Date: 2008-05-13 09:06 Subject: "A man who sticks to his plan will become what he used to want to be." Security: Public Reading: The Ring and the Book, Robert Browning tags: get off my damn lawn, litcrit, writing

There's been a lot of heat-and-light going around lately on How To Write -- and by "lately" I mean "the past two millennia" -- and not wanting to be left out, for the benefit of writers everywhere, here is my own dogmatic writing advice manifesto based on personal experience. Note that of course this only applies if it works for you, however anyone who fails to follow it is clearly All Wrong and not a Real Writer^TM:

1. "Good enough" isn't.

This is my final pronouncement on the matter for the next decade. Now if you'll pardon me, I'll be over here working on revisions for a while. A long while.

---L.

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Date: 2008-05-09 14:40 Subject: "Water is holy when it falls from the sky / water tastes bitter when it falls from your eyes" Security: Public tags: fluffing

And in the Department of WTFery, today the discount shelves at the local Target had some neckties.

$1 neckties, people.

One dollar discount neckties.

The designs are as bad as you might think. I got the one with the remote control pattern, and am now wearing it at work. Over, of course, a Hawaiian shirt with macaws. Because it made my coworkers wince that much.

---L.

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Date: 2008-05-09 08:10 Subject: "Some things never change / my middle name's still Risk" Security: Public Reading: Suppli vol. 1, Mari Okazaki tags: linkage, manga, plays, poetry

Catching up, with links. Which is not the same thing as catching up with links, though I'm doing that as well.

As part of working out why I like Yotsuba&! so much, I've started doing a critical reading of a chapter a day (as befitting a slice-of-life series with nearly daily episodes) in yotsubato: one, two, three so far (ETA: and now four). Feel free to read along and join in. Maybe by the time I reach volume 6, ADV will stop delaying the release.

I can see why Browning's Aristophanes' Apology was not as popular as Balaustion's Adventure -- and why I've bounced off it both times I've tried to read it. The narrator, Balaustion, is more or less the same character but her voice is nowhere near as appealing as before. It doesn't help that the Euripides play is this time done as a script direct instead of, as in the first poem, a retelling by a fourteen-year-old girl of a performance -- thus abandoning two layers of imagination and mediation. (See previous comments about Browning being less interesting without personas.) Not to mention, Herakles isn't as interesting a play as Alkestis.

• What to do with the cognitive surplus: or, how sitcoms are like gin. (via)
  
  
• Pixelated waterspouting. (via)
  
  
• Spiders don't like it when you mend their webs for them but metronomes like it when you synchronize them. (via)
  
  
• Middle- and lower-class incomes grow faster under Democratic than under Repuiblican presidents. (via)
  
  
• A simple rule for chosing -ible or -able. (via)

---L.

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Date: 2008-05-02 07:58 Subject: "My girlfriend should be human -- not my right hand!" Security: Public Reading: Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Saviour of Society, Robert Browning tags: anime, fluffing, manga

Short shameful confession: I am more amused than is warranted, given the syntactic differences of Japanese and English, by translated taglines for anime and manga.

My current favorites are "Mysterious school academy cat action!!" and "Thus begins a girl-meets-monster love comedy!" -- which are probably even funnier if you DON'T know the context -- though I remain fond of "Non-stop after-school exorcist action!" Current runner-up is "Taisho cherry blossoms amidst a fanciful storm."


(Answers: Neko-Ten, Tokyo★Innocent, Ga-Rei, and Sakura Wars (tv series), resepectively.)

---L.

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Date: 2008-04-28 09:13 Subject: "It took many years for me to learn that emotions were just extra strong feelings" Security: Public Reading: Balaustion's Adventure, Robert Browing tags: linkage, typography

Link, link, linkity link. Most of them about art.

• Every junior college/community college should have a Pre-Ninja Program. (via)
  
  
• Useful advice on how not to be That Kind of guy. This goes beyond the whole men who explain things thing. Endorsed by some guy who's spent most of his life trying to train himself out of it. (via et al.)
  
  
• An excellent set of new cover designs for the Divine Comedy. (via)
  
  
• All 120 Crayola crayons color names, with their color codes. (via)
  
  
• Through origami and tattoos, why art exists. (via)
  
  
• Maybe it's a modern art installation, or maybe it's just a dog sleeping on a horse in the Reykjavík zoo (scroll down). (via)
  
  
• Clever use of grid alignments (similar to the techniques used in digital sundials) produces an installation that displays one poem on the summer solstice and another (I can't find the text) on the winter solstice. (via)
  
  
• Yes, Virginia, there really is a Tarantula Nebula.

