From whiskey river:
A Way to Look at Things
We have not yet made shoes that fit like sand
Nor clothes that fit like water
Nor thoughts that fit like air.
There is much to be done —
Works of nature are abstract.
They do not lean on other things for meanings.
The sea-gull is not like the sea
Nor the sun like the moon.
The sun draws water from the sea.
The clouds are not like either one —
They do not keep one form forever.
That the mountainside looks like a face is accidental.
(Arthur Dove [source])
Not from whiskey river:
“We’re going through!” The Commander’s voice was like thin ice breaking. He wore his full-dress uniform, with the heavily braided white cap pulled down rakishly over one cold gray eye. “We can’t make it, sir. It’s spoiling for a hurricane, if you ask me.” “I’m not asking you, Lieutenant Berg,” said the Commander. “Throw on the power lights! Rev her up to 8,500! We’re going through!” The pounding of the cylinders increased: ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa. The Commander stared at the ice forming on the pilot window. He walked over and twisted a row of complicated dials. “Switch on No. 8 auxiliary!” he shouted. “Switch on No. 8 auxiliary!” repeated Lieutenant Berg. “Full strength in No. 3 turret!” shouted the Commander. “Full strength in No. 3 turret!” The crew, bending to their various tasks in the huge, hurtling eight-engined Navy hydroplane, looked at each other and grinned. “The old man will get us through” they said to one another. “The Old Man ain’t afraid of Hell!” . . .
“Not so fast! You’re driving too fast!” said Mrs. Mitty. “What are you driving so fast for?”
“Hmm?” said Walter Mitty. He looked at his wife, in the seat beside him, with shocked astonishment. She seemed grossly unfamiliar, like a strange woman who had yelled at him in a crowd. “You were up to fifty-five,” she said. “You know I don’t like to go more than forty. You were up to fifty-five.” Walter Mitty drove on toward Waterbury in silence, the roaring of the SN202 through the worst storm in twenty years of Navy flying fading in the remote, intimate airways of his mind.
“You’re tensed up again,” said Mrs. Mitty. “It’s one of your days. I wish you’d let Dr. Renshaw look you over.”
(James Thurber, from “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” [source])
…and:
The Dead
Their reward is
they become innocent again,and when they reappear in memory
death has completely erased
the blurs, given them boundaries. They riseand move through their new world with clean,
clear edges. My grandmother, in particular
has become buoyant, unattached finallyfrom her histories, from the trappings
of family. By no means was shea good woman. But the dead don’t care anymore for that.
Weightless, they no longer assume
responsibility, they no longerhave bodies. Once,
at the end of August, after swimming
in the muddy pondI’d gone into the living room, cool
as vodka, where my grandmother
sat. Greed thins a woman,I remember her rings, bigger
than her fingers.
Water ran down my legsonto the floor becoming slippery
and my grandmother, her breath
scratchy from cigarettes and blended whiskey,leaned into my ear and whispered
you’re an ugly girl. Do I haveto forgive her? My mother tells me
no one ever loved her,
so when I see her, I see her again in the park
in her pink tailored suit, suede pumps,I see her moving among the strange
gentlemen that have gathered, the dark
powerful men. She is still young, blondeand most of all, she is beyond reach, beautiful.
(Kate Northrop, from Back Through Interruption [source])
Finally, no video or music clip this week. It just seemed right to use this bit, from Douglas Adams’s unfinished novel The Salmon of Doubt. Adams would have been 58 years old today yesterday, but died — the very model of a writer with sadly unfinished business — in 2001. Which I guess makes this excerpt trebly appropriate: content, source, creator.
One particularly niggling piece of Unfinished Business, it occurred to me the other day in the middle of a singing session with my five-year-old daughter, is the lyrics to “Do-Re-Mi,” from The Sound of Music. It doesn’t exactly rank as a global crisis, but nevertheless it brings me up short anytime I hear it, and it shouldn’t be that difficult to sort it out.
But it is.
Consider.
