[Hat tip to the Speak Coffee to Me blog’s consistently brilliant selections in its Ad of the Week series]
Unexpectedly Needed, or Not Needed At All
[Video: classic moment from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre]
From whiskey river:
We may be only one of millions of advanced civilizations. Unfortunately, space being spacious, the average distance between any two of these civilizations is reckoned to be at least two hundred light-years, which is a great deal more than merely saying it makes it sound. It means for a start that even if these beings know we are here and are somehow able to see us in their telescopes, they’re watching light that left Earth two hundred years ago. So, they’re not seeing you and me. They’re watching the French Revolution and Thomas Jefferson and people in silk stockings and powdered wigs — people who don’t know what an atom is, or a gene, and who make their electricity by rubbing a rod of amber with a piece of fur and think that’s quite a trick. Any message we receive from them is likely to begin “Dear Sire,” and congratulate us on the handsomeness of our horses and our mastery of whale oil. Two hundred light-years is a distance so far beyond us as to be, well, just beyond us.
(Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything [source])
…and:
Chang Tzu tells us of a persevering man who after three laborious years mastered the art of dragon slaying. For the rest of his days, he had not a single opportunity to test his skills.
(Jorge Luis Borges [source])
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 hundred ninety pages. Subtitle (all by itself practically a foreword to the book): Investigations in the Shadowy World of Early Jazz-Blues in the Company of Blind Willie McTell, Louis Armstrong, Don Redman, Irving Mills, Carl Moore, and a Host of Others, and Where Did This Dang Song Come from Anyway?
Briefly, though (and thank you, Wikipedia):
“St. James Infirmary Blues” is based on an 18th century traditional English folk song called “The Unfortunate Rake” (also known as “The Unfortunate Lad” or “The Young Man Cut Down in His Prime”)… “The Unfortunate Rake” is about a sailor who uses his money on prostitutes, and then dies of a venereal disease…
The title is derived from St. James Hospital in London, a religious foundation for the treatment of leprosy.
Doesn’t sound much like an invitation to party, does it? No good times rollin’ here! But then we find these relevant lyrics, almost sketching for us a picture of a completely classic New Orleans funeral march:
“Get six young soldiers to carry my coffin,
Six young girls to sing me a song,
And each of them carry a bunch of green laurel
So they don’t smell me as they bear me along.“Don’t muffle your drums and play your fifes merrily,
Play a quick march as you carry me along,
And fire your bright muskets all over my coffin…”
Here’s “The Unfortunate Rake,” in a suitably mournful interpretation by A.L. Lloyd (vocals) and Alf Edwards (concertina) (complete lyrics here):
[Below, click Play button to begin The Unfortunate Rake. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 2:59 long.]
[audio:unfortunaterake_alloyd_alfedwards.mp3|titles=’The Unfortunate Rake’|artists=A.L. Lloyd & Alf Edwards]
By the time Louis Armstrong got hold of it, “The Unfortunate Rake” had morphed into a mysterious What exactly is going on here? sort of song. Now it’s no longer the rake, but his woman laid out in the hospital. And the guy? Well, the sound is right. But the words? He’s strangely, awfully damn ready to sing his own praises…
I went down to the St. James Infirmary
Saw my baby there
Stretched out on a long white table
So cold… so sweet… so fairLet her go… let her go… God bless her
Wherever she may be
She can look this wide world over
But she’ll never find a sweet man like meWhen I die Baby in straight-lace shoes
I wanna a boxback coat and a Stetson hat
Put a twenty-dollar gold piece on my watch chain
So the boys’ll know that I died standing flat…
[Below, click Play button to begin St. James Infirmary (Louis Armstrong). This clip is 4:46 long.]
[audio:stjamesinfirmary_louisarmstrong.mp3|titles=’St. James Infirmary’|artists=Louis Armstrong]
Finally, we have straight-up instrumentals — no need for any of these to retain a single lugubrious scrap of “The Unfortunate Rake.” This is sweetly swinging Allen Toussaint, on the piano:
[Below, click Play button to begin St. James Infirmary (Allen Toussaint). This clip is 3:51 long.]
