a stomach for schlegel

Fred Schlegel, 1772-1829
Excerpts from the literary aphorisms of Friederich von Schlegel

• One must drill the board where it is the thickest
• In poetry, too, all that is whole might be only half-done, and yet all that is half-done might actually be a whole
• A classical work doesn’t ever have to be understood entirely. But those who are educated and who are still educating themselves must desire to learn more and more from it
• Just as a child is really a thing that wants to become a man; so is the poem an object of nature that wants to become an object of art
• In every good poem everything must be both deliberate and instinctive. That is how the poem becomes ideal.
• A critic is a reader who ruminates. Thus, he should have more than one stomach.
• …the most necessary: for whenever we do not restrain ourselves, the world will restrain us; and thus we will become its slave. The highest: for we can restrain ourselves only in those points when we have infinite power, in self-creation and self-destruction.
• Not art and works of art make an artist, but sense and enthusiasm and instinct.
• Good drama must be drastic
• The historian is a prophet looking backwards
• Every concept of God is idle talk. But the idea of the Godhead is the idea of ideas.

the pelican parade

This is something Todd Brozman and I co-wrote (he wrote most all of it) way back in January of 2004 on my typewriter in the house on Tennessee Street. I found this in a stack of papers while moving things around at my parents' house. Click on it to make it readable.

A Short History of Mario Linkofsky and the Nintendo Power Poets

Mario Linkofsky (christened Philip Greenhorn) formed the one-man poetry collective, the Nintendo Power Poets, after he underwent a profound hypnosis prompted by the opening strains of the Legend of Zelda musical theme. He probably would have lived out a normative video-game playing childhood had his father not confiscated the family NES after witnessing the alarming behavioral impact the games had upon his children.

"Father was convinced Nintendo was invented by the Japanese to control our minds," Linkosfky later wrote in a letter to his sister. "He was wrong, of course. But only that it was my soul, not my mind, that I surrendered."

Linkofsky's first literary efforts consisted of an album of folk songs protesting the totalitarian regime of Gannondorf, but audiences at coffeeshops and talent shows dismissed him as a novelty act. It wasn't until Linkofsky set aside the lute and turned all the way to verse before he received any recognition.

His first and only success came in a chapbook he called, "Hyrulian Sonnets," which were essentially Homeric Hymns addressed to Zelda in the form of Italian sonnets. Among the most popular was the 1999 poem, "You rule, Hyrule."

I wonder today with a youthful pain
What lay beyond the purple waterfall
The allure of lost landscapes, monsters and all
No lyrical tribute can contain

Let me go back to Hyrule once again
Where warp whistles whisk me away with their call
To lost lakes, sylvan glades and dungeon halls
All the fair lands under Zelda's reign

Oh pixilated princess, I will save you
I'll set sail in a raft across the ocean
On a quest for Triforce; a search for truth
I'll swing my sword and swig healing potion
climb Death Mountain just to enjoy the view
while relishing my Hyrulian youth

Unfortunately for the Power Poets and the entire Nintendo Lit subculture, Linkofsky's later efforts were less evocative, with a series of tone-poems entitled "Odes to Dodongo" bordering on the embarrassing. By the publication of his only 2002 novella, "A Wrong Turn on Rainbow Road," his unabashed glorification of Don Flamingo as masculine idyll had besmirched his reputation, and he died rupeeless in a Parisian prison under the name Sebastian Melmouth.