My Book!

Check out my book on Amazon.

https://www.amazon.com/Just-Today-Ed-Luhrs/dp/B0F9P9V1Z9

The Golden Key to the Secret Treasury

This story had its beginnings in 1997. I added recent details to give it humor.

Read the tale on Google Docs.

— Brother — Sweetgum — Remembers —
Bonus Article by Richard Pindell (In Memoriam)

I was inspired to be creative by Libby Tucker, Richard Pindell, and so many other faculty members that I had in my student days at Binghamton University. Professor Pindell gave me the nickname "Brother Sweetgum" in class, which I got for correctly identifying the name of a tree, and Professor Tucker taught me the value of studying folklore.

Using Logical Perspective to Shape a Jazz Essay

Sidney Bechet (1897-1959)

This is an essay within an essay, the inner one being about music and the outer about strategies one can use to shape a topic. The two are meant to work together to show how academic purpose can be matched with resources that suit the writing. I hope it to be of equal utility to writers and music enthusiasts as it is for discussion in a class.

Read the essay on Google Docs.

In making this essay I maintained a focus of musical choices in connection to  the narrative. I made a point to emphasize musicians that hail from New York, but as you see, the music covers a wide variety. Some names have yet to be mentioned that can become part of the picture. A student suggested Allan Holdsworth to me, and I went home to discover The Sixteen Men of Tain (2000). Brilliant. I can add others, trombone players — Frank Rosolino (1956), “I May Be Wrong (But I Think You’re Wonderful).” Hiroshi Suzuki gets slick in Cat (1975). Then Albert Mangelsdorff,  a German trombone guru, did something unique and coupled a folk song from the northern reaches of the New World with free jazz in “Icy Acres” (1969). Sure there are others yet: feel free to mention any favorite performers that you have in the comments.

Sotirios Chianis

Here is a short film (1968/1972) made in cooperation with SUNY, Discovering the Music of the Middle East, featuring a music professor I had at Binghamton, an ethnomusicologist who also taught a course about the Romantic Era. (We learned, among other things, that Debussy heard gamelan music at the World's Fair and that Mahler had a fondness for Chinese poetry, then had a great feast at the end of the semester.) Here he is performing at the opening, Dr. Sotirios (Sam) Chianis, a scholar of musical traditions and brilliant performer of traditional music.

The Unanswered Question Revisited

This is a tribute to the six parts of Leonard Bernstein's Norton Lectures at Harvard University from 1973, a mix of his words and my own to provide transition.

ONE

Knowing a thing
in the context of other disciplines,
a quixotic foray —
whither music?
Understanding whence —
what music? whose music?
Copland, Bach, Stravinsky, Ravel
tapping the code of raga,
a musical grammar
underlying human speech,
the varied nature
and structural functions of mind,
abstracting larger principles
of how we are constituted,
our innate grammatical competence
that proclaims its autonomy —
music, a metaphoric phenomenon
expressing affective existence
through mathematically
measurable elements —
phonology, syntax, semantics,
sound plus structure;
begin with the anatomical,
the protosyllable ma,
how it leaps from the breast
of mother into sound —
the processes of speech,
grammar known and unknown,
human kinship, love —
open the breath to vocalize ah…
hablar, falar, fabulare,
the branches of the olive vine,
common origin,
the mists of prehistory
where all mothers grew,
where bad is small,
the gods big thereby good,
the growling great, grow, groot, God;
and once again the baby, ictus and glide,
the mouth mother morpheme
rewritten as a pitch event —
music as heightened speech,
hunger, anticipation, aggression,
the physical manifestations of affect,
gooseflesh and moist feelings,
music among patterns —
the singsong tease "Little Sally Water"
plaintively expanded,
a constellation of two-and-three note
variants the world over —
vibrating bodies emitting waves,
the tonic and its overtones,
fractional segments vibrating separately;
and five notes away, the dominant,
itself a fourth away from the next overtone,
then the third, making the fundamental
and the three pitches — the triad,
one of many cultural expressions,
tempered to tonal harmony,
the blue notes resting
in the spaces between,
the birth of pentatonic longing
and the tonal centers.


