Repeating myself from yesterday, this post goes into some detail about the theme entries for the Ubercross Abecedaria H. I will restrain myself from giving the exact answers, but there’ll be some pretty big hints, so if you don’t care for those…hit a “back” arrow or a “window close” button or something, and see you tomorrow!
I used Jonathan Feinberg’s Haiku Finder on twenty different texts, throwing them into the system one after another. My sources were:
Holy books (1, the Koran)
A collection of proverbs (2)
Thomas Paine’s Common Sense (1)
Movies (7)
Shakespeare (1)
TV (1)
Famous (non-haiku) poetry (1)
Song lyrics (2)
Popular fiction (3—Sherlock Holmes, Stephen King, Terry Pratchett)
Comics (Watchmen)
As I mentioned, I didn’t look for season words or dramatic line-end stings, but I did look for flashes of insight and a certain two-partedness, a feeling that there was a change of direction partway through. A modest surprise ending. A twist.
I was disappointed to find nothing usable in the Bible. You’d think that out of the 727,969 words of the New International Version, there’d be at least a few sentences that met the 5-7-5 standard. In fact, I did find four. But none of them really stood on their own that well, whereas the Koranic passage used concrete imagery to provide a simple rule for living. It’s not necessarily that relevant a rule for most people today, but like Leviticus, it’s interesting from an anthropological perspective…the kind of rule people would adopt to help survive hard desert living.
The proverbs, one of which was quite familiar as an Eastern-style koan and the other of which is sadly relevant to modern times, both cover some abstract issues in an exoskeleton of concrete imagery.
The same can be said for Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, the only straightforward nonfiction I ended up using. There were lots of other disappointments like the Bible. In the case of nonfiction, most of the books I was interested in suffered from a smaller percentage of memorable or stand-alone sentences. Even when they offered me a lot of 5-7-5, that turned out to be a lot of nothing.
Movie dialogue was a much richer vein. One of the haiku was a movie title—a famously long one, naturally—which doubled as a bit of smart-sounding, albeit highly specific advice. Another was split in two, representing the single most brutal dialogue exchange in Frozen—if you’ve seen it, you can probably guess which one I mean. Hans’s self-revealing line gets most of the attention, but it’s the beat of Anna’s reply that really puts it over the top for me.
Some of the haiku were concerned with abstract matters but ground them in concrete language—only Terry Pratchett’s came close to being straight-up abstract throughout, but its language was still easy to visualize. Others had more of a concrete focus, but always with some kind of abstract meaning energizing them.
Finding these was one of the biggest distinct pleasures of doing this project. Tomorrow, I’ll do my best to share that pleasure with the rest of you.