Friday, May 10, 2002

Enjoying Poetry. Currently only a small fraction of literate readers regularly read poetry. As recently as the 1800s nearly all literate people would have read and enjoyed poetry, and memorized verses would not be uncommon among the illterate. Go back even further, and poetry becomes a dominant form of entertainment, along with music and story telling. So, what exactly are we missing? I think, like many things we learn about in school, we have lost the sense that we can obtain pleasure from something that admittedly requires some effort to understand. More people I know derive pleasure from calculus than from poetry. People today have to be introduced to poetry because it is no longer part of our daily experience. [kuro5hin.org] 6:36:20 AM

NY Times: The Entertainment Server. Entertainment servers are making their way onto the rack next to the television. These various devices -- game systems, audio centers, set-top boxes and digital video recorders -- have four common attributes: a microprocessor, networking capability, a graphical user interface and a huge hard drive. [Tomalak's Realm] 6:25:25 AM

© Copyright 2002 Douglas W. Burke.