breaking the frames, an essay on content and form

We've secretly replaced your regular song of the day with an essay. Let's see what happens.

Yesterday I took a break from my life of ceaseless toil to knock out a lyric for the current project (number 2.633, Recycle) which contained these lines:

Nothing new comes in
but energy
information, dust
and entropy
So it's all about
recycling
Mostly carbon, nitrogen
oxygen and hydrogen

And I caught myself thinking, man, stringing these lists of chemical elements together is a snap, it's like rhyming in Italian. I had to laugh, because this was such an obtuse, nerdy thing to think - but fundamentally accurate and not, I'd think, without some reasonable linguistic underpinnings. Keeping in mind that I am a student of neither Italian nor linguistics.

But it put me in mind of the fact that, man, if anyone is reading this thing, the stuff you are in for. In less than sixty songs we'll be in the thick of my terrible, terrible recasting of Dante's Inferno, a work of 34 songs (duh, obviously) featuring myself cast in Dante's role with T.S. Eliot serving the part played by Virgil in the original. Ooh, it's horrible, partly because my soft 20th century brain can't quite negotiate Dante's stark Medieval Christianity, partly because it just seems worse when you are taking on something widely regarded as one of the great works of poetic literature, but mostly because I insisted on perpetuating Dante's terza rima structure, a rhyme scheme where things go something like this:

Ducks are very awesome
I think ducks are nice
A duck is as cool as a possum

So I will tell you twice
There's nothing as great as a duck
I'd buy one at double the price

And think of it as better luck
Than getting hit by a truck

See how that works? The important things to note are, you have to come up with a trio of each rhyme rather than the usual pair, and notice how I suck at it. English, I discovered in my researches on the topic, is what they call a "rhyme poor" language. I'm not slagging off Dante or anything, I'm just pointing out, that 90 percent of everything in Italian ends with "oh" or "ah." Add in the narrative necessities of hewing somewhat to Dante's original story arc and it winds up with a mess that was horrible to write and is all but impossible to read. If I had tried to keep up the hendecasyllable meter I probably would have gone insane. Actually I probably would have just given up, which might not have been such a bad thing, but I cling to the theory that finishing it built character.

This is the sort of thing that can end up seeming like a plan in the face of coming up with something new to write day after day after day. I'm not looking forward to transcribing this, and I doubt anyone would try to slog through much of it, but there it is: I'm a completist, an obsessive, so it will all be carried across the digital divide and presented here.

And anyway there is the central thing about a song a day: as I liked to point out about what I came to refer to as "my pathetic little inferno," the writing of the first cantica of Dante's masterwork took him 5 years of his exile from Florence to complete. Writing mine took 34 days with a full time job. However painful it is to online it, 34 postings later we will be on to new things.

I think, now, 6 months into the online project, that it will take a few years before the central object of the song of the day project - persistence - really begins to become clear to the outside observer. People I tell about this project tend, I think, to necessarily view it as an abstract: part of putting it online is to transform this into something concrete. This isn't some theory: these songs exist, for all that they ain't Dante. I question at this point whether what it is can sustain anything like a regular readership, but perhaps I can hope to occasionally bemuse the random passer-by. Back to songs tomorrow.

You can read an explanation of the origin of these lyrics here