Bobby McFerrin is brilliant. (And so are his audiences. It’s just that he’s the one onstage.)
[Hat tip to Janet Reid.]
Have I Forgotten to Remember to Answer the Right Question?
[Found this image here.]
From whiskey river (highlighted portion):
The Difficult Simplicity of Certain Contemplations
Tapping a tarot card with her dusky finger,
the woman tells me
sit with your emptiness,
in time answers will come.
She says I know them all and only must remember.My friend tells me I must decide what is enough,
then live with it.Even my shiny-suited banker waxes wise, asks me
if I think rich people are happier than I.But always there’s the knowledge
of how all this will end.In between
we try to love a life that’s like a man who can’t commit–
a little restless, always vague
when someone asks when are you going to. . . ,a life that’s like the ragged, feral cat
mewling at the door,
insinuating with its cheek and hunger.
We give it mercy or rough blame.I’ll tell you what love of this life is. It’s looking up
through trees newly bare of leaves
and seeing there the oldest road,
a broken line of white stars
stretching out across the sky.It’s thinking,
this could almost be enough.
(Susan Elbe [source])
Something Is Gained in the Translation
RAMH has seen a boost in its site traffic over the last week — not in the number of visits to the blog, but in the number of pages read per visitor. Just as one example, over a 25-minute period last night 60 pages were “read,” all by one visitor: pretty amazing for a blog which, until last Wednesday(ish), averaged fewer than two pages per visit.
Without getting into a lot of detail, in short, I’m getting lots of attempts to post comment spam. One attempted spam comment — let’s call it a spomment — per post. Each (with a few exceptions) lasting no more than a minute. The posts themselves aren’t being visited — the “reader” is jumping right to the comment form. All of these bulk spomments are trying (apparently) to sell name-brand shoes: walking shoes, boots, and so on.
And all of these bulk spomments originate from pretty much the same location: Beijing.
I corresponded briefly about this with the doyen of RAMH‘s overseas contingent, Froog, who lives and works in that city and is as far as I know my only connection there. (On his own blog, roughly concurrently with the onset of spam at my end, he’d written of a sudden burst in Internet service disruptions at his end. That post of his was only the most recent in a loooooong and probably ongoing series about his problems getting — and staying — online.)
Most likely, we think, his service disruptions have nothing to do with my bulk spomments. Someone over there may have found RAMH via Froogville, or vice-versa, but is probably just testing, successfully, workarounds for the little reCaptcha word-verification scheme which I use here.
At any rate, the spomments’ contents take an interesting form. If you look at a given batch, you’ll notice that the messages are identical — though different from one batch to the next. Each spomment is a literary-sounding (but clumsily Englished) passage littered with a handful of hyperlinks, and if you jump right over the hyperlinks while reading it, the passage makes a sort of sense. Sorta. Kinda. Like.
Last night’s barrage was especially amusing, especially when you consider they’re — ostensibly — trying to sell you walking shoes (emphases added, shoe brand and of course hyperlinks removed):
We should so live and labor in our cheap [brand name] shoes time that [brand name] shoes sale what came to us as seed may go to the next [brand name] walking shoes generation as blossom,and what came to us as blossom may go to them as fruit. This is what clearance we mean by progress. It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.
“The Hinge Around Which a Song Swings”
I had occasion this morning to hear a song I haven’t heard in a couple years, and this made me think of the guy who introduced me to it. Like many friends these days, he’s not one I’ve ever actually met: I know him only through his online handle, “FLJerseyBoy” (three guesses what first got my attention about that), and his blog, A Dog Starv’d.
If you follow that link you’ll know a couple things about him (and his blog) pretty much immediately. You’ll know that he’s much more politically vocal there than I’d ever dream of being here, and you’ll know that he pretty much ran out of blogging fuel after less than a year, his last post going up in June 2008. Since then he seems to have disappeared. I’ve made numerous attempts to contact him, to no avail. Wherever he is, I hope he’s all right. (Maybe he’ll come across this post and contact me.)
The New Jersey/Florida connection aside, one thing I liked about his blog was that — although ostensibly about politics — it reflected FLJerseyBoy’s apparent inability not to be “distracted” by other matters. (Boy, do I relate to that.)