TWO

The deep structure
and the surface structure of language;
deletion (of underlying strings) in syntax
produces surface structures
that make the components of a sentence —
the aesthetics of this as poetry,
the prosaic elements not there,
musical prose and its underlying strings,
transposing strings;
the metaphorical leap,
our innate symmetrical instinct intact,
the resolution of yes and no, lingam and yoni,
how one and other become fulfilled —
Mozart, a string of dualities,
the 40th symphony…
two within four within eight
just so, just so
are the things left unsaid —
we learn symmetry
is not necessarily balance;
structures undergo
principles of transformation and deletion,
the aggregations of phrases,
contrapuntal syntax,
the interweaving,
the perception of structure,
repositioning and permutation,
pronominalization —
we reach a dead duck —
yet the music is ongoing,
side-slipping on skis,
conjoining, developing deletions,
inversions, strong weak strong —
another dead duck, another conjoining,
crazy side-slipping, embedding,
enjoining a single sentence of music,
the first period.


THREE

A broad dispassionate view —
the beauty of ambiguity,
a reminiscence of phonology,
syntax, semantics, meaning —
The whole town was populated
by old men and women…
war, or aging,
the deep structures
combined and condensed,
yoked together —
now Stravinsky,
a series of nouns,
the harmonic support
a verbal adjective;
the zeugma of poetry,
decision-making steps,
grammatical justification,
finding a poetic level:
the broken
semantic rules of metaphor,
sidereal organisms…
Juliet is the sun —
abnormal human speech,
transformational principles,
lexical meanings, deletions,
radiant metaphor,
literal discourse,
inner corporeal logic,
beauty born, music —
unburdened
by literal semantic weights,
two metaphors undergo
instantaneous transformation,
not radiance nor brownness
but the rhythm,
harmonic progressions,
semantics, the weak link,
the prolongation
of the ictus of the protosyllable ma —
Jack and Jill, Harry and John and golf
and persuasion, a Chomsky trap
from willy nilly to meaningful,
the tonal structures playing,
semantic thinking,
juggling the game of notes,
puns of twelve letters
working vertically and horizontally,
a continuing play of sonic anagrams;
significational sensory data
release energy and the affective functions;
intrinsic meanings
not to be confused with specific moods,
pictorial impressions, stories —
a stream of metaphors is the thesis…
the Pastoral Symphony of Beethoven —
merry peasants, brooks,
and birds sportively juggled,
offering something fluid,
the sounding notes combined
eliciting subjective associations…
Is affect intrinsic or merely a transference
via the notes from the composer
to the performer to the listener?
Moments coy and wheedling
with tears and passion
offer a drama of pleading and refusal —
then firm agreement, conditions settled.


FOUR

Beyond duality,
the growing
accretion of chromaticism,
contained and containing
the diatonic nodes
in a tonic dominant frame —
to be within the container
and to form the frame,
a beauty that depends
on ambiguous surface structures —
Mahler’s Adagietto, the swooning
notes that lean on resolution,
the surface notes of the triad, just so,
these again recall
a youthful teasing chant —
the semantic ambiguities
so well accentuated by Beethoven,
the modified series
of tonic dominant changes
before the return —
artist, priest, prophet,
the divine rights
of greater expression,
new freedoms,
an expanding universe
of the artists’ personal passions —
Romanticism, together
with the New Chromaticism,
volcanic sparks;
the madness of Schumann,
the festival
of rhythic symmetry
in Carnaval, marching
in three quarter time,
or the Symphonic Études
landing odd footing —
and Chopin, somewhere
between tonal and modal,
the implied sound resonating
between the chords —
submediants and subdominants
falling almost in key,
just before the true cadence —
musical semantics,
chromaticism in poetry,
the freedom to pursue sound
for its own sake,
new sonic relationships,
labials and plosives —
the sonorous beauty
of "The Leaden Echo
and the Golden Echo,"
a chromatic plea
to keep beauty
from vanishing away,
farther and farther
from center,
the semantic vacuum filled
by interweaving poetic tones —
the contiguous styles
of Berlioz and Beethoven,
the great dramas told orchestrally.


