Here are a couple of poems. Sonnets again. The schtick here is that they concern a pair of Harry Potter characters. It should be trivial to figure out who they are (although it might require a dictionary for our younger readers).
(I admit I felt compelled to put these here so that the three of you coming from Ash's poetry blog don't feel like you got put on a bus to Hoboken, Nerd Jersey.)
emerge
The boy stepped forth and took his place beneath
the brim. A minute passed, now two, then three,
within which time the shades of bravery
and justice armed their forces to the teeth.
Though all saw brav'ry take the palm and wreath,
it lay in waiting, seeming idly:
At length, his courage glowed for one to see,
demure, as though he'd drawn it from its sheath.
It wavered, unaccustomed to the light;
it felt about, uncertain of its tread.
Till blunt necessity called out its right,
to cleave the foul ophidian at its head.
Oh say! where night left off and day began,
to slumber off a boy and wake a man.
unreadable
He stands, a glower made inscrutable,
ambiguous. He wreaths his honest thoughts
in coronets of random noise, in knots
of truths both blank and indisputable.
The swollen ranks, beneath his gaze, bear gloom.
Their dully thronging stride stamps out the time
left to his bitter charge, and neither rhyme
nor reason can forestall his chosen doom.
Though he may carp or cavil over weights
none else has will or wherewithal to bear,
that memory, besmirched, of onetime mates
does focus his poor genius in its glare.
So pity not the fool who plays the lie--
once! twice! now thrice!--to gamble and to die.
Copyright © 2011 Brian Tung
Wednesday, May 15, 2013
Tuesday, May 7, 2013
Why CPU Utilization is a Misleading Architectural Specification
MOAR Q-ING TREE PLZ.
Actually, this post only has a little to do with queueing theory. But I can't help tagging it that way, just 'cause.
Once upon a time, before the Internet, before ARPANet, even before people were born who had never done homework without Google, computer systems were built. These systems often needed to plow their way through enormous amounts of data (for that era) in a relatively short period, and they needed to be robust. They could not break down or fall behind if, for instance, all of a sudden, there was a rush in which they had to work twice as fast for a while.
The companies that were under contract to build these systems were therefore compelled to build to a specified requirement. This requirement often took a form something like, "Under typical conditions, the system shall not exceed 50 percent CPU utilization." The purpose of this requirement was to ensure that if twice the load did come down the pike, the system would be able to handle it—that the system could handle twice the throughput that it experienced under a typical conditions, if it needed to.
One might reasonably ask, if the purpose was to ensure that the system could handle twice the load, why not just write the requirement in terms of throughput, using words something like, "The system shall be able to handle twice the throughput as in a typical load of work"? Well, for one thing, CPU utilization is, in many situations, easier to measure on an ongoing basis. If you've ever run the system monitor on your computer, you know how easy it is to track how hard your CPU is working, every second of every day. Whereas, to test how much more throughput your system could handle, you'd actually have to measure how much work your CPU is doing, then run a test to see if it could do twice as much work without falling behind. A requirement written in terms of CPU utilization would simply be easier to check.
For another thing, at the time these requirements were being written, CPU utilization was an effective proxy for throughput. That is to say, in the single-core, single-unit, single-everything days, the computer could essentially be treated like a cap-screwing machine on an assembly line. If your machine could screw caps onto jars in one second, but jars only came down the line every two seconds, then your cap-screwing machine had a utilization of 50 percent. And, on the basis of that measurement, you knew that if there was a sudden burst of jars coming twice as fast—once per second—your machine could handle it without jars spilling all over the production room floor.
In other words, CPU utilization was quite a reasonable way to write requirements to spec out your system—once upon a time.
Since those days, computer systems have undergone significant evolution, so that we now have computers with multiple CPUs, CPUs with multiple cores, cores with multi-threading/hyper-threading. These developments have clouded the once tidy relationship between CPU utilization and throughput.
Without getting too deep into the technical details, let me give you a flavor of how the relationship can be obscured. Suppose you have a machine with a single CPU, consisting of two cores. The machine runs just one single-threaded task. Because this task has only one thread, it can only run in one core at a time; it cannot split itself to work on both cores at the same time.
Suppose that this task is running so hard that it uses up just exactly all of the one core it is able to use. Very clearly, if the task is suddenly required to work twice as hard, it will not be able to do so. The core it is using is already working 100 percent of the time, and the task will fall behind. All the while, of course, the second core is sitting there idly, with nothing to do except count the clock cycles.
But what does the CPU report is its utilization? Why, it's 50 percent! After all, on average, its cores are being used half the time. The fact that one of them is being used all of the time, and the other is being used none of the time, is completely concealed by the aggregate measurement. Things look just fine, even though the task is running at maximum throughput.
