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The History of English, in Ten(ish) Minutes
When I was a sophomore in high school — this was just a plain old everyday public high school, not a school for high-achieving nerds or anything — our English teacher let us write an end-of-year research paper on any topic we liked. I have no idea why, of all possible subjects, at the age [...]
Go Right Ahead
[Image: note dropped by South Vietnamese Air Force Major Buang-Ly onto the deck of the USS Midway on April 30, 1975. It says, "Can you move the Helicopter to the other side, I can land on your runway, I can fly 1 hour more, we have enough time to mouve. Please rescue me. Major Buang, [...]
Clear
Not unusually for a Sunday, I took The Pooch for a longish walk this morning. The temperature had broken this week, and it was only in the high 70s. A couple of neighbors took advantage of the opportunity to fire up lawnmower and chainsaw, but few people otherwise had yet ventured out. It was such [...]
What’s in a Song: Body and Soul (1)
It starts in silence. By the end, the singer has thrown him- or herself melodramatically, almost operatically on the mercy of a lost love. It’s drenched in self-pity, but was written for and first performed by a woman once dubbed “Hollywood’s first maneater.” One of its most famous covers includes no vocal at all, and [...]
Making an Illuminated Manuscript
In the category of “Things Our Ancestors Did to Humble Us,” this mini-documentary [UPDATE: a little over six minutes long] from the J. Paul Getty Museum: (If you go to the page at the ArtBabble site where I found this, you might also like some of the “related videos” in the right sidebar there.)
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 [...]
Midweek Music Break: “St. James Infirmary”
Laissez les bons temps rouler, eh? And among the songs often regarded as “typical New Orleans,” we have the subject of today’s Midweek Music Break. No way could I even begin to match the masterful job of documenting its history which Robert W. Harwood undertook with his I Went Down to St. James Infirmary. One [...]
Landscapes, Perceived
[Image: a view of the Preseli Hills in north Pembrokeshire, West Wales. See the note below for more information.] From whiskey river: Landscape and Soul Though we should not speak about the soul, that is, about things we don’t know, I’m sure mine sleeps the day long, waiting to be jolted, even jilted awake, preferably [...]
The Fluttering of Things Going ‘Round (and Sometimes Away, and Sometimes Back)
[Video: La Fée des Grèves, or The Fairy of the Surf, a 1909 silent film by Louis Feuillade, dubbed "film's first fairy tale" by the Film: Ab Initio blog] From whiskey river: A Blessing For Absence May you know that absence is full of tender presence And that nothing is ever lost or forgotten. May [...]
Book Review: Who Hates Whom, by Bob Harris
My latest review is up at The Book Book. This time around, it’s a non-fiction title, Who Hates Whom. (Subtitle: Well-Armed Fanatics, Intractable Conflicts, and Various Things Blowing Up: A Woefully Incomplete Guide.) In brief, it’s a good overview of world “trouble spots” — where they are, how they became troublesome in the first place, [...]