---L.

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Date: 2008-04-27 20:34 Subject: "My debts are not like prison -- there's hope of getting free" Security: Public Reading: Asolando: Fancies and Facts, Robert Browning tags: poetry

After reading 550-odd pages of later Browning, Asolando comes like a moist breeze in a desert afternoon. Not that he didn't write Good Stuff from The Inn Album on -- The Two Poets of Croisic stands out, as do a couple Dramatic Idylls -- but it was slogging through Ferishtah's Fancies and, especially, Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in Their Day: a wonderfully Browning title with dreadfully Victorian content.* His last dacade, Browning increasingly wrote in his own voice, rather than fictive personas, and the works suffered. Or to put it another way, I don't want to listen to him Pronounce upon Big Issues, I want to hear him tell stories with a variety of unreliable narrators.

Or so I thought. I'll also take a voice straitened into lyrics, mixed with short narratives, on themes of facts versus fancies.

Not sure what's next: possibly back to the Balaustion poems, or the couple volumes between, which I've never read.


* That said, the parley "With Gerard de Lairesse" is both playful and plays well with Asolando.

---L.

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Date: 2008-04-24 21:56 Subject: "For you I'd burn the length and breadth of sky" Security: Public tags: meme, poetry, well-versed skiffy

In retrospect, an acknowledged incomplete poem is not the best thing to offer for International Pixel-Stained Technopeasent Day, with or without added bardolotry. So to make up for it, another sonnet. Title is with apologies to Flanders & Swann.

"Now 1608, If You Cast Your Minds Back, Was a Very Bad Year for the Theater"

The task: you have a time machine that's stuck --
It jumps four centuries exactly: who
To rescue from Jacobian moil and muck
To poetize for us? Whose death undo?
Will Shakespeare's lines are getting crabbed by then;
Ben Jonson was, now, barely getting going;
There's Beaumont/Fletcher -- but they're boring men --
Or Middleton, or Dekker -- both weak showing;
Sidney and Spencer are Right Out -- both quite dead
As Kit (who'd soon as knife you as perform);
There's Daniel, with his virtues (here I "meh"ed),
And Drayton's lack of vice (and I'm lukewarm) --
So none of these will do; yet -- here's the one:
'Tis by John Donne our verse today's undone.

---L.

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Date: 2008-04-23 20:36 Subject: Forensic revisionism: Or, Finding a room the right size Security: Public Reading: Parleyings with Certain People who Can't Get Browning to Shut Up tags: meme, poetry

The first draft is dated Sep 1994; I no longer have that text, only an incomplete revision from Aug 2001. I believe, though cannot prove, that edits focused on craft -- trying to regularlize rhymes and iron out awkward syntax and rhythm -- while keeping the argument entire. Withall, they are still 44 very rough lines in what should be a smooth, craft-spot-on work, given the style. The title may or may not be a deliberate misspelling.

Yesterday, I revised it into a sonnet: 14 sometimes deliberately rough lines (why yes, I have been reading a lot of Browning lately). For your possible amusement, for Pixel-Stained Techno-Shakespeare's Birthday, I give both versions, plus my a post-mortem -- behind courtesy cuts.

( 1994/2001: Since as we know, Greg, art's not life -- except ...  )

( 2008: Since as we know, art is not life -- except ...  )

( But do we know what's art? ) I think no one would get it.

---L.

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Date: 2008-04-22 07:56 Subject: "He's fast, he's courageous, he's ninja dinosaur!" Security: Public Reading: Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in Their Day ... still tags: linkage

In honor of Passover, here's a link matzoh brei:

• Science Tattoo Emproium (via)
  
  
• "Drive till you qualify" needs to factor cost of driving, complete with mapping tool for several U.S. metro areas. (via)
  
  
• How blind children learn the verb "see". Sorta. (via)
  
  
• "Why I Let My 9-Year-Old Ride the Subway Alone" (via)
  
  
• Up for a Messier Marathon? (via)
  
  
• Sometimes, the best strategy is to look bigger. Sometimes ... (via)

Mmmm -- brei.

---L.