In the meantime, while all of these developments were occurring, what was happening with the requirements? Essentially nothing. You might expect that at some point, people would latch onto the fact that computing advances were going to affect this once-firm relationship between CPU utilization (the thing they could easily measure) and throughput (the thing that they really wanted).
The problem is that requirements-writing is mind-numbing drudge work, and people will take any reasonable measure to minimize the numbness and the drudge. Well, one such reasonable measure was to see what the previous system had done for its requirements. What's more, those responsible for creating the requirements were, in many cases, not computer experts themselves, so unless the requirements were obviously wrong (which these were not), the inclination was to duplicate them. That would explain the propagation of the old requirement down to newer systems.
At any rate, whatever the explanation, the upshot is that there is often an ever-diverging disconnect between the requirement and the property the system is supposed to have. There are a number of ways to address that, to incrementally improve how well CPU utilization tracks throughput. There are tools that measure per-core utilization, for instance. And even though hyper-threading can also obscure the relationship, it can be turned off for the purposes of a test (although this then systematically underestimates capacity). And so on.
But all this is beside the point, which is that CPU utilization is not the actual property one cares about. What one cares about is throughput (and, on larger time scales, scalability). And although one does not measure maximum throughput capacity on an ongoing basis, one can measure it each time the system is reconfigured. And one can measure what the current throughput is. And if the typical throughput is less than half of the maximum throughput—why, that is exactly what you want to know. It isn't rocket science (although, to be sure, it may be put in service of rocket science).
<queueingtheory>And you may also want to know that the throughput is being achieved without concomitantly high latency. This is a consideration of increasing importance as the task's load becomes ever more unpredictable. Yet another reason why CPU utilization can be misleading.</queueingtheory>
Actually, this post only has a little to do with queueing theory. But I can't help tagging it that way, just 'cause.
Once upon a time, before the Internet, before ARPANet, even before people were born who had never done homework without Google, computer systems were built. These systems often needed to plow their way through enormous amounts of data (for that era) in a relatively short period, and they needed to be robust. They could not break down or fall behind if, for instance, all of a sudden, there was a rush in which they had to work twice as fast for a while.
One might reasonably ask, if the purpose was to ensure that the system could handle twice the load, why not just write the requirement in terms of throughput, using words something like, "The system shall be able to handle twice the throughput as in a typical load of work"? Well, for one thing, CPU utilization is, in many situations, easier to measure on an ongoing basis. If you've ever run the system monitor on your computer, you know how easy it is to track how hard your CPU is working, every second of every day. Whereas, to test how much more throughput your system could handle, you'd actually have to measure how much work your CPU is doing, then run a test to see if it could do twice as much work without falling behind. A requirement written in terms of CPU utilization would simply be easier to check.
For another thing, at the time these requirements were being written, CPU utilization was an effective proxy for throughput. That is to say, in the single-core, single-unit, single-everything days, the computer could essentially be treated like a cap-screwing machine on an assembly line. If your machine could screw caps onto jars in one second, but jars only came down the line every two seconds, then your cap-screwing machine had a utilization of 50 percent. And, on the basis of that measurement, you knew that if there was a sudden burst of jars coming twice as fast—once per second—your machine could handle it without jars spilling all over the production room floor.
In other words, CPU utilization was quite a reasonable way to write requirements to spec out your system—once upon a time.Since those days, computer systems have undergone significant evolution, so that we now have computers with multiple CPUs, CPUs with multiple cores, cores with multi-threading/hyper-threading. These developments have clouded the once tidy relationship between CPU utilization and throughput.
Without getting too deep into the technical details, let me give you a flavor of how the relationship can be obscured. Suppose you have a machine with a single CPU, consisting of two cores. The machine runs just one single-threaded task. Because this task has only one thread, it can only run in one core at a time; it cannot split itself to work on both cores at the same time.
Suppose that this task is running so hard that it uses up just exactly all of the one core it is able to use. Very clearly, if the task is suddenly required to work twice as hard, it will not be able to do so. The core it is using is already working 100 percent of the time, and the task will fall behind. All the while, of course, the second core is sitting there idly, with nothing to do except count the clock cycles.
But what does the CPU report is its utilization? Why, it's 50 percent! After all, on average, its cores are being used half the time. The fact that one of them is being used all of the time, and the other is being used none of the time, is completely concealed by the aggregate measurement. Things look just fine, even though the task is running at maximum throughput.
In the meantime, while all of these developments were occurring, what was happening with the requirements? Essentially nothing. You might expect that at some point, people would latch onto the fact that computing advances were going to affect this once-firm relationship between CPU utilization (the thing they could easily measure) and throughput (the thing that they really wanted).
