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You Never Know
[Image: "Untitled #153," by Chris Marker. For more information, see the note at the foot of this page.] From whiskey river: Only Once All which, because it was flame and song and granted us joy, we thought we’d do, be, revisit, turns out to have been what it was that once, only; every invitation did [...]
Midweek Music Break: Herb Alpert
I didn’t really “get” rock until I was in college (which is weird, when you consider that I grew up right alongside the 1950s and ’60s). My appreciation of a certain Liverpool quartet’s songs was postponed for years thanks to the kids across the street, who stood on the sidewalk and annoyed passersby (and neighbors) [...]
Book Review: Children of God, by Mary Doria Russell
A few weeks ago I reviewed Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow at the Book Book review blog. I just posted a follow-up there, a review of The Sparrow‘s sequel, called Children of God. However, if you have not read The Sparrow, please don’t read my Children of God review: it assumes that you know what [...]
Paying Attention to What You Want
From Seems to Fit: “For this one time,” [Bonnie] said aloud, “I want us each to think about the same question, one question, while we do this. We don’t have to say anything out loud, and we don’t have to spend more than ten minutes doing it, I don’t think—” George: “Wait! Brandy first, question [...]
Anima
[Image: Isle of the Dead (third version), by Arnold Böcklin] From whiskey river: Life is a garden, not a road we enter and exit through the same gate wandering, where we go matters less than what we notice (Bokonon [source: see note below]) …and: Walking to Oak-Head Pond, and Thinking of the Ponds I Will [...]
RAMH@3: The Mix
Today, Running After My Hat turns three years old. Over the last couple weeks, I had the opportunity (if that’s the word!) to go back and read a whole bunch of posts from that time. I thought, y’know, that I could maybe identify more clearly what the blog is (even vaguely, if not exactly). At [...]
Savage Beasts
A first for Running After My Hat: a guest blogger! Kate Lord Brown is already familiar to some of you as the curator of the blog What Kate Did Next. (She also instigated the Burning Lines experiment in collaborative online fiction of a couple years ago.) More recently, though — and the reason she’s feeling [...]
Spark of Interest
[Video: "Musical Tesla Coils: Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies." For more information, see the note at the foot of this post.] From whiskey river: What is it that you contain? The dead. Time. Light patterns of millennia opening in your gut. Every minute, in each of you, a few million potassium atoms succumb to [...]
Midweek Music Break: Earworms of a 1950s Childhood
When The Boy was a boy*, he did not know that nursery rhymes and fairy tales and folk songs had already lived lives stretching back centuries. When The Boy was a boy, he imagined that each story, verse, and tune had been crafted just for him and for people like him, all within the last [...]
“Issue Fiction”
Today’s the birthday, per The Writer’s Almanac, of an author named Gary Soto. I haven’t read anything by him, but the Almanac provided an interesting quotation. This is the whole thing, including the question which prompted it, from a 2007 interview with papertigers.org: Are there issues which you think are particularly relevant to young adults [...]