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Date: 2008-04-20 11:18 Subject: "The children of Men ... believe the Eldar make a display of their greatness in mockery of others" Security: Public Reading: Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in Their Day, Browning tags: fluffing, origami, poetry

Origami is a transient art form. Even aside from fragility, paper is springy -- the creases spread, legs splay, bodies puff and distort. Models undo themselves. You learn as well, as a folder, to be generous. A single pack of paper can fill all available horizontal display space. It's give them away or be buried -- or watch them fall, or get crumpled, or gnawed on by cats.

And yet, sometimes models last. That black scorpion on the television set is nearly a decade old, as is this dragonfly above my desk. Sometimes.

      "The life of an origami reaches its zenith with the delight that glows in the face of the creator either at the instant of completion or at the moment when the work is offered as a gift to someone else. It is fated, however, to decline thereafter.
      "The life span of origami works of all kinds -- animals or flower forms or unit-figures -- is short. Displayed on shelf or table, they are centers of attention for a little while. Some of them serve for a time as containers. But, sooner or later, they become dusty, faded, and destined for the trash basket. Even carefully kept they do not remain in good condition for very long.
      "Nonetheless, though the individual folded works may be short lived, an origami design springs to fresh life each time someone executes it and in this sense may be regarded as eternal."

—Tomoko Fusé, Unit Origami: Multidimensional Transformations

I fold the words, line upon line,
until they fill my own design,
one marble monuments will not
outlast, per legend -- which is rot:
words are just breath, soon said and heard
and then forgotten when we're old.
I take my scribbled page and fold
a masu box to hold this word.

---L.

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Date: 2008-04-14 20:35 Subject: "The problem with being punctual is that nobody's there to appreciate it." Security: Public Reading: Ferishtah's Fancies, Robert Browning tags: latin, poetry

The answer to the challenge is Robert Browning, of all people. The title is, in full, "On Being Defied to Express in a Hexameter: 'You Ought to Sit on the Safety-Valve'" -- and he does just that, seven times in the first seven lines. With some syntactic gymnastics (full disclosure: some lines, while I get the drift, I can't honestly say I can construe them completely).

The implication is that he's addressing himself in the last line: "Imprint on your mind, little Robert, this complicated verse."

I think I'll pass on that, thanks.

---L.

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Date: 2008-04-11 18:04 Subject: "Musa venit carmine dulci modulamine" Security: Public Reading: Jocoseria, Robert Browning tags: fluffing, latin, poetry

For those whom it might amuse, a quote and a challenge:

Plane te valvem fas est pressisse salutia,
Aequum est te valvâque, salutis sede, locari;
Convenit in sellâ, valvâ residere salutis,
Omninoque salutis par considere valvâ;
Sedibus est justum valvae mansisse salutis,
Haesisse in valvâ te, sede salutis, oportet;
Est tibi valvis, inque salutis sede, sedendum;
Valvâ, sede salutiferâ super, assidet omnis
Qui discrimen adit, fortem quem numina servant:
Mutliplicem versum tu mente, Robertule, figas!

Can you guess whose hexameters and who is little Robert?

---L.

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Date: 2008-04-09 08:43 Subject: "Lie with me upon the earth / feel its curve beneath our spines" Security: Public Reading: Dramatic Idyls, Robert Browning tags: linkage, poetry

Quote salad:

• Pick another monster: "We only have two weeks left before the wedding ceremony... I guess I should start turning into Bridezilla." —C.
  
  
• I suspect this quote will not spawn nearly as much superheros-in-bodypaint porn as it ought to: "This sad outcome even in the wake of thousands of dollars spent and months of hard work given to sewing and to packing foam rubber into helmets has an obvious, an unavoidable, explanation: a superhero's costume is constructed not of fabric, foam rubber, or adamantium but of halftone dots, Pantone color values, inked containment lines, and all the cartoonist's sleight of hand." —Michael Chabon (via)
  
  
• Train your brain: "The brain has a limited capacity for self-regulation, so exerting willpower in one area often leads to backsliding in others. The good news, however, is that practice increases willpower capacity." —Sandra Aamodt and Sam Wang (via)
  
  
• A sonnet to insomnia = good; fumbled ending = bad: "I've thought of all by turns, and still I lie / Sleepless" —William Wordsworth
  
  
• I can't help but go awww: "Narcoleptic seeks insomniac for unscheduled nap times." —Anonymous (via)
  
  
• I think I've told some of these lies: "If you are very very quiet you can hear the clouds rub against the sky." —Raul Gutierrez (via)

---L.

