Jazz and haiku
Jun. 26th, 2005 12:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lectrix_lectiInexplicably, I'm annoyed and grumpy. I actually had a nice day (despite a little run-in with The Body Shop, where the company policy obviously is to log everything I buy and then make absolutely certain my preferred products will never be made again and the recipes will be destroyed). I even managed, along with bf, to spend some time at lovely Bare Jazz (for the Norwegian-challenged: 'bare' means 'only'), which is undoubtedly my favourite café. And a record shop. I don't buy many jazz records, but I think it's the perfect café background music - not insipid or irritating, it's smooth and generous and rich and every now and then I will fall silent and just listen.
Bare Jazz is a great place, I can feel my mood lifting just thinking about it.
Photobucket, however, annoys me a bit. Well, to be honest, more than a bit. Which is why I just now opened an account at Flickr. I'm also searching the Interweb for a good scanner/printer thingy, because most of my photos have been and will be taken with my good old RealFilm camera (and possibly a new good old RealFilm camera as soon as I find the one I want at a reasonable price).
How come nobody told me about Flickr before? Photobucket and Imageshack, ha. My mood is lifting even more browsing Flickr's features.
And now to something completely different; I'm developing a serious addiction to haiku. Perhaps not so odd, as I'm utterly fascinated by all things Japanese and wrote my major thesis on a hypertext short story called Lasting Image by Carolyn Guyer and Michael Joyce. This story, aside from being a technologically lovely piece of hypertext literature, has a Japanese theme. Go read it. It's wonderfully intricate and it's beautiful.
But I was going on about haiku, wasn't I?
Haiku is actually a quite young form of poetry, developed in the late 19th century. There are strict rules for Japanese haiku, but haiku in other languages are less strict, even to the length of the syllables. In Japanese, a haiku poem must consist of 5+7+5 syllables, in other languages with varying syllable patterns this rule doesn't always apply. The poem shall consist of to parts, divided by a colon, a dash or an ellipse, and both parts are meant to enrich the understanding of the other. Finally, the poem must contain a kigo, a word that indicates what season the poem is set in, but this can be less than obvious.
There's something wonderfully appealing about the strict form of the haiku, even the looser form of non-Japanese poems. Yes, I like sonnets too... It's my belief that modern poetry, free of formal demands, tends to make life all too easy for so-called poets. Everybody and their great-aunt can scrawl a few incoherent lines and call it "art", but very few are sufficiently gifted to be able to work within the strict boundaries of the sonnet or the haiku and come up with something good. I'm certainly not among them.
A haiku poem about summer, by Dhugal Lindsay:
they've gone...
where the beach umbrella was
the sand not quite so hot
Bare Jazz is a great place, I can feel my mood lifting just thinking about it.
Photobucket, however, annoys me a bit. Well, to be honest, more than a bit. Which is why I just now opened an account at Flickr. I'm also searching the Interweb for a good scanner/printer thingy, because most of my photos have been and will be taken with my good old RealFilm camera (and possibly a new good old RealFilm camera as soon as I find the one I want at a reasonable price).
How come nobody told me about Flickr before? Photobucket and Imageshack, ha. My mood is lifting even more browsing Flickr's features.
And now to something completely different; I'm developing a serious addiction to haiku. Perhaps not so odd, as I'm utterly fascinated by all things Japanese and wrote my major thesis on a hypertext short story called Lasting Image by Carolyn Guyer and Michael Joyce. This story, aside from being a technologically lovely piece of hypertext literature, has a Japanese theme. Go read it. It's wonderfully intricate and it's beautiful.
But I was going on about haiku, wasn't I?
Haiku is actually a quite young form of poetry, developed in the late 19th century. There are strict rules for Japanese haiku, but haiku in other languages are less strict, even to the length of the syllables. In Japanese, a haiku poem must consist of 5+7+5 syllables, in other languages with varying syllable patterns this rule doesn't always apply. The poem shall consist of to parts, divided by a colon, a dash or an ellipse, and both parts are meant to enrich the understanding of the other. Finally, the poem must contain a kigo, a word that indicates what season the poem is set in, but this can be less than obvious.
There's something wonderfully appealing about the strict form of the haiku, even the looser form of non-Japanese poems. Yes, I like sonnets too... It's my belief that modern poetry, free of formal demands, tends to make life all too easy for so-called poets. Everybody and their great-aunt can scrawl a few incoherent lines and call it "art", but very few are sufficiently gifted to be able to work within the strict boundaries of the sonnet or the haiku and come up with something good. I'm certainly not among them.
A haiku poem about summer, by Dhugal Lindsay:
they've gone...
where the beach umbrella was
the sand not quite so hot
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-26 05:41 am (UTC)Anyway, I shouldn't be posting messages to people that I don't know. I'm probably just making an arse of myself, or something, by doing that. I'm good at that, I think.
Feel free to tell me to get lost, if that's what you want. :-)
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-26 10:26 am (UTC)I desperately wanted to play the saxophone as a child. Ended up with the cello instead. Go figure.
As for posting messages to strangers, well, I posted a comment in your journal... We don't know each other, no, but we're both off the The Tears forum. I've read your posts there, and although I strongly disagree with you on several (most, probably) subjects, I respect your intelligence and what comes across as your honesty (but you could be lying your head off for all I know). Feel free to comment here whenever you like.
Bugger!
Date: 2005-06-26 10:46 am (UTC)'Varitey' above is supposed to be 'variety'. Argh.
Re: Bugger!
Date: 2005-06-27 07:00 am (UTC)I'm going to add you as a friend, if that's alright.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-28 01:33 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-28 05:35 am (UTC)I don't agree on everyone being able to write poetry. At least not any of good quality, there's a great difference between good and bad. But then, it depends on how you define good and so on.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-28 01:30 pm (UTC)the fish in the ocean and
in the
sky
are weeping tears of
joyous madness
violet drops falling through my
hands
trembling
and pass it off, often with success, as poetry. I think about 99 % of modern poetry is pure, cringingly embarrassing, rubbish.
Problem is, these days, people are actually allowed to claim that their shite scribblings are art. Like a guy I know, whenever he was told that his guitar playing was off key, insisted on it being deliberatly disharmonic. Truth is, he can't play worth a rat's arse.
That's why I like forms of poetry with hellishly strict rules. There's no cheating in haiku.
Oh, and I wrote the crap "poem" above. In as much time as it took typing it.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-28 03:18 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-28 04:19 pm (UTC)what does a haiku poem say anyway? nothing!!
Date: 2005-06-28 06:29 pm (UTC)Three lines say it all. Wondrous.
Date: 2005-06-29 05:50 am (UTC)Refugees on the breeze...
Hemingway I say. Horrible.
Date: 2005-06-29 07:06 am (UTC)Edit 1
Date: 2005-06-29 07:10 am (UTC)Btw, do you use the "notification on new replies" function and get annoyed everytime you get like four notifications from me because I delete and re-write and delete and re-post everything? Please ignore me if so. I'm working on this (bad) habit of mine.
On wobbly knees
Date: 2005-06-29 01:15 pm (UTC)