FIVE

An urbane dance, pleased with itself,
unaware of crisis, similar either/or
moments present in Wagner or Debussy,
the ambiguous chromatic color
of 1908, Rapsodie Espagnole,
contained among familiar counterparts,
safe before war,
before Mahler bid the last farewells to tonality
and the doubts and terrors of the Sibelius Fourth —
Karl Kraus declaring the degeneration of language,
and the stretched Wagnerian tonalities of Schoenberg
of a sudden become
too many notes and too many meanings,
leading to artistic shifts,
upheaval and renunciation:
air from another planet, unconfined,
Ives and his Unanswered Question —
a sustained footing,
pierced by the trumpet’s pleading
amid retorts growing farther and farther from sense,
only the pulsing G major remaining to answer —
so the question of clarity and confusion begins;
joined by the same desire for expressive drive,
to expand metaphorical speech,
other voices enter the music of the times,
convulsive tonalities, logical antinomies
of the cultural crisis,
a break from syntactic structures
based on odd symmetry,
aleatoric riddles of atonality,
Pierrot lunaire for voice and instruments,
Sprechtstimme, the glory of heightened speech;
the ictus present here again,
the ungovernable freedoms difficult to follow,
despite the brilliant inner procedures
of canonic inversion, retrogrades and the rest;
moving counter to innate tonal drive,
the tone rows outlining the occasional triad,
a burly Till Eulenspiegel melody
under a romp that remembers Wagner,
aesthetic order among members
of the new democracy forming the chain
along which new surface structures arise.


SIX

Whether Verdi, an Italian
writing phony Egyptian ballet music,
or the silk-gowned Wagner
following the wanderings
of the penitent fool,
the sincerity of the line remains —
“Fern Hill” flies —
blessings on the poet’s artifices
that give it wings!
On all artifices
that make the emotions
aesthetically pleasant and intelligible;
the Firebird that gave its first glow,
and Satie,
casually delivering musical objects,
a sincere triviality, whimsy, Parade;
the rattle of a typewriter
and the sound of an amplified puddle —
then the toy waltzes and calliopes
in Petrouchka, contemplating a world
of affective detachment recorded
in personal language,
object added to object,
touchingly mechanical, pitiless,
the great artificer
with his bag of tricks,
the duality of the puppet
concealing a passionate human heart
through syntactic rhythmic displacement —
the phonology, syntax, and semantics
of tonal refreshment,
the phonological slides of dissonance,
the expansion of the triadic idea,
mitosis by polytonality,
the tri-toned interval of Debussy’s Faun
and Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto,
an unstable relationship between triads;
or those two chords, equally consonant
in themselves, that combined strike
the raw primal blow in Rite —
the revivifying art
of asymmetrical language,
between phrase structure
and motivic structure,
new pulses and jabs,
fashioned out of tiny motivic cells,
like a kaleidoscope fashioned
from jagged pieces of broken glass,
the asymmetry racket in full color —
sets of rhythms buried
one within the other,
a musical folklore
of anthropological metaphors
and atavistic blood constellations.

The Major Arcana

This fantasy sketch is based on the Thoth tarot.

THE FOOL rises from the womb of innocence. He is Parsifal and Dionysus, spiraling from the readiness of heart into risk. THE MAGUS, on wings of creation, works the dual strands of truth and illusion into an imperfect fabric of energy. THE PRIESTESS cultivates the vast garden of her inner vision through arid terrain, the moon her guide. THE EMPRESS is beauty. She is mother and lover, the fruition of generosity, while THE EMPEROR with the fire of Mars fathers the completion of her gifts. He, however, must care to know what power can generate, and what can destroy. THE HIEROPHANT rules the dominion of mind. He unites with Venus, she who implements the wisdom of his energies to inform and to instruct. But THE LOVERS have little need of this, their contradictions concerned merely with the complexity of union. Their progeny complete the ceremony of generation. From this path THE CHARIOT rolls forth, unshackled, to seek the fortunes of the Grail. This sovereignty attempts balance, but ADJUSTMENT is necessary. No amount of fortune and creativity can be sustained without weathering the storms of imperfect direction. Then comes THE HERMIT, with quiet wealth of inner clarity, the stranger who seeks union only with those who foster his vision. What unexpected gifts come from FORTUNE? The sun, the center of the wheel, emanates outward into realms of possibility, into LUST. The energy of transformation burns brighter than propriety. It consumes it utterly. But there is a stalemate — THE HANGED MAN loses trust of intuition, comes to the naked reality that life abounds in struggle, despair. DEATH. Osiris rules these parts, the skeleton with scythe harvesting decay among the swimming predation and the gaseous bubbles. This is transformation of old into new, the broken essence that leads to creation. There is no temperance here. ART, the integration of fire and water, light and dark, male, female, death, rebirth, is the thirst of the lion and the eagle. Examine the inner realms of the Earth; by cleansing you will find the hidden stone. The giant balls of THE DEVIL, with the horned energy of Pan, culminate in the third eye of laughter that sees the dry, staid folly of ignorance for what it is. THE TOWER has been destroyed, the outmoded hindrances, gone. From the sheer mass of chaos comes transformation, knowledge of being. THE STAR is a guide liberating us from the bonds of fanaticism and illusion; THE MOON shines over this struggle. It is the seductive charm of shadows, drawing attention to blind forces. Be vigilant. THE SUN radiates at the center of creative union. It is ripening and fruition. THE AEON of Horus is at hand. There is no condemnation, only recognition of what has fallen from harmony. From thence comes the dance of completion, elemental grace, the great expanse of THE UNIVERSE.