And one of my favorite, non-political posts of his was titled — as is this one — “The Hinge Around Which a Song Swings.”
In it, he took about 750 words to pick apart a song barely three minutes long. An instrumental, at that — and, for the most part, he focuses on a single instant. That post by FLJerseyBoy very much provided the template for my What’s in a Song? series: lay out what you know about the song, talk about its psychological effect(s), and provide it for listening. In the rest of this RAMH post, I’ll paste what he had to say, verbatim, and trust that he (or his ghost) won’t mind.
(He made one mistake of fact, which I’ll correct here. He also provided a sample from the song in three different digital forms; here, you’ll get just the MP3 — but you’ll get, too, the whole thing.)
So here’s FLJerseyBoy, on “Je M’Ennuie.”
—-
Finding the Life You Want in the Life You’ve Got
[“Crossroads,” by Hungarian artist István Orosz. For more about this image, see the Note at the bottom of this post.]
From whiskey river:
A Note
Life is the only way
to get covered in leaves,
catch your breath on the sand,
rise on wings;to be a dog
or stroke its warm fur;to tell pain
from everything it’s not;to squeeze inside events,
dawdle in views,
to seek the least of all possible mistakes.An extraordinary chance
to remember for a moment
a conversation held
with the lamp switched off;and if only once
to stumble upon a stone,
end up soaked in one downpour or another,mislay your keys in the grass;
and to follow a spark on the wind with your eyes;and to keep on not knowing
something important.
(Wislawa Szymborska [source])
…and:
I feel sometimes as if I were a child who opens its eyes on the world once and sees amazing things it will never know any names for and then has to close its eyes again. I know this is all mere apparition compared to what awaits us, but it is only lovelier for that. There is a human beauty in it. And I can’t believe that, when we have all been changed and put on incorruptibility, we will forget our fantastic condition of mortality, and impermanence, the great bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us. In eternity this will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets. Because I don’t imagine any reality putting this one in the shade entirely, and I think piety forbids me to try.
(Marilynne Robinson, Gilead [source])
All Good Stories Start Small
A couple of stray tidbits for your daily (weekly, hourly, etc.) writerly use…
—-
First: You may have noticed agent Nathan Bransford’s recent contest, for which he invited readers to submit as contest entries the first paragraphs of their own works-in-progress. (He announced the winners yesterday.)
Regular RAMH commenter Froog has been observing Nathan’s contest as well. But Froog goes on to wonder if the contest winners would have been his own choices. He goes yet further, to solicit input from the aether: what examples can you offer of good first paragraphs from already published works?
Note that this informal survey (as Froog concedes) will not yield objective results. It’s more: what do readers (and writers) like?
I’ll drop a favorite from one book or another over there later today, when I’m closer to books I might quote from. In the meantime, if you’ve got a candidate, please do visit Froog’s “Good Beginnings” post and offer yours.
—-
Second: The Missus and I are doing some rearrangement of things around the house to prepare for *shudder* a garage sale. This involves a lot of unshelving of some things, and shelving of others in their place. The latter, in turn, requires that things potentially shelvable be examined. Many of these things have not been examined in, like, whole freaking years. Decades, even.
I came across such an object the other day: a small gray steel box with a flip-open lid. Dimensions: just about right for, oh, say, a few hundred 3×5 index cards. Guess what I found inside?
Clever, very clever, and right you are: a few hundred 3×5 index cards.
The majority of these, blank front and back, promptly found themselves being shredded. The others — all in my handwriting — recorded two sorts of information:
- Bibliographic information for a book which I apparently once considered writing. I haven’t looked closely at these, because I was so distracted by #…
- Notes about confidence games, gypsies, rigged carnival games, and so on. In this stack appear quotations from a strange assortment of sources — nursery rhymes, a letter from Lord Chesterfield to his son, Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack, an essay by a La Rochefoucauld (presumably this one), physicist Freeman Dyson‘s autobiographical Disturbing the Universe, Oscar Wilde, Samuel Butler…
I couldn’t quite make sense of the quotations, that is, why they’re clipped together with the con-game (etc.) notes. The best theory I’ve come up with so far says that they may be possible epigraphs, maybe even for the con-game (etc.) book — although (again) the connection really isn’t clear.
