LJ Post WNFR
Jan. 1st, 2008 09:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rhu[Public post, but meaningless to you if you're not in the NPL]
Is it my imagination, or has Crax been running a lot more flats "WNFR" than Sax did? Personally, I don't usually care for these, because (1) they don't feel quite fair to me -- if you don't catch what the flattist had in mind, there's often not enough to go on, and (2) they often feel like the flattist wussed out. ("Yeah, it was an amusing enough base to want to send it in, but not enough that I felt I could be bothered to write a couple of lines of doggerel.")
Certainly there are times when a base is so inspired and extraordinary that it deserves this kind of treatment --- Xemu's #42 from Nov. 2004 was elegant.
How do others feel?
Is it my imagination, or has Crax been running a lot more flats "WNFR" than Sax did? Personally, I don't usually care for these, because (1) they don't feel quite fair to me -- if you don't catch what the flattist had in mind, there's often not enough to go on, and (2) they often feel like the flattist wussed out. ("Yeah, it was an amusing enough base to want to send it in, but not enough that I felt I could be bothered to write a couple of lines of doggerel.")
Certainly there are times when a base is so inspired and extraordinary that it deserves this kind of treatment --- Xemu's #42 from Nov. 2004 was elegant.
How do others feel?
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-10 07:23 pm (UTC)Hopeful's BEGUN, Painkiller's DONE.?... It has meter and rhyme, but feels equally flavorless to me. I think the artistic "flavor" that distinguishes a flat from just a list of clues is not so much in the verse as in a single idea/image/story/... that draws them together. Sometimes the connection is so obvious that no text is needed at all other than the enumeration and one of the parts, as in apt letter banks (or apt transposals, a.k.a. anagrams); in a picture flat, of course, a literal image provides the connection without any text. WNFR's can work the same way, *if* the cluing is sufficient and the text unifies the parts, however fragmentary or ludicrously contrived the whole (relativistic bird-flight comes to mind). I certainly agree that WNFR's are more susceptible to inadequate cluing than fully versified flats. But the recent WNFR's don't feel to me noticeably harder to solve or less fun to read than the average Enigma flat. Maybe composers have simply gotten better at it...
=[Aleph]