The Imaginarian

In the mind
of the imaginarian
there are bubbles
that become
urgent as molasses,
the placid movement
of time a drudgery.

But then wings
of angelic forms come to light
and a vast horizon of being
stretches outward
to new adventures.

Go for those adventures,
o wingéd Pegasus,
and with equine strength
weigh improbably upward
like a vast eagle.

Not So Simple

Here are some topics we discuss as examples of science and technology reporting in my classes, bringing home the point that oversimplification of information often leads to lack of clarity.

Graphene

This 2013 article was posted to reddit about two weeks ago and got plenty of upvotes as if it were a new and easy magical thing -

http://gizmodo.com/5990876/lockheeds-new-carbon-filter-takes-all-the-effort-out-of-desalinization

Graphene has awesome potential as both an electrical conductor and a molecular sieve, but there is more work to be done to make its use practical on a larger scale. This MIT article from last year looks like a more reasonable update on graphene’s use as a filter - 

http://news.mit.edu/2015/repair-graphene-leaks-0508

Wolves

Check out the different focal points of this video and article, both from 2014 -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysa5OBhXz-Q

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/10/opinion/is-the-wolf-a-real-american-hero.html

The feel-good style of the video has touched far more hearts than Arthur Middleton’s more balanced analysis published a month afterward, but the question is do we want to dig deeper? 

Fiber

This article focuses on meat and cheese -

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-3534246/Western-diets-high-meat-dairy-salt-eroding-gut-bacteria-scientists-say.html

This article focuses on fiber -

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-04/cp-cmf040516.php

Which of the two gives a more accurate depiction of the research?

Rocket Science

Finally, consider this op-ed from last year, which encourages us to
understand discovery as hard effort rather than a moment of epiphany -

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/16/opinion/it-is-in-fact-rocket-science.html

These kinds of distinctions are important when evaluating information.

Bread Keeper

at the nexus
of lord and loaf
the grain supply
the holders of plenty
and the bread beggars

the shepherd of sums
exacts his due
from the low places
he himself
bathed in the glass light
of heaven

father, son, ghost
the one law
of plentitude
in communion

blessed the high walls
of providence
sun, soil, and rain
on the fields of eternity

blessed the plow and yoke
the share exacted
the protection given

blessed the poor
the compliant
the copper-filled pockets
of towns become
cities, states, nations at war

Santa Loves You

Never forget Santa's love :-)
I composed this tune with MuseScore
and edited the video in Movie Maker.

The Secret of Kells

Aithníonn ciaróg ciaróg eile... one beetle recognizes another. Here is a very cool animated film called The Secret of Kells, which you can find among other places on Amazon Instant Video. The character Aisling (left) is a real marvel, but Brendan, the main character on the right, is the star. The film got nominated for an Oscar in 2010. I highly recommend it.

Crewcut (Ellen Umansky)

Here is one of Playboy magazine's college fiction contest winners with a story from the October 1991 edition:

http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?dggu2ik7wsulvsx

Were I a fiction editor putting together an anthology of contemporary stories, I'd consider "Crewcut" in a heartbeat. References to the story on the web are scarce, so I uploaded my copy of it in PDF format. Umansky gets inside the head of the young female character, who is dealing with family dysfunction while discovering her own identity.

I have had the story in my files for close to twenty years now. I remember the hassle I went through to photocopy the story at the SUNY Binghamton library, brown-paper bagging the cover of the magazine, struggling to get the job done quickly. I'm glad I did.

I lived off campus that semester. This was one of magazines the guys had lying around the living room. One day I got bored and wondered if the actual words in Playboy were any good; sure enough, every now and then, they strike gold, as is the case here. I hope you enjoy the story as much as I did. Happy December!

Like the Scribes of Old, We Wrote

Though only a small percentage of Earth's population had George Kleinmeier as an elementary school principal, I feel compelled to share the punishment assignment that the bad children received in detention if they got caught having a food fight in the cafeteria.

