Just Another Literary Lizard

This weekend during a poetry reading, a Portuguese woman shared the following poem from one of her countrymen, Fernando Pessoa. I loved it and thought I would share it.

If, After I Die

If, after I die, they should want to write my biography,
There's nothing simpler.
I've just two dates - of my birth, and of my death.
In between the one thing and the other all the days are
	mine.

I am easy to describe.
I lived like mad.
I loved things without any sentimentality.
I never had a desire I could not fulfil, because
	I never went blind.
Even hearing was to me never more than an
	accompaniment of seeing.
I understood that things are real and all different from
	each other;
I understood it with the eyes, never with thinking.
To understand it with thinking would be to find them
	all equal.

One day I felt sleepy like a child.
I closed my eyes and slept.
And by the way, I was only Nature poet.

More poems

more poems

If you spend much time in Second Life, you will probably heard about the community of Caledon. It is (very) loosely based on 19th century Victorian England, but the community includes a “steampunk” subculture. I had, of course, heard of “cyberpunk” before joining Second Life, but steampunk is new to me. (NYT has a new article on steampunk fashion.) I’ve been working to get my mind around it, at least from a literary stand point.

So, what is steampunk? It is speculative fiction, alternative history, and gadgetry. It came into being during the 1980s and 1990s with the works of Tim Powers and James Blaylock, but it has its roots in the 19th century. The works of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne are perhaps the most obvious examples. I tend to think of the old 70s TV show “Wild, Wild West” as an example of steampunk gadgetry. Or the film “The Illusionist” for the sentiment.

As I mentioned, I’m getting my head around the steampunk concept. To do so, I’m exploring three resources:

• Girl Genius online comics
• Steampunk, a new anthology edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer
• Steampunk Magazine and other miscellaneous web resources

So far, Girl Genius has been a blast to read, so I’m looking forward to the rest of my steampunk explorations.

Kevin Kelly suggests avenues of revenue as digital media become essentially free. His take is pretty solid, from my perspective, and it seems to fit with a lot of the demographic research being done on ways people use technology. It seems as the method of recording becomes less valuable, there will need to be shift in how the creatives are compensated. I’m still processing the implications. (via the Penguin Blog)