Flogo

Geoff Manaugh at BLDGBLOG posts about the nascent ability to print clouds – using a buoyant "mixture of soap-based foams and lighter-than-air gases such as helium" to create logos and messages that float like clouds across the sky until they disintegrate up to an hour later. Geoff, creative optimist that he is, writes:

there is an obvious (and, frankly, rather uninteresting) reaction to all this – i.e. please save us from yet another form of corporate advertising, we don't need logos in the sky – but there are also artistic, and even literary, implications here that go beyond mere outrage

before proceeding to riff on the glorious possibilities.

Me, I'm down there with the obvious and frankly uninteresting, trying to console myself that there will be parts of the sky unflogoed so long as there are parts of the world insufficiently inhabited and/or rich and/or influential. There are times when I even resent vapour trails. Don't get me wrong, I love the built environment, but I am cynical about what money does.

Actually, BLDGBLOG is one of my favourites, and I love Geoff's thought experiments. Many of his commenters take him to task on practicalities while ignoring the principle he's exploring. I'm guilty of this myself, here.

What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

Factoid

H drew to my attention a recent (31 March) letter in the FT. In response to some bad press about Icelandic banks, Sigrún Davídsdóttir makes the point that Icelanders are a very homogenous and small community with a mostly shared experience and outlook. She says: "It is easy to lie with statistics, but difficult to tell the truth without them."
And then the money quote:

It is dangerous to extrapolate from statistics: an Icelandic poet can count on selling 500 copies of his book of poetry in Iceland - although the ratio of English inhabitants to Icelandic is 200:1, an English poet cannot expect to sell 100,000 copies.

Davídsdóttir is a novelist and woman of letters as well as an economist, so that may be one reason she used that particular example. But 500 books! to 313,000 people! 500 copies is a good number for an English poet to sell, unless they are really famous. Curiosity led me to this article (from 1996, when the population was smaller):

With the multiple and seemingly inexhaustible blandishments of the electronic age, poetry still holds pride of place among the seven arts with close to a hundred collections of poems published annually -- in a population of just over 260,000. Poetry may not be as politically potent today as it was during the struggle for independence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, nor is it as commonly quoted in everyday conversation as it used to be, yet it is very much a living part of our existence, both at home and at public gatherings. `The President never makes a speech without quoting copiously from poems old and new, nor does a politician worth his salt ever deliver a festive talk without rich poetic ingredients. At private parties, on the radio (or even television), and in the press there are not infrequently poetic contests eliciting interest from all classes and categories of society.

Why all this interest in poetry? Attempts at explication should be made. The tradition is very old and very strong. Some of the most engrossing visions of Iceland, both past and future, have been expressed in lyric form. The natural scenery is imposing and lends itself easily to poetic descriptions. The language is sonorous, flexible and highly translucent, making it a supple instrument for poetry.

I've heard that in Korea, poetry books sell as fast as cookery books. (Co-incidentally, another very homogenous society. And there again, poems about the seasons and the weather are very popular.) Are there other places in the world where poetry sells as well?