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Hoards
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Found
- Hits: 1933
A Hoard is simply another name for treasures generally hidden with a view to recover them later.
Fortunately for us, not all of them were recovered. Wikipedia has an excellent list of recovered hoards (principally in Britain), which should whet the appetite of even the most complacent of treasure hunters.
Work & More Work
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Miscellany
- Hits: 1901
I've stumbled into a gold mine, this poetry thing, and getting it out is only half the battle, the other is the forging, smithing of it into something half intelligible. And I've finished the book - "An Artist's Life" -finally! - a dozen books on my shelf now vie to be next but I'm taking something of a break...
On an unrelated note the website, this website, will be down from somewhere in mid July through to September. Too much to do, need to buy a car, find a job, summer vacation....there won't be time to maintain it, and I think it would be prudent that while I'm looking for work I keep a reasonably low profile. Not that there's anything here to hide (well...), but you understand. It'll probably look mostly like a professional resume, boring, but that's what they want....
Rhymes with ee
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Miscellany
- Hits: 2241
I'm cleaning out handfuls of old poetry. Some of it worthwhile, much of it drivel, I try to find and save, finish the worthwhile bits.
I've noticed that I'm bad for rhyming words that end in "ee". The hard e sound. And I wonder why, but it's obvious, there are an immense number of easy rhymes for words that end in the ee sound: "He, She, Me, We, See, Free", .... one syllable through many: "integrity, futility, celibacy, ingenuity, aristocracy".
And with the addition of suffixes (ly and y for example) you can make almost any word in the English language rhyme with e.
Look at the musical scale: A B C D E F G - 5 out of seven of the notes rhyme with e.
While it makes for easy, musical rhymes it's a bit lazy, (hard e sound), and combined with my tendency (hard e sound again) to overuse the rhyme-scheme abababab it's ruining my flow...
But poetry, (hard e sound), it's like a hydra, and as I sort through and try to finish old poems new ones spring forth:
Some Doggerel:
Her new suitor suits her better
He's what she asked for to the letter,
(Musical with red hair?)
She can't wait for him to bed her
Only question is is when she asks if he will let her...
Irrelevant, but I'm a fan of the light play and double-entendres, thought to polish and improve it, but it's not the sort to be polished and improved.
Then on the heels of that there comes another, Chalk Circle - "She's drawing a chalk circle, when she's done she salts the line, ..." and this one, this will be great, and there's an epiphany where I'm distracted and begin making notes, finding rhymes, building ideas...checking the online thesaurus, rhyming dictionary, it's a poor cheat, my imagination is better and there is no tool finer, there could be though....I need a rhyme for book, the rhymes online are poor, there's "hook, crook, took, cook", a few others, none to the purpose, the visual thesaurus is no help whatsoever either, what would help...reorganize the sentence, and here I pause, move on, then there flows again a torrent of ideas: "Library --> shelf --> book --> page --> word --> letter"; the scale of ideas, each one an order of magnitude above or below the other, and the thesaurus, it doesn't have this, and now I have 6 words I can find synonyms for - now more brainstorming, the maps, paper maps as there are no computer tools that come close, read - the verb of book, there are words like chapter, paragraph, sentence, and more synonyms, antonyms, rhymes, and the brainstorming continues.
And the original poem, the one I began restoring, it's so far up the page now that I've forgotten it's existence.
What is needed is an associative thesaurus, a flash program that generates associated ideas, maps them for you in different colored bubbles, to click on one will lead you to another, the link above does something similar but not at all, instead generates a list and doesn't order them in space...
Perhaps it's for the best, poetry isn't supposed to be easy. But it'd be nice to finish it all up and move on.
The murder of slow days
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Miscellany
- Hits: 2055
It's murder, this. My temper is short, I've almost entirely run out of patience, the solution, of course, is to leave and I'm resolved, I'm not returning after the vacation, but there's the caution, the memory of hard times too close to forget, the bills aren't yet fully paid, but it will be done one way or the other and I would prefer it be on good terms.
Hot, slow days in the restaurant, customers trickle in, they want to come late, stay later, we're not paid by the hour, there's no incentive to stay until the wee hours, already enough of our lives is stolen, it's trying this "So Happy to see you" game and my patience is wearing thin.
Time passes, each day the same, wake, coffee, bus to work, work, work, home, if I'm lucky the sun's still up, an hour or so on the computer, then to bed. Repeat. If my life were set to music it would be the Vuvuzela theme from the world cup.
The benefits, they haven't kicked in, administrative errors and they're not bringing it up, me either, I'll live.
But in my mind there's always the knowledge that it's the slow murder of innocent days.
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