A while back, I said I’d be trying to fix things so that printouts of Running After My Hat posts would look more like “real” articles or stories as opposed to Web-based content: omitting the left and right margins, increasing text font sizes, and so on.
Just in time for the ginormous “Fay, Part 2” post, that feature is now working.
I’ll be tinkering with it off and on, no doubt. In the meantime, hope it helps your experience here!
[Continued from yesterday’s brief “We’re still here!” post. All images accompanying this post come from the online “Readers’ Gallery” of photos posted at our local newspaper’s site.]
Dear Family —
I know some of you have been keeping a watchful eye (“eye”: ha ha ha) on The Weather Channel for news of the damages suffered to our neck of the woods.
You may remember a post by my good friend FLJerseyBoy, three years ago (in his long-defunct Where Left Is Right blog), which talked at greater length about TWC:
The point is this: The Weather Channel doesn’t need to scare us. Yes, of course, people need to be warned. They need to watch the skies, especially with the help of The Weather Channel’s (and NOAA’s and others’) undoubtedly informative and beautifully computer-enhanced images. They need to have supplies on hand, and to prepare themselves for the interruption of essential services like electricity and water.
What people don’t need is a bombardment of ever-more alarming reports from shouting jackasses in windbreakers, leaning into the wind and rain as floodwaters rise around their ankles and houses and cars tumble by in the background. They don’t need it for themselves, and their distant families and friends — unfamiliar with the relevant geographic scales, and thus unaware (for instance) that a hurricane’s likely landfall is hundreds of miles away — sure as hell don’t need it either.
I’m with him. There’s no way The Weather Channel’s talking rain-spattered heads can possibly paint a decent picture of every neighborhood’s experience during a storm. So I hope you aren’t even now watching the statistics scroll by on your screens, with voiceovers by grim-faced tight-lipped anchorpeople — watching, and wondering what on earth might be happening with John and The Missus.
So let me put your minds at ease.
So far, just a lot of wind (up to about 45mph, nothing to toss vehicles) and rain.
Looking forward to posting something for real later today… In the meantime, we’re headed to the animal hospital to pick up the (formerly) ailing Sophie. (“Sophie?” you ask. Hint: Sophie is not, strictly speaking, human.)
From whiskey river:
Air
Naturally it is night.
Under the overturned lute with its
One string I am going my way
Which has a strange sound.This way the dust, that way the dust.
I listen to both sides
But I keep right on.
I remember the leaves sitting in judgment
And then winter.I remember the rain with its bundle of roads.
The rain taking all its roads.
Nowhere.Young as I am, old as I am,
I forget tomorrow, the blind man.
I forget the life among the buried windows.
The eyes in the curtains.
The wall
Growing through the immortelles.
I forget silence
The owner of the smile.This must be what I wanted to be doing,
Walking at night between the two deserts,
Singing.
(by W. S. Merwin)
Hypothetical-question time:
You’ve just been introduced to the classic visitor from outer space. He (or is it she?) is in a hurry — in fact, will be leaving in about 20 seconds, starting, say, now — but has a super-important question which needs answering. How you answer is to determine whether the saucers will (a) blow Earth up or (b) let her (or is it him?) continue on its stately course through the stars, through terrestrial history, and through the annals of intergalactic comedy.
Here’s the question:
We are very interested in this thing you call ‘fiction.’ But we do not understand it, and it is the last thing on my chop-chop must-do last-minute checklist before reporting back to Grand Inquisitor Xarg. I need to get going. Can you please give me one word so that I may understand it?
(Tip: “Uhhhh…” will not count as a valid reply. Nor will “Wait!”)
So what’s your answer? And if you yourself write novels or short stories, what’s the one word which is the key to understanding your fiction in particular?
Back in the day — you know, the day — you could say (as I used to) “I work for the phone company” and no one would doubt which phone company paid your salary. That’s why Lily Tomlin’s old “Ernestine the telephone operator” could say, without ambiguity, “We’re the phone company. We don’t have to care.”
Aside: Okay, listen, this isn’t the point of this post but now that I’ve got Ernestine on the brain I just had to look her up on YouTube. She’s there, all right. Here’s a sample:
Now back to our regularly scheduled blogging…
Anyway, aside from the fact that there are now as many phone companies in the USA as there are neighborhoods, the technology itself has of course made huge leaps. Cell phones, obviously. Cordless phones. Caller ID. Phones that take pictures. In fact, phones do so much anymore that it’s easy to forget some of the things they no longer do.
