mind because I haven't seen anyone selling them thus far. >_> I could swear in past years they had a poppy stand at Namur metro, but...

Last night I had to get off the computer at the WORST CLIFFHANGER CHAPTER EVAR in Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle, so much so that this morning I lost half an hour so I could read the ensuing chapters and find out what happened. XD;; Of course the thing about CLAMP is that they let the reader see them coming from fifty miles away - from page 4 in some instances - secure and smug in the knowledge that said reader will nevertheless not be able to predict exactly what will go down. Or did go down. Apart from it being teh Bad. They build entire merchandising empires around three-sentence summaries but you don't know what the three sentences are. Other mangaka go relatively easy in comparison, the worst thing that could happen being merely along the lines of discovering someone wasn't dead after all or a character was having an incestuous affair with his sister.

...I'm getting a little obsessed with Fye. :0 It seems rather as if CLAMP purposefully constructed a dialectic by creating him and Kurogane and setting them at odds, I'd like to see the synthesis they have in mind. ...And here you must insert about an hour of me rifling through J's journal looking for the post where she talks about "kiyou binbou". A related character concept - morally related, at least - is that of the casual genius with no sincerity whose accomplishments are somehow devalued because of that lack, which crops up so often because some people have a decided liking for the type and others don't care for it at all. (I am not just talking about TezuFuji fanon okay. XD) Of course this is only Fye insofar as it is also Hakkai. Attack of the three-sentence summary again: it's clear that the Fye you get to see - like present-day Hakkai - is a construct cobbled together from remains scattered by the storm, but you don't get a backstory, because explanations are for sissies. The other example that came to mind was X!Subaru, taken in and of himself, but Subaru is hardly lacking in painful sincerity toward the universe at large shall we say. Then again, Hakkai is insane, Subaru is insane if in a monomaniacal sort of way, but Fye?

What am I saying, he probably is. After all it does rather seem as if a large portion of his wounds are self-inflicted.

Also.

And I realise this reaction is very 2004 and all but—

VAMPIRES???

One day Watanuki will be cleaning Yuuko's place, and he will come across The CLAMP Eyeball Collection. That will be one more day he rues in his tender life.

May Dance
by gisho. TRC fic, far too tame to justify how dirty I felt after reading it. XD;; Rarely do I get that minty fresh ride-to-hell sensation from fanfiction these days, but this one did the trick - not because it was excellently written and characterised to the point of total believability (it was) but because it seriously hit a button I didn't think I had. Then I thought twice and realised it was the same whatever that causes me to write Toshiki x Ren (I thought of it as a pairing fic when I started writing but the point it was trying to make eventually precluded that). Clearly I just... have a kink for conflicted gay older man x sweet self-possessed pubescent girl. Oh, Papa Freud, where are you now.

Why Learn A Second Language?
Article found from darcenciel. The bit about the Persian ghazal is tremenjously OTM and made me laugh. I'm not sure I've ever read a translation of a classical Chinese poem that seemed to me like the same poem (although it may be, and is often, a quite good poem in its own right). And when my Japanese comprehension improved to the point that I could read haiku and tanka I was taken aback by the difference as well.

(...Improved to the point, she says. Really it's only just about at that stage.)

Have been thinking of the aesthetics of poetry lately. My sister claims she "understands" poetry better now, in English - not so much in French. I know intelligent and literate people who say they don't "get" poetry at all. I always want to ask, what is there to get? —But that sounds condescending. Still. Maybe because I was practically taught to read on aforementioned classical Chinese quatrains but to me a poem is like... like a well-dressed woman in the metro. Or a well laid-out magazine cover. Or a pop song. It's an instinctive and pedestrian pleasure (or discomfort, if the poem is awkward). All these things follow design principles - for poetry I keep learning and forgetting the rules - but the end effect is instantaneous and has to do with the "meaning" of the words only in a partial sense. Analogous to how the clothing choice of the woman on the metro is a semiotic signifier, certainly, but one could be a well-dressed teenaged candy raver or a well-dressed professional of a certain age. ^^;

