Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

Gratuitous Disingenuousness

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[The post below uses the words author and artist more or less interchangeably. Apologies to those in either camp who might dispute the lumping-together.]

A long-time friend and I have kidded each other for years about being disingenuous. This started, as I recall, when I once teased her in terms like, “You’re even more disingenuous than you think you are” or maybe, contrariwise, “Don’t look at me like that. You’re not all that disingenuous.”

(Oh, stop. Like you don’t have any weird in-jokes with your friends.)

Exactly how it all started doesn’t really matter. The point of the running joke is that the word disingenuous seems (at least to my friend and me) to mean, sounds like it means, sort of the opposite of what it actually does mean.

(Embedding it in some kind of complicated syntax, as in either of the two possible statements above, makes the meaning even more slippery.)

The word gratuitous is like disingenuous: it seems to mean something convenient, so people grab for it even when it’s not really the right word… or when it’s the right word, but for the wrong reasons.

All of which (whew) has been triggered by a post over at the writing in the water blog, where the pseudonymous “mapelba” (who is both an artist and a writer) has asked some unnerving questions. Questions like these:

Can art or story be too pretty to be any good?… What are your expectations when you walk into a museum or open a new book? What expectations do you have for your own work?

Well, they unnerved me, anyhow. I tried twice to answer them in a comment but both times broke down and deleted what I’d typed. Part of my difficulty (as I’ve said before) is that I tend to focus on “writing pretty” first, and worry about “writing story” later.

And part of my difficulty lies in that word “expectations.” There’s a big rub there, no? To wit: The expectations of the work’s creator and those of its audience cannot be assumed to match.

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Sleeping, Waking, and Grimmer Things

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From whiskey river:

Waking at 3 a.m.

Even in the cave of the night when you
wake and are free and lonely,
neglected by others, discarded, loved only
by what doesn’t matter — even in that
big room no one can see,
you push with your eyes till forever
comes in its twisted figure eight
and lies down in your head.

You think water in the river;
you think slower than the tide in
the grain of the wood; you become
a secret storehouse that saves the country,
so open and foolish and empty.

You look over all that the darkness
ripples across. More than has ever
been found comforts you. You open your
eyes in a vault that unlocks as fast
and as far as your thought can run.
A great snug wall goes around everything,
has always been there, will always
remain. It is a good world to be
lost in. It comforts you. It is
all right. And you sleep.

(William Stafford [source])

…and:

And if awakening is also already present, inescapably and everywhere present from the beginning, how can the emotions not be part of that singing life of grasses and fish and oil tankers and subways and cats in heat who wake us, furious and smiling, in the middle of the brief summer night?

(Jane Hirshfield)

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Balancing Act

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A famous translation exercise (well, famous among wordish-nerdish types) takes the phrase “one man’s meat is another man’s poison,” translates it into Russian, and then back again into English. I can’t find the result online anywhere (maybe the exercise isn’t as famous as I’d thought), at least without buying access to a document apparently by someone speaking at a language/English conference. But it was predictably bizarre, as literal translations tend to be.

A Web site called Translation Party (which I just found courtesy of an acquaintance’s “shared items”) automates this. The translation process begins with an English phrase; you click on the “find equilibrium” button, and off it goes — translating the phrase to Japanese, then back into English, then feeding the translated English back into the translate-into-Japanese engine, and so on. “Equilibrium” is said to be reached when the engine repeats the same translation twice.

Here’s what I got from the famous tagline (well, famous among movieish-nerdish types) tagline for Jaws II: “just when you thought it was safe to go in the water”:

Please also enter the water safely.

If you try it yourself and come upon a translated phrase so good that you just have to look at it, like, once a month*, note the link at the bottom which stamps your result onto a T-shirt or mug.

The Internet world is so full of strange and/or wonderful things…

By the way, feeding the “one man’s meat…” line into Translator Party doesn’t work. It just goes back and forth, repeatedly switching the two phrases on either side of the “is.” Eventually it gives up and says equilibrium will never be reached. (I know how it feels.)