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Date: 2008-04-05 08:45 Subject: "Looking for evil, thinking they can trace it / but evil don't look like anything" Security: Public Reading: Two Poets of Croisic, Robert Browning tags: fluffing, poetry

Short shameful confession: I am still unable to read "Ode to a Nightingale," nor even the story of Ruth, without thinking of the parody line, "She stood in tears amid the alien porn."

Though I suppose that's not as bad as thinking highly inappropriate interpretations of the first four lines of this poem -- which makes the rest of the poem seem even pervier than it is. Though I suppose it shouldn't surprise me that Wordsworth is a perv. I can just imagine him parked outside the Catholic school with a pair of binoculars.

Short recent admission: Wordsworth can be good, when he manages to line up his images and sentiments in a striking way. His versecraft, though, is weak -- he generally handles rhyme competently, but his meter is muddy and the shape of lines is often shoddy. His verses rarely sing because the sound rings out in a match for the sense. Seeing a bunch of Wordsworth and Shelley mixed together brings this out -- the latter's lyrics are almost always lovely, enough so they can work despite the sense. Wordsworth doesn't pull things off if his matter isn't on. And whether he's on varies by taste; for me, it's rarely.

---L.

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Date: 2008-04-01 11:24 Subject: "Show me how pretty the world is because I envy the way you move" Security: Public Reading: Land of Unreason, Pratt & de Camp tags: anime, movies, music, origami, poetry

Varieties of textual experiences:

• Fry, Stephen: The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within - A solid and entertaining beginner's guide to writing formal verse. If you like Fry's usual manner, he's in full form her; if you're allergic, there are other guides for you. Generally sensible, energetic, and if I disagree with some of his readings, he's rarely outright Wrong. I especially appreciate his insistence, backed by repeated examples, of the importance of crappy finger exercises. Bonus: an instructive analysis of what, exactly, goes wrong in McGonagall's The Tay Bridge Disaster.* All this said, it really is a beginner's guide: I did learn some technical tidbits, but mostly it was an enjoyable review of the basics. Rating: 3 odes**
  
  
• Juno - Dude. Yes. That. Tight script, tight snark, tight acting. I especially like how there are no characters from central casting, nor any scenes that are by the numbers (though a few play with expectations, only to break them nicely). Cleverness as a way of insulating yourself, oh yes. That. Rating: 4 TicTacs
  
  
• Shindell, Richard: Somewhere Near Patterson - It took me a while to warm to this album, possibly because only one song from it was on Courier. There's a lot to like here -- Shindell's first-person storytelling is in full form, starting with the tone-setting first track, "Confessions." "You Stay Here," despite one word that is exactly wrong, blows me away every time. A few tracks, I listen to and think "standard Shindell sort of thing," and I include his cover of Dar William's "Calling the Moon" in that, but there's enough songs like "Abuelita" and "The Grocer's Broom" and "Transit" to keep you going. Besides, standard Shindell is better than quite a number of people. Interestingly, there's a handful of songs where the speaker is in middle age or older. Rating: 3 1/2 Jersey turnpikes
  
  
• Lang, Robert: Pegasus (in Origami Design Secrets) - Nifty base and there's some satisfying transitions, especially when folding up the neck, but the final details leave something to be desired. In particular, the legs do not readily come out as diagrammed, even on my second attempt, and the head is more stylized than I like. Not nearly as nice a model as some of the others in the book, such as the box turtle with a plated back. Rating: 2 1/2 cranes
  
  
• I was going to do Yotsuba&! volume 6, but a month after supposed publication, the English edition is still MIA. Curse you, ADV! So moving along ...
  
  
• Sakura Wars tv series, episodes 1–5 - Lessee, we've got a Taisho-era Takarazuka-knock-off troupe piloting steampunked mechas in secret. Hello, my buttons. As long as it didn't actually suck, this looked worth watching. And it doesn't suck -- it ain't great, but it's watchably entertaining. The Imperial Defense Force Flower Division is the usual motley band of misfits -- a samurai girl, a veteran sharpshooter, Miss Rich Bitch, a powerful but traumatized orphan,*** and the (male) recent Naval Academy graduate inexplicably put in charge of the admittedly tactically changed band -- they spend so much time rehearsing for their cover story and learning to just use the mechas, the women seem not to have learned how to fight as a team. I think I know where this is going, but that's okay -- I'm looking for more. Besides, they're kinda hot in the opening credits dance. Rating: 3 sakura petals of DOOM blowing in the wind

* In brief: everything.