For instance: when your power goes out, so do your phones.
One of the shortest stories I’ve ever written clocks in at under 1500 words — a miracle, for me.
It’s based on a true story from some years ago, maybe the early to mid-’90s, the details of which I no longer remember. I do remember that the true story, too, took place in New York City. And without any hesitation at all, I can say I never forgot the most surprising ingredient in the story; that was part of the true story, as well.
Forager
Clay was lost that night somewhere way the hell out in the West 50s. Wind-blown, tacking erratically from one side to the other of the narrow cross streets, holding himself erect in painstaking dignity as he traversed the broad avenues. Muttering. Cursing the drivers of the rare passing cars. Enjoying but at the same time trying like hell to walk off the effects of the nearly full bottle of MD 20/20 that the teenage couple had left behind in the park when they fled, yelling, from his ragged bearded countenance suddenly rising up out of the bushes, fumbling with his stubborn, twisted zipper.
Shutting his eyes a moment, still in motion, he collided, kaboom, smack in the bull’s-eye of his goddam crotch with one of those goddam standpipes, and lurched, doubled over, around the corner of a building and into an alley. That’s when he saw it.
Okay, look — so I don’t have kids of my own, and my niece and nephews and stepkids are all grown and the next generation is still somewhere out on the misty horizon.
But I keep coming across these nominally “children’s” books which I then wish I had a non-adult excuse to read. Much of the credit (or blame) for this must be placed at the doorstep of the Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast blog, whose focus is principally (but not exclusively) on children’s and young-adult books. (The 7-Imp innkeepers, Eisha and Jules, are school librarians.)
Once a week, 7-Imp features the work of a single children’s-book illustrator. This week, the subject was one Ursula Vernon.
Vernon apparently came to children’s books after first succeeding in the Web comics world, as the writer and artist behind Digger, which she describes thusly:
…it is a story about a particularly no-nonsense wombat who finds herself stuck on the wrong end of a one-way tunnel in a strange land where nonsense seems to be the specialty. Now with the help of a talking statue of a god, an outcast hyena, a shadow-being of undeterminate origin, and an oracular slug she seeks to find out where she is and how to go about getting back to her Warren.
That sounds rather… well, precious — right up until you hit the “outcast hyena/oracular slug” part. And indeed, despite her fascination with cute and furry creatures, Vernon does apparently have a knack for putting them in dire straits, depicting them as dangerous characters, and at the very least writing — and writing damn well — about them.
The picture at the top right, for example, is titled “Overwhelmed.” I discovered this and other outstanding bits of her work in her gallery at the DeviantArt site, where she says of “Overwhelmed,” briefly:
And once again, we prove that Ursula trying to do angst = hamsters.
Oh, well. At least they’re expressive little buggers.
In the Writers to Be Read category over there on the right, you’ll see a link to something called Froogville. Its proprietor, one (presumably pseudonymous) Froog, runs a second blog as well: Round-the-World Barstool Blues whose mission, he says there, can be summed up as “Musings on life & love from the bars of the world.”
In a recent post, titled “Great Drinking Songs (9),” Froog includes a video of a group of Cornish fishermen singing the song “[Bound for] South Australia.” Which is entertaining, sort of — in the way any given film of any arbitrary group of non-professional semi-professional [thanks, Froog] singers, singing any given drinking song on a beach in a vaguely disorganized way, is entertaining.
Much much better, though, is the YouTube video below (a simple link to which Froog provided in his post), of an Australian guitarist named Tommy Emmanuel — playing the same song in a manner which frankly left me slack-jawed with amazement. I have NEVER seen or (I think) heard anyone play a guitar this fast.
See what I mean? I close my eyes and hear not a guitar but a banjo, or maybe a mandolin. But guitar…?
An interesting article by Rachel Donadio will appear in tomorrow’s New York Times Book Review, on the practice of blurbing — that is, authors (generally best-selling ones who, as the saying goes, Need No Introduction) providing capsule reviews to appear on the back covers and jacket flaps of books by authors who, well, generally need every introduction they can get.
Specifically, the article covers the work of a new company called Blurbings LLC. From their site’s About page:
