Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

Hard Questions

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From whiskey river:

The rest I have told you already

The rest I have told you already.
A few years of fluency, and then
the long silence, like the silence in the valley
before the mountains send back
your own voice changed to the voice of nature.
This silence is my companion now.
I ask: of what did my soul die?
and the silence answers

if your soul died, whose life
are you living and
when did you become that person?

(by Louise Glück)

And (not from whiskey river):

Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.

(by Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet)

And finally, just for a change, something of an answer:

My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it’s on your plate — that’s my philosophy.

(by Thornton Wilder, The Skin of Our Teeth — one of my all-time favorite plays to read)

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How Do You Figure?

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Crazy week upcoming (as if the last one wasn’t crazy enough)… More details on that later, but for now I’ll just say that I’ll have blog posts stacked up in the pipeline and ready to go, starting a week from today [double emphasis added 2008-08-29] and continuing for the next four days. (I know how the Web’s attention wanders if a site goes dark too long.)

The catch?

I hope but can’t promise that I’ll be able to get to a computer to actually post the things. All I’ll need, once the posts are written, is about ten minutes to read, revise as needed, and click the Publish button. But I won’t actually have a computer with me — so will depend on the kindness of strangers or family members or, I don’t know, Internet cafes. Don’t be surprised if you read reports of some guy in Groucho glasses and mustache, stealing laptops in bookstores and then returning them 15 minutes later.

Anyhow, to kick off that series of posts starting which shall start [clarification added 2008-08-29] in a week, let me introduce you to a slender volume (103 pages, with index) called Figures of Speech: 60 Ways to Turn a Phrase, by Arthur Quinn. (Amazon says the book is 112 pages long, which may be attributable to a later edition; the one I’ve got here is copyright 1982.)

From Quinn’s preface:

Graduate students in literature eagerly buy little dictionaries so that when a monograph intones about later Shakespeare’s penchant for the anthimeria, they will have a place to look it up. So they look it up, while their own prose often becomes more and more like a monograph’s, a groaning misery to read.

…Learning about the figures of speech should be less like learning about the periodic table of elements than like learning how to model clay. To ask a sentence if it has a zeugma is not like asking a rock if it has silicon. In fact, the very phrase “figures of speech” is misleading in its static, passive form. It should be the “figurings of speech” — or, better yet, “figuring speech.”

The figurings of speech reveal to us the apparently limitless plasticity of language itself. We are confronted, inescapably, with the intoxicating possibility that we can make language do for us almost anything we want. Or a least a Shakespeare can. The figures of speech help us to see how he does it, and how we might.

I’ve always been haunted by the possibility that I might be a better writer than storyteller. Discussions about story always have me glancing nervously over my shoulder, as though the ghosts of Homer and Twain and Hemingway are going to materialize and demand my credentials. “Papers, please,” they’ll say. I’ll pat my pockets, frown, slap my forehead, say “Jeez, my other suit–” and while they’re distracted I’ll take off in a broken-field run, heading for the safety of the Prose Mountains.

[Read more…]

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Creating in the Margins

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After yesterday’s post about and the tendency of things to break down along edges, I was reminded this morning about the other side of the matter: the tendency of interesting and indeed surprising things, good things, to happen between two adjacent experiences.

A few weeks ago, I set myself a general writing objective (to write a story with a given first and last sentence) and a specific deadline: Labor Day, September 1 (this Monday). I had plenty of other stuff to do in the meantime, but my main motivation was a sort of writer’s guilt. I was bothered, see, that I’d been so distracted by other stuff (marketing Merry-Go-Round, blogging, and then of course I do have a day job, a wife, and books to read!) — so distracted by all that stuff that I hadn’t been able to write something new.

(Well, I did write myself a few sentences into a MGR sequel. But that wasn’t “real” writing.)

The main effect of this objective was, alas, not that I sat down, raised the lid of my inkwell, and began to write. The main effect was to foster a different and somewhat more exquisite sort of writer’s guilt: the guilt of not-writing when you know you quote-unquote “have to.” Especially when under your own deadline (you know you can’t weasel out). Especially when you publicly announced your deadline (you know everyone will know, even if you do try to weasel out).

So this morning I’m lying in bed. The alarm has gone off once, been snoozed, and gone off (and been snoozed) again. I’m kind of semi-conscious. It’s 5 a.m.

Then a picture starts to form behind my eyelids: A man in a cabin, dusting something off, it’s not his cabin but someone else’s… Wait, no, that’s not dust — it’s snow… He picks up a scrap of paper and reads it… He finds another scrap of paper, and reads it, and sometime later he finds an old photograph…

…and so on, to the end.

There, in the crevasse between waking and sleeping (or between pokes at the snooze button, if you will), there I found my story.

I’ve always loved the sensation of falling asleep, even more than I like sleeping itself (which I love quite a bit!). But the transition to wakefulness can bring its own rewards.

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Cramming Technologies into an Elevator

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My brother the architect once explained to me the key to building things successfully. By building he meant not just framing, erecting walls and roofs and so on, but everything: flooring, painting, pouring foundations, and so on. All of it, he said, had one critical element: edges. How an architect or builder or home handyman handles edges defines his or her success at it. Buildings fall down; patterned wallpaper fails to match up at the seams; bookshelves wobble, and a marble placed on the floor rolls freely from one corner to another.

This doesn’t apply just to physical structures, to edifices. It applies, I think, to just about everything artificial.

One of Merry-Go-Round‘s underlying themes is the fragility of technology. Any one piece of equipment or software, even two or three, may work just fine after being tested and tested and tested. The word for this is “robustness”: the more robust a system, the closer it is to that magical (and mythical) state commonly known as fail-safe.

Where problems begin to arise is, yes, along the edges: those conceptual little nooks and crannies where the surfaces of multiple technologies come together.

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Will Cuppy

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The most recent category for the links here, all the way at the bottom of the right-hand menu, is labeled “The Pantheon.” These aren’t authors who’ve necessarily influenced my style (although no doubt many of them have); they aren’t all authors who’ve meant a lot to me for my whole life (although some of them have). Instead, they’re authors who at one time or another bowled me over with the unexpected, offering surprising insights into what writing could possibly achieve.

One who didn’t make the cut, although I sure thought about including him, was Will Cuppy.

It was during the summer of 1964 that I first encountered Cuppy’s The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody. Earlier that year I’d been introduced to James Thurber, thanks to my 7th-grade English teacher Mr. Krause; I had almost made up my mind that I wanted to grow up to be a Professional Humorist or, failing that, a Professional Teller of Occasional Jokes.

And then I hit Cuppy. (It was almost exactly like that, a collision.)

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Printability!

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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!

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They Call the Wind… Fay? (2)

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[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.

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Staying, Moving

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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)

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Boiling It Down to a Single Word

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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?

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