soph (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sophia_sol) wrote2012-01-23 02:15 pm
sophia_sol) wrote2012-01-23 02:15 pm
Snowflake Challenge, part three
DAY SEVEN: "In your own space, create a list of at least three fannish things you'd love to receive, something you've wanted but were afraid to ask for - a fannish wish-list of sorts."
HUGS GIMME HUGS GIMME HUGS -- um. Yeah, I got nothing. I'm not actually particularly afraid to say what I want? Like the other day when I was like DUDE FIC ABOUT CLUB CALLED HEAVEN PLEASE. I mean, nothing came of it, but I asked.
Although speaking of, actually, if you have recs for any fic at all about any of the FOB folks set in the current now (like, since they went on hiatus) that would be amazing?
DAY EIGHT: "talk about a talent (or talents) you have."
One talent I have is reciting poetry I've memorized! It's a lot of fun, and every time I do it, the listeners tend to be really impressed and appreciative. I work at putting the emotion and drama into my voice as I recite, and I think people respond to that.
Another talent I have is for jigsaw puzzles, but that one's mostly only good for annoying people who are doing puzzles with me. :P
HUGS GIMME HUGS GIMME HUGS -- um. Yeah, I got nothing. I'm not actually particularly afraid to say what I want? Like the other day when I was like DUDE FIC ABOUT CLUB CALLED HEAVEN PLEASE. I mean, nothing came of it, but I asked.
Although speaking of, actually, if you have recs for any fic at all about any of the FOB folks set in the current now (like, since they went on hiatus) that would be amazing?
DAY EIGHT: "talk about a talent (or talents) you have."
One talent I have is reciting poetry I've memorized! It's a lot of fun, and every time I do it, the listeners tend to be really impressed and appreciative. I work at putting the emotion and drama into my voice as I recite, and I think people respond to that.
Another talent I have is for jigsaw puzzles, but that one's mostly only good for annoying people who are doing puzzles with me. :P
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Reciting things (and podficcing): AWESOME talents to have.
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(no actually it's more like I'm really bad at coming up with, like, specific things I really want. It's far more common for me to see something and be like OH HELLO THING I NEVER KNEW I WANTED)
Although if you're taking requests I never say no to pretend boyfriends? :D (SGA totally welcome! It's been a very long time since I've read me a good Rodney/John pretend boyfriend fic)
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(TRUE)
I will, uh, take this under consideration. I DO SO LOVE PRETEND BOYFRIENDS MYSELF.
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Pretend boyfriends are AMAZING obvs! :D
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Rating: NC-17; 3,856 words; Demi Lovato/Pete Wentz
Summary: He taps in a text to Gabe: what if im fallin in love with someone else not appropriate
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My standards (because they are the first two I learned, and thus the ones I know best) are The Cremation of Sam McGee, and The Highwayman. Two very different poems, but both such fun to recite! I'm also really fond of reciting Errantry, by JRR Tolkien, because it is just one of those poems that works the very best out loud. It's got this fantastic rolling forward feel, and a palpable love of language, and feeling it come tripping off my tongue is just delicious. As a story it's nothing special, but as a set of words put together into beautiful rhythm and rhyme it's fantastic.
(oh wow that is a lot of work! Good luck getting it all accomplished! And feel free to tell me about your favourites whenever you do have the time...)
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I've always meant to learn "Forty Singing Seamen" by the same author who wrote "The Highwayman" (Alfred Noyes), but I can never find our copy; the only poem of his that I know is four quatrains long.
St George he killed the dragon,
But he did not shout hurray,
He dumped it in a wagon
Just to clear the mess away.
But the wagoner he sold it
To a showman at the Fair,
And when St George was told it
He was almost in despair.
For the people crowded round it
To admire its teeth and claws,
And St George he was an Englishman
And did not like applause.
"The creechah weighed a ton at most,"
He muttered through his vizahd.
"I do not feel inclined to boast
About that puny lizahd."
Welp, I lie, because I can quote a lot of oddments (including an even goofier one about... subjective points of view, I think? I'm not sure. Yosemite and Ancient Greece were involved, as were flatfish) from an epically amazing book he wrote in 1940 called "The Secret of Pooduck Island". Which is about squirrels and Native American ghosts and Italian poets and an island in Maine whose name means "the place where the world ends". And, um, inspired me to paint a fanart, it did. :-) But that whole book has elements of being a poem, and I cannot recite the whole thing, so I don't count it. XD
And, um, Cremation of Sam McGee! I don't know any Robert W Service at all, because the way I learn a poem is to read it out loud over and over till everyone in my family knows it, and the one I'd like to learn - "Spell of the Yukon" - has too much cussing to do that with. And most of the others have reasons to not learn them, too. o_O (And there was that one spoof of his most famous poems that amuses me rather a lot - but I haven't learned it because it's all about unexamined slut-shaming. Which is sad.)
