(no subject)

[nny]

I'm currently researching piano teachers in Southampton, because I'm pretty sure my grade 5-ness is completely invalidated by having not played for the past... what, eight years? XD I miss playing and it's something I'd really like to do well, so. We'll see how long this lasts. I'm also going to look for a driving instructor; since I've started actually achieving things, I've also started assessing what it is I actually want to achieve. And man, knowing how to drive would be sweet.


I also want to find out some more about T'ang dynasty poetry. Because I'm looking at postmodernism (bear with me, eventually there is a link) and the guy who's explaining it in layman's terms says that postmodernism is basically the same as modernism - looking at what's created in terms of what's come before. Postmodernism is all OOH SHINY about it whereas modernism is more... woe. Things used to be so good. Anyway, yes, very BASIC understanding and explanation, but you do not read my journal for the smarts, let's be honest. I'm reading more. So anyway, yes.

I was reading some Shlovsky, leading figure in Russian formalism, apparently.

[incidentally, he quotes Tolstoy: "why, if people have an affinity of souls, must they sleep together?" Heh.]

He was speaking of imagery, and said "...images change little; from century to century, from poet to poet, they flow on without changing. Images belong to no one: they are 'the Lord's'. The more you understand an age, the more convinced you become that the images a given poet used and which you thought his own were taken almost unchanged from another poet. The works of poets are classified or grouped according to the new techniques that poets discover and share, and according to their arrangement and development of the resources of language; poets are much more concerned with arranging images than with creating them*. Images are given to poets; the ability to remember them is far more important than the ability to create them."

This brought to mind T'ang poetry I'd read when I was working in the bookshop; I really wish I'd picked up the volume. More to the point, I wish the boss'd told me the shop was shutting, but never mind. I'm not bitter.

Anyway, yes -

from Untitled by Li Shang-yin: The wick of the candle turns to ash before its tears dry.

And from Farewell Poem by Tu Mu: The wax candles feel, suffer at partings:
Their tears drip for us 'til the sky brightens.

It made me wonder how much of it was actually formalised, whether they were teacher and student or if that sort of metaphor was a part of the general cultural database, how the poetry worked then. So yeah, mental note to take a look around.


Finally, and completely unrelatedly, although this fic will make more sense if you've actually seen Stargate:Atlantis, I don't think it's necessary to really bloody enjoy reading it.

Hands-On Science by nindulgence.

Puts forward the possibility that Rodney and John met before Antartica, which is possibly one of my favourite scenarios ever, and does it in an absolutely fabulous and absorbing way. I totally fell in love with this story.


Heh. This one-post thing is going to make things even more eclectic around here.


*Hunh. Interesting from a fanficcer's perspective, really.

Comments

[campkilkare]

My favorite Tang poet is Du Fu. This is like saying your favorite Tang poet is Shakespeare, but I don't care.

The cool of bamboo invades my room
moonlight from the fields fills the corners of the court
dew gathers till it falls in drops
a scattering of stars, now there, now gone
A firefly threading the darkness makes his own light
birds at rest on the water call to each other
all these lie within the shadow of the sword.

Powerless I grieve as the clear night passes.

[campkilkare]

...English poet. Yeah, Shakespeare is not Chinese.

[villainny.livejournal.com]

*laughs*

I only actually noted down a few choice quotes - I was going through a major whitetext phase (it's like RP emo) and was making notes for threads, mostly. Of the ones I still have lying around, though, this one is definitely my favourite.


On and On Forever: Lin Ho

The white glare recedes to the Western hills,
High in the distance sapphire blossoms rise.
Where shall there be an end of old and new?
A thousand years have whirled away in the wind.
The sand of the ocean changed to stone,
Fishes puff bubbles at the bridge of Ch'in.
The empty shine streams on into the distance,
The bronze pillars melt away with the years.

[campkilkare]

Oh! I have a link for you.

The fabulous zhongwen.com has a page of 300 Tang poems. You have to navigate there from the index or you lose the (invaluable) frames, but it's linked on the front page under Readings.

You'll pretty much have to navigate at random, BUT once you get to an individual poem, each one has an English translation that comes up in a pop-up window. And, bonus, every character in the Chinese version is clickable--you get definitions in the sidebars. So you can get some of the nuance and parallelism that an English translation has to sacrifice.

Er, if you're that interested.

[villainny.livejournal.com]

*awed*

Wow, John, shiny! Thanks so much!

[campkilkare]

The one hiccup is that these poems are in classical Chinese, and that's a modern Chinese dictionary. But that's not going to be too much trouble. And regardless, you've got the English, so you could just use it as a random poem selector.

You could even do your own word-by-word translations, then compare! Hey, it worked for Ezra Pound...

[villainny.livejournal.com]

Well considering this is enormously procrastinatey reading around my english lit A-level, I don't reckon I'll have time for now, but I'm definitely gonna take a good look through.

(at some point I will read the assigned Keats. Honest.)

[campkilkare]

...I just like knockin' Ezra Pound.

[villainny.livejournal.com]

I am not fond of what I have read of his. It was not much. But then I found a random quote that made me go 'ooh shiny' in a kind of 'wow that fits in with potential story' so I decided to reserve judgement once more.

[campkilkare]

I object philosophically to a lot of things he wrote, particularly his Cathay. Which I guess should not prejudice me against the basic quality of his writing, but I am flawed in this way, I guess.

(The anti-Semitism does not help.)

I just. Orientalism bugs me, particularly in art, where it informs and creates orientalist thoughts in others who don't even know they're getting a false image of another culture. Pound "translates" from a language he doesn't really know, interpolating long sections and deleting others in order to, in essence, use China and Chinese poetry to explore thoughts about WWI and England. Which may make great art, but at the expense of reinforcing the Western perception of the East as a mirror for the West.

[tropes.livejournal.com]

Man I wish you were around on AIM so's we could natter about postmodernism.

[villainny.livejournal.com]

Someday I will be. :D And I am so not yet knowledgeable enough to natter about it; I've learned enough to know that I tend to like Modernist writing but not architecture, but that's about it. I got dragged to the pub at lunchtime so my reading was unfortunately curtailed. XD

[tropes.livejournal.com]

Heeee. Well, I tend to make huuuuuuuuge generalized statements that sound smart but are actually very stupid, so we'll be fine. XD

[villainny.livejournal.com]

*cracks up*

I make posts like this in which they don't particularly sound smart, really, at all. I am willing to admit that my eddication is somewhat lacking. XD

[josepheenie.livejournal.com]

think my boss's other half at the pub teaches piano but not sure, can check if you like :)