Each line of the lyric takes the names of a note from the solfa scale, and gives it meaning: “Do (doe), a deer, a female deer; Re (ray), a drop of golden sun,” etc. All well and good so far. “Mi (me), a name I call myself; Fa (far), a long, long way to run.” Fine. I’m not saying this is Keats, exactly, but it’s a perfectly good conceit and it’s working consistently. And here we go into the home stretch. “So (sew), a needle pulling thread.” Yes, good. “La, a note to follow so…” What? Excuse me? “La, a note to follow so…” What kind of lame excuse for a line is that?
Well, it’s obvious what kind of line it is. It’s a placeholder. A placeholder is what a writer puts in when he can’t think of the right line or idea just at the moment, but he’d better put in something and come back and fix it later. So, I imagine that Oscar Hammerstein just bunged in a “a note to follow so” and thought he’d have another look at it in the morning.
Only when he came to have another look at it in the morning, he couldn’t come up with anything better. Or the next morning. Come on, he must have thought, this is simple. Isn’t it? “La… a something, something… what?”
One can imagine rehearsals looming. Recording dates. Maybe he’d be able to fix it on the day. Maybe one of the cast would come up with the answer. But no. No one manages to fix it. And gradually a lame placeholder of a line became locked in place and is now formally part of the song, part of the movie, and so on.
How difficult can it be? How about this for a suggestion? “La, a…, a…” — well, I can’t think of one at the moment, but I think that if the whole world pulls together on this, we can crack it. And I think we shouldn’t let the century end with such a major popular song in such an embarrassing state of disarray.
Update: Oh, the heck with it. It’ll make this post awfully long, but here’s an excerpt — Episode 1 — from the original BBC radio production of Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
[Below, click Play button to begin. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 28:36 long.]
You can learn more about the Hitchhiker’s radio program(me) at the BBC site.
marta says
I do love the BBC and their Sci-Fi. Adams was grand. I told my kiddo a line from Adams. “If you want to fly, just throw yourself at the ground and miss.”
The kiddo laughed.
I liked The Dead poem here too.
Now I’m off to do what I can against unfinished business.
John says
marta: That is a great Adams line. The kiddo evidently has a sophisticated sense of humor in the making!
Froog says
Ah, I never could get the hang of Thursdays.
The HHGTTG radio series was a huge part of my childhood, and Adams was something of a hero. I saw him speak at the Oxford Union Society when I was a student there in the 80s.
I think my very favourite line of his (from the opening episode of the second radio series; I don’t recall if it ever found its way into the books) came when Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect found themselves trapped underground beneath an enormous boulder which they couldn’t possibly move, with no hope of rescue. They searched The Book for advice – “What to do if trapped underground beneath an enormous boulder which you cannot possibly move, with no hope of rescue” – and received the following reply.
1) Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far.
2) If – which, given your current circumstances, seems more likely – life hasn’t been good to you so far, consider how lucky you are that it won’t be bothering you much longer.
The Querulous Squirrel says
The Hitchhiker’s Guide was read again and again by my sons growing up. Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency was also a favorite. Adams’ humor was so unique. I also love the poem “A Way to Look at Things”…shoes that fit like sand, beautiful.
John says
Froog: Love the specificity of the question they needed help with. A general rule of writing says that the more specific the language, the more specific the image which can be called up in the reader’s (or listener’s) head — and thus the more effective. This is always true of comedy, especially; there’s a point where you’ve piled on too many details, no doubt, but up to that point the more details, the more qualifying phrases and such, the more ridiculous and hence funny the joke. I’d love to be able to look up something like Arthur’s and Ford’s questions on Wikipedia, but am pretty sure I’d be able to get no further than boulder. Or maybe emergency. Or death.
Squirrel: You have excellent taste in images, too: the sand-shoes one was my favorite! (Which I guess doesn’t necessarily mean you have excellent taste — just that it corresponds to the host’s here!
Jules says
Whoa to “The Dead.” Harsh. Cutting. Beautiful. Gracious. All at once. And Kate Northrop is new to me.
John says
Jules: I wish I could tell you more about Kate Northrop. “The Dead” just showed up in the browser window during the free-association portion of putting this post together; the book review of Back Through Interruption has been my only exposure to her.
Fwiw, here‘s an interview with her, printed in Fall 2009.