Saturday, November 19, 2011

A Song on the End of the World

I have placed a WAV example of Czesław Miłosz  “ A Song on the End of the World”  or Piosenka o końcu świata at http://poets.aule-browser.com in Curl markup.

The Curl RTE browser plugin from Sumisho/CSK/Curl is required to see or hear the poem.  Links are provided to an English translation by Anthony Milosz and to the Czeslaw Milosz CD at Poetry Foundation.

Saturday, November 12, 2011

Czeslaw Milosz poem Campo di Fiori

I have added Czesław Miłosz’s poem "Campo di Fiori" in Curl web content markup at my http://goo.gl/7LKuA with versions in Polish and English, They are copyright, so text is not selectable and no popup menus are present. The Curl browser RTE plugin is required.


The poem is part of the collection at http://poets.aule-browser.com/index.html

Becauce both the poem and the translation are under copyright, there are no menus and the text is not selectable with mouse or keys - but it is just UTF-8 text in a text file.

Sunday, November 6, 2011

Shakespeare Sonnet 116

At poets.aule-browser.com I have added Curl markup of William Shakespeare's Sonnet 116.

The subtlety of the otherwise elegant markup is only evident when resizing the browser window horizontally: the lexical equivalents flow in and collapse.

Most of the lines are in Curl web content markup using a simple text-format defined so as to enable

{ln Let me not to the marriage of true minds }
{ln Admit ... next line with footnote }

The superscript degree symbol is given with

some word{lex-mrk}

and the full line includes

some word{lex-mrk} more words {gap}{lex synonym1 / synonym2}

As yet I have no alternative to explicitly specifying an auto-adjusting filler width with a {gap} as markup.

A line with lexical annotation is a

{linx  A line with the sounds of crepitating{lex-mrk} leaf litter ... {lex crisp  / crackling}

A footnote, as usual, is {fn 1} which gives a small superscript numeral and the corresponding annotation is in

{footnote 1 The expected footnote in a suitable small font}

For the complexity of the sliding annotation presentation, the markup remains suitably minimalist and simple to learn, master and retain.

Versions of the poem without footnotes or other annotation use the SAME source file with the SAME unchanged markup.  This is an alternative to the usual separation of content and presentation.  This permits using the same source for both teaching, tutoring and practice examinations: one source file with different home page format definitions.

For foreign language poetry instruction this has many advantages.

The next version will include optional line meter presented below each line of the sonnet.

I have a note for the global Curl community at http://communities.curl.com/showthread.php?tid=336&pid=890.

Freud Gradiva

I have added German and English versions of Wilhelm Jensen's Gradiva and Freud's essay to poets.aule-browser.com. It is a companion to the Luther Bibel: the connection is dreams. The new web page requires the Curl RTE browser plugin.

In Freud's Traumdeutung text there are passages which must be read in the original in order to reflect Freud's own tendentious readings onto his own writings.  The parallel with the Luther Bibel might seem mistaken: Freud's family did not originate in Catholic Vienna: they were Jews in Galicia, where the few Protestants were Augsburg Confession, Confessio Augustana. But Freud earnestly sought the Lutheran-minded Jung (Binswanger, for example, while Swiss, was from a Jewish family of Augsburg) as has often been noted. In the wider world, the Germans were Lutherans (see the struggle of the Lutheran convert Husserl in the Freiburg university and the long standing issue of Catholic influence intruding into Protestant "instances".)

In some ways you might see Freud's later "metapsychology" essays as his struggle to post his "theses". Sigismund Schlomo Freud certainly saw his psychoanalytic movement as comparable to that of a Moses or a Luther or a Galileo (but in the city of Ignaz Semmelweis and Ludwig Boltzmann.)

Central Freudian terminology such as “Traumentstellung” have a subtle ambiguity - this one more easily noted in French - but even further, the use of “Entstellung” in chemistry in Freud's day is not that of morgue notes: defaced, disfigured, distorted, Tatschen entstellen, Tatsachen verdrehen, Wirklichkeit entstellen, irren, Irma.