Okay, I think I have overcompensated with points in this entry. XD

Comments

[worldserpent.livejournal.com]

Eheh, I don't really get poetry in French. Well, part of it is undoubtly because that range of my vocabulary is not that developed, and part of it is that it's not just knowing the words, but being aware of the word's resonance and connotations, and that I don't always have, nor a complete sense of the rhythym (in other words, I can't even fathom considering the differences between Chinese and English, how it's even possible to get that same-or a similar-sound-impact). I did learn how, supposedly, to 'appreciate' English language poetry, but I don't seek out and I don't read poetry for fun. It doesn't enter my mind to bother to look for it, the way I want to read stories.

Plus, doesn't it seem like the average person can write a story much better than the average person can write a poem?

[petronia.livejournal.com]

I'm not so sure that the average person can write a story much better than a poem. ^^; Who's the average person? It seems to me that the average man on the street has about the same chance of writing a halfway decent one or the other, though your average person's attempt at humourous limerick probably has a better chance of success than your average person's attempt at "meaningful" free verse.

Also, the readers' standards may be unconsciously higher. XD Hobby readers always end up reading a lot of admittedly crap prose, but very few people venture beyond known masterpieces when they read poetry, which makes high school paper efforts all the more jarring.

Prose writer and poet really are two completely different things, though. It's possible to wear both hats but I suspect practice at one doesn't help your skill level much with the other. So if you take your average fan writer (like me) who writes twenty prose stories to one poem, it's obvious where the balance of quality is going to lie.

[worldserpent.livejournal.com]

More like, "tell a story," really. Or perhaps the average person who has pretensions to writing tends to write prose better than poetry, probably because they've practiced more, or because in general they teach you at school how to write prose. I think to a certain extent essay work and regular writing will help you write prose, whereas comparable fields that will help you with poetry are not emphasized in schools.

Perhaps; although maybe it's that a good story can partially overcome bad technique, whereas a poem is mostly technique? ( or at least as I see poetry)

[gisho.livejournal.com]

Mmm, I find one trouble with English poetry is that frankly, most of it isn't any good. Of course, I only speak English fluently so I can't compare poetry across language, but I've never read a poem I really liked in English that was less than a hundred years old.

It's a lot easier, as suggested above, to disguise bad writing in a story than a poem. Stories are expected to have a plot; if the writing is at least adequate, most people will ignore it and pay attention only to the content of the story, although superbly "poetic" writing will intruige the thoughtful reader. Poems, on the other hand, are mainly about the technique. The content is secondary, and can be quite inane; what matters is the way words are fit together. This can be far more difficult than coming up with a strong storyline or interesting characters. It also requires a larger vocabulary, if one is trying to preserve a consistent rhythym.

And now we descend to the realm of IMO; it seems to me that a significant amount of recent "good poems" are in fact free verse, which in my mind should be distinguished entirely from poetry, because it does not have the vitally important quality of meter that a poem is intended and designed to showcase, while which in prose is an accidental adornment if at all present.

On the other hand, if one reaches to the roots of poetry as an oral art form and allows song lyrics to be considered as poems, then there is a good deal of good poetry being written in English. Songs, after all, have to sound good. One cannot write a song with the same sort of sloppy disregard for the pure interaction of sound that distinguishes so much "poetry".

Forgive my rambling; this is a subject that annoys me deeply.

[worldserpent.livejournal.com]

I think I agree with your main points about prose (fiction) vs. poetry as general catagories. Although there are narrative poems, most poems are not narrative, whereas most people prize fiction for the narrative techniques, characterization, etc.

But isn't free verse a subset of poetry? (And of course, what about the prose poem?) I don't know if meter is necessarily the distinguishing characteristic of poetry, as most people understand it.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't actually say free verse lacks meter by definition. It lacks consistent scansion rules, certainly, but on a "local" level within the poem itself (for a given line or verse, say) meter and prosody are important. English prose actually falls into iambic quite easily for stretches, and in any case the "natural" meter for English is fixed-stress, which I think is what a lot of popular song lyrics do (no formal analysis of this on my part though it's certainly been done XD).