First, some background. Mr. Kleinmeier, an old-school patriot and formerly an English teacher, had traditional ideas about teaching. In order to get us schooled in writing mechanics, he had every student write verbatim something called The Agenda, which explained "the parts of speech, the basic tools of communication." Each of us would write the whole thing down, in fourth grade, then in the fifth and sixth grades - three times, so not to forget. When the weather was warm, he'd take us out in groups in the morning to do jumping jacks, sit ups, and run around the track. Gym wasn't enough. He counted on his loudspeaker, and we hopped to action by our desks.

The bad kids who went to detention got a little something extra. Here is the text:

I AM THE NATION 

I was born July 4, 1776, and The Declaration of Independence is my birth certificate. The blood of the world runs in my veins, because I offer freedom to the oppressed. I am the nation.

I am 250 million living souls and the ghosts of millions more who have lived, fought and died for me.

I am Nathan Hale and Paul Revere. I stood at Lexington and fired the shot heard around the world. I am Washington, Jefferson and Patrick Henry. I am John Paul Jones, the Green Mountain Boys and Davy Crockett. I am Lee, Grant and Lincoln.

I remember the Alamo, the Maine, Pearl Harbor. When freedom called, I answered and stayed until it was over, over there. I left my heroic dead in Flanders Fields, the rock of Corregidor, on the bleak slopes of Korea, in the steaming jungle of Vietnam and the desert sands of Kuwait.

I am the Brooklyn Bridge, the wheat lands of Kansas, the granite hills of Vermont. I am the coal mines of the Virginias and Pennsylvania, the fertile lands of the West, the Golden Gate and Grand Canyon. I am Independence Hall, the Monitor, the Merrimack and the Challenger.

I am big. I sprawl from the Atlantic to the Pacific... more than three million square miles of land throbbing with industry, more than two million farms. I am forest, field, mountain and desert. I am quiet villages, cities that never sleep. 

Look at me; see Ben Franklin walking down the streets of Philadelphia with his bread loaf under his arm; see Betsy Ross with her needle; see the lights of Christmas and hear the strains of "Auld Lang Syne" as the calendar turns. 

I am Babe Ruth and the World Series. I am 200,000 schools, colleges and more than 300,000 churches where my people worship God as they choose. I am a ballot dropped into a box, the roar of a crowd in a stadium, the voice of a choir in a cathedral. I am an editorial in a newspaper and a letter to Congress.

I am John Glenn, Neil Armstrong and their fellow astronauts who whirl through space. I am Eli Whitney, Stephen Foster, Tom Edison, Albert Einstein and Billy Graham.

I am Horace Greeley, Will Rodgers, the Wright brothers. I am George Washington Carver, Jonas Salk and Martin Luther King, Jr. I am Longfellow, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Walt Whitman and Thomas Paine.

May I always possess the integrity, courage and strength to keep myself unshackled, to remain a citadel of freedom and a beacon of hope to the world.  

Yes, I am the nation. These are the things that I am. I was conceived in freedom, and God willing, in freedom I shall spend the rest of my days.

It's equal parts historical reminiscence and flag-waving - not a bad sort of thing on account of its emphasis on freedom and democracy, but still, it has that distinct ring of patriotism. Seeking to reclaim my own history, since I was among those who had to write it verbatim in detention, I began an Internet search for the text. The author is Otto Whittaker.

So much writing gets lost in time. If it weren't for the medieval monks writing down verbatim the Greek and Roman classics, we wouldn't have those to read. In a similar way, Mr. Kleinmeier kept this piece of Americana alive in my memory. Writing of this sort preserves the ethos of a generation, which in the present day gives us the ability to evaluate what matters to us most. As an example, let me share an old Etruscan temple inscription from the 5th century B.C., unearthed by Massimo Pallottino in 1964:

DEDICATION AT PYRGI 

This temple and this statue
have been dedicated to Uni.
Thefarie Velianas, head of the community,
donated it for the worship of our peoples.
The temple and sanctuary
and the consecration of their boundaries
in the month of Xurvar, were given
as gifts during his three-year reign.
This record together with the divinity statue
shall thus be buried by order of the Zilach,
that the years may outlast the stars.

We'll never know Thefarie Velianas, Uni, the month of Xurvar, or the Zilach any much more than as names on the inscription, but we do know at least that they were a proud people, eager to be remembered by ensuing generations. Nothing outlasts the stars, not even us, but hopefully we'll go on with the best we've got.

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.

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.

Daily Office

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