__________________

* Depending on the frequency of your laundry cycle.

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A Little Learning, a Little Yearning

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[Image above shows the Parthenon, and its reflection in the facade of the New Acropolis Museum. Click image for more information and the original photo.]

From whiskey river:

Just Thinking

Got up on a cool morning. Leaned out a window.
No cloud, no wind. Air that flowers held
for awhile. Some dove somewhere.

Been on probation most of my life. And
the rest of my life been condemned. So these moments
count for a lot — peace, you know.

Let the bucket of memory down into the well,
bring it up. Cool, cool minutes. No one
stirring, no plans. Just being there.

This is what the whole thing is about.

(William Stafford [source])

…and:

There is a bitter aftertaste when one swallows the truth, sometimes. It may be years before it becomes apparent, so long that you’ve forgotten that first taste, but it does come. It comes when, having thought you swallowed truth whole, what you got was only a morsel. Further, the spreading bitterness derives from understanding that what you thought was true was, actually, true, but not in the way you thought or wanted it to be.

(Terrance Keenan [source (p. 169)])

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Review: How Sex Works, by Dr. Sharon Moalem

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My review of this book is now online, over at The Book Book.

Short version:

  • Non-fiction, written by a neurogeneticist and evolutionary biologist.
  • Based on fairly current research. Informative. (Especially on the question of what makes you turn your head at someone, or not — at least if they’re within sniffing range.)
  • Not as provocative as you might imagine, not as clever as the chapter titles might suggest…
  • …but not bad. Okay.

One issue has already come up, related to my review rather than to the book itself. I wouldn’t mind hearing from others about it. Which is: Did I go too far in using asterisks to hide certain keywords (including the title’s most important word) from the hungry, Google-fed appetites of spammers, link farmers, and so on?

I really don’t know. Thought about it for weeks, in fact — and finally decided to err on the side of caution, mostly since I’m not the unlucky soul who’d be responsible for scrubbing away all the comment spam, and/or turning comment moderation on.

Opinions?

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Inherent Vice

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Thomas Pynchon’s newest hit the bookstores a week ago. Penguin Press’s description:

Part noir, part psychedelic romp, all Thomas Pynchon — private eye Doc Sportello comes, occasionally, out of a marijuana haze to watch the end of an era as free love slips away and paranoia creeps in with the L.A. fog

It’s been awhile since Doc Sportello has seen his ex-girlfriend. Suddenly out of nowhere she shows up with a story about a plot to kidnap a billionaire land developer whom she just happens to be in love with. Easy for her to say. It’s the tail end of the psychedelic sixties in L.A., and Doc knows that “love” is another of those words going around at the moment, like “trip” or “groovy,” except that this one usually leads to trouble. Despite which he soon finds himself drawn into a bizarre tangle of motives and passions whose cast of characters includes surfers, hustlers, dopers and rockers, a murderous loan shark, a tenor sax player working undercover, an ex-con with a swastika tattoo and a fondness for Ethel Merman, and a mysterious entity known as the Golden Fang, which may only be a tax dodge set up by some dentists.

In this lively yarn, Thomas Pynchon, working in an unaccustomed genre, provides a classic illustration of the principle that if you can remember the sixties, you weren’t there… or… if you were there, then you… or, wait, is it…

Here’s the trailer — narrated by Pynchon himself (but don’t expect to see him!):

(“Twenty-seven ninety-fi— Twenty-seven ninety-five? That used to be, like, three weeks of groceries, man. What year is this again?” Ha!)

There’s even a Wiki set up — and active! — for the new book already.