[audio:stjamesinfirmary_allentoussaint.mp3|titles=’St. James Infirmary’|artists=Allen Toussaint]
The Usefulness of Bad Things
[Cartoon found at the site of the Anxiety and Stress Disorders Institute of Maryland.]
From whiskey river:
Bad People
A man told me once that all the bad people
Were needed. Maybe not all, but your fingernails
You need; they are really claws, and we know
Claws. The sharks — what about them?
They make other fish swim faster. The hard-faced men
In black coats who chase you for hours
In dreams — that’s the only way to get you
To the shore. Sometimes those hard women
Who abandon you get you to say, “You.”
A lazy part of us is like a tumbleweed.
It doesn’t move on its own. Sometimes it takes
A lot of Depression to get tumbleweeds moving.
Then they blow across three or four States.
This man told me that things work together.
Bad handwriting sometimes leads to new ideas;
And a careless god — who refuses to let people
Eat from the Tree of Knowledge — can lead
To books, and eventually to us. We write
Poems with lies in them, but they help a little.
(Robert Bly, Morning Poems [source])
…and:
We think hitting the ground, knocking over the barrier is a mistake, but the ground we hit, the failure we experience is not a mistake. The world is endlessly mysterious, experience is profound to a degree that will always surprise us. But it is never a mistake. To foster even a meager appreciation of that (and when we’re in the midst of a fall, meager is pretty big) is to begin to practice, to raise the bodhi-mind. It is the decision to stop complaining and to start paying attention. Contained in the fall is exactly what we need to stand. Everything we need is available, but we have to invite it.
(Bonnie Myotai Treace [source])
The Fundamental Things Apply
[Below, click Play button to begin well, playing. During this time, volume control will appear at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 4:22 long.]
[audio:lovewalkedin_errollgarner.mp3|titles=’Love Walked In’|artists=Erroll Garner]
On March 1, 1991 — twenty years ago yesterday — I got an email from a stranger who’d downloaded and read an unpublished story of mine.
The story in question, “The Last Supper,” was a slender-little-nothin’ of a horror story about a church congregation who disposed of each pastor, when they tired of him, by consuming him at a communal covered-dish meal. My new correspondent just wanted me to know (a) she had enjoyed reading it and (b) in a word, Eeeeewww…!
Gross-out aside, the tone of the note was a little fangirlish. And in my reply, I — who’d written but not yet published a mystery about an email stalker — was simultaneously a little puffed-up and evasive.
Unfortunately, neither of us retained a copy of that first exchange. We both remember it, though — oh yes we do. And we both remember (in sometimes excruciating detail <g>) the long-term effects…
Erroll Garner’s piano provides the soundtrack to this post: “Love Walked In.” Seven years after George Gershwin composed the music, Ira Gershwin added the lyrics, the first verse of which goes:
Nothing seemed to matter any more,
Didn’t care what I was headed for.
Time was standing still,
No one counted till
There came a knocking at the door.
The rest fits, too.
Love you, Baby.
[Comments closed for this post, obviously.]
The Nonexistent Kavalier & Clay Film
This is almost heartbreaking to watch — because the film it’s promoting (by director and cinematographer Jamie Caliri, of Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay) hasn’t (yet) been made.
(And if you haven’t read Kavalier & Clay yet, well, now you’ve got one more reason to do so.)
Paying Attention to the Click
Nearly every writer, I imagine — maybe we can even dispense with the nearly? — has favorite words. It’s certainly true of me. Some of them are words I just like the sound of. Some of them have meanings just too right: I can’t help reaching for those words whenever I set to writing or talking about a favorite topic.When I’m editing something I’ve written, one of the toughest jobs is ridding the text of these pets, which after the second or third occurrence on a page start to jut out at me like snaggleteeth just begging to be attacked by a cosmetic dentist.
But I’ve also got favorite words which I’ve never used. Words which I’ve been hoarding, waiting to be spent at just the right moment, in just the right piece…
This is about one of those words.
Notice What This Post Is Not Doing
From whiskey river:
The range of what we think and do
is limited by what we fail to notice.