At the same time, song lyrics are designed to interact with music, so it's difficult to say if they can be considered poetry - i.e. a standalone work of art - taken in and of themselves. The impact isn't the same. A song can be magnificent even if the lyrics are trite, as they often are in opera. (The same argument can and has been applied to plays; there's a school of critical thought that considers them "incomplete literature".)

If there is sloppy disregard for the pure interaction of sound, then it is not good free verse. This is why free verse is in fact more difficult to pull off than metered verse: there are less rules to fall back on.

[akatonbo.livejournal.com]

*has a little moment of Toshiki/Ren squee*

...my Toshiki x Ren concept is inevitably complicated not only by Kazuki (obviously) but also by the fact that my Ren was kind of a baby dyke before the Fuuga gang came along.

[corneredangel.livejournal.com]

Last night I had to get off the computer at the WORST CLIFFHANGER CHAPTER EVAR

...if we're thinking of the same one, I came to it in the manga first...and realized that the first and only other time I felt like that was way back in '96, Eva episode 18-or-whatever, Rei, N2 bomb, no more Rei...and a broken teenage me whose first true love is now...well, kinda not there anymore.

...also, wait for it. Try as they might, it looks like Season 2 will give us *some* Fai!backstory. I mean, yeah, so all we get in Episode 26 is...*a sentence*...but that's still a sentence more than what we *had*

...also, welcome to the club.

*also*, trying to a write a coherent review critique of Volume 7 is a *BITCH*

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Volume 7? We're probably thinking of the same one. (Though there was a... quick succession of cliffhangers...)

Well. N2 bomb is Seishirou's whole thing, yanno?

Read on, MacDuff! I need me some fic to liven up my workday.

[morphaileffect.livejournal.com]

hmm... so "kiyou binbou" appears to be a mix between "dilettante" and "idiot savant," like the naturally talented people who don't take their skills seriously and drive frustrated aspirants up the wall (and into poverty, i.e. hakkai's case)? ^^

re: languages: i remember that while researching on something, i came across an interview of esther dyson where she said the biggest assets in any company are multilingual employees. implying there's no one language in the world that has all the words for everything, and multilingual people just have a broader scope of the world than er, unilingual people do.

and lord literary translation. hate. stories are just as terrible to translate as poems, i think. especially if you care a lot about the cadence of the prose.

[wildelamassu.livejournal.com]

I find the "Insincere Savant" character type absolutely fascinating--they're usually what glue me to a given series, even after the fandom starts to die out. CLAMP may never bother with more than hints by way of backstory, but I imagine that Fai's polite, kyaah!ing disinclination to use his magic abilities has much to do what Gonou/Hakkai would have done if he had had similar resources at the crisis moment. It's almost as though Kurogane and Gojyo/Sanzo exist to see through/acknowledge that sick duality, or force it to cusp after cusp. I'm thinking of the latest Saiyuki chapter (http://www.livejournal.com/users/wildelamassu/38165.html) as compared to the scene about fighting to save one's life with Kurogane in Oto, Vol. 6.

All these things follow design principles - for poetry I keep learning and forgetting the rules - but the end effect is instantaneous and has to do with the "meaning" of the words only in a partial sense.

Having just come home from my seminar class on modernism with Charles Bernstein (http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bernstein/) (who has so many visceral yet articulate things to say on this very topic--hell, we were even talking about today in connection to Zukofsky), my answer to that would be that to truly "get" poetry, one should first learn the 'rules' and then go about forgetting them as quickly as possible.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

I find the "Insincere Savant" character type absolutely fascinating--they're usually what glue me to a given series, even after the fandom starts to die out.

These days I can see the mangaka coming, but sometimes they get me anyway. >___>

The one thing you can count on with CLAMP is that everything has a reason. But I'd better not speculate until I'm caught up. XD

[joliefolie.livejournal.com]

D'you want me to get you a poppy from school? A whole bucketful at Student Services. I'm pretty sure that they're free.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Hmm, sure? Still didn't see any tonight. o_O;