At Amazon, they’ve got a listing (“Exclusive!”) of the soundtrack Pynchon himself supposedly chose for the book, including:

  • “Bang Bang” by The Bonzo Dog Band
  • “Can’t Buy Me Love” by The Beatles
  • “Desafinado” by Stan Getz & Astrud Gilberto, with Charlie Byrd
  • Elusive Butterfly by Bob Lind
  • “Fly Me to the Moon” by Frank Sinatra
  • “God Only Knows” by The Beach Boys
  • The Greatest Hits of Tommy James and The Shondells
  • “Happy Trails to You” by Roy Rogers
  • “Help Me, Rhonda” by The Beach Boys
  • “Interstellar Overdrive” by Pink Floyd
  • “It Never Entered My Mind” by Andrea Marcovicci
  • “Motion by the Ocean” by The Boards
  • “People Are Strange (When You’re a Stranger)” by The Doors
  • “Quentin’s Theme” (Theme Song from “Dark Shadows”) performed by Charles Randolph Grean Sounde
  • “Something Happened to Me Yesterday” by The Rolling Stones
  • “Sugar Sugar” by The Archies
  • “Surfin’ Bird” by The Trashmen
  • “Telstar” by The Tornados
  • “Tequila” by The Champs
  • “There’s No Business Like Show Business” by Ethel Merman
  • “Volare” by Domenico Modugno
  • “Wabash Cannonball” by Roy Acuff & His Crazy Tennesseans
    “Wipeout” by The Surfaris
  • “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” by The Beach Boys
  • “Yummy Yummy Yummy” performed by Ohio Express

Amazon provides links from most of these songs to MP3 previews/downloads and/or pages of information about the artists or songs. But there are also a number of unlinked ringers in the list — tunes which I would be very surprised to find on any real playlist. Tunes like:

  • “Just the Lasagna (Semi-Bossa Nova)” by Carmine & the Cal-Zones
  • “Skyful of Hearts” performed by Larry “Doc” Sportello
  • “Soul Gidget” by Meatball Flag

Pynchon’s in his 70s now; I wonder how long he can keep this up? In any case –for its length, fewer than 400 pages (versus hundreds more for nearly all his other titles) if for no other reason — if you’ve postponed reading anything by the guy, this might be the one to start you off. It’s not likely to be dull.

Update: A couple more items (for now; wouldn’t be surprised to find more later)…

First, Wired has put up an interactive Google Map of Los Angeles-area sites which figure in Pynchon’s work — Inherent Vice and others. And by “interactive” I don’t mean just the usual zoom-and-slide Google Maps controls: you can actually make additions yourself, if you’re suitably well-informed and/or obsessive. (Wired‘s capsule summary of the book, by the way: “The Big Lebowski meets The Big Sleep.”)

Second, the Wall Street Journal‘s “Speakeasy” blog has confirmed that it is indeed Pynchon himself doing the voiceover. They hired a voice-recognition expert, and armed with his affirmative response managed to wrench a confession out of the Penguin Press PR folks. Ah, but is it possible their “expert” is maybe a wishful-thinking Pynchon fan? Nah:

We should point out [voice-recognition guy] Primeau is an unbiased witness, having never read Pynchon (“I don’t know this guy but it looks like he has some history as an author,” he said). Nevertheless, if he hasn’t been taken by the man’s work, Primeau is intrigued by his voice, which he describes as “a tobacco-driven soft rasp.”

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What’s in a Song: Begin the Beguine (2)

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[This is another in an occasional series on popular songs with long histories. Part 1 — which focused on the song’s composition and lyrics — appeared on Wednesday.]

How many times and by which performers has “Begin the Beguine” been covered? It is to laugh.

The most comprehensive list I’ve seen was on the page of information at the WICN radio station’s site which I mentioned in Part (1) of this post. That list includes around 118 names “and many others” (I can’t swear to the count — I counted it once but am damned if I’ll put myself through that again :). Among those names — and aside from the dozens of Big Bands who jumped on the song following Artie Shaw’s success with it — were artists as varied as Chet Atkins, Liberace, Frankie Lyman & The Teenagers, Julio Iglesias, Django Reinhardt, Coleman Hawkins, Lalo Schifrin, Mario Lanza…

One thing you notice from many of these covers is how heavily their pacing and rhythm have been influenced by the Shaw swing-band version. But how close was that version to Cole Porter’s intentions?

