Cruise to Bermuda

I have a trip to Bermuda coming up, and it's going to be weird to say the least. In my life, I have rarely had a chance to return to an overseas location where I lived -- once I had moved to West Virginia, that is. The closest thing to a "return trip" involved going back to the UK multiple times. My father was at the end of his Federal career and needed to sell the home he and my mother owned in Buckinghamshire. (A house I lived in when I was 7 ... after my family left the UK for Bermuda, my parents continued to own the house and rented it out). So, he took his final posting in England to facilitate that. By that time, I was in college flew over every year for Christmas until my dad retired in 1997.

Bermuda will be an interesting visit for a number of reasons. After I left grad school and needed time away from poetry, I returned to horror fiction -- after 10 years of, basically, ignoring its existence. Bermuda is where I started writing fiction, essentially, for publication, and it is the location of a very fat book due out from KHP / Skullvines Press this summer.

My guess is essentially simple: much will be different, and much will be the same. I'm going to try like hell to make it out to St. David's island, where the navy base used to stand. My other goal is to take approximately 12,893,221 digtal pictures.

Hrmph.

Due to economic circumstances, and a need to pay a really screwed-up mortgage (while fighting the bank), it looks like I just might have to go back to Wal*Mart.

Another Quick One.

Not going off of an actual program template, but sometimes cover design seems as easy as picking a good detail from public domain art and picking a decent font, and coordinating the fonts with a color within the detail. This took about ten minutes or less to do. A few minor glitches, though. But still ... not as labor intensive as some might think....

Many Things All At Once

Well, my Mom's health is getting to the point where she needs oxygen. I wrote a post the other day about it, which I promptly erased because I thought I was being whiny. It was basically about not being sure how much I should actually talk about my mother on a blog or to other people.

But, here is where it's at, at the moment.

• Dementia
• A gargling cough
• A lack of mobility
• Struggled Speech.

In the mean time, my struggles against my mortgage holder are still ongoing. We (my wife, father and I) managed to get the state of New Jersey involved in an official compliant. In the mean time, I am seriously thinking of returning to Walmart, at least part time. My wife left her job in order to prepare for her PhD program at Fordham. Only thing: she had our health benefits. We need more money, but more importantly, we need some sort of health coverage, especially since I used to take aderall for my ADHD, and I have largely been unmedicated for several months.

More of myself trying to learn photoshop....

Silliness rather than madness

Well, sometimes, I do have to resort to this sort of thing (while at my parent's house)....

Paul Park -- Ragnarok

Paul Park's Ragnarok sets off conficted feelings in me as a reader. It's a poem Tor.com published online, and it's available on Kindle as a $0.99 read. As a lover of science fiction, horror, and fantasy, I feel that I should be grateful whenever an established writer makes a serious attempt at writing poetry. As a lover of poetry, the poem itself does not leave me impressed. It leaves me wholly unsatisfied.

Ragnarok is a meant as a post apocalyptic tale told in heroic verse. By heroic verse, Paul Park is not using metrical verse found in Homer, but more of the alliterative type seen in the Old English version of Beowulf (See the Heaney translation)and the sagas of the vikings.

Paul Park has a facility with language. That's the one thing I did enjoy about Ragnarok. He takes alliteration and uses it masterfully as an organizing poetic principal. For example:

There was a man, Magnus’s son,
Ragni his name. In Reykjavik
Stands his office, six stories,
Far from the harbor in the fat past.

That's just the inter-lineal alliteration. Paul Park also works his sonic groupings in such a way that sounds from one line also work with the line that came before. All of this is very well done.

So, what's my problem? It's not with the story, but it's largely a case of poetical aesthetics. I get what park is trying to do here. He's trying to juxtapose a post-apocalyptic time with the "heroic" dark ages. However, it doesn't work -- or, it doesn't work for me, at least.

It goes beyond the use of alliteration as an organizational principal. Park even mimics the modifiers used: "Far from the harbor in the fat past." Present-day idioms seem mismatched to me with this type of versifying. So, as poetry, this sounds far from contemporary. In a way, it makes the whole poem read rather stiff and stilted. As a result, the language seems contrived, not natural.

And this is a shame. Park clearly has the ability to work with language on a poetic level. His use of line organization demonstrates that -- the lines seem like, UM, lines ... not prosaic sentences arbitrarily chopped into lines, which, unfortunately, is a rather common problem in "science fiction" poetry.