Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

Costs of Creation

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From whiskey river:

The Midnight Club

The gifted have told us for years that they want to be loved
For what they are, that they, in whatever fullness is theirs,
Are perishable in twilight, just like us. So they work all night
In rooms that are cold and webbed with the moon’s light;
Sometimes, during the day, they lean on their cars,
And stare into the blistering valley, glassy and golden,
But mainly they sit, hunched in the dark, feet on the floor,
Hands on the table, shirts with a bloodstain over the heart.

(Mark Strand, The Continuous Life [source])

…and:

The important thing about despair is never to give up, never wrap up and put away a sterile life, but somehow keep it open. Because you never can know what’s coming; never. That’s the great thing about life, the crucial thing to remember. You may beat your fists on a stone wall for years and years, and every consideration of common sense will say it’s hopeless, forget it, spare yourself; and then one day your bleeding hand will go through as if the wall were theatrical gauze; you’ll be in another realm where birds are singing and love is possible, and you’d have missed it if you’d given up, because it might be only that one day the wall was not stone.

(Allen Wheelis, from The Illusionless Man [source])

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Things You Don’t Want to Hear
(or Make) Someone Say

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Back from a three-day beach weekend with spotty Interwebs access…

On Saturday — scattered amongst dog-walking, sightseeing, storm-dodging, and various other activities — The TV Network Whose Name I Cannot Type offered some sort of monsters-of-the-deep marathon: maybe six or eight films about giant sharks, reptiles, squid, etc., threatening the lives and livelihoods of people living in waterfront communities. Only a couple of these movies had been made for theatrical release; the quality, therefore, was a little uneven.

I had no notebook at hand, so I can’t  swear that the following snippets of dialogue are verbatim. But in each, the central phrase remains intact.

  • If you’re familiar with this genre, you know there’s often on hand a seen-it-all, weatherbeaten old veteran of combat with exactly the sort of beast now threatening everyone. (The template for this role: Robert Shaw’s character Quint, in Jaws.) In one of Saturday’s films — it might have been Super Gator, or perhaps Croc — this character gives the others an example of the monster’s extraordinary toughness. A disbelieving bystander says, approximately, “Can these creatures really do that?” The grizzled old guy replies:

    Yep. Why, I seen one o’these things run five miles across a rough road just to—

    [I didn’t notice what the thing meant to do after its nightmare steeplechase; my attention kept returning to the first part of the sentence.]
  • In another film, off the coast of California, severe underwater tremors have caused two very unpleasant events:
    • They have disturbed a school, or pack, of prehistoric sharks, called goblin sharks (there really are such things), bringing them to feed near the surface instead of at their usual great depths; and
    • they have launched a tsunami.

    With no operational radios, cell phones, or land lines, two groups of survivors of the tsunami must deal with the sharks on their own. At one point, some of these survivors are wading around the lower floor of a building under construction, and they meet up with the rest of their party, whom they’d feared lost. They compare notes on their experiences, and Guy A from one group asks Guy B from the other if they can escape by going out the way they came in. Says Guy B:

    No. There’s a shark in the parking lot.

Were I a screenwriter, I’d live for the experience of building a script around a line like “There’s a shark in the parking lot.” Just once, though.

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Art Forms

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[Above, the trailer for the short film Lost and Found, an adaptation of the children’s book of the same name by Oliver Jeffers. For stills from the movie, visit the Cartoon Brew link above, and STUDIO aka.]

From whiskey river:

Recipe for an Ocean in the Absence of the Sea

You have the ingredients on hand,
Get to the edge of something,
yourself best of all, and take
yourself in hand. Take, I mean, your hand,
trace out the blue menaces
released and lapsing there,
watch closely around the wrist: they will
remind you what you must do,
They are what you must do. Be
them, until there is nothing but them,
then you are ready. Now take
time, all there is in the house —
it does not have to be yours. Take time
and never for a moment
losing track of what changes
back into yourself, bitter enough
so that you will need almost
no salt, mix well and then leap
over the edge. Wait there. When you can
wait no longer, it is done.
Serve at once. It does not keep.

(