Categories
Other

good things happening

Three things which I found pleasing today: the UK had the least road deaths last year since records began in 1926; Canada and Spain have legalised gay marriage; Venus Williams beat Maria Sharapova to get into the Wimbledon final.

Categories
Other

bad subediting on teletext

The original headline for this story on Ceefax was ‘Police search torso find canal’. Which comes very close to being gibberish.

Categories
Culture

Isaac D’Israeli on poets

At Curiosities of Literature, Isaac D’Israeli’s thoughts on poets.

I thought this bit he quotes from Charpentier was particularly entertaining:

“Men may ridicule as much as they please those gesticulations and contortions which poets are apt to make in the act of composing; it is certain however that they greatly assist in putting the imagination into motion. These kinds of agitation do not always show a mind which labours with its sterility; they frequently proceed from a mind which excites and animates itself. Quintilian has nobly compared them to those lashings of his tail which a lion gives himself when he is preparing to combat.”

Categories
Me

help me get a free ipod

Help me get a free ipod (and get one of your own!) by clicking on this link.

Categories
Other

MIT blogosphere survey

Take the MIT Weblog Survey

Categories
Culture

Christopher Logue’s Iliad

War Music is Logue’s long-running version of the Iliad. Which I’ve been reading recently. Bits of it can be found here, here, here, and here.

I guess the most obvious thing to comment about in WM is the relationship to Homer (use of anachronisms, scenes cut, others added). But actually I think the most interesting thing is the possibility that it offers an exciting new model for contemporary narrative poetry. It’s a film in verse, rather than a novel in verse. It reads like a cross between a screenplay and a poem.

Some specific qualitites of WM wouldn’t suit all subject matter or all poets – the terseness, the metre, the layout on the page, the varied line lengths. But the cinematic aesthetic – the way it’s dialogue heavy, the ‘cuts’ between long shot and close up, the use of simple visual details to set the scene – could presumably be adapted. In setting out to write a narrative poem, one could perhaps do worse than to actually storyboard it as though it were a movie. We’re brought up with cinema, so the techniques are deeply familiar to us.

Anyway, that aside, I’d recommend the poem.