6/30/11

The Ever-Expanding List

Here is a list of books I'd like to read, with links to the Kindle edition or the Amazon marketplace, depending on availability. I can read books on my cell phone through the Kindle app, but for most of these I'll either wait until I get a Kindle reader for Christmas or head over to the library. Right now I'm reading The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross on my phone. Because the amount of text on each page is small, the book has around 14,000 pages. I'm halfway there.

I've heard in order to write well, one should read well. By that standard, I'm in a world of hurt. I usually read fiction at a horrendously slow pace. I made sure to list shorter fiction in a separate category from longer works, and put non-fiction material at the very top of the list. Learning new things about the real world is a big bonus for me. No poems here: I'm focusing on books with paragraphs to widen my reading horizon, or at least lengthen my attention span.
Non-Fiction/History/Science 
Common Sense by Thomas Paine
The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson
The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean
The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddharta Mukherjee
The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge
Without Conscience by Robert D. Hare
The Synaptic Self by Joseph LeDoux
NurtureShock by Bronson and Merryman
Brain Rules by John Medina
The War of Art by Steven Pressfield
Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris
The Master and His Emissary by Iain McGilchrist
A General Theory of Love by Lewis, Amini and Lannon
The Shallows by Nicholas Carr
Parasite Rex by Carl Zimmer
The Beekeeper's Lament by Hannah Nordhaus
Biophilia by Edward Wilson
Bonk by Mary Roach
Four Fish by Paul Greenberg
Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes
Freakonomics by Leavitt and Dubner
The Invisible Gorilla by Chabris and Simons
The Information by James Gleick
The Filter Bubble by Eli Pariser
Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin
Written in Stone by Brian Switek
Lost to the West Lars Brownworth
1491 by Charles C. Mann
Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl
Shorter Fiction (mainly ~250 pgs. or less) 
Post Office by Charles Bukowski
The Bride Wore Black by Cornell Woolrich
The Search for Delicious by Natalie Babbitt
The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
Rootabaga Stories by Carl Sandburg
Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
Florence of Arabia by Christopher Buckley
The Mammy by Brendan O'Carroll
The Passion by Jeanette Winterson
Pobby and Dingan by Ben Rice
Freckles by Gene Stratton-Porter
The Tent by Margaret Atwood
Stories by Anton Chekhov
The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Solzhenitsyn
The Definitive H.P. Lovecraft by H.P. Lovecraft
Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome
The Tunnel by Ernesto Sabato
Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion
Candide by Voltaire
The Wild Geese by Ogai Mori
Hunger by Knut Hamsun 
Literature & Science Fiction 
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee
The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa
Independent People by Halldor Laxness
The Waves by Virginia Woolf
The Moviegoer by Walker Percy
Islands in the Stream by Ernest Hemingway
A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul
Max Havelaar by Multatuli
The Metamorphoses by Ovid - tr. Horace Gregory
Narcissus and Goldmund by Hermann Hesse
Spring Snow by Yukio Mishima
Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon
The Children of Húrin by J.R.R.Tolkien
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin
The Fourth Awakening by Pennington and Martin
Good Omens by Pratchett and Gaiman
Dying Inside by Robert Silverberg
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis
Choke by Chuck Palahniuk
Some of the Kindle titles listed above are free, and some cheap. Most are either $9.99 or $11.99. I have a bunch of the free titles on my phone already. This e-book idea might be a good thing for me. I need to give some of the paper books in my collection away, so I have room to walk around.

6/24/11

The Semantics of Nonsense

I have so far used three ways to create poetic nonsense, through imagination, mangled translation, and crafty manipulation of speech recognition software. I can't say which is more fun.

