Tetherd Cow Ahead

a·nal·o·gy [uh-nal-uh-jee] –noun (plural analo-gies)

1. A similarity between like features of two things, on which a comparison may be based.

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Definition courtesy Dictionary.com

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Queasy

Hydrogen

Laminate

Spokesman

Flume

Atramentous

Quincunx

Traipse

Mauve

Hagioscope

I’m packing up my house into cardboard boxes in preparation for my impending relocation from Sydney to Melbourne. As is always the case when it comes to reviewing the amount of crap one accumulates over the years, there have been many sidetracks, some of which will almost certainly make it to The Cow over the next short while.

This book, which I found in my study, was sent to me nearly two years ago by a fellow blogger with whom I was once in almost daily contact. It is called ‘Strange Red Cow (and other curious classified ads from the past)’ by Sarah Bader. It’s a curious, quirky, charming book and as soon as I picked it up I was reminded strongly of the curious, quirky, charming personality of the woman who sent it to me.

I never actually met her in real life, sadly, and she stopped blogging over a year ago with no warning or explanation, and after the very worst kind of family crisis. She also stopped replying to my emails. I have many friends, both in the real world and in cyberspace, and I know from experience that usually when someone abruptly stops communicating it means trouble. I really hope that’s not the case, and I hope she just got bored with blogging and the ephemera of online friends and has found a really happy and contented space in her real world. I guess I’ll never know.*

Que sera, sera.

When I took a break from my cramming of things into boxes and and had a quick nostalgic browse through Strange Red Cow I found this ad, which I like to think would have appealed to her:

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*We can say for certain that she’s not attending to her blog. Great drifts of spam now clog up all the comments on her posts, reminding me as nothing so much as an abandoned house with its porch ankle-deep in unswept leaves.

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This morning, while listening to the radio I heard the following two items of interest:

The director of this year’s Young Writer’s Festival in Newcastle NSW, Nick Powell, was asked how the opening day went on Saturday and he declared enthusiastically that ‘it literally blew my mind!’

No, Nick, it really didn’t, because you’re talking to us on the radio. If it literally blew your mind you’d most likely be in a cold metal cabinet with a tag on your toe, and someone would be sloshing liberal quantities of Clorox over the Writer’s Festival office floors. It figuratively blew your mind, perhaps, and it seems to me that if it is incumbent on anyone to know difference between those two things it should be the director of a Writer’s Festival for chrissakes.

On the same show, reviewer Geoff Page dispensed some pearls of wisdom about poet Jane Gibian’s new collection Ardent.

There is considerable range here, from the mystery of the title poem… through certain semi-satirical works… to several impressive haiku and tanka sequences. These latter forms can be a trap for younger poets who take them to be easier to write than they are, especially since, quite reasonably these days, we ignore the strict syllabic requirements of the Japanese.

Whoa there boy!

When did it become quite reasonable to abandon the strict syllabic requirements of the haiku? I said it before about limericks, and I’ll say it again about haiku: you can forget all about the structure of the form if you like, but then the thing you’re writing is not a haiku!. It is a short non-rhyming poem. Or, being charitable maybe, a short haiku-like poem. BUT IT IS NOT A HAIKU.

Allow me to draw an analogy: an elephant is a big heavy grey mammal with four solid legs and a fearsome demeanour. If we ‘ignore the strict descriptive requirements’ of the biologists we could call it a rhinoceros. Indeed, an elephant even bears some superficial resemblances to a rhinoceros, but I put it to you Mr Page: you may disagree with the biologists about what it is, but that does not actually change anything in reality.

So. A traditional Japanese haiku is a poetry form such that three lines consist of five syllables, seven syllables and then five again. There are many variations of this form that are similar to haiku, such as senryu, haibun, kimo, scifaiku and waka, but here’s the thing – they are variations, and are not called haiku! That’s why they have other names.

The Reverend sighs
When those who keep the language
Are its greatest foes

A certain friend of mine, let’s call her Alice, has been having some work done on her house. Last week a tradesman asked her why such an attractive and vivacious woman didn’t have a partner.

I said to Alice “Well, that was a bit flirty!”

“No, I don’t think so,” said Alice, “It was just a nice caring comment.”

Later in the conversation Alice revealed that the tradesman (a visiting tradesman, not a friend or colleague…) had also asked her for a hug.

“Oh really?” said I. “And that’s not flirting?”

“It was just a nice caring hug.”

Even later in the conversation Alice revealed that the tradesman had given her another hug.

“O-k-a-a-a-y…”

This morning Alice said to me in an email: “To add to the conjecture as to ‘flirting’ or ‘caring’, I’m still thinking he was ‘caring’.”

So I told Alice I would pass the matter over to the wisdom of the Cow readers for comment.

Flirting or Caring? Let the Hive Mind of The Cow decide!

The Weasel has this week opined that the world is not facing a problem of climate change so much as climate shift.

And in a stunning revelation he asserts that the reason that we have any problem at all here in Australia is because of ecologically minded people:

… if some years ago we had not bowed so much to the greens and had built more dams, maybe things would have been different, and that applies all around the country.

So, to recap – don’t be concerned, the climate is not changing, just shifting, and that’s not something you should worry your pretty little head about. If people tell you different they’re probably evil Greenies who, as everybody clearly knows, want to cause the world to shrivel to a dessicated husk due to a lack of dams.