Author: admindavid

It <SlaughterHouse 5> doesn’t tell us how to get to the planet Tralfamadore, but it does tell us how to communicate with its inhabitants. All we have to do is build something big, like the Pyramids or the Great Wall of China. Maybe the wall that some individual whom I will not name is planning to build between the United States and Mexico will be read as an urgent message on Tralfamadore. The person who wants to build the wall will not know what the message means, of course. He is a pawn, being manipulated by a power greater than his to send the message in this time of great emergency.

I hope the message reads, “Help.”

salmon rushdie

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/what-kurt-vonneguts-slaughterhouse-five-tells-us-now

Poets writing poems about poetry is perhaps the peak of human expression. The struggle to perfect the craft is a real one:

Sweating bullets,
the poet counted the syllables
and rearranged her lines
until her tanka poem
was utter perfection.

https://examples.yourdictionary.com/examples-of-tanka-poetry.html

i’m a little cranky this morning
it’s so early and my rest was uneasy
i seek inspiration on the web
but find irritation, instead with tanka
about tanka

never mind, you, what am i doing here
never mind that i am judgemental
but to climb ‘the peak of human expression’
and to find such a lowly foothill
disappoints

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.