Can you move it like this?

One of the things we discussed in class yesterday was the art of transition as executed by Gene Weingarten in Pearls Before Breakfast.

Sir John Betjeman had been in the news, and therefore (because this class requires me to keep up with the news this semester) also on my mind, and of course I had been thinking about his infamous 1937 poem Slough (yes, this year is the Diamond Jubilee of its publication).  In fact, if this weren't a long weekend, I'd probably have brought that poem to class on Monday as my example of strong writing ... btw the professor said we don't have to blog on Labor Day.  We finally caught a break  :)

Now Slough achieves some exquisite transitions with a simple and natural technique, so I decided to write about that today.

Okay, let's read the poem first:

Slough

By John Betjeman


Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough!
It isn't fit for humans now,
There isn't grass to graze a cow.
Swarm over, Death!

Come, bombs, and blow to smithereens
Those air-conditioned, bright canteens,
Tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk, tinned beans,
Tinned minds, tinned breath.

Mess up the mess they call a town---
A house for ninety-seven down
And once a week a half a crown
For twenty years.

And get that man with double chin
Who'll always cheat and always win,
Who washes his repulsive skin
In women's tears:

And smash his desk of polished oak
And smash his hands so used to stroke
And stop his boring dirty joke
And make him yell.

But spare the bald young clerks who add
The profits of the stinking cad;
It's not their fault that they are mad,
They've tasted Hell.

It's not their fault they do not know
The birdsong from the radio,
It's not their fault they often go
To Maidenhead

And talk of sport and makes of cars
In various bogus-Tudor bars
And daren't look up and see the stars
But belch instead.

In labour-saving homes, with care
Their wives frizz out peroxide hair
And dry it in synthetic air
And paint their nails.

Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough
To get it ready for the plough.
The cabbages are coming now;
The earth exhales.

So (the speaker of) the poem talks about four subjects:  the town Slough, the "man with double chin", the "bald young clerks", and the sorry lives of those clerks.  How does it shift from one of these subjects to the next?

Well, it stays with each of the four subjects for approximately two consecutive stanzas:  lines 5--12 are about Slough, lines 13--20 about Mr. Double Chin, lines 21--27 about his clerks, and lines 28--36 about the clerks' lives (including the clerks' wives).

And, whenever it changes subject from one stanza to the next, it smoothens the transition by letting the last lines of those two stanzas rhyme:  years/tears when it shifts from the town to the the bad guy, yell/Hell when it shifts from the bad guy to his employees, and Maidenhead/instead when it shifts from the employees to their pitiable lot.

Of course, it also uses the same idea to start and end the poem:  Death/breath at the transition from its initial imperative to the town (its first subject), and nails/exhales at the transition from the wives (its last subject) to repeating the imperative. 

The technique even has a nice side-effect:  Whenever the poem stays with the same subject for two consecutive stanzas, the last lines of those two stanzas do not rhyme, thus creating variety.  This also happens when the structure makes you return to the first stanza after you've finished reading the poem (exhales and Death do not rhyme).

Jo.B. could shake it like that  :)  Have a great long weekend! 

Magic on the fly

Okay, I have to print the first four entries and bring them to class, and class meets in an hour, so I'll use one of my lifelines:  I'm writing a piece of my own class prep today  :)

So you are doing this magic show.  Ask for a volunteer from the audience, and ask her to think of a (whole) number between 1 and 99.  Running example:  Let's say she thinks of 59.

Now ask her to divide the number by 9 and tell you the remainder.  If she chose 59, she'll say "5".

Next, ask her to divide the number by 11 and tell you the remainder.  If she chose 59, she'll say "4".

You're going to amaze your audience by guessing the number she chose from the two remainders.  Here's how:

Add the two remainders together, multiply the answer by 10, then add the remainder from 9 and subtract the remainder from 11.  In the example:  You added the 5 and the 4, which gave you a 9; then you multiplied by 10, so you got to 90; then you added the 5 and got 95; then you subtracted the 4, so you have 91.

After the above, you don't even need the remainders any longer  :)  Just multiply what you have by 5---in the example, multiply the 91 by 5, which gives you 455---and if it's a 3-digit number, add the digit in the 100's place to the rest of it---in the example, add the 4 to the 55---and you have the answer.

(And if you get a 1-digit or 2-digit number in place of the 455, that would be the answer already.  Exception:  If you get a 0 in place of the 455, she chose 99.)

One more example:  Let's say your volunteer chooses 98.  She tells you that the remainder from 9 is 8, and that the remainder from 11 is 10.

