CSotD: Why nerds should study the liberal arts
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Two weeks or so ago, NPR had a feature on the morning show about some fellow who sells custom poetry the way caricature artists sell caricatures. He sits at some farmers market/craft fair place and people give him a few bucks whereupon he takes their names and a random fact or two about them and then types — yes, typing is part of his schtick, as waving around a turkey drumstick would be if he were working a Renaissance Faire — a few broken lines of vapid, self-absorbed custom drivel for them.
To which my response was that this is a good thing, because I'd much rather read broken lines of vapid, self-absorbed drivel about myself than about someone else. Which is why I cannot hit the button on the radio fast enough when "The Writer's Almanac" comes on.
And god knows I've given up on quoting Robert Frost's observation that "writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down" and singing the praises of poets who could frame their thoughts within exquisitely precise linguistic sculptures.
Apparently, being able to sculpt with language is no longer relevant, perhaps because understanding the structure of language is no longer relevant.
Poetry is about feelings. It's about writing a gaseous 75-word essay about something and then cutting up the lines at random to make them more sincere.
And, anyway, structure is like math and math is for nerds.
Which brings us to xkcd's brilliant riff on the Major-General's song, which is one of the nerdiest and most wonderful pieces of word-play ever set to a demanding and absolute structure:
xkcd is sometimes so incredibly geekish in its analysis of structure that I have to shrug and move on because I have no idea what he's taking on, much less what he's done with it. But that minute, obsessive delight in how the parts fit together works in everyone's favor this time around because, by gawd, he got it right.
Nobody ever gets it right.
Cartoonists continuously attempt to incorporate take-offs on songs or poetry in their strips and it nearly always reminds me of the old limerick:
There was a young chap named McMahon
Whose poems would never quite scan.
When told it was so,
He said, "Yes, I know,
"but I always try to get as many words into the last line as I possibly can."
Sometimes the overlying satire is quite well-based, because, after all, good cartoonists have a talent for choosing their targets. But if they don't have an equal talent for analyzing and imitating structure, the thing clumps along like a shopping cart with a bum wheel.
By contrast, this is as smooth as the original, including the variations in pace that are a part of Gilbert and Sullivan's greatest patter song. And note that it makes a series of sharp satiric points in much the same way that the Major-General's song brilliantly skewers the educated-but-incompetent senior officers in Victorian England's military.
Below is John Reed's classic performance of the song, and I've saved you some work by here linking "mamelon" and "ravelin." (Picture him in a pith helmet; the picture on the album cover is from "The Mikado," in which he played Koko and the patter song was the also much-spoofed, much-covered but nowhere near as intricately constructed "I Have A Little List.")
No, never mind, don't bother looking at the picture at all.
Instead, start the video and then scroll back up and read along with xkcd and see how well the song is mimicked.
I don't think anyone can possibly improve on such pointed, intelligent word play as:
"… when I have learnt what progress has been made in modern gunnery
… when I know more of tactics than a novice in a nunnery,"
but, boy-jayzuz, this fellow makes a more than credible attempt, and quite possibly — in the hundreds of knock-offs of this song that I have seen — the best ever.
This is why I think we need more nerds in the liberal arts: to impose some kind of intellectual discipline on the creative geniuses who, left without direction, will end up down at Fanueil Hall or Fisherman's Wharf writing poems for the tourists.
Which may be what they deserve but is damned unfair to Petrarch and Wordsworth and Keats.
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