In 1972 I was in the south of France. I had eaten some bad fish and was in consequence rather ill. As I lay in bed I had a strange recurring vision, there, before me, was a concrete building like a hotel or council block. I could see into the rooms, each of which was continually scanned by an electronic eye. In the rooms were people, everyone of them preoccupied. In one room a person was looking into a mirror and in another a couple were making love but lovelessly, in a third a composer was listening to music through earphones. Around him there were banks of electronic equipment. But all was silence. Like everyone in his place he had been neutralized, made gray and anonymous. The scene was for me one of ordered desolation. It was as if I were looking into a place which had no heart. Next day when I felt better, I went to the beach. As I sat there a poem came to me. It began ‘I am the proprietor of the Penguin Cafe. I will tell you things at random.’
Category Archives: Poetry
Aubade
by Philip Larkin
Algorithms, DVD CSS and Haiku
My mother dropped off a book for me to read called “Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking” by Gabriella Coleman.
The section on poetic protest within the chapter “Code is Speech” reminded me of the haiku called
How to decrypt a
DVD, in haiku form
Thanks, Prof. D. S. T.
A quick search for the original text of the poem brought me to an interesting backstory by its author, Seth Schoen:
A strange tradition current among programmers calls for the use of the 5-7-5 pattern — preferably cleverly — to express technology, or jokes about technology, or really anything at all, just for the fun or the challenge of writing within the constraint. I remember particularly that the UC Berkeley Computer Science Undergraduate Association has a mysterious tradition of writing haiku poems about the chemical element zinc. The tradition seemed to start with a 1995 transcript of a conversation in which CS students began to write poems about zinc, but it continued within and without the Berkeley CSUA, and I know that I personally helped spread the tradition to other forums and communities.
[…]
It’s clear that the practice of writing 5-7-5 verses and calling them “haiku” seizes on only one aspect of the haiku form and entirely removes it from its original cultural context. I freely admit that my poem has no cultural continuity with the ancient Japanese haiku artform, although I think it has its own sort of literary merit.
Well, maybe if the ancient Japanese had DVD CSS to deal with…but seriously, poetry often can be revealing and controversial through indirect methods. It can be a backdoor of communication on subjects where the front door is sealed. There is perhaps more continuity than Schoen realizes.
Tweets from Gaza
Reporters are rushing into Gaza to report. Their first words are appearing real-time via Twitter. I noticed this Tweet from @erinmcunningham, for example.
I couldn’t help but see the raw material perfect for a haiku. With a little editing I came up with this:
Inland from the sea
Just heard #Gaza explosion
Roar of F16s
One of the curious elements of live reporting is that much of it, on its own, is anecdotal and unverified. “I heard an explosion” is like saying “something just happened” and then we end up waiting on details that could never come. Loud unexpected noise is unnerving. Without details the report is what they are feeling more than what may be happening; it is easy to come to various conclusions. Perhaps in the near future the mobile video/audio devices will not only be Tweeting text but also incorporate real-time data on how many db was an explosion, the visual effects, etc.. Until then, poetic interpretation may be the best the public can get when we look for immediate reports.