A quick followup to my previous post about Russel Hoban's The Hungry Three series!
A friend of mine who happens to be both a professor of poetry and also a poet herself pointed out that the opening of The Great Gumdrop Robbery also happens to be poetry.
Quoth the poet:
"Your analysis of the paragraph noting the repetition/patterns and fairytale conventions is spot on, but the meter is a significant factor as well, contributing to the paragraph's incantation-like quality."
She suggested looking at the following stanzas of Edgar Allan Poe's "Raven" and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" as "examples of comparable meter":
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
“’Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door—
Only this and nothing more.”
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean;
And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!
The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
For comparison, here's The Great Gumdrop Robbery again:
There was a deep-sea diver.
He was diving, diving, swimming, swimming far down deep. He was finding golden treasure, secret caverns. He was swimming where the great white shark was gliding, where the giant clam was waiting, where the kraken groaned and slobbered. He was swimming where the crusted sunken galleons and the waiving-weeded bones of dead men lay.
Mind blown.
Oh, and while I'm talking about The Great Gumdrop Robbery, I'd also like to point out one of my favorite things about this series. Master illustrator Colin McNaughton hand drew the little patterns that decorate the endpapers of each book. They all feel delightfully cozy and handcrafted (and, of course, hint at the story to come.) Out of all of them, the endpapers for The Great Gumdrop Robbery are my favorite, because you can find the three pivotal characters hiding in the palm trees (The Deep-Sea Diver, the King of the Desert, and the larcenous Baby Turpin). It hardly takes Sherlock-level observational skills, but I loved finding them every time that I got the book out as a child.
Something something, experience design, something something every delightful experience should be ground up, snorted, and turned into extrapolated business lessons because no experience is worth having unless you can blurb about it on LinkedIn.
Although, that does remind me that I need to make a post about what being an unwitting childhood accessory to mail fraud taught me about experience design!
Stay tuned**, cosmonauts*…
***
-[{END TRANSMISSION}]-
* That's right, I called you a cosmonaut. What you gonna do about it?
** The cosmonauts have a television in their ship, apparently****.
*** The two* note comes before the one* note, both because I needed to explain the use of the word cosmonauts first, and also because time is flowing backwards. (Seriously, would you believe that I wrote this blog post IN THE PAST?! Put that in your space pipe and smoke it!)
**** Which would imply that this blog is broadcast in video format, which seems like an odd, ahem, form factor for a blog, but what do I know?
***** These footnotes don't actually point back to anything in the blog post, but at this point, I've kind of become addicted to hammering the *key.
****** What accidentally losing my consciousness in infinitely expanding footnotes taught me about B2B SAS (Do this one thing. It's genius.)
******* I just remembered that I'm supposed to be repainting my bedroom right now! Why did I come in here? What am I doing?
******** Please send help.
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