Problems with Poetry

I've always had a hard time retaining content from poetry and I finally realized why.

I'm good with rhymes, anagrams, songs, and such but when I hear them or read them, I hardly ever remember the words.

The reason I miss them is because my brain auto-completes the lines. Taking context and style into account, I generally know what word is going to be rhymed at the end and I then just throw in words that fit the meter and general style and tone of the poem.

I have difficulty remembering them because I have only the first rhyming word and the meter, all the rest of the text is lost and I lack sufficient data to recreate the string from memory.

I realized this only because I was reading a translated version of Faust and many of the rhymes are bad or use archaic wordings and meanings and throw off my parser.

So now I'm analyzing for a different way to read verse so that I might better recall it.

App(le) woes

*sigh* Still no release in sight for intelMac versions of Photoshop, Illustrator, and Maya.

Maya, having been recently bought by Autodesk, I have fears they'll NEVER release an intelMac version.

Maybe I should just start watching eBay and try to get a G5 tower. :(

True Power

Midst all the reading, I've also been working on some projects for better personal organization.

I mentioned google calendar the other day and the limitations of it. I'm still not thrilled with the weird limitations it has but there are some points to it that give it great power. Mostly, what google does best. Search.

Below the public calendars, there's a search box. Type in something you want, say 'San Francisco raves' and it will show you all public calendars matching your request. Cool.

By this way, I discovered that the Love Parade is happening in just a couple of weeks. I missed this last year but this year I think I might like to make it. Anyone interested?

While on the subject of organization, a quick thanks to Peggy for help figuring out how to make a smart playlist in iTunes that would corral all of my radio channels into a group instead of having to hunt through them in the main library. A bit annoying I can't delete dead ones from there too but this is still a big improvement and has let me organize the audio on my computer considerably better.

Lastly, I'm going to start using XJournal more for doing LJ posts. The way it handles looking at friends list history and such is helpful. :)

Faust

I started reading Faust on the train on the way home from San Francisco last night and finished it up just now.

By in large, it's the same story as The Tragical Story of Dr. Faustus but made a bit clearer and about 3 times as long. There were things I liked about Dr Faustus better than Faust, and vice versa, but those were probably due to the translators more than the story itself.

Unlike the later americanized remake of these stories The Devil and Daniel Webster Neither Faust nor Faustus meet a happy end. Their version of God gives them no last-second redemption for a life of sin. Interestingly, Faust starts off much the same as the story of Job in the Old Testament, and maybe most simply put that's what Faust is about. A man tempted by the devil who didn't have the religious fortitude of Job.

Worth the time to read both of them. Together, they're scarcely 1/16th the length of the bible and quite a lot more fun.

I found the translator's footnotes in Faust to be much more interesting than the ones in Dr. Faustus. In particular, this one caught my eye as something that might be fun to read.

[Footnote 37: "The Talmudists say that Adam had a wife called Lilis before
he married Eve, and of her he begat nothing but devils." Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy.

I can't help but think this isn't the kind of book one might find in the library of Egon Spangler. ;) Alas, gutenberg.org is down for updates so I can't search and see if they have a copy.

Ohwell. In the meanwhile, I've got plenty of other books to read.