melannen | That's good enough for me.

Current Mood: high
Current Music: Sesame Street - C is for Cookie

That's good enough for me.

Okay, I take back everything bad I said about my poetry workshop. It is fun fun fun to be the only formalist in a class that is basically "Remedial Form for Free-verse Writers". >:D
Of course, I'm probably not getting much out of the class; as I said to the laughter of a class struggling to get iambic pentameter, what I probably need at this point is a teacher who will kindly force me to read and write reams of bad free verse, so I can lose the bad habits I've built up. Also Laura seems to see poetry as limited by language, not poetry as *creating* language, as I do. We had a poem due this week, in blank verse. I have not been feeling poetically inspired lately, but I have been re-reading reams of Shakespeare, and hence am thinking largely in blank verse, so I just sat down five minutes before class and wrote stream-of-consciousness. And since I'm still hopped up on poetry ketones, I'm going to break one of the primary rules of keeping an interesting journal, and post said poem, *without an lj-cut* Fear me, for I am gothy.

Grammar's a forgotten word for magic.
Glamour, grammarie, it's all the same
at root, where words and things are made. Spelling
is a spell.
Abracadabra into alphabet.
Abcdefghijklmnopqrstuv-
wxyz. Sesame and poppyseed.
Eat not the bread of fairyland.
The flesh made word is nothing of the world.

Real toads aren't toads. They're too, too solid flesh.
A garden sewn with words, a poison dew.
A real toad is a word.
Words shape creation, throwing light.
Mene, mene, tekel upharsin.
Measured. Counted. Power and control.
Words are for sorcerers. I am become--
Know what you change, and that you change, and why
before you change it. Only words forget.

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Glamour, grammarie, it's all the same...

I was about to post a comment complaining that Sir Walter Scott's to blame for that, but upon closer examination it looks like it just wasn't in literary use before him - he got it from Scots usage, so we don't have to point our fingers and say "those silly Vickies, mucking it all up!" after all....

.. though e2 claims that he was responsible in typical Victorian style for inventing tartans for clans who had lost theirs over the years due to crown suppression and such, though I can't verify this (I can only find a tartan that might make a nice dish towel but which I wouldn't want to wear.) Not that there's anything wrong with this, so long as you realize the kilt you're wearing was made up by Sir Walter Scott (pretty neat in and of itself) rather than actually being something associated with their clan.. of course, tartans didn't really become explicitly associated with particular clans until around that time anyway, so caring too much about this is probably silly. (I still want a kilt in a Clan Drummond tartan, though, 'cause Bonnie Prince Charlie wore it from time to time, and there's a scrap of fabric and a letter in the Museum of Scotland to prove it. (Not that it's necessarily not a fake, mind you.))

So there you go. His Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border probably also earns a "Silly Vickie" label at least in part, but it's Sir Walter Scott and we loves him anyway.

Didn't we have a conversation about Vickies and restoration vs. conservation not that long ago? I think it's time to go home now.

Mind you, I very much like the poem, especially

Abcdefghijklmnopqrstuv-
wxyz.

which calls up very early memories of listening to Sesame Street records (records!) on an old Fisher Price record player.

Oh yes, and Jessica in the Neverwhere miniseries reminds me way too much of Laura.

Oh *great*. You like the part I stole from song lyrics. :P I was basically riffing off Eliot in the style, you realise.

And gosh, you dislike Laura. ;) They're of the same type, I guess. Nervous organizer. If Jessica was more concerned about art and helping people than money, and had far less confidence in herself, and was worried about compassion, and had ADD, and wasn't nearly as scarily good at what she did, and was anything more than a negative caricature. Then maybe.

it's not your fault, and worse than you rip off Eliot and song lyrics and post it in their ljs.

i don't dislike Laura.. we, um, just don't always work well together. yup. each of us has a tendency to misinterpret what the other says.. if it's either of our faults, it's both. if the actress had not looked not entirely unlike Laura it wouldn't have worked.

I wasn't 'ripping off,' I was 'riffing off.'

Really. I'm not that conceited.

To quote Da Man himself, "The immature poet imitates; the mature poet plagiarizes."

Anyway, what's not my fault?

It's not your fault that I liked the sesame street reference because you most likely weren't thinking of my memory (though perhaps one like it) when you wrote it;-)

Well, I mean I thought I'd only pounded the Sesame Street ref in with a nine pound *hammer*, but yeah.

I don't ever remember them actually singing that song on the show itself, just on this record that wasn't actually even produced by CTW. My memory may be playing tricks on me. And even so, it makes me think of the part of my childhood before my parents got divorced, which I don't think of as being as unpleasant as most of the rest. All the ones I can think of are pleasant except for the time I got a splinter in my butt from the slide at my preschool (no, the slide itself wasn't wooden, but the 'launching platform' at the top was...)

