Spring Foreboding

Happy Groundhog Day, everyone.

I was going to set this video to my Twitter Sonnet, but I thought it was better by itself.



I suppose I couldn't explain to Socrates to his satisfaction why I thought these leaves were interesting. Still reading Birth of Tragedy, and Nietzsche seems to regard Socrates as partially responsible for the death of tragedy, though he puts most of the blame with Euripides. It's interesting to read Nietzsche's ideas even though I've never read Euripides. Nietzsche says its Socrates constant need to look for the rational and logical that killed tragedy, and resulted in something that's neither Apollonian nor Dionysian. Nietzsche also seems to see comedy as very Apollonian, which makes a great deal of sense to me, going back to what I was saying about Who Framed Roger Rabbit. I think a lot of people mistake logic as being Apollonian, but its Socrates' logic that Nietzsche said made Euripides drift away from both Apollo and Dionysus.

The Wikipedia entry on Apollonian and Dionysian has a bit about the concepts being used in linguistics that I think nicely demonstrates Nietzsche's meaning;

Similar to Nietzsche's usage, some linguists use Apollonianism to denote "the wish to describe and create order, especially with unfamiliar information or new experience. An updated, albeit frivolous, example of this general tendency is the story about the South Dakotan who went to Athens and was happily surprised to find out that the Greeks are fans of NASA’s projects: wherever he went, he saw the name Apollo. As this anecdote shows, the ‘Apollonian tendency’ would also seem to include a significant dimension of ethnocentricity."

So in fact, not only is Apollonian order not necessarily logical, it can be quite illogical.



In case anyone's wondering, I didn't have to sing in class yesterday. In fact, I could've studied half as hard as I did--I'd memorised the whole song, but the test turned out to be "fill in the blank". Oh, well, I have a feeling having this song memorised will come in handy.

Twitter Sonnet #350

Softer membrane wands make foolish magic.
Macaroni horns paint preservative
Fox hunts over tomato paste, tragic
Steads of nature's chlorophyll additive.
Styrofoam buses squeeze fruit punch into
Classrooms that melt with Hell's apple boiling.
Senators all secretly just want to
Get some cotton candy terraforming.
After school trees carpet bomb the bread field.
Jelly sprays in crisscross patterns over
Dragon ideas of the sandwiches killed
For the capricious young fast food lover.
Ornate toupees baldly display the lie.
And lo, for a good fleece, gold sheep must die.