Bouncing between them
4 October 2006 04:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Tag-team reading can produce interesting effects. Normally I wouldn't expect a chicklitty corporate fantasy and a thumping chanson de geste (I adore the horses' expressions on that cover. Adore. They are the world's most dubious equines. With perms!) to play well together, but Aymeri's battles with Moors and Katie's against industrial espionage ping nicely off each other. Unexpected, that.
OTOH, Imagination's Other Place goes well with neither. The subtitle claims this is Poems of Science and Mathematics compiled by Helen Plotz. It's actually a stunning gallimaufry of verse: a few bits good, many banal, and all too much bathetic.
Pause to let
sovay and
dancinghorse shudder at the thought.
Its flavor can be adequately conveyed with the last stanza:
---L.
OTOH, Imagination's Other Place goes well with neither. The subtitle claims this is Poems of Science and Mathematics compiled by Helen Plotz. It's actually a stunning gallimaufry of verse: a few bits good, many banal, and all too much bathetic.
Behold within our Hayden Planetariumbegins a straight-faced Ode to that institution by one Authur Guiterman. Undistinguished A.E. Housman is followed by dreadful Carl Sandburg, followed in turn by a limerick about a young man from Trinity. More odes to Newton and Einstein than you can shake a pentameter at. And then there's an extract of W.H. Mallock's translation of Lucretius into rubaiyat stanzas.
More stars than there are fish in the aquarium
Pause to let
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Its flavor can be adequately conveyed with the last stanza:
Oh Science, lift aloud thy voice that stillsI am in awe that not just the translator but the editor thought this was a good idea. Just not the good sort of awe.
The pulse of fear, and through the conscience thrills--
Thrills through the conscience the news of peace--
How beautiful thy feet are on the hills!
---L.
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Date: 5 October 2006 12:01 am (UTC)Just to start, technically, it should be "O Science", you were are going to use such a repellant phrase to start with.
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Date: 5 October 2006 12:04 am (UTC)---L.
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Date: 5 October 2006 12:36 am (UTC)I mean, it's pretty difficult to get Fitzgerald to spin in his grave because of the lack of quality of verse, y'know?
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Date: 5 October 2006 07:43 am (UTC)That said, tonight I found something that's actually worse: a parody of "The Jabberwocky" using geometry terms, done as a ballad of proving a Euclid theorem. Which manages to be not only bad but offensive -- as someone with a math degree, I resent the implication that the precisely meaningful words of the field are as nonsensical as Carroll's neologisms. The poetaster's tin ear only makes it worse.
---L.
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Date: 5 October 2006 12:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 5 October 2006 07:47 am (UTC)---L.
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Date: 5 October 2006 09:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 5 October 2006 04:12 pm (UTC)Thanks for the recco -- it's thumping meter, but that's good for the genre. Based on it, I'm shelling out for Newth's expensive collection of six.
---L.
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Date: 9 October 2006 02:27 am (UTC)The pulse of fear, and through the conscience thrills--
Thrills through the conscience the news of peace--
How beautiful thy feet are on the hills!
Excuse me while I drink myself insensible.
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Date: 9 October 2006 02:48 pm (UTC)---L.