(Also Cremation of Sam McGee... honestly freaks me out too much for me to want it stuck in my head. IDK. I just have a ghost/zombie/unexplained-reanimation squick? And it bothers my fannish brain because there is no good way to think about what happens after. *puzzles*)
The first poem I learned was "Oh how I do like to go up in a swing", by Robert Louis Stevenson. I love it specially because it actually works well, when you are a small child in an average-sized swing, for reciting at such a rate that you are "up" and "down" at the proper moments. (I love all literary things that show the maker understood kids. Yes. KIPLING'S JUST SO STORIES MUST BE MENTIONED HERE.)
And speaking of Kipling - another one I really want to learn is Gods of the Copybook Headings. I love love love that one, and it is in my not!NaNo (James is a slightly unlikely Kipling fan and can recite gobs of his poetry and several of the Just So Stories off by heart. Mort prefers Masefield. They have EPIC POETRY BATTLES. XD) D'you know it?
(And heehee, Masefield. The amount of Masefield I want to know! I had his Complete Poems out of the library for a while, and both his and Kipling's were as full of wee Post-It flags marking poems to learn as anything you have ever seen. But I didn't get them all copied out before they had to go back.)
I know Sea Fever, of course, and "Cargoes" I learned because David McCallum recited it so well (I've said that to you, I think), and one called "Tewkesbury Road" that I can never remember the name of but it's a wonderful walking song.
It is good to be out on the road, and going one knows not where,
Going through meadow and village, one knows not whither nor why,
Through the grey light drift of the dust, in the keen cool rush of the air,
Under the flying white clouds and the broad blue lift of the sky,
And to halt by the chattering brook, in the tall green fern at the brink,
Where the harebell grows, and the gorse, and the foxgloves purple and white,
And the shy-eyed delicate deer troop down to the pools to drink
When the stars are mellow and large at the coming on of the night.
O! to feel the warmth of the rain and the homely smell of the earth
Is a tune for the blood to jig to - a joy past power of words,
And the blessed green comely meadows seem all a-ripple with mirth
At the lilt of the shifting feet, and the dear wild cry of the birds.
Read it aloud; it needs it. :-) He can rival Gerard Manley Hopkins for "this sounds funny at first", but unlike Hopkins, it resolves itself into something beautiful and memorable if you can wrap your tongue around it. (Sorry - I just can't appreciate Hopkins. Sprung rhythm + hinky rhymeschemes = doesn't fit inside my brain.)
But I also want to learn "West Wind" and lots of other things! Including that one that had to be a youthful effort because it contains the line "In the comely land of Teme and Lugg, and Clent and Clee and Wyre." And every verse-ending is like that, and it's just the stupidest- sounding poem to recite, except everywhere else where it's beautiful. ;P But I want to learn it anyway. :-) (I'm such a Masefield fan. I mean, who else do you know who can make "upper mizzen-topsail sheet" fit perfectly into the sense of a poem as well as the rhythm? *g*)
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"Earendil was a mariner" is actually a middle-earth rewriting of "Errantry" although with slightly less complicated rhyme-scheme! (Tolkien wrote only one or two poems in the form Errantry's in, and gave it up for too much work. I do not blame him!)
Errantry begins:
There was a merry passenger,
A messenger, a mariner
He built a gilded gondola
to travel in and had in her
a load of yellow oranges
and porridge for his provender
He perfumed her with marjoram
and cardamom and lavender
So you can see how it's related to Earendil the Mariner!
I've never actually read any other poems by Alfred Noyes; it's interesting that The Highwayman is so very popular but nobody ever hears of anything else he's written. Is he a generally good poet?
The way you memorize poetry is a bit different from me! I find that interesting. I go a line at a time, and say it until I've got the line, then I say that line and the next one, and then that line and the next and the next, and so forth. Mostly I do it in my head, not aloud, although I practice aloud while walking places so that I don't annoy people I'm living with.
Did you ever read the Cremation of Sam McGee fic I got for yuletide last year? It's really great, and addresses at least in part what happens to McGee afterwards!
What's the spoof of Service's most famous poems? I don't think I've ever come across it!
I actually think the first poem I ever memorized was Stevenson too! It was "In winter I get up at night," though. Although I ALSO have "Oh how I do like to go up in a swing" memorized, though completely by accident. I just sort of...realized one day that I could say it all the way through and went "HUH!"
I'm not actually familiar with much of Kipling's poetry; mostly I've only ever read his Just So Stories. I just went and looked up Gods of the Copybook Headings, and then went and looked up what copybook headings are and it made a bit more sense after that but I'm still not entirely sure I get what he's going after with that poem...
But Kipling does have a dab hand with rhythm in his poems, is one thing I've noticed and appreciate! It's one of the things I like so much about Service -- his poems really sing when you read them aloud, and there's never a stumble in the beat.
Speaking of Service, you should look up his "Carols of an Old Codger" -- it's a poetry collection he wrote quite late in life and it's really interesting to read his perspective on things as an old man. (handily, you can find the book online here)
I've never read any of Masefield either, but I believe you've recommended him to me before. I definitely need to look him up! That Tewkesbury Road is lovely.
