Eleanor Arnason's Blog, page 43

For some reason I thought about this poem this morning, m...

For some reason I thought about this poem this morning, maybe because it's a cold spring day. I was thinking of traditional Chinese poetry, especially the poems in The Book of Songs, when I wrote this.

I.

“Caw! Caw!” sing the crows in the bare spring branches.
“Honk! Honk!” call the geese in the cold spring sky.

II.

At twenty-one my hair began to silver.
At the age of forty it was completely grey.
At sixty-five it’s white and thin.
I wear it short, my hair clips put away.

III.

At twenty-one I had ambition.
At the age of forty I wondered what I’d done.
At sixty-five the days move quickly.
I try to pay attention. They are too soon gone.

IV.

“Caw! Caw!” sing the crows in the bare spring branches.
“Honk! Honk!” call the geese in the cold spring sky.

I may have posted it on the blog before. If so, here it is again.

Weather Report

Drizzle right now. Rain predicted for today, rain or snow tomorrow, snow Wednesday and possibly Thursday. I love Minnesota.

Depression

The Monthly Review is calling what we are now in stagnation. But it's stagnation with a large amount of unemployment. The U-6 rate for February was 14.3%, which strikes me as way high. That means one worker in seven is unemployed or under employed.



The above chart is from the blog of the economist Brad DeLong. It shows a severe drop in the percentage of the population in the labor force. This happens when people can't find jobs. They drop out entirely and live with relatives or live under bridges. Some go to college and run up student loans, hoping to find a job when they graduate. Some retire, if they are 62 or over. A few may be able to get on disability: people who are genuinely disabled, but would find work in a high-employment economy, which utilizes every possible worker. Some may make money doing odd jobs and getting paid in cash.

A healthy economy is supposed to employ 65-70% of possible workers: that is, adults of working age. That's where we started in 2000. We keep going down.

Factories (we still have them in the US) have unused capacity, and corporations are sitting on mountains of cash, which they don't put into expanding production, because they don't see a market for more goods and services.

Because there is no reason to invest in anything productive, that might create jobs, money tends to go to speculation: the kind of Wall Street scams that caused the 2007 financial crash.

I don't call this stagnation. I call it recession or depression. It's different from the Great Depression, because there is this huge froth of speculation on top of a real economy that is barely moving.

Remember that the entire US infrastructure needs to be rebuilt.

Remember that we need to move to different kinds of energy and to energy conservation. Solar power. Wind power. Better mass transit. Buildings that use less power and radiate less heat.

Remember that we have to face global warming: more storms, rising sea levels, more flooding and more drought. All of this requires changes to infrastructure.

If we don't do this, our entire society will crumble like the I-35 bridge.

So, there's plenty of work to be done, and a world full of people who need jobs. What is holding us back?

A society dominated by the rich and financial speculation.

Don't ever believe we can't afford to do what must be done, if society is going to survive. The rich pay far little in taxes. We can raise their taxes and rebuild America. Or we can let them keep their money and watch our society fall apart.

P.S.: I wrote, let the rich keep their money. In what sense is it their money? Property is theft, as Proudhon wrote. Great wealth is the result of an unjust and irrational allocation of resources, of laws that favor one group over another and of governments that enforce unfair laws. One person is rich because many others are poor.

Spring

It's a glum, gray day. I am going to a meeting of my poetry workshop in an hour or so. I spent yesterday inputting an old, old story for which I had no e-file. It's rough in places; I am a better writer now; but I think I can fix it pretty easily. And I went over the next essay for Strange Horizon, which is due at the editor any day now. It's about fan fiction.

Next on the list is getting two stories out to editors. That leaves three Lydia Duluth stories which need light revision before going out. And the novel, which was supposed to be done in May, but other things came up.

I feel restless, which is probably spring. I want to write something new, not finish old work. Maybe "The Herman Melville of Brooklyn." Or a light YA fantasy adventure. I think the very wet noir planetary romance could be expanded into a novel, but it would require a lot of work. A new short story or a light YA sounds better.

Spring

Rain this afternoon. I was out in it a while. I wanted to stand on earth and raise my arms, until they turned into branches and produced leaves, while my feet sank into the earth and became roots. This is an over reaction to spring.

Housekeeping

I've gone through again and trimmed or deleted some of my recent posts. Less is more.

Ragnarok

I read Paul Park's "Ragnarok," because it was mentioned in Paul Cook's essay on why science fiction poetry is bad and in F. J. Bergmann's response. Both Cook and Bergmann said "Ragnarok" is based on the Icelandic sagas.

Yes, but...

"Ragnarok" is a poem, and the sagas are always prose. One reason I read "Ragnarok" was to see if Park was basing his poem on Eddic poetry. He is, sort of, though his stanzas run on. Eddic poems are more like ballads. Each stanza is complete.

I haven't checked to see how closely he follows the meter and alliteration of Eddic poetry. This is an example is from the Waking of Angantyr, courtesy of Wikipedia:

Vaki, Angantýr! || vekr þik Hervǫr,
eingadóttir || ykkr Tófu!
Selðu ór haugi || hvassan mæki
þann's Svafrlama || slógu dvergar.

(Awaken, Angantyr! It is Hervor who awakens you, your only daughter by Tófa! Yield up from your grave the mighty sword that the dwarves forged for Svafrlami.")

I don't know if you can tell through the foreign language, but the verse has a beat like a hammar. The language is spare and compressed. This is my word-by-word translation of the above stanza:

Wake, Angantyr!// Wakes you Hervor
only daughter // by Tofa.
Give from grave // sharp sword
That for Svafrlami // forged dwarves.

I have added one word, "for," in the last line. It is implicit in the case-ending of Svafrlami. Notice that the Wikipedia translation adds a lot of words and makes some of the words fancier. I rooted around in my Old Norse dictionary, looking for the word "hvass" meaning mighty. I found "hvass," which means sharp or prickly.

Also from Wikipedia:

Fornyrðislag (the verse form) has two lifts per half line, with two or three (sometimes one) unstressed syllables. At least two lifts, usually three, alliterate, always including the main stave (the first lift of the second half-line). It had a variant form called málaháttr ("speech meter"), which adds an unstressed syllable to each half-line, making six to eight (sometimes up to ten) unstressed syllables per line.

So, a fairly tight structure, based on meter and alliteration, which reinforce each other, thus the hammar-like beat.

Because of the run-on narration, Park's poem reminds me of English translations of Beowulf.

As for the content of "Ragnarok" -- yes, Park has clearly used the Icelandic sagas. Though I found his story far more brutal and ugly than the sagas. They, after all, were written by educated Christians living in the 13th and 14th centuries, who were influenced by European literature of the time. Compared to the sagas, I find Park's story a pointless description of violence, which has no resolution -- only praise of revenge. Well, he warns us about this in the title. This is about the end of order.

The conventional end of a saga is an ending of violence. The blood feud finally winds down, and the survivors make peace. The great, violent, dangerous hero finally dies and is replaced by men who are less heroic and more reasonable. Park's story reverses this. It begins with a precarious peace and ends in full-bore war.

I read the Eddic poem about Volund the Smith recently, because I was putting Volund in a story. Now, there is a brutal and ugly tale, much closer to what Park is doing. The Eddic stories have the savagery of myths: Cronos eating his children.

The great message of the sagas comes from Njals saga and the wise and noble legal expert Njall: "By law the land is established, and through lawlessness it is destroyed." This is not the message of the Eddas.

So, final conclusion: Park is using both the Eddas and the sagas. His poem is a tour de force. I don't like it, because he is doing horrible things to Iceland. But I think his story makes sense, given where we are now: in the early 21st century, with the breakdown of human civilization due to global warming evident on the horizon.

More on SF Poetry

This is a response to Paul Cook's very wrong essay on science fiction poetry: Here.

Art and Awards (More on SF Poetry)

This is a response to Paul Cook's very wrong essay on science fiction poetry: Here.

I've had three friends win the Rhysling Award, which is given by the Science Fiction Poetry Association. So I am not going to complain about it. However, the SFPA uses the same process that the Science Fiction Writers of America uses for the Nebula: members nominate and vote. This means a small group of people, many of whom know each other, determine the winner. This can be a problem. However, juried awards also have their problems. The point of any award is not to pick the best work, which is difficult or impossible, but to draw attention to the art form and to make a few artists happy.

I have been on a couple of juries. In the end, the final choice is likely to be a compromise.

Of course, one tries to pick the best book. But the best book of the year may never reach the jury. What if its publisher didn't know about the award and never sent copies? What if no one nominated it? What if everyone voting on the award makes an error of judgment? That can happen. There are fabulous novels that I had to start several times, before I stopped bouncing off them, and novels I am sure are good that I don't even want to try. There are poets with huge reputations, respected by people I respect, who I cannot stand.

A good award is the result of decent people making their best effort.

But van Gogh sold one painting in his life.

My father, an art historian, said after the mistakes of the 19th century, no one should take himself or herself seriously as a critic of art.

Nightmare

Another comment from facebook. This obviously derives from the discussion on flying that I posted yesterday.

Another clear sunny day. I was going to sleep in, because I have a slow day ahead of me, but I ended in one of those dreams where you are running to catch a plane and aren't going to get it. It was the Pittsburgh airport, I think, which I may have been to, but I don't remember it. The concourses were gigantic and looked like an old train station or maybe a factory and were very complex, rising into various levels, and very badly marked, so we couldn't find our gate. Patrick and I lost the rest of our party, and then I realized I didn't have my baggage. And then we ended at a TSA checkpoint.

It was running to catch a plane in an Escher print with the TSA.

So I got up.

Most of the dream was ordinary, but the building was remarkable: huge and complex and old and dirty with lots of bare girders visible. The TSA agent who was giving Patrick a hard time had a computer out of the 1980s.

This is the police dystopia which flying is becoming. Flying as it would be done in 1984.

There is a story, which may or may not be true, about frozen orange juice. When it first came out, people were used to fresh orange juice. So Minute Maid, or whichever company was first, had to work to make their product taste like fresh juice. As time went on, people got used to drinking frozen juice and no longer remembered what the fresh juice was like. So it was possible to make the frozen juice more economically, paying less attention to flavor. Till finally it had its own flavor, that people thought was the taste of orange juice.

Flying is like that. When it began, it was in competition with trains and transatlantic steamers, and it was a luxury. Gradually, as flying became common and people became used it, it turned into a experience like riding a Grayhound bus. Now, it is -- if anything -- worse than riding a bus. I'd take a Jefferson Line bus like a shot. I have to brace myself to fly.

This may be typical of capitalist competition. Economic forces, especially the need to be cheap, drive the quality of the product down -- unless it is aimed at the seriously rich. But even they have to go through the TSA.