But once I thought of them as epigraphs, I started to think of other books or stories which they might inspire. So let’s consider them as found epigraphs, then: writing prompts, if you want to call them that. Story starters. Kicks in a procrastinating seat of the pants.
I’ll post one here every now and then. Beginning with this one, at the top of the stack:
The Derby Ram (nursery rhyme)
The man that killed the ram, sir,
Was up to his knees in blood.
And the boy that held the pail, sir,
Was carried away in the flood.
Thoughts? Suppose you were working on a story which didn’t depict these events literally, but still used this epigraph; what might that story be like?
Lost in the Trees
[Image from Where the Wild Things Are, by Maurice Sendak. Today seems like a good day to open with this, since it marks the official release of Spike Jonze’s film version.]
From whiskey river:
Threat
You can live for years next door
to a big pine tree, honored to have
so venerable a neighbor, even
when it sheds needles all over your flowers
or wakes you, dropping big cones
onto your deck at still of night.
Only when, before dawn one year
at the vernal equinox, the wind
rises and rises, raising images
of cockleshell boats tossed among huge
advancing walls of waves,
do you become aware that always,
under respect, under your faith
in the pine tree’s beauty, there lies
the fear it will crash someday
down on your house, on you in your bed,
on the fragility of the safe
dailiness you have almost
grown used to.
(Denise Levertov [source])
From the Crazy Mixed-Up Files…
…of the Be Careful What You Wish For Department:
We’re clearing some stuff out in preparation for a garage sale. Aside from that, we’ve got a lot of stuff in boxes which we’ve never been able to take out of boxes — because of all the stuff on our shelves, stuff which we once imagined might be important than has ultimately come to pass.
So what are we looking at here in this photo?
These are the shredded galleys of my half-dozen tech-reference books. If you think you just can’t imagine ever wanting to shred something like galleys from books you actually wrote and published… well, feel free to re-think that. :)
Paying Attention to Unpleasantness
[Image: “Marshmallow Gun” (excerpt) — click for full original at xkcd.]
I realized a couple days ago — during this criminally busy week — that I hadn’t posted any writing samples in a long time.
Many of the (non-blogging) pieces I’ve posted on RAMH are grouped together under the category called “Paying Attention.” But I don’t post a given bit of my work with a “I thought you’d be interested in reading this” preface, followed by the thing itself. (Yes, smart aleck: that would be too simple.) Instead, I’ve prefaced each piece with a full blog post about an component of writing to which I try to (yes) pay attention when I myself am writing: setting, character, action, and so on. At the foot of each such full post is a link to some writing of mine which illustrates (if I’m lucky!) whatever point the post was ostensibly making.
The topic of today’s post, obviously, is something no one really wants to think of — and maybe not a lot of people are willing even to read. But I’m not talking about a specific something, mind you, because everyone has different thresholds for different sorts of unpleasantness.
What things or experiences does the word “unpleasantness” call to your mind? Do you expect to encounter them in fiction? If you know you’ll encounter them in a given book, will you not read it?
Starting and Restarting
[Image above is captioned: “Hoagy Carmichael* pretending to crank start a car.”
From the Hoagy Carmichael Collection at Indiana University.]
From whiskey river, still mining the William Stafford vein (and no complaints from this quarter):
The Gift
Time wants to show you a different country. It’s the one
that your life conceals, the one waiting outside
when curtains are drawn, the one Grandmother hinted at
in her crochet design, the one almost found
over at the edge of the music, after the sermon.It’s the way life is, and you have it, a few years given.
You get killed now and then, violated
in various ways. (And sometimes it’s turn about.)
You get tired of that. Long-suffering, you wait
and pray, and maybe good things come — maybe
the hurt slackens and you hardly feel it any more.
You have a breath without pain. It is called happiness.It’s a balance, the taking and passing along,
the composting of where you’ve been and how people
and weather treated you. It’s a country where
you already are, bringing where you have been.
Time offers this gift in its millions of ways,
turning the world, moving the air, calling,
every morning, “Here, take it, it’s yours.”
(William Stafford [source])
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