Anyways, I would talk more about what poems I've memorized only I actually have this terrible tendency to forget which poems I've memorized and then I wrack my brain thinking "what else do I know? I KNOW I know more!" It's kind of annoying!
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Alfred Noyes is generally quite excellent! :-) Here is his Forty Singing Seamen, which is a gloriously meta bit of nonsense about some sailors who find the mythical kingdom of Prester John. (Sadly it has not got the illustrations from my anthology, which were a bit fabulous.) I mean, it has the wonderfully brain-breaky line "Could the grog we dreamt we swallowed make us dream of all that followed?" and other things like that. :-)
Oh, and he wrote the best of all the "Francis Drake comes back to England" poems. It is The Admiral's Ghost, which I read when I was tiny and which (appropriately enough, lol) haunted me for the next fifteen years when I couldn't find it again. But I remembered a couple of the lines, and when the Internet was far enough advanced I turned it up with the aid of Google. :-)
Although, okay, Drake's Drum by one Sir Henry Newbolt (of whom I never heard elsewhere) is a pretty darn close second. It's a wee bit better for reciting, maybe; it's got such a wonderfully unique character voice. (Noyes... has a better narrator voice than talent for different character voices, I would say, though I never thought of that as a thing I would check poems for till this minute.)
I did read your Cremation of Sam McGee fic! I'd forgotten I'd read it. It's... interesting, a very well-done sequel-y-thing. (Yay fanfic! Fanfic is such a marvellous... type of magic, I almost want to say. In the kind of household-fantasy way that, say, knitting is sort of magic: it turns things more shiny and awesome, but you have to know how to use it. Am I making any sense at all?)
Here is the spoof! The Ballad of Yukon Jake, also known as "The Hermit of Sharktooth Shoal", by one Edward Paramore. It's about a kid who reads too many Robert W Service poems and runs away to have Adventures. Here is a verse:
'Without coming to blows he would tweak the nose
Of Dangerous Dan McGrew,
And becoming bolder, throw over his shoulder
The lady that's known as Lou.'
It's a very clever parody / fanfic thingy. Aaaaand apparently they made a movie of it in 1926, which makes me boggle rather. O_O
'though completely by accident. I just sort of...realized one day that I could say it all the way through and went "HUH!"'
Hee, that's happened to me with a few poems - mostly of that length or shorter, I think. I think this is the longest; it's better recited aloud but you are not here to be subjected to it (I changed a couple of words to reduce the race!fail). It made me giggle massively to remember it during the couple of episodes of Deep Space Nine where Odo is reeling off, to remind Sisko et al how good he is, all the long informant-trails he uses:
'Absolute knowledge I have none,
But my niece's washerwoman's son
Heard a policeman on his beat
Say to a laborer in the street
That he had a letter last week
Written in the finest Greek
From a Chinese coolie in Timbuktu
Who said that the planters in Cuba knew
Of a millionaire in a Texas town
Who got it straight from a circus clown
That a man in the Klondike heard the news
From a gang of South American Jews
Who heard of a society female rake
Whose mother-in-law will undertake
(As stated in a printed piece)
To prove that her husband's sister's niece
Has a son, who has a friend,
Who knows when the war is going to end!'
--Anonymous.
I... think the point of "Gods of the Copybook Headings" is that human nature doesn't change? AFAIK, he was kind of poking fun at all the utopias that were going around when he wrote it, that were pretty much dependent on "welp, now nobody will be greedy or evil anymore because we've abolished something!" Like the verse "On the first Feminian sandstones we were promised the Purer Life, Which began with loving our neighbor and ended by loving his wife". It's... a somewhat depressing sort of realism (and like all Kipling-for-grownups, I never know exactly what level of snark he was aiming for; f'rinstance, does White Man's Burden (which I keep trying to google as "Grey Man's Burden" ever since somebody mentioned Gul Dukat in connexion with it) represent something he thought personally, or something he was making fun of like He Travels the Fastest Who Travels Alone?)
But I basically like it because it's this fantastic bundle of snark about stars-in-eyes idealism. Kipling!snark is the snarkiest snark. :-) (Aaaand I am not the most, well, optimistic person. ;P So it kinda fits my temperament.)
*looks at that set of links* But really, he has some lovely poems too! Not just weird or vaguely problematic ones. Look, here is L'Envoi aka "When the Earth's Last Picture is Painted"! And Recessional, better known as "Lest We Forget", which is one of my favorite poems ever. And Road Through the Woods, which is possibly the most difficult poem I have ever learned because the rhyme-scheme is so complex. (I had to do an ABAC-type diagram of it. I didn't even have to do that for Ëarendil.) Um, sorry, that got a bit long... I just really love Kipling, okay? :-)
I shall have to read "Carols of an Old Codger"! The collection of Service poems I had out of the library was only his first three books or thereabouts; I'd date it around 1926, very tentatively, from memory. I'm not at all familiar with his later work. *bookmarks*
And ooh yes, Masefield. I would link ALL THE MASEFIELD here, except I... can't think of any. :P My brain is suddenly running down. I possibly should have done my homework instead of babbling about poems. But poems are more fun! XD