The only thing worse than bad poetry is bad love poetry. The following letter, from a boy who still brags that we dated, is completely golden and untampered.
Juliet
I heard this and changed and add to it
Some day when are live is done
And or course is almost gone
Then we can look back at the fun
That we had under the sun
And realize what imprints we made
In someone that need our making
In their lives and in there souls
That is just so beautiful . yea time to go send some for me.
Romeo
And then he spelled his name wrong.
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My brain bent sideways slightly as I tried to read that poem....!
ReplyDeleteNow for pointless trivia:
As revealed by the late, great Douglas Adams, the second worst poetry in the world was written by "Grunthos the Flatulent." During a reading of the poem, four of his audience died of internal hemorrhaging, and the president of the Mid-Galactic Arts Nobbling Council survived only by gnawing one of his own legs off. Grunthos was reported to have been "disappointed" by the poem's reception.
An excerpt is as follows:
Putty. Putty. Putty.
Green Putty - Grutty Peen.
Grarmpitutty - Morning!
Pridsummer - Grorning Utty!
Discovery..... Oh.
Putty?..... Armpit?
Armpit..... Putty.
Not even a particularly
Nice shade of green.
Ah, Douglas, we miss you.
If I could give you a Christmas present, I would give you his brilliant and moving book "Last Chance to See," which follows his journey with a naturalist to discover and observe species that were threatened with extintion - the Kakapo of New Zealand, the Komodo Dragon of Indonesia etc etc. It's a beautiful and inspiring book, as well as being terrifically funny.
And doing a quick search, it seems I can grant your Christmas present.
I have found the link: Last Chance to See.
Someone has transcribed it, I think it's all there - It's not an enormously long book.
It's a bit hard on the eyes... if you're feeling adventurous, I recommend this little tool: Readability. You just drag a little bookmark onto your bookmarks toolbar, and whenever you're on a website that is hard on the eyes like that Last Chance to See, click the bookmark, and it automatically formats it into something, well, something more readable!
Merry Christmas!
It's Voltare44! I can't describe to you the big grin that spread across your face when I got your email, and then just now when I got your insightful comments. What's it been--a year? Sounds like your year went pretty well. And bingo- just found the last chance to see book. For some reason on looking at that site I am reminded of the Crocodile Hunter, who died from a jellyfish sting. That poetry was great; it had me gagging. Even now I'm trying not to scroll up the screen, for fear that the gagging will begin again. haha
ReplyDeleteMy year has flown by. I hestitate to think back a year; trite or not, it seems like centuries ago. I'm sure you remember how long a semester can feel, and how victorious one feels after checking off a set of classes and forever putting them behind. I can't imagine a year ago, being without so many classes. It seems I'm always learning that I have so much more to learn. haha
While at school this last semester I wrote for my school newspaper.
http://www.bju.edu/collegian/ You have to hit the archives link and then I'm spread out throughout issues 1-11 of Vol. 23. Alot of it is pretty rough, I have to admitt, but each article was a huge learning experience for me. I still have so much to learn! But that's the exciting part, because one never knows what might be discovered along the way! That sounds sappy and ridiculously idealistic, I know. But I had to throw that in. :)
So yeah, Voltare44 (AKA Anthony) I think you should start a blog. You could call it-- Voltare44-- and everyone who visited would die trying to figure out what your site name meant.
That would be pretty awesome. :) So, yeah, it's pretty awesome to bump into your insight again online. Catchya later.
crap, now I see all the typos. *spread across my face.
ReplyDeleteand btw I'm the only Andrea in the Vol. 23 archives. if you go there.
For some reason on looking at that site I am reminded of the Crocodile Hunter, who died from a jellyfish sting
ReplyDeleteAh poor old Steve Irwin. He was such a champion of Australian wildlife - and behind the TV persona, he was a passionate conservationist and environmentalist. I think his real charm was his huge personality showing that snakes and spiders and crocodiles and all the "scary" animals aren't perhaps all that bad after all.