Er, </ramble>. What were we talking about again?

No idea.

It was definitely on the show. They strung a big banner across Sesame Street to celebrate some sort of alphabet holiday, and Big Bird came in halfway through and thought the banner was a word, so he pronounced it.

It had Snuffleupagus somewhere in there, too. He was my favorite character.

Do you *really* think I'd use etymology in a poem without checking it? ;)

Actually, I was less than enthusiastic about glamour there, because I realize that despite the OED it's a shaky derivation, but frankly, given my intended audience, there's a less than even probability any of 'em will know either of those words, so I thought I'd double my chances. (I suppose I should try to work "grimoire" in there, too, and hope for the best.)

My poem this week was about a pomegranate, and only one other student had even any idea what one looked like, and I don't think anybody but Laura got the classical allusions. And we had a long discussion in which I tried to convince them it's pretty safe to assume that in an abandoned lot, any grass that's growing will be more than a few inches high, as there's nothing there to cut it short.

At any rate, you're the working linguist, but I seem to recall the last time I read our dictionary that the association of words about magic and words about words was fairly widespread and went back to indo-european. But that was an aged dictionary. Pre-Chomsky. So I tend to sound like someone who learned English from a very old book. :)

I just assume you're all-wise and all-knowing;-) You won't have any argument about the association of magic and words. You've got the whole 'true name' thing which I believe is a strong theme in the Jewish Kabbalah, the words 'enchantment' (and 'charm' which comes from the same 'to sing' root), 'spell' of course.. unfortunately I can't get to the OED from home or I'd make pronouncements about magus, sorcerer, hex, curse, witch, etc.. I should figure out what's involved in that VPN stuff..

stellar_dust should know. Grimoire is probably more familiar than grammarie, at least in silly fantasy novels.

I hope to Zeus your classical allusions were deeper than just Persophone eating pomegranate seeds (I can't think of anything else off the top of my head, but then I rely on google to hold my memory for me) but I guess it wouldn't be that surprising if they'd never even heard of that. Me, I was reading books about mythology in my church library when I was young. In fact, I think there was a dried pomegranate on one of the dried floral thingies there. The grass thing is so disturbing I'm just going to forget you mentioned it.

At any rate, I'm about as much of a working linguist as you are a working physicist, which is to say that I'm almost, but not entirely, completely unlike a working linguist.

Well, charm and chant, and curse is from cross; witch wizard etc and magic mage etc both come roots for wise; hex I think is from math, actually, hex symbols are often hexagonally symmetrical. Sorcery I must admit I don't know offhand, but it could be the same root as "strega", which is another "wise woman" thing-- ah, no, it's another math one: same root as "sort." Destiny and all that.

The problem is they don't get silly fantasy novels, ne?

The allusions were more general pomegranate as food of the dead, actually, didn't mention dear Persephone by name. Just by title.

I *am* entirely unlike a working physicist. You, at least, are working. :P

Well, I wouldn't go so far as that. I get paid, and sometimes I write code, especially when they ask me to do so. I wouldn't call it so much "working" as "sitting at a desk and sometimes writing and thinking about code." You see, I share with

stellar_dust the goal of doing as little real work as possible (work being defined as something I don't want to be doing) and still gaining the praise and admiration of my superiors. This will someday bite me, but hasn't yet.

Besides, geology (your nominal field) follows from physics, while as a computer scientist (at best) or software engineer (at worst) I merely use tools other people wrote to do things with language without really understanding it and if I pick up some linguistics along the way it was probably just an accident. So at best I'm doing something almost, but not entirely unlike working, while you're doing something almost but not entirely unlike physics. So it tracks;-)

And 'fate' is from 'fatum,' that which has been spoken. Hex seems to have nothing to do with six and is actually from the same root as 'hag' but beyond that things seem murky. The OED disagrees with you about curse but doesn't really offer anything better:(

Hmm, umd.edu appears to be down. How odd.

Anyway, OIT has very easy instructions for setting up VPN. Assuming you're on a windows box, you download a thingee, install it, and it should work. You'll have to give it your directory name and password.

I suppose I'm going to lose my spiffy access to UMD's e-journal subscriptions in a few weeks .. very sad. *sniffle*

Good Lord. I'm going to go look at something nice and soft and friendly now, like the insides of my eyelids.

See if I ever clicky one of *your* links again ... c(;

Hey, I stumbled upon your journal randomly. I like the poem.

You also appear to be the only lj-er aside from me who has "oracular pigs" listed under interests. You rock. : )

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That's good enough for me.

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