I. Imagination
This piece is like an ancient creed,  its rhetoric quite noble -
The Code of Sirinthia 
The notion that by still grace we are made holy,
     is like kneading liquid turnips without butter.
Correct ungodly mayhem in steadfast devotion to cheese.
Knowest thy mercy leadeth all righteous manner
    of tumescence into the word inviolate,
    of spoons making chordless cheddar sounds through a tuba,
    of live piquant tamarinds in fish sauce painting mangoes,
    of dew-riddled salamanders speaking prickly lawnmower slang.
We, who sit in majesty, waken joyously
    to the reincarnation of rutabagas
    and recall the blows of those
    who never ceased to call, ever mightily,
    upon the liver of penguins.
By right conduct we uphold the breakfast meetings once held
    by the mighty sleepwalker kings,
    as the plundered princesses
    carry the grand makeshift cycle
    of the psychic pimple to a head.
Here is an example of crafting the utterly ridiculous without the aid of electronic software. The poem's inspiration was a friend of mine, who was asked what he believed in. His reply: "I'm a Sirinthian. We believe in the reincarnation of rutabagas." Soon after I crafted this to codify the tenets of said belief system. I posted it a few years back on craiglist, of all places, and got very useful feedback. A gentlemen suggested using the word uphold in lieu of behold, because it makes more sense semantically. I took the advice and learned a valuable lesson. Sometimes you need to make sense in order to be demented.

II. Mangled Translation
This is a piece inspired by a friend who suggested taking lyrics and running them back and forth through an online translator called Babel Fish -
Babel Fish Translation of Stairway to Heaven
German to Spanish to Russian to English (Edited) 

Sure, the lady has one! First she has reliably everything:
the sparks of gold and the purchase of stairs to the sky.
If purpose holds it there, if entire memory with the word is closed,
she stops and obtains that it has arrived.
And the stairs, she buys them to the sky.

It gives the instruction on the wall, but she wanted to be safe,
because sometimes words, they have two reasons.
In the shaft next to the flow, which the bird gives,
will be all our misgiven thought.
            Sometimes, form is a miracle. Oh, form, it is a miracle.

It gives sensation, which is received if I glance to the West
and my alcoholic stupor, which is necessary to go away into smoke rings,
is made longer by the jaunty ego of thought than by the shafts in question.
Form expresses miracles. Oh, form, it is a miracle.

And it is whispered that soon, if we all conduct the melody,
the Piper will order that we conclude.
There will be a new day for dawn,
against which they who desire resound,
and the forest will have an uproar of laughter.

If it is precipitated in the hedgerow,
what is alarming you now will require pliability
when the May queen sufficiently completes her job.
Yes, two clean roads, which can be exchanged
for the changing road they set on fire.
And it gives formation to the miracle.

When your head snores, you do not know
that the Piper is connecting to it.
Lady, can you hear the wind burn, and did you know
the stairs to your bed are whispering in wind?

Then as our road coils downward,
the curtains go more above our souls.
We give one lady we entirely know
the chance to show, in her white light intensity,
that everything returns to gold.
And if you pay strong attention,
the melody will finally arrive.
When one and one is everything
then by rock and by roller…
… you will not purchase stairs to the sky.
I actually did more than the title suggests, using the translator to put it from English to German to English to Spanish to English to Russian to English. Each time the words became more and more removed from the original, so that "a tree by the brook" became "the shaft next to the flow," etc. I like how the translation added the word not to the last line. Of course I then edited the end result some. Try your own song. It's actually a fun thing to do with friends! 

The overall resulting mess needed heavy editing to achieve a rhetorical effect. Just as with the poem before, the writer needs to consider the piece as a whole and how the words lead up to one another - semantically. So long as the work possesses some form of internal logic, an audience has a greater chance of appreciating the inanity.

III. Manipulating Speech Recognition Software (and Xtranormal)
I was pleased Windows 7 comes with speech recognition software, but irritated that it doesn't understand what I say as often as I like. I turned the whole thing into a game, shouting nonsense into the program, watching 60 % get misunderstood, and editing the end result. I then took the text and ran it through the Xtranormal Movie Maker and had a robot narrate. Here it is on YouTube -


It's all about the delivery. I think the robot does a nice job, plus it helps that I added special effects at key moments. Certain phrases get repeated. Repetition is a useful poetic device. Here the repetition emphasizes the deeply meaningful idea that St. Stephen is not the rain. I think that about sums it up.