** Although I learned to program in FORTRAN, not C, I use the traditional [0-4] scale instead of this newfangled 1 to 5 thingie.

*** You can tell she's traumatized because she talks through her teddy bear.

---L.

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Date: 2008-03-30 20:07 Subject: "Music is worthless unless it can make complete stranger break down and cry" Security: Public Reading: The Inn Album, Robert Browning tags: music

"Super Scooter Happy" by Capsule is bouncy and frenetic even by J-pop standards. And it keeps it up for nearly six minutes without getting repetitious. I tried to put together a superbounce pick-me-up mix around it and failed. It pwns everything in my library -- even Machine Gun Fellatio's "Rollercoaster" and Yotsuba playing in the park. Totally pwns.

Clearly, this is a shared challenge: help me find tracks that CAN keep up with a song about having fun around town on a scooter.

Anyone?

---L.

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Date: 2008-03-22 10:15 Subject: "When a crop is so thin, / There's nothing to do but to set the teeth / And plough it in." Security: Public Reading: The Ode Less Traveled, Stephen Fry tags: poetry

More intellectual archeology. This copy of Palgrave's Golden Treasury is from 1951, a reprint of a 1906 Everyman's edition with a supplemental section of Victorians. By the inscriptions, it had at least three owners before me, two of whom, named B. Waters and Peterson, made marginal lecture notes. (The third is traced only by the flyleaf inscription

1. Write Dad about salary
2.  

Talk about unknown stories.)

I don't know exactly when I bought this -- I'd thought late undergraduate, but the stratigraphic annotations date to early grad school, showing early steps toward analyzing craft and how form affects content. Also, I was ready to argue with Keats: I found "The Realm of Fancy" "defensible" but not its companion poem. Wordsworth gets slagged off for his supposed natural diction. I noted without further comment that in "To the Night," Shelley personified "day" as female but "Day" as male (though the capitalization of my edition is not matched in Bartleby's online text). Go me.

Other comments are more puzzling. How on earth did I happen to know that "Henry's holy shade" was Henry VI, founder of Eton? And what was I thinking in labeling this Keats a "ballad, nearly"? Total lyric. One that I'm more impressed by now than then. And then there's the cryptic "This should be longer: WHY?" next to "Admonition to a Traveler." Why, indeed.

Other potshard glosses reveal a pedant and a prude in action. Thus, annotations detailing the omissions and rearrangements of Palgrave's version of Crashaw's "Supposed Mistress" (including title change!). A prior reader responded enthusiastically to Campbell's Romantic argument for polyamory, but I did not -- while acknowledging the versecraft was good. At least I apparently had fun analyzing the metrical gymnastics of "When the lamp is shatter'd."

What strikes me most, digging through the anthology now, is just how limiting Palgrave's definition of "best original Lyrical pieces" is -- not just in form and genre as acknowledged in the Preface, but also subject and tone. The only optimistic poems allowed in are superficial love lyrics and patriot pieces; anything with real thought is pessimistic and stoical. It's of a piece with the critical mindset that defines tragedy as inherently higher in value than comedy -- but that is for a rant, not an excavation. Suffice to note that Palgrave's selection is as incomplete as an archeologist's collection from his time -- all golden masks and painted tombs walls, without the broken dolls and iron cloakpins of daily life. A Schliemann of poetry, if you well.

---L.

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Date: 2008-03-19 15:02 Subject: "When conscious thought meets careless heart and two lost souls make one fresh start" Security: Public tags: litcrit, poetry

Eleven Ten things I learned from rereading The Comedy:

1. If you can at all avoid it, do NOT read a Miltonic translation. Especially Cary's.
   
   
2. The scope of Dante's vision is breathtaking, even in Miltonic dress. Now that's mythopoesis.
   
   
3. As a show of impartiality, Dante is perfectly willing to damn members of his own party -- but he does not, that I can see, save a single political opponent.
   
   
4. No matter what I think of Virgil as a writer, he rocks as an NPC.
   
   
5. Dante/Virgil: So close to canonical, you might as well accept it.
   
   
6. The middle book of the trilogy is (still) the best part.
   
   
7. When and if I write an epic where the tension shifts from character- to metaphor-driven, I need to signal this change clearly.
   
