Adjust text size:
The Garden, Neglected
[Video: scene from 12 Monkeys, in which the protagonists learn the true intentions of a shadowy revolutionary movement] From whiskey river: The wind, one brilliant day, called to my soul with an odor of jasmine. “In return for this jasmine odor, I’d like all the odor of your roses.” “I have no roses; I have no [...]
Alien You
From whiskey river: One Source of Bad Information There’s a boy in you about three Years old who hasn’t learned a thing for thirty Thousand years. Sometimes it’s a girl. This child has to make up its mind How to save you from death. He said things like: “Stay home. Avoid elevators. Eat only elk.” [...]
Fiction and (Overly) Real Life
[Photo by Alan Bauer] I want to share with you a little anecdote about one of the wild joys of writing a novel. But let’s put real life aside for a moment; let’s start with a hypothetical. Let’s say you’re writing a novel, as follows: A certain set of events must happen at night, say, [...]
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: Scott Joplin’s “Solace”
I caught 1973′s The Sting on TV recently. By now, I’ve seen it often enough that the kick of the plot has pretty much evaporated, leaving behind the not inconsiderable on-screen pleasures of watching the cast at work. (Robert Shaw as Doyle Lonnegan, I just learned from Wikipedia, did not have to fake his limp: [...]
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 [...]
Ingredients of Revelation
From whiskey river: Shinto When misfortune confounds us in an instant we are saved by the humblest actions of memory or attention: the taste of fruit, the taste of water, that face returned to us in dream, the first jasmine flowers of November, the infinite yearning of the compass, a book we thought forever lost, [...]
What’s In a Song: Smoke Gets in Your Eyes (1)
[One of a continuing series of posts on American popular songs with long histories. As is usually the case, this one on the history of "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" will be was followed in a couple days by Part 2, about some of the cover versions.] Where Were You in ’62? So asked one [...]
Buh-Bye, Book-Buying Guilt!
The Missus has a refrigerator magnet which features a head-and-shoulders hand-tinted photo of a wealthy, hoity-toity society-matron sort of woman; the text alongside says, “‘Frugal’ is such an ugly word.” (Ha!) Like many people, I suppose, I have great ambivalence about acquiring ever more Stuff. Examined closely, expressions like Wow, that would be so cool! [...]