And because we fail to notice
that we fail to notice
there is little we can do
to change
until we notice
how failing to notice
shapes our thoughts and deeds
(Daniel Goleman, quoting R.D. Laing [source])
…and:
You know, all mystics — Catholic, Christian, non-Christian, no matter what their theology, no matter what their religion — are unanimous on one thing: that all is well, all is well. Though everything is a mess, all is well. Strange paradox, to be sure. But, tragically, most people never get to see that all is well because they are asleep. They are having a nightmare.
(Anthony de Mello [source])
Midweek Music Break: The Mellotron, and The Moody Blues
[A view of the interior of the Mellotron M400. To learn more about how the Mellotron works, see the Out of Phase: Magic Machines Resources “information about Mellotron, Fairlight and other vintage keyboards” site.]
A dim little back corner of the cabinet which houses musical-instrument history is occupied by an odd device called the Mellotron. It was an early “synthesizer,” sort of. But it didn’t create the sounds of other instruments artificially, by generating electronic pulses and sending them directly to amplifiers and sound boards. The Mellotron played strips of audiotape, several seconds in length, on which had been recorded a host of musical instruments: at its simplest, one note per instrument per strip of tape. Choose your instrument and press a key on the keyboard; the corresponding tape strip moves over a playback head; and out comes the sound of that instrument playing that note. When you release the key, the tape is repositioned so the playback head returns to the beginning of the strip.
(It puts one in mind of that Samuel Johnson wisecrack: “It’s like a dog dancing on its hind legs. The wonder is not that it does it well, but that it can do it at all.”)
Book Review: The City & The City, by China Miéville
My full review of this book is up, over at The Book Book.
Part conventional murder mystery, part dark urban fantasy, The City & The City is constructed on a bizarre high concept which the author makes somehow believable: two Eastern European cities are not just neighbors, adjacent to each other; they’re even closer than that. They […wait a beat…] overlap.
Note that this departs from the parallel-universes or -dimensions premise employed in many science fiction and fantasy novels since the mid-20th century. Those other narratives generally suppose that the two places have completely different timelines, perhaps branching off from each other, so that events in one place have no direct impact on the other; people can move between dimensions only with difficulty, by way of some exotic technology or talent.
The people in The City & The City have no such weird abilities or devices. They’re just normal human beings. Physically, they can move from one city to the other just by stepping from one to the other.
The key word there: “physically.” For the two cities have developed legal and cultural barriers preventing crossover. They have different languages. They have different architectural and clothing styles, favor different color schemes. Their cuisines smell and taste different. (They even differ in their diplomatic relationships. One city is recognized by the US and Canada; the other, by Canada only. If you want to fly from the US to the latter, you must do so from some other country — like Canada.) From childhood, people learn to unsee the people and objects in the other city. They are forbidden to cross back and forth except at one location, a single otherwise conventional border crossing with gates and guards.
All of which has no bearing on the investigations and solutions of most crimes. But now, an American woman has been killed in City A, and the body found in City B…
When I started reading this book, I knew pretty much nothing about it. I’d seen comments on it on various blogs I read and respect; these comments praised it highly but never for specific reasons (other than with expressions like “blew my mind”). Even after I began reading, it took me a while to catch on — by Miéville’s design, I think. The body is discovered; the detective talks with eyewitnesses and colleagues, and collectively they start developing some theories. But then at the end of Chapter 1, a dozen or so pages in, I came to the following passage. The detective-narrator, in an idle moment, finds himself watching an elderly woman on a nearby street.
… In my glance I took in her clothes, her way of walking, of holding herself, and looking.
With a hard start, I realised that she was not on GunterStrász at all, and that I should not have seen her.
Immediately and flustered I looked away, and she did the same, with the same speed. I raised my head, towards an aircraft on its final descent. When after some seconds I looked back up, unnoticing the old woman stepping heavily away, I looked carefully instead of at her in her foreign street at the facades of the nearby and local GunterStrász, that depressed zone.
That screeching sound, that crash you just heard? That was the echo of my collision with the word unnoticing. Even when I read back a few sentences, and then ahead — “should not have seen her”? “her foreign street” vs. “local GunterStrász”? — I was still confused as hell. I couldn’t wait to turn the page.
And that, above all else, is what I want from a mystery.
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