Oh, incidentally, he died from being stabbed by a Stingray barb, not a jellyfish. I caught a stingray once, fishing off the south coast - it was enormous, over a meter across. Needless to say, I didn't dare try and haul it in, just let it go!
I still have so much to learn! But that's the exciting part, because one never knows what might be discovered along the way! That sounds sappy and ridiculously idealistic, I know.
I don't think that sounds sappy and idealistic at all - it's a simple fact of life, and some would say the best thing about life! One of the greatest achievements of humans is the expansion, and retention of knowledge - since the development of writing, we have methods of storing and passing information on accurately; so much knowledge is stored and accessible.
I think in some ways, it's only a fairly recent phenomenon that we "can't know everything that is known."
If we go back thousands of years, knowledge was fairly limited to local geographical areas - where the water is, what plants will kill you, how to use the seasons for farming, how to build huts - and the stories, myths and songs of history passed down from elder to elder. A rich, fascinating, functional, but fairly finite corpus of knowledge.
It's quite possible that, during the Renaissance at least, a thorough grounding in arts, philosophy, science, architecture, theology, botany, languages and engineering was still possible; and one could, with enough study in all areas, consider that perhaps they know almost everything that is currently known. Classic "Renaissance Men" like Da Vinci, Pascal, Newton, Jefferson were all extremely well grounded in most areas of knowledge - and, it seems, because they had learnt "everything there is to know" about a subject, that they went forward and discovered new and exciting things.
But by the 20th Century, the accumulation of knowledge is now so great, so vast and detailed, that we can't know everything. I could spend my entire life doing nothing but study light and optics, which Newton started exploring all those years ago, and in a lifetime I might be able to grasp everything that is currently known about light, and maybe make my own contributions to the knowledge.
But could I learn all about light, and water, and photosynthesis, and plant evolution, and geology, and reproduction, and embryology etc etc, not to mention acquaint myself thoroughly with philosophy (Jung, Nietzsche, Kant, Hegel, Ducasse, Plato...) AND theology (catholicism, methodism, deism, feminist theology, latter-day saintsism, nontrinitarianism, from John Chrysostom and the Venereable Bede, to R.C Sproul and Bishop John Spong - and that's only starting on CHRISTIAN theology), not to mention the modern architectural knowledge required to build this or the engineering knowledge required to build this?
It would be simply impossible in a single lifetime, in a multiple lifetime, to learn everything about all these fields.
...continued....
...continued...
ReplyDeleteKnowledge is now specialised immensely. I think that is an amazing thing - that the human race knows so much, that there can be no single repository for it all. No one person or one book can tell you everything there is to know.
So the modern Renaissance man can still delve into all these subjects, but will inevitably only have a cursory understanding of them. But in some ways, that is enough. The knowledge base is now strong enough and solid enough that I can investigate a bit about light and optics, understand some basic properties, read a couple of books and then feel comfortable in the knowledge that there are specialists who know a lot more about it, who are inventing and discovering new things every year, adding to the knowledge.
My random tangent seems to have brought me to a place that I didn't intend to go, but now I'm here, it is this "accumulation of a body of knowledge" that allows me to accept fully a "theory" like evolution, even though my knowledge of it is only relatively cursory - relative, that is, to an evolutionary specialist.
So, to your comment on the joys and surprise of learning - yes, it is indeed a great thing, and I think every child should be educated to be somewhat of a "renaissance man" as much as possible. So don't get me started on education systems!!!!
That was quite a tangential, pointless essay.
In answer to other questions - voltare44 is purely meaningless; a random name chosen because I'd been reading Candide at the time, which I deliberately mis-spelled for no good reason, and two numbers chosen at random probably because the name "voltare" was already taken and I had to add some numbers.
As for a voltare44 blog..... I'm yet to be convinced, and I already don't have enough hours in the day to spend on here..... maybe. But I wouldn't know what to blog about! I think I'm more "reactive" - I am best when reading something someone has written and responding to it - than "creative" - when it comes to writing, at least. Maybe I should try!
I'll find some time to read your college writing, thanks for the link.