Let’s refer again to Porter himself, who once wrote of the dance called the beguine (emphasis added): “I was very much taken by the rhythm of the dance, the rhythm was practically that of the already popular rumba but much faster.” Compare this with the writeup by the anonymous WICN writer (emphasis added): “It is similar to a rumba, but slower, with dance moves performed smoothly and deliberately. Like many Latin dances, the beguine emphasizes the ability to roll the hips to evoke sensuality while performing the steps.”

(Yeah — no wonder so many artists have covered “Beguine”: apparently there’s enough leeway for them to do whatever the heck they want with it.)

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Surprises in Store

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From whiskey river:

For My Young Friends Who Are Afraid

There is a country to cross you will
find in the corner of your eye, in
the quick slip of your foot — air far
down, a snap that might have caught.
And maybe for you, for me, a high, passing
voice that finds its way by being
afraid. That country is there, for us,
carried as it is crossed. What you fear
will not go away: it will take you into
yourself and bless you and keep you.
That’s the world, and we all live there.

(William Stafford [source])

…and:

So strange, life is. Why people do not go around in a continual state of surprise is beyond me.

(William Maxwell)

…and:

Life is mostly froth and bubble,
Two things stand like stone,
KINDNESS in another’s trouble,
COURAGE in your own.

(Adam Lindsay Gordon [source])

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What’s in a Song: Begin the Beguine (1)

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[Cole Porter at the piano, sometime in the 1930s. For me, it’s easy to see in him,
from this photo, the song “Begin the Beguine” — but not the beguine itself.]

[This is another in an occasional series on popular songs with appeal across the generations. This post will be broken into two parts; Part 2 appears in a few days here.]

So let’s start with the obvious question for a word geek, that word: beguine.

As far as I can tell, every Google result for the word “beguine” (pronounced something like b’GEEN) refers to the song — with these exceptions:

  • dictionary pages (some of them!) for the word itself;
  • pages about a 13th- to 14th-century religious order, whose female adherents were called Beguines; and
  • pages on which only the lyrics appear.*

And what does beguine refer to, in the context of the song? Wikipedia:

The beguine is a dance, similar to a slow rumba, that was very modestly popular in the 1930s, coming from the islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique, where the Martinique beguine is a slow close dance with a roll of hips.

(Indeed, a whole style or genre of music exists, known as biguine — not at all unrelated to the beguine dance.)

Cole Porter had two stories for where he encountered the dance before enshrining its name in the song. In one, he saw it performed on an island in the South Pacific; in the other, later version, he saw Martinique immigrants perform it on a Paris dance-hall stage. Charles Schwartz’s Cole Porter: A Biography offers a letter from Porter to a fan as an explanation which joins both of those stories into one:

I was living in Paris at the time and somebody suggested that I go to see the Black Martiniquois, many of whom lived in Paris, do their native dance called The Beguine. This I did quickly and I was very much taken by the rhythm of the dance, the rhythm was practically that of the already popular rumba but much faster. The moment I saw it I thought of BEGIN THE BEGUINE as a good title for a song and put it away in a notebook, adding a memorandum as to its rhythm and tempo.

About ten years later [on an island to the west of New Guinea, in what is now Indonesia, a] native dance was stated [?] for us, the melody of the first four bars of which was to become my song.

In these terms, then, the music of “Begin the Beguine” sprang from a Caribbean rhythm and a South Pacific melody. (Note, though: Porter was a notorious kidder and practical joker, and very aware of his popular image. Various other explanations have been offered — by Porter and others — for the song’s origin. Basically, all we truly know about the song is what anyone has known since it was published.)

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