The problem is that requirements-writing is mind-numbing drudge work, and people will take any reasonable measure to minimize the numbness and the drudge. Well, one such reasonable measure was to see what the previous system had done for its requirements. What's more, those responsible for creating the requirements were, in many cases, not computer experts themselves, so unless the requirements were obviously wrong (which these were not), the inclination was to duplicate them. That would explain the propagation of the old requirement down to newer systems.
But all this is beside the point, which is that CPU utilization is not the actual property one cares about. What one cares about is throughput (and, on larger time scales, scalability). And although one does not measure maximum throughput capacity on an ongoing basis, one can measure it each time the system is reconfigured. And one can measure what the current throughput is. And if the typical throughput is less than half of the maximum throughput—why, that is exactly what you want to know. It isn't rocket science (although, to be sure, it may be put in service of rocket science).
Sunday, April 28, 2013
The Strange Existence (and Subsequent Non-Existence) of Albert Cribbage
(a précis)
This is not a poem, not even a prose poem. But it shares enough quirkiness with poems I enjoy for me to find it in the spirit of National Poetry Month, so in it goes.
I found this while I was going over some of my old writing projects. I say "projects"; these were not for any kind of organized course or anything. I wrote (as I still do) whenever I have a bit of idle time and am able to cobble together thoughts in any particular direction. This one struck my fancy, and the précis tag was intended to remind me to extend it into a more protracted argument, which (of course) never happened. Other ideas distracted, and continue to distract.
Anyway, without further ado, we present:
The Strange Existence (and Subsequent Non-Existence) of Albert Cribbage
Albert Cribbage had his dream, and he spent much of his life constructing her. Blessed with the world's longest serial lucid dream, he manufactured a perfect Woman over a period of years, taking as inspiration pictures from fashion magazines (the late 80s, which he preferred, much to the disgust of his "hipper'' friends), television commercials for beauty products, and several of the mainstream literary journals. He did, after all, want her to be well read.
At last he had completed her; all that remained to bring her to life (insofar as that was possible for her) was the Kiss. He went out and purchased fine satin sheets, and a royal purple bed cover set (limned in gold cord, of course). He settled into bed, and tried to go to sleep, with great difficulty, as he had never in his life been so excited.
At length, he managed to doze off. His dream began, as planned, with him approaching his soon-to-be-loved in his bed. He leaned down, as in the fairy tales of yore, and touched his dry, trembling lips to her still, perfect ones. Instantly, she opened her eyes, and it was as if they had been waiting for each other for all of eternity. She allowed herself to be swept up even further in the kiss, and he was soon with her, under the covers.
They made love, passionately, in the semi-darkness (where all dreams are; the well-lit ones are simply optical illusions in mid-slumber), and after several exhausting but very satisfying hours, their legs became entwined as they enjoyed the smooth sleep of afterglow.
In the morning she awoke, and the memory of the past night had left a smile on her face. But, she mused, he was still not quite perfect (italics hers), and once the morning niceties (a warm shower, a generous breakfast) were done, she set out for the newsstand, where she thought the latest monthlies from Paris might just give her the ideas she needed to create a new dream lover, one she would want to keep for good...
Copyright © 1996 Brian Tung
This is not a poem, not even a prose poem. But it shares enough quirkiness with poems I enjoy for me to find it in the spirit of National Poetry Month, so in it goes.
I found this while I was going over some of my old writing projects. I say "projects"; these were not for any kind of organized course or anything. I wrote (as I still do) whenever I have a bit of idle time and am able to cobble together thoughts in any particular direction. This one struck my fancy, and the précis tag was intended to remind me to extend it into a more protracted argument, which (of course) never happened. Other ideas distracted, and continue to distract.
Anyway, without further ado, we present:
The Strange Existence (and Subsequent Non-Existence) of Albert Cribbage
Albert Cribbage had his dream, and he spent much of his life constructing her. Blessed with the world's longest serial lucid dream, he manufactured a perfect Woman over a period of years, taking as inspiration pictures from fashion magazines (the late 80s, which he preferred, much to the disgust of his "hipper'' friends), television commercials for beauty products, and several of the mainstream literary journals. He did, after all, want her to be well read.
At last he had completed her; all that remained to bring her to life (insofar as that was possible for her) was the Kiss. He went out and purchased fine satin sheets, and a royal purple bed cover set (limned in gold cord, of course). He settled into bed, and tried to go to sleep, with great difficulty, as he had never in his life been so excited.
At length, he managed to doze off. His dream began, as planned, with him approaching his soon-to-be-loved in his bed. He leaned down, as in the fairy tales of yore, and touched his dry, trembling lips to her still, perfect ones. Instantly, she opened her eyes, and it was as if they had been waiting for each other for all of eternity. She allowed herself to be swept up even further in the kiss, and he was soon with her, under the covers.
