Asymmetric
Mathematics and prose
took us down the rabbit-hole —
literary bull.
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a.k.a. Lewis Carroll, was born this day (January 27th) in 1832. He was an inventor and a mathematician as well as a celebrated author.
This post was prompted by the Genre Haiku Challenge on this blog. Follow that link to find out more and participate!
Rob's Surf Report 
Yes! Love the way this flows (and the “oh” in “prose” & “hole). The haiku really captures his essence. Such an interesting & controversial man.
Thank you, I didn’t even notice the “vowel symmetry” (maybe they’d call it that?) thanks for pointing that out. 🙂
The term an English teacher would use is “assonance,” and “vowel symmetry” is a great way to describe it. 🙂
I got called “assonance” once . . . I got the impression it wasn’t good! 😉
I don’t get what you mean by “literary bull.”
I read an interesting notion that the Alice books are Carroll’s critique of the mathematics systems of his day. If you’d like a link, I’ll see if I can find again where I read that…
I’d heard of that, and I really like the idea. I would gladly take that link because I’m still interested in digging into that deeper.
As to the “literary bull” part – you understand, for one thing it fits standard form. (that’s me being stubborn).
for another thing, bull takes the place of “nonsense”, because his work has been often characterised as “literary nonsense” – not in a derogatory sense, but more as a type of genre. (that’s me going for the simple kill)
Lastly, it serves as a sort of double-entendre suggesting Carroll is a sort of bull of literature, like a bull in a china shop and the expectations of literature are the china (I just made that up, I was originally thinking like ‘bulls of Wall Street’ kind of bull in literature, but I like the china shop analogy better) (that was me reaching / possibly overreaching, but now it’s me thinking I’m so clever.)
You know.
Ahhh yes, that makes sense.
I couldn’t find my original link– it was either at Slashdot, or Ars Technica, but these links might be of some use:
Algebra in Wonderland (Op-Ed at the New York Times)
Math Gives Alice A Darker Side (review of Wonderland at Epinions.com, rather summarizes things nicely)
and Lewis Carroll in numberland (book review at plus.maths.org, site for +Plus magazine)
I like the first one, it reads the best.
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