   
8. Verse is not the best vehicle for, say, detailed mechanical explanations, be it of setting or theology; it's an excellent vehicle for bringing to life the apparent contradictions of infinity when viewed by finite creatures.
   
   
9. If you ever meet Adam's spirit and get to ask him four questions, do not waste one of them on "What language did you speak?" Seriously. (Edited: see comments)
   
   
9. Not only does someone need to create the manga adaption, someone needs to write the Very Secret Diaries version. "The old guy showed me yet another pit full of dead people -- sodomites or something like that. What a depressing hell-hole. NB: Still not saved."
   
   
10. Ovid: It's what's for literature.

And in the end, despite the plotty problems and the fact that Dante's New Jerusalem is the Mystic Rose, which does not make for good ninjaing over the rooftops, I still think it'd be better if Beatrice were replaced with a ninja. Final Ninja Replacement Score = 1. Which is pretty darn good for a story this size.

I was wrong about one thing: instead of waiting till the end, Dante starts collapsing his structure of symbolism in the Primum Mobile, with the vision of God as an infinite point that is infinite space. He even points to the fact that he's collapsing it, with his question about the inverted circles. It's an intermediate step that softens the bang of the transformation, in the Empyrean, to the Divine River and then the Mystic Rose, but gives it more conscious power. It takes a creator with complete control, and complete confidence, to pause a climax like that.

I know I said I'd probably read Pharsalia next, but here's a volume I may not be able to resist: The Story of Troilus ed. by R.K. Gordon. Benoît de Sainte-Maure's history of Troy, or rather those parts that tell the first extant story of Troilus and Cressida, Boccaccio's Il Filostrato (in prose, alas), Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, and Henryson's Testament of Cresseid. Transmission and redaction ho!

---L.

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Date: 2008-03-17 19:51 Subject: "I don't know nothing but change will come / year after year what we do is undone" Security: Public Reading: Paradiso canto 26 tags: linkage

This has gone past linksalad and into the linkfishcourse:

Stress analysis of a strapless cartoon panel.

Check out that groovy space opera, man. (daddy-o)

This is not the llama song. Really. (blame)

In which "which" and "that" are all that.

World tour of English accents. (yo)

Some traditional Japanese monsters you don't want to meet in the dark. (yikes)

The secrets we keep, the secrets we learn. Like that you're dating an assassin. (uh oh)

Our planet has a metric armload of "north pole"s.

Take a random Japanese poem generator and toss it through Babelfish's Japanese -> English translator and what do you get? Machine-generated incomprehensibility to the max! Now if I could only figure out a URL for the result...

Where to find pictures of the "50 best works of art" (sweet)

In which we learn that Auden could, indeed, write smut. In rhyme. (a-hem)

---L.

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Date: 2008-03-13 10:59 Subject: "Been ten years waitin' but it's better than late than the never we've been told before" Security: Public Reading: Paradiso canto 22 / Revolutionary Girl Utena volume 5 tags: poetry

The local Borders has 14 translations (none the one I'm reading) of the Comedy, not counting separate editions, plus a 15th on the discount rack that had pen-and-ink illustrations of Dante's travels through an urban, Los-Angelesque landscape. The B&N has 16. Dante seems to be something of a minor publication industry.

In the last couple days, Heaven stopped being a struggle, to my surprise. Last weekend, I wrote in my notes: "The narrator's easiest journey is the reader's hardest. To give Dante his due, he does try to maintain interest by varying the setting. The problem is, nothing changes there, which gives him very little scope, and the pallet of colors ranges from very bright to incomprehensibly bright. And one can't help feeling a little resentful that he doesn't have to take a single step the whole canticle." BUT, if you look at the canticle as shifting not from adventure to (endless) theological discussions, but from variety of incident to variety of imagery, it helps enormously. It also gives the vision of the Eagle Collective* in Jupiter a lot of power. After which, the Jacob's Ladder of Saturn gains even more resonance.

In short, Dante is spending the canticle accumulating a superstructure of symbology, which releases its stored tension with (as I remember) a bang in the vision of the Mystic Rose.

Speaking of powerful language, English lost a fair amount of expressiveness when it dropped the second person familiar form. It's quite striking when Dante meets his great-great-grandfather the Crusader and shifts from "thou" of equality to the respectful "you" (as this translation does).


* Insert medieval Borg joke here.

---L.

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