You add the remainders and get 18; you multiply by 10 and get 180; you add the remainder from 9 and get 188; you subtract the remainder from 11 and get 178.  Now you can forget the remainders.  You multiply the 178 by 5 and get 890 (btw, this is the biggest number you can get at this stage); you add the 8 to the 90 and you have the 98.

Want to know (a) whether this really works for all whole numbers between 1 and 99, (b) why this works, (c) how to make up more magic tricks to depress your friends?  Talk to your local college about taking a number theory class!

And I'm actually done with this entry in time  :)

A triggering town?

I spent the morning assembling some furniture I had bought on the internet (at IKEA), so I thought I already had the perfect topic for today:  The professor had mentioned in class that he writes for a publication about furniture, so I could simply review the stuff I had made today, and that would be relevant, right?

Wrong  :(  Luckily, I also thought I should check out his work before I started writing, and The Monday Morning Quarterback turned out to be way more specialized than I had expected (it seems to be about the business of furnishing offices by contract or something).  My sofa bed would have been very out of place.

Well, something else I found out this afternoon got me wondering about Dillon, MT, so I decided instead to look that up and write what I saw.  Why not?  Richard Hugo had some great poems (such as this one, which was one of the pieces Jim discussed on my first day at the Workshop this summer) about small towns in Montana, and I have even read his book about it, and I am only blogging, I am not writing a poem.

I have never been to Dillon (the closest I have ever been is Butte, which is about an hour north), so the first order of business was to land right in the middle of the town (with Google Street View) and walk around for a while.  And it is pretty  :)  Since this is Journalism class, I should probably mention that the office of the Dillon Tribune-Examiner is on South Montana Street between East Glendale Street and East Bannack Street (with a restaurant called Blacktail Station to its left and an Alltel store to its right) (there is a green bench on the sidewalk in front of the Tribune's window, which should make the office easy to spot).  Okay, no more spoilers, visit it yourself if you have a few minutes!

My next stop was the city's website, where I found some beautiful old photographs and a link to the more-than-a-century-old Dillon Public Library, but not much else on the website caught my eye.  I did notice that the Mayor's blog was started in April and has exactly 2 entries to date (he blogged one time in June).  I have to blog five days a week for this class *sigh*.

The other place I looked was this website, where I learnt that Dillon is not far from a ghost town called Bannack.  If I have a couple of extra hours the next time I drive through Butte, I might drive down there, because maybe I will get lucky and strike pay dirt in some abandoned mine  :)

Or I might drive down to Dillon, because maybe I will get even luckier and experience a Richard Hugo moment.

The world before breakfast

Yes, this is a food-and-restaurant review, but let's begin at the beginning:  When I got assigned starting a blog, finding and reading a 13-page newspaper article from 5 years ago, and the whole of Norse mythology---the Norse gods alone know what next---on the first day of the semester, my professors were obviously trying to make sure I'd stay out of trouble and not go out looking for dinner until local businesses started serving breakfast.

Well, either they miscalculated, or I misunderstood their assignments, because it was only about midnight when I was done.  My daughter vetoed pizza after she reluctantly signed out from Skype, Facebook, Twitter, and about fifteen other things, and I wanted to eat somewhere that was at least approximately on the way to my apartment, so we ended up stopping at the Grand Coney again.

That is a 24-hour diner that has kept us alive on all my nights of homework-related hardship during my time in Grand Rapids, so this review cannot be entirely impartial, but the place is almost always full when we go there, which should count as independent evidence that it's good.  Actually, I have often thought they could use a bigger parking lot.

Back to last night:  The atmosphere was lively (as you'd expect in a place that's fairly full); service was friendly and prompt; the men's restroom was clean; the coffee was, as always, weaker than what I drink at home (but it's still good enough that I drink it when I eat there); I had the Hangover Skillet (which I like a lot, even when I'm not actually hungover, but only tired); my daughter had chicken lemon rice soup and a veggie gyro (I have never tried either of those, so I wouldn't know first hand whether they are any good, but she orders both often); it only costed 16 dollars something; and we were home before 1 in the morning (so I still got in some sleep before my 9:25 AM class).

So yes, there is hope after homework of bread before breakfast.  Go to the Grand Coney and discover it for yourself some night!

Test run

A fifth of the grade in my Journalism class is for creating a blog (and then blogging five days a week).  I have never created a blog before, so the purpose of this first post is to check whether this is really going to work.

Another assignment is to read some news every day, and the only website I do read every day is Poetry News, so I spent some time researching other news sources, and I think I might go with BILD on some days (and stay with Poetry News on other days).  I'm beginning to like this  :)

Okay, it's time to see whether this really shows up after I click "Publish".  Wish me luck!