Failed Poet
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1178522/
watching Little Dorrit Series now . . . we love the jane austen & dickens series . . .
but THIS is the most Kafaesque Dickens i have ever seen!
They be dealing with the “Circumlocution Department” . . . 8^D . . . They being “Flintwinch”, “Pancks”, “Sparkler”, “Plornish”, “Chivery”, not to mention Dorrit.
There are more resonances between programming and poetry than you might think. Computer science is an art form of words and punctuation, thoughtfully placed and goal-oriented, even if not necessarily deployed to evoke surprise or longing. Laid out on a page, every program uses indentations, stanzas, and a distinctive visual hierarchy to convey meaning. In the best cases, a close-reader of code will be rewarded with a sense of awe for the way ideas have been captured in words.One poet’s “road not taken” is one programmer’s “if-then-else” statement. Generations of coders have taken their first steps by finding different ways to say “Hello, World.” Arguably, you could say the same for poets.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/the-mechanical-muse
so while looking for something else, i came across this bag o’shells – namely array # 23839 from page 51 of my book Traum von dem Geschietert Dichter, eponymous of my web site, if you see how i mean. “Array” or “Paradigm” is an opuscule coposed reductio ad absurdum with the idea that “poetry is the best words in the best order” . . . but i always try to elevate to some next level what ever experiment i am making . . . at this time, just juxtaposing some arrays, which meant in the process, another experimental direction got truncated . . . see below (and gosh-darn this word-press table-software, it’s all crooked, depending on how big my screen is . . .)
the original version:
array # 23839
delusion we might excuse politicians, for being ill
delusional optimism maybe they’re just over-optimistic to the point of illness
faking pretension
tall tale everybody likes stories
exaggeration an error of quantity, rather than quality
bullshit amicable untruth
mis-statement oopsie
equivocation as in the two-handed-economist
fudging a harmless inaccuracy (in CZ, “the Bulganske Konstant”)
hedging an inaccuracy introduced by uncertainty
evasion a guilty demur
white lie a harmless guilty demur
fib an innocent, if not harmless demur
fabrication a demur made up
distortion a demur obfuscated
fiddling a deviousness
misleading mongering red-herring
misrepresentation a mendaciousness
falsehood a transparent untruth
prevarication an untruth
lie a lie
damned lie a pernicious lie
statistics yeah
deception a betrayal
out-and-out-lie trumpian lie level 1
bald-faced-lie trumpian lie level 2
propaganda goebblian lie
forgery/fraud an unredeemable lie
so, hmpf . . . there it is . . .
“During the Vietnam War, every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.” -Kurt Vonnegut
i mean, nobody quotes & mis-quotes Vonnegut as much as i do, but this one quote comes from a fellow-poet at Unlikely Books, C. Derrick Varn.
If You Have These Traits You Might Be a Writer
Karen E. Bender
So first: there is the love of language. You are, after all, working with words. For writers, there is the sense that you don’t want to read a sentence or a description or a story—you want to eat it. You want to make love to it. You want to, above all, give birth to it—which is what each work is in response to another—a birth. You are affected deeply, in a physical way, when you read a sentence, a character, a story of a writer who you admire. You are obsessed with how.
This sensitivity toward language is what people refer to as “talent.” It is described in a sort of appropriating way: “She has talent.” I have always been suspicious of the word “talent” in writing. Yes, there must be sensitivity to language and an interest in words and image and story. Virginia Woolf, describing Shakespeare, says in her essay, “The Common Reader”: “(Shakespeare), the word-coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping.”
. . .
First, yes, you need sensitivity to language.
And then the psychological traits that I believe are necessary to becoming a writer are:
a tendency toward extreme sensitivity,
openness to the imagination,
a particular stubbornness, and
a precise form of delusion.