They made love, passionately, in the semi-darkness (where all dreams are; the well-lit ones are simply optical illusions in mid-slumber), and after several exhausting but very satisfying hours, their legs became entwined as they enjoyed the smooth sleep of afterglow.
In the morning she awoke, and the memory of the past night had left a smile on her face. But, she mused, he was still not quite perfect (italics hers), and once the morning niceties (a warm shower, a generous breakfast) were done, she set out for the newsstand, where she thought the latest monthlies from Paris might just give her the ideas she needed to create a new dream lover, one she would want to keep for good...
Copyright © 1996 Brian Tung
Wednesday, April 24, 2013
When We Flew
[Another Facebook post cannibalized for National Poetry Month. At the time I wrote this, Kobe had not yet suffered his season-ending Achilles injury.]
I was watching yet another YouTube clip of Kobe wowing us with his athleticism and wizardry, and I started thinking about how many of the highlights were in another century. Hard as it may seem to believe at the moment, there will come a day when Kobe will no longer be able to dunk. It might not come this decade—hell, if MJ is any indication, it might not come the next, either—but it will come.
Anyway, I started getting a bit depressed about that, and so as if to bring myself out of that funk, I started scribbling some lines. And I found that it actually sort of helped, a little. I hasten to emphasize that all this has nothing at all to do with the fact that a birthday is coming up, or anything like that. That is so a coincidence.
It may read as though it's about other things, and it can be. But I really did write it with basketball in mind.
when we flew
When we flew,
we made legends.
We startled and we stunned,
and foes grasped at us in vain.
Our wings would never tire,
and our lungs never fail.
The world lived a thousand times
and never knew how close it had come,
and all because we flew
when we flew.
When we flew,
time stood to watch,
then travelled back to watch again,
hardly daring to believe.
Space cleared space for us,
and light held us in her gaze.
The stars shone their mute fanfare
shattering their crystal spheres,
and all because we flew
when we flew.
Now we stand,
make way while children soar.
We wear our pride like envy,
and dress our unease in longing.
We envision battles we will never fight,
and so we shall never lose.
A thousand times we'll close our eyes and ears
and sip champagne from glass slippers,
and all because we flew
when we flew.
Copyright © 2012 Brian Tung
I was watching yet another YouTube clip of Kobe wowing us with his athleticism and wizardry, and I started thinking about how many of the highlights were in another century. Hard as it may seem to believe at the moment, there will come a day when Kobe will no longer be able to dunk. It might not come this decade—hell, if MJ is any indication, it might not come the next, either—but it will come.
Anyway, I started getting a bit depressed about that, and so as if to bring myself out of that funk, I started scribbling some lines. And I found that it actually sort of helped, a little. I hasten to emphasize that all this has nothing at all to do with the fact that a birthday is coming up, or anything like that. That is so a coincidence.
It may read as though it's about other things, and it can be. But I really did write it with basketball in mind.
when we flew
When we flew,
we made legends.
We startled and we stunned,
and foes grasped at us in vain.
Our wings would never tire,
and our lungs never fail.
The world lived a thousand times
and never knew how close it had come,
and all because we flew
when we flew.
When we flew,
time stood to watch,
then travelled back to watch again,
hardly daring to believe.
Space cleared space for us,
and light held us in her gaze.
The stars shone their mute fanfare
shattering their crystal spheres,
and all because we flew
when we flew.
Now we stand,
make way while children soar.
We wear our pride like envy,
and dress our unease in longing.
We envision battles we will never fight,
and so we shall never lose.
A thousand times we'll close our eyes and ears
and sip champagne from glass slippers,
and all because we flew
when we flew.
Copyright © 2012 Brian Tung
The Wolfpack and the Lone Wolves
So a friend of mine posted a link to this story, and because it involves game theory (even though it wasn't actually a game theory course) and I do, in fact, work like that, I immediately started thinking about a way to analyze it. Actually, I think thirty students is way too many to get some of the more interesting interactions going; the wolfpack is almost certainly the way to go, especially if you're not one of the brighter bulbs. Thirty is probably too many to deal with analytically anyway. So let's start with three.
Suppose the three students A, B, and C have (possibly) different aptitudes, represented by a, b, and c, respectively. These three numbers represent the probability with which each of the students answers questions correctly. (We'll assume that questions have two answers, one right and one wrong.) Without loss of generality, let's say that a ≥ b ≥ c. Under which conditions will two or more of these students collude? Without explicitly prescribing a curve, let us say that the aim of any of the students is to improve their own grade; specifically, there is no benefit to philanthropy.
We can fairly quickly conclude that two students will not collude. Consider A and B, and suppose first that a > b, and that A and B know that (that A is a better answerer than B). A and B compare answers. If they coincide, then of course they both answer that way, but if they differ, they'll choose A's answer (since it's more likely to be correct than B's). But if that's the case, then they'll both answer correctly only if A already had the right answer. That is to say, both A and B will answer correctly with probability a. Well, there's no reason for A to collude with B, since it helps B without helping A.
The situation is not helped even if a = b, since the only difference is that some other means must be used for breaking the tie. No matter how the tie is broken, the answer that is chosen cannot have a greater probability of being correct than a = b, so there is no benefit to collusion for either A or B.
A similar line of reasoning applies to any other pair of students. Well, then how about all three students colluding? That will only happen if all three students are benefited, and A, with the highest aptitude, is the standard here. Let's consider how A's answer would be affected by the collusion. The first way is that A's initially correct answer would be made incorrect by collusion. That happens if A would have answered correctly, but B and C would not. That happens with probability a (1 - b) (1 - c).
The second way to affect A's answer is to change an initially incorrect answer into a correct one. That happens with probability (1 - a) b c. So, on balance, A has an incentive to collude (and therefore all students do) if
(1 - a) b c > a (1 - b) (1 - c)
For instance, if the three students respectively have 90, 80, and 70 percent probabilities of answering questions correctly, then we have
(0.1) (0.8) (0.7) = 0.056 > 0.054 = (0.9) (0.2) (0.3)
and it makes sense for all three to collude, by this metric.
Why by this metric? What other metric could there be? Suppose we now introduce an explicit curve: The students receive, as their final grade, not their actual raw score, but a ranking-scaled score. The top raw score earns three points, the second best raw score earns two points, and the lowest raw score earns one point. Two students tying at the top both earn 2.5 points, while two students tying at the bottom earn 1.5 points, and finally if all three students tie, they all earn two points.
Under these conditions, the three students will not all collude. A, as the best student, is the most likely of the three to earn three points, and the more questions there are, the more certain that is. If A, B, and C all collude, they will all three earn two points (since their answers will be identical). So chuck out three-way collusion.
But two-way collusion is now even less likely than before. As we observed, it only improves the accuracy of the inferior student. Before, that at least did not hurt the superior student, but now it improves the inferior student's scaled score at the expense of the superior student's scaled score. So two-way collusion is out, too.
Shall we move on to four students? I'll save that for a later post.
We can fairly quickly conclude that two students will not collude. Consider A and B, and suppose first that a > b, and that A and B know that (that A is a better answerer than B). A and B compare answers. If they coincide, then of course they both answer that way, but if they differ, they'll choose A's answer (since it's more likely to be correct than B's). But if that's the case, then they'll both answer correctly only if A already had the right answer. That is to say, both A and B will answer correctly with probability a. Well, there's no reason for A to collude with B, since it helps B without helping A.
The situation is not helped even if a = b, since the only difference is that some other means must be used for breaking the tie. No matter how the tie is broken, the answer that is chosen cannot have a greater probability of being correct than a = b, so there is no benefit to collusion for either A or B.
A similar line of reasoning applies to any other pair of students. Well, then how about all three students colluding? That will only happen if all three students are benefited, and A, with the highest aptitude, is the standard here. Let's consider how A's answer would be affected by the collusion. The first way is that A's initially correct answer would be made incorrect by collusion. That happens if A would have answered correctly, but B and C would not. That happens with probability a (1 - b) (1 - c).
The second way to affect A's answer is to change an initially incorrect answer into a correct one. That happens with probability (1 - a) b c. So, on balance, A has an incentive to collude (and therefore all students do) if
(1 - a) b c > a (1 - b) (1 - c)
For instance, if the three students respectively have 90, 80, and 70 percent probabilities of answering questions correctly, then we have
(0.1) (0.8) (0.7) = 0.056 > 0.054 = (0.9) (0.2) (0.3)
and it makes sense for all three to collude, by this metric.
Why by this metric? What other metric could there be? Suppose we now introduce an explicit curve: The students receive, as their final grade, not their actual raw score, but a ranking-scaled score. The top raw score earns three points, the second best raw score earns two points, and the lowest raw score earns one point. Two students tying at the top both earn 2.5 points, while two students tying at the bottom earn 1.5 points, and finally if all three students tie, they all earn two points.
Under these conditions, the three students will not all collude. A, as the best student, is the most likely of the three to earn three points, and the more questions there are, the more certain that is. If A, B, and C all collude, they will all three earn two points (since their answers will be identical). So chuck out three-way collusion.
But two-way collusion is now even less likely than before. As we observed, it only improves the accuracy of the inferior student. Before, that at least did not hurt the superior student, but now it improves the inferior student's scaled score at the expense of the superior student's scaled score. So two-way collusion is out, too.
Shall we move on to four students? I'll save that for a later post.
Monday, April 22, 2013
i saw in yesterday your pretty when
I almost called this "in crude homage to edward estlin," but I thought maybe that would be too predictable.
Most people know about E.E. Cummings's free verse. I first came into contact with his name, if not his poetry, from a poster in my seventh-grade English classroom. (Does anyone remember Mr. Clancy from Redwood Junior High? No?) I don't think I actually read any of his poems until rather much later. I did hear an exquisite (and in context, wholly inappropriate) love poem of his in Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters, entitled "somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond."
I may as well say that although his deconstructive approach to grammar is refreshing, I find some of his poems orthographically grotesque. Not for the reasons most frequently cited; I have no problem with his lack of capitalization (I do that myself in chats), or his exuberantly nested parentheticals, or anything pedestrian like that. No, what bothers me are the superlatively trivial things, like not having a space after commas (see above, you have no idea how that killed me to accurately reproduce his title), or before parentheses, and that sort of thing.
Anyway, because of the renown of his free verse, not many people know that he wrote sonnets, too, and intensely romantic ones at that. Sonnet XCII of his 95 Poems is one of his better known ones; it goes
(It's a good thing that all I had to do was cut and paste; I don't know that I could have elided all those spaces otherwise.) Anyway, here's my tyro's try at the same kind of thing, and at least it's honest, it's a thing I feel (and doggone it, I shall put spaces where I will):
i saw in yesterday your pretty when
i saw in yesterday your pretty when
and past a rise your beautifully where
(i do lose during you my now and then,
and inside you(r inside) my here and there).
since draw me to your captivating why
(a finger may mislead, i have no who
that cries the how you tear), i heard them sigh
your fragile yes or maybe noes to do.
with you i have no ask or answer (no
inquire or wonder, neither no believe,
no yet or still, no if (or so, or so)
for(giving life, where is no is to grieve))
but breath demanding breath, each every day
in death for(little death) you to replay.
Copyright © 2013 Brian Tung
Most people know about E.E. Cummings's free verse. I first came into contact with his name, if not his poetry, from a poster in my seventh-grade English classroom. (Does anyone remember Mr. Clancy from Redwood Junior High? No?) I don't think I actually read any of his poems until rather much later. I did hear an exquisite (and in context, wholly inappropriate) love poem of his in Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters, entitled "somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond."
I may as well say that although his deconstructive approach to grammar is refreshing, I find some of his poems orthographically grotesque. Not for the reasons most frequently cited; I have no problem with his lack of capitalization (I do that myself in chats), or his exuberantly nested parentheticals, or anything pedestrian like that. No, what bothers me are the superlatively trivial things, like not having a space after commas (see above, you have no idea how that killed me to accurately reproduce his title), or before parentheses, and that sort of thing.
Anyway, because of the renown of his free verse, not many people know that he wrote sonnets, too, and intensely romantic ones at that. Sonnet XCII of his 95 Poems is one of his better known ones; it goes
i
carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my
heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i
go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by
only me is your doing,my darling)
i
fear
no
fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no
world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and
it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and
whatever a sun will always sing is you
here
is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here
is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and
the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher
than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and
this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart
i
carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)
(It's a good thing that all I had to do was cut and paste; I don't know that I could have elided all those spaces otherwise.) Anyway, here's my tyro's try at the same kind of thing, and at least it's honest, it's a thing I feel (and doggone it, I shall put spaces where I will):
i saw in yesterday your pretty when
i saw in yesterday your pretty when
and past a rise your beautifully where
(i do lose during you my now and then,
and inside you(r inside) my here and there).
since draw me to your captivating why
(a finger may mislead, i have no who
that cries the how you tear), i heard them sigh
your fragile yes or maybe noes to do.
with you i have no ask or answer (no
inquire or wonder, neither no believe,
no yet or still, no if (or so, or so)
for(giving life, where is no is to grieve))
but breath demanding breath, each every day
in death for(little death) you to replay.
Copyright © 2013 Brian Tung
Monday, April 15, 2013
Daybreak (a Chinese poem)
Another offering for National Poetry Month, but something a bit more unusual this time.
Every now and then, I'll attempt a Chinese poem. Because I'm not as fluent as I'd like to be, this effort is invariably a little stilted, but (I hope, at least!) progressively less stilted each time. Before I say any more, here first is my latest attempt in the original Chinese:
朝陽
夜裡星星亮，
朝陽處處光。
青年游外地，
老是想家鄉。
Now, those of you who speak Chinese will probably recognize this as somewhat stilted (which is true), while those of you who don't have no idea what I just said. I'll explain in a moment, but before I do so, allow me to put on my professor hat and insert a few thoughts on Chinese poetry.
I make no secret of the fact that I find Chinese writing to be the most beautiful. By that I don't mean that I find Chinese prose better than prose in other languages; I mean the actual written characters. But because I actually do read Chinese (about 60 to 80 percent as well as I'd like to, but that's a story for another time), I instinctively see the meaning behind most of the characters before I see their form. I often wonder what it's like to see those characters from the perspective of someone who has no idea what they say.
At any rate, one of the appealing features of Chinese writing is that the characters (which are almost universally monosyllabic) are distinct and individual pieces of art, and a Chinese poem puts that all together in a composite that's a piece of art (when properly conceived) at multiple levels.
Because the monosyllabic characters are all distinct, one can easily tell from the above that this poem consists of four lines of five syllables each. That may remind some of you of the poem's more famous Japanese relative, the haiku, which is three lines of five, seven, and again five syllables. In fact, I would say that—in Western minds at least—that is the defining characteristic of the haiku, is that it contains seventeen syllables in that arrangement.
Writing these poems gives me some insight, though, why that conception isn't accurate, even with respect to Asian poetry in general. (I think it's a remarkably trivial characterization, not the least because it's totally underspecified. See the postscript, for instance.)
In the first place, there's a difference between Chinese syllables and English syllables. The majority of Chinese words are polysyllabic—that is, they consist of compounds of two or more characters—but nevertheless, the characters retain a distinct identity that is different from that of English syllables. The characters are less subordinated to the line, so to speak. That is more true of older writing than of modern writing, and also more true of poetry than of prose.
From a more technical perspective, Chinese poetry has its constraints that roughly map onto English meter and rhyme. For instance, the above poem belongs to a form called 五言絕句, which means (broadly translated) five-character quatrain, which it clearly is. This form prescribes a simple rhyme scheme: the end of the second line must rhyme with the end of the fourth line. And they do: the characters in question are spelled, in hanyu pinyin, guāng and xiāng, and even if you don't know a darned thing about Chinese spelling, I think you can tell that the two characters rhyme. (The macrons over the a's indicate that the tones match, too, which they must do.)
In addition, the tones of the characters must follow certain arrangement rules. Chinese characters generally have one of four different tones, of which the first two might be called "level" tones, and the last two "deflected" tones. [EDIT: I should add here that originally, there was only one level tone and three deflected ones. The one level tone evolved, in Mandarin, into the first two tones, while the second and third tones evolved into the last two Mandarin tones. The fourth original tone, the so-called entering tone, disappeared from Mandarin, and characters with that tone were haphazardly distributed amongst the surviving tones.]
The tones in the first couplet must complement each other, as must the tones in the second couplet. That is to say, for every level-tone character in the first line, the corresponding character in the second line must have a deflected tone, and vice versa. The same is true of the third and fourth lines. For instance, the above poem has the following pattern of tones (if we denote level tones with = and deflected tones with ×):
××==×
==××=
===××
×××==
What's more, the patterns are traditionally restricted. One does not generally see ===== or ×××××, or =×=×=, or anything like that. Some variation is permitted (as is true of English poems, too), but is fairly carefully circumscribed.
In addition to all this is the usual transcendant pressure to make the expression of the form "beautiful" in some ill-defined (and probably undefinable) way, so that it isn't just a bunch of syllables, nor a bunch of syllables conforming to some rules, nor even a bunch of sensible syllables conforming to some rules.
I don't know Japanese at all, really, so I have no idea if some of these considerations apply (or if there are others in their place), but I certainly do not expect that haiku are simply seventeen syllables in a particular arrangement. I have heard, for instance, that some reference to the seasons is expected, and that the syllables are not really syllables, but mora (the Japanese unit of speech timing), and so forth.
Anyway, enough of this palavering. Here's a rough English translation of the poem:
daybreak
The stars gleam in the nighttime,
but the dawning sun drowns them all out.
We venture into the world in our youth,
but thinking always of our hometown.
No, it's not deep, I never said it was! I'm working on it!
P.S. Because I'm unable to let a post go without some nerdery involved: Suppose that one uses a vocabulary of English words that are (with equal probability) one, two, or three syllables long. What is the probability that an arbitrary sequence of words totalling seventeen syllables can be broken into lines of five, seven, and then five syllables without breaking a word?
Every now and then, I'll attempt a Chinese poem. Because I'm not as fluent as I'd like to be, this effort is invariably a little stilted, but (I hope, at least!) progressively less stilted each time. Before I say any more, here first is my latest attempt in the original Chinese:
朝陽
夜裡星星亮，
朝陽處處光。
青年游外地，
老是想家鄉。
Now, those of you who speak Chinese will probably recognize this as somewhat stilted (which is true), while those of you who don't have no idea what I just said. I'll explain in a moment, but before I do so, allow me to put on my professor hat and insert a few thoughts on Chinese poetry.
I make no secret of the fact that I find Chinese writing to be the most beautiful. By that I don't mean that I find Chinese prose better than prose in other languages; I mean the actual written characters. But because I actually do read Chinese (about 60 to 80 percent as well as I'd like to, but that's a story for another time), I instinctively see the meaning behind most of the characters before I see their form. I often wonder what it's like to see those characters from the perspective of someone who has no idea what they say.
At any rate, one of the appealing features of Chinese writing is that the characters (which are almost universally monosyllabic) are distinct and individual pieces of art, and a Chinese poem puts that all together in a composite that's a piece of art (when properly conceived) at multiple levels.
Because the monosyllabic characters are all distinct, one can easily tell from the above that this poem consists of four lines of five syllables each. That may remind some of you of the poem's more famous Japanese relative, the haiku, which is three lines of five, seven, and again five syllables. In fact, I would say that—in Western minds at least—that is the defining characteristic of the haiku, is that it contains seventeen syllables in that arrangement.
Writing these poems gives me some insight, though, why that conception isn't accurate, even with respect to Asian poetry in general. (I think it's a remarkably trivial characterization, not the least because it's totally underspecified. See the postscript, for instance.)
In the first place, there's a difference between Chinese syllables and English syllables. The majority of Chinese words are polysyllabic—that is, they consist of compounds of two or more characters—but nevertheless, the characters retain a distinct identity that is different from that of English syllables. The characters are less subordinated to the line, so to speak. That is more true of older writing than of modern writing, and also more true of poetry than of prose.
From a more technical perspective, Chinese poetry has its constraints that roughly map onto English meter and rhyme. For instance, the above poem belongs to a form called 五言絕句, which means (broadly translated) five-character quatrain, which it clearly is. This form prescribes a simple rhyme scheme: the end of the second line must rhyme with the end of the fourth line. And they do: the characters in question are spelled, in hanyu pinyin, guāng and xiāng, and even if you don't know a darned thing about Chinese spelling, I think you can tell that the two characters rhyme. (The macrons over the a's indicate that the tones match, too, which they must do.)
In addition, the tones of the characters must follow certain arrangement rules. Chinese characters generally have one of four different tones, of which the first two might be called "level" tones, and the last two "deflected" tones. [EDIT: I should add here that originally, there was only one level tone and three deflected ones. The one level tone evolved, in Mandarin, into the first two tones, while the second and third tones evolved into the last two Mandarin tones. The fourth original tone, the so-called entering tone, disappeared from Mandarin, and characters with that tone were haphazardly distributed amongst the surviving tones.]
The tones in the first couplet must complement each other, as must the tones in the second couplet. That is to say, for every level-tone character in the first line, the corresponding character in the second line must have a deflected tone, and vice versa. The same is true of the third and fourth lines. For instance, the above poem has the following pattern of tones (if we denote level tones with = and deflected tones with ×):
××==×
==××=
===××
×××==
What's more, the patterns are traditionally restricted. One does not generally see ===== or ×××××, or =×=×=, or anything like that. Some variation is permitted (as is true of English poems, too), but is fairly carefully circumscribed.
In addition to all this is the usual transcendant pressure to make the expression of the form "beautiful" in some ill-defined (and probably undefinable) way, so that it isn't just a bunch of syllables, nor a bunch of syllables conforming to some rules, nor even a bunch of sensible syllables conforming to some rules.
I don't know Japanese at all, really, so I have no idea if some of these considerations apply (or if there are others in their place), but I certainly do not expect that haiku are simply seventeen syllables in a particular arrangement. I have heard, for instance, that some reference to the seasons is expected, and that the syllables are not really syllables, but mora (the Japanese unit of speech timing), and so forth.
Anyway, enough of this palavering. Here's a rough English translation of the poem:
daybreak
The stars gleam in the nighttime,
but the dawning sun drowns them all out.
We venture into the world in our youth,
but thinking always of our hometown.
No, it's not deep, I never said it was! I'm working on it!
P.S. Because I'm unable to let a post go without some nerdery involved: Suppose that one uses a vocabulary of English words that are (with equal probability) one, two, or three syllables long. What is the probability that an arbitrary sequence of words totalling seventeen syllables can be broken into lines of five, seven, and then five syllables without breaking a word?
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