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It occurred to me, after I got back to my room after last night's sauna session, that it will be my last such session for this trip. With that realization in mind, I lay down on the bed to do a little reading and prompty fell asleep somewhere around 8 pm, as far as I can tell.
I woke up around an hour ago (at almost ten to one in the morning) feeling quite refreshed, until I looked at my clock, whereupon a bit of "whoa!" got put into the emotional mix. So I got up, checked on the LJ Idol results, and then took a look at what kind of blanket party Gary had arranged for the remaining 24 participants for round 12.
As it turned out, he had provided 24 topics, and each participant was to choose two topics to write about, with the additional wrinkle that no topic could be chosen by more than two participants. This added a decided "first come, first served" aspect to the round.
I was the 22nd participant to stake out a claim, which leaves not a whole lot of wriggle room for the two people who have yet to check in, but in the final analysis, it really doesn't matter because it's not as if topics dictate theme (although they can). My most recent effort, for example, actually could've been posted under three of the four topic choices proffered by Gary.
This brings to mind something that has come to be a tradition during the dinner arranged by the Slavic Languages Division at annual conferences of the American Translators Association: the burimé.
I've mentioned burimé before in my journal. The name comes from from the French bouts rimés, or end rhymes, and is the result of the poet writing a poem with the constraint that a set of preselected rhymes must appear at the end of the poem's lines. In the case of the burimé poem at this particular dinner, the rhymes are solicited from dinner attendees, which results in an added challenge for the poet, which is having to deal with rhymes in English (e.g., Viagra and Niagara), in Russian (бездарный and высокопарный [which rhyme in Russian but mean "mediocre" and "bombastic," respectively]), and in both languages (намекает [allude] and "try it").
The examples in the previous paragraph reflect what may be broadly considered three basic types of rhymes, where I mean "type" to be independent of language. Thus, the first example reflects an attempt to throw something a bit risqué into the mix; the second is a much more serious, more "intellectual" choice of rhyme; while the third is just about as serious, but with the added twist that the poet must change language (or come up with something really creative) between lines.
On the surface, it seems like it'd be very hard to write burimé, and from experience (e.g., here), I can tell you it's not exactly easy, but what's hard is not incorporating the rhymes. That part is a relative breeze.
What's hard is having the result hang together as a whole to make any kind of sense, which just happens to be the same difficulty faced by anyone writing for an audience (as in, say, in LJ Idol).
Ah, well... this might be a good time to see if I can drift back to sleep.
Cheers...
I woke up around an hour ago (at almost ten to one in the morning) feeling quite refreshed, until I looked at my clock, whereupon a bit of "whoa!" got put into the emotional mix. So I got up, checked on the LJ Idol results, and then took a look at what kind of blanket party Gary had arranged for the remaining 24 participants for round 12.
As it turned out, he had provided 24 topics, and each participant was to choose two topics to write about, with the additional wrinkle that no topic could be chosen by more than two participants. This added a decided "first come, first served" aspect to the round.
I was the 22nd participant to stake out a claim, which leaves not a whole lot of wriggle room for the two people who have yet to check in, but in the final analysis, it really doesn't matter because it's not as if topics dictate theme (although they can). My most recent effort, for example, actually could've been posted under three of the four topic choices proffered by Gary.
This brings to mind something that has come to be a tradition during the dinner arranged by the Slavic Languages Division at annual conferences of the American Translators Association: the burimé.
I've mentioned burimé before in my journal. The name comes from from the French bouts rimés, or end rhymes, and is the result of the poet writing a poem with the constraint that a set of preselected rhymes must appear at the end of the poem's lines. In the case of the burimé poem at this particular dinner, the rhymes are solicited from dinner attendees, which results in an added challenge for the poet, which is having to deal with rhymes in English (e.g., Viagra and Niagara), in Russian (бездарный and высокопарный [which rhyme in Russian but mean "mediocre" and "bombastic," respectively]), and in both languages (намекает [allude] and "try it").
The examples in the previous paragraph reflect what may be broadly considered three basic types of rhymes, where I mean "type" to be independent of language. Thus, the first example reflects an attempt to throw something a bit risqué into the mix; the second is a much more serious, more "intellectual" choice of rhyme; while the third is just about as serious, but with the added twist that the poet must change language (or come up with something really creative) between lines.
On the surface, it seems like it'd be very hard to write burimé, and from experience (e.g., here), I can tell you it's not exactly easy, but what's hard is not incorporating the rhymes. That part is a relative breeze.
What's hard is having the result hang together as a whole to make any kind of sense, which just happens to be the same difficulty faced by anyone writing for an audience (as in, say, in LJ Idol).
Ah, well... this might be a good time to see if I can drift back to sleep.
Cheers...
