See those four numbers? Those are the four beats. Four stresses, as we say in the meter business. Tetrameter. Four. "Tetra" is four. Like Tetris, that computer game where the squares come down relentlessly and overwhelm your mind with their crude geometry and make you peck at the arrow keys like some mindless experimental chicken and hurry and panic and finally you turn your computer off. And you sit there thinking, Why have I just spent an hour watching squares drop down a computer screen?
The New Atlantis Blogs:
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Saturday, September 5, 2009
Tetris and tetrameter
Paul Chowder, the narrator of Nicholson Baker's new novel The Anthologist. He needs to write his introduction to an anthology of poetry but gets distracted, by life and sometimes by other things.
Labels:
Nicolson Baker,
poetry
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About
Commentary on technologies of reading, writing, research, and, generally, knowledge. As these technologies change and develop, what do we lose, what do we gain, what is (fundamentally or trivially) altered? And, not least, what's fun?
Alan Jacobs
Alan Jacobs is Distinguished Professor of the Humanities in the Honors Program of Baylor University and the author, most recently, of How to Think and The Book of Common Prayer: A Biography. His homepage is here.

Sites of Interest

How to Read Well in an Age of Distraction
Watch video of Alan Jacobs discussing his book in a Washington, D.C. lecture in June 2011.

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