Freud: «Aus dem im Träume [Trauma] mitspielenden Gedankenkries [Benzinring] möchte ich nachträglich den Ausdruck für diese flüchtige Empfindung einsetzen [einstellen]. Es ist, als ob er mir gesagt hätte: Du nimmst deine ärztlichen» (my insertions in square brackets)


The page ends with Freud's essay Der Dichter und das Phantasieren.

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Luther Bibel

I have put a complete Luther Bible in German at http://poets.aule-browser.com/lutherbibel.html

Why?  Vexation.  First that my university library had none (the German ! Department thought it belonged in the library of a religious college.)  Something like having no Chaucer and no Shakespeare and no KJV for an English Department.  Then, more recently, I found that the internet sources are all annoying and offered no simple text version.

This one is a straight HTML file, all 4+ Mb. The page comes with links to books at the top, but nothing more.

I will create a Curl version using Curl markup from www.curl.com - which will allow as much markup and annotation as I care to add.

Why in the 'poets' Aule?  Because it stands to German poetry as do the above-mentioned to English poetry.

HTML Luther Bibel auf deutsch.

Monday, October 24, 2011

Albrecht Haushofer

At http://poets.aule-browser.com/haushofer-1.html I have added "Der Vater" by Albrecht Haushofer, a victim of the Gestapo in the last days of Nazi Berlin.

The poem is in my Curl poetry markup, but the text is not selectable as I have no copyright information for the version which I have available.

The page requires the Curl RTE browser plugin available at http://www.curl.com/download/rte

Sunday, July 17, 2011

Google+Yahoo+Bing = MicroData-by-committee

A google search for 'poem' or 'novel' at schema.org turns up nada.

Painting is there; sculpture is there; book is there; article is there.  Poem is not.

But there is a provision for keywords as text. So law, speech, proof, precedent are all relegated to being keywords?  As is that key term: peer-reviewed? We have advanced so far beyond Solon, Cicero, Priestley and Edmund Burke. A dialog of Plato, say, The Sophist, would now be tagged ... oh yes, I saw the BBC version so that is under TVSeries. Forget Sophocles.  Drama and play are banished?

But Movie and TVEpisode and Recipe are at level 3.  GovernmentOffice falls under LocalBusiness ? {a sibling of the latter is GovernmentOrganization.]  And how Brits are going to grate their teeth on that American 'z'. GovtOrg was not an option?

Oddly missing is that key term: 'porn'.  And 'art' is replaced by 'CreativeWork' so that kitsch can rub shoulders with Kandinsky, YouTube with Andrei Tarkovsky.  The final leveling is a couch-potato hierarchy in which poetry is finally banished so that any and all can be labelled "poetic"?

Quantity is there; evaluation is not: tripe, drivel, true-but-trivial, disproven, canard, putative, alleged, hypothetical, unproven, disputed, well-confirmed, assumption, presupposition, axiom, non sequitur, proof, fallacy, tautology, insightful, perspicuous, prolix, pithy, ludicrous, ironic, unscientific, elegant, consistent, coherent ... pre-Darwinian, pre-DNA, pre-Newtonian, pre-Galilean, pre-Hubble, biblical, dogma, credo, cant.

Not to be alarmed: there is an extension mechanism.  But surely this first pass at tagging for the triumvirate is a comment on the geeks of America and their managers.

Bavarian Gentians

There is now a web page with simple Curl markup of D.H. Lawrence's Bavarian Gentians at poets.aule-browser.com which is built from a text-to-Curl tool.

In this case the markup uses the default {paragraph } text-procedure and the markup has no semantics particular to an English poem from the twentieth century.  Each paragraph is a Visual object and can be assigned a name property.

The text of the poem is not selectable in this version of the page.  In a study version the word "Dys" would be clickable as might several others.  Initially the page might be up 3 minutes before any links or button appear, especially if displayed in a teaching browser for students with no BACK button.

The button for the image and the links were added manually.

Saturday, June 4, 2011

Poem continues

 
A lovely German poetry volume has a font glyph which indicates that a poem on a facing or recto page continues on the next, back or verso page: the character resembles // but I do not find one in the Ogham Unicode 6.0 page or the like.  It seems to be more of an issue in bilingual books with the source language on verso and the translations on recto pages such that both pages may benefit from a continuation character.  Judging from what I.A. Richards wrote about when a poem knows that it is done, the reader may deserve the same.  This is clearly more of an issue in e-book formats.

I do see some lovely Unicode points for the glyphs in the Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics.

Some poetry is set with a centered asterisk between sections.  I recall having seen a variety of barred lines and curved-lines for poem separations or endings.

A very simple macro in Curl would allow you to choose what to place within a poem immediately prior to where a page break has been placed.

One user-controlled optional presentation feature in Curl web content line-numbering could be
    50 / 150 (at verso last line)
  100 / 150 (at recto last line)
which might alert a reader (but perhaps not well-advised for some epic poems.)

Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Seuls Demeurent and New Directions bilingual René Char poetry

I added a review at amazon.com on the common Mary Ann Caws "Selected Poems" of René Char.


Amazon.com should list the book under Mary Ann Caws in addition to Jolas as MAC provides the preface in addition to many of the translations and both are designated editors.

The editors fail to indicate which poems are from 1938-1944 "Seuls Demeurent" or the other volumes gathered together in 1948 as the collection "Fureur et Mystère" - which neglect is a real disservice to the reader. In southern France, 1943 was not 1948.

The prolific MAC may well get two things wrong in her own translation of Evadné - a poem which surely requires and deserves at least a short note. For starters, this is Maubec in the Luberon district or Vaucluse. Note the connection to de Sade. The heraldics of Maubec are also amusing (4 lion's feet and a gold tower.) The stones of the chateau were recycled by the locals. Old Maubec is gone. See "silex" and Char on de Sade and "la boue du ciel". Note the four feet of Lilith in some illustrations.

In short, it is time for a new edition with an adequate TOC, notes and some revised translations, not another reprint.


I might add here that the ARGUMENT of the book Seuls Demeurent is produced as a poem with a first line as title.  The ARGUMENT of the book Le Poème Pulvérisé is produced as the third in that sequence (a sequence not noted as such despite the work of Pierre Boulez and Henri Matisse with regard to that book.)  I could go on.

Related ISBN are 9780811211925 0811211924 9780811211918 for the 1992 paperback and hardcover from New Directions.

The Oeuvres Complèts date to 1983 so it appears that whoever built the TOC ignored Caws own preface.

As an e-book, would you want to see the relevant links in a Table of Contents [TOC] or in a preface or as a pop-up with the respective translations?

Friday, May 13, 2011

Roger Moore

I have added a Curl poetry markup page with two poems by Roger Moore to the Aule-Browser Canadian poets page.

The poems are set to Oaxaca photographs by Tina Modotti.

Friday, April 29, 2011

Obsidian 22 by Roger Moore

I have placed two poems from Roger Moore's 2007 Obsidian 22  [ISBN 978-1-895306-63-7] at

    http://poets.aule-browser.com/obsidian22.htm

The poems are

  Old Man from Arrazola
and
  Puppet on Sundry Pieces of String

Both are in Curl markup and require the Curl RTE plugin from the www.curl.com site.

Both are copyright text and neither the text nor the images are selectable — regardless of the use or not of CSS or JavaScript by the user's browser.

Obsidian 22 treats of 10 photographs by Tina Modotti and is volume 3 of The Oaxacan Trilogy.

Each poem on that Moore page is prefaced by the respective stanza from the opening "Raison d'être".

Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Frye Festival

Here is a link for the 2011 Frye Festival in Moncton, NB.

Maybe next year there can be a session on security for online chapbooks?

I have a post elsewhere on collaborative viewers for commenting on scripts under consideration.

Monday, April 18, 2011

Thursday, April 14, 2011

Amber Tamblyn's poetry

Poems by Amber Tamblyn can be seen at her  http://www.amtam.com/about-me/selected-poems but also at Google Books.

Her books of poetry are Free Stallion and Bang Ditto.

The poems at her site have a printed copyright but are not otherwise protected — although they could have been secured using Curl web markup.

Here is an example of a partially-secured copyright poem of Franz Baermann Steiner (the link will require the safe and secure Curl browser plugin in order to view the poem.)

On the web, the Curl 7.0.3 browser plugin is often referred to as the Surge RTE (runtime engine) and it is somewhat similar to plugins for Flash or Java but with a more mature security model.  The plugin is used in mission critical software by companies such as the Paisley division of Thomson Reuters with their impressive global clients.  Curl's own customers include Nissan and Hitachi.

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

UNICODE text for poetry pages

This is a useful page if you do any work on web pages with literary text: Joel on Software.

Especially if you have any text prepared with Microsoft Windows Notepad, you need to know about their use of the initial BOM bytes in your "text" file.

UNICODE "UTF-8" and the topic of character-encoding is essential for working with translation text prepared in ascii, ansi or in some 16-bit encoding.

Sunday, February 27, 2011

letter spacing

I put a note up at curl.com today as I hope to see more options in Curl 8.0 for text formatting.

This arose when I was looking at the old University of California Press reprint of Mary Barnard's translation of fragments of Sappho.  That book has many nice features, such as the suppression of page numbers on poetry pages (the fragments themselves are numbered) and the Greek key pattern preceding each fragment number.

That book got me to thinking about stanza spacing and the advent of both line-spacing and word-spacing.

A large part of what distinguishes poetry from prose is the line - and spacing can be as essential as the choice of font.

One Canadian poetry e-journal rejects submissions with spacing not to the editor's taste (this may reflect his frustration with HTML+CSS as much as anything aesthetic.)

I can only hope that Curl 8.0 will offer the spacing features that we are currently denied by HTML, CSS, IE and Microsoft.  Curl does allow control of line-spacing at this time (negative values compress, positive expand, the default.)

Saturday, February 5, 2011

Sternbild Reiterlein and Rilke's Sonnet to Orpheus on Mizar and Alcor

In the eleventh of the first Sonnets to Orpheus, Rilke teases us as to whether there is an asterism "Rider" - and of course there is; Mizar and Alcor [Alkor], the "Reiterlein".

This has been ignored by translators, who can then make no sense of

  Neue Weite. Und die zwei sind eins.

In pursuit of a partial rhyme, Willis Barnstone veers off into 'galaxy'.

Mizar and Alcor are not just two stars.  Rilke has chosen "the little rider".

These two are bound as a binary, known now to be a sextet, part of the U. Ma. Moving Group drifting past us through our arm of the galaxy: not of this world of ours and not always to be with those on earth as a 'Sternbild'.

The U. Ma. Moving Group has been known since 1869.

Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Curl Markup

While I usually import the layout declarations so that they do not clutter my view of a file containing a poem in Curl markup such as

{poem
   {stanza
      the first
      couplet
   }
   {stanza
      the second
      couplet
   }
}

here is a simple Curl page with a StyleSheet declaration:


{curl 7.0 applet}
{curl-file-attributes character-encoding = "utf8"}

{def styl_em =
    {StyleSheet
        {StyleRule "text.emphasis",
            font-style = "italic",
            font-weight = "bold"
        }
    }
}

{paragraph style-manager = {BasicStyleManager styl_em},
  
    {text style-class = "emphasis",

             this text will be presented as italic font-style with bold font-weight
    }
  
}

The resulting page is simply:

this text will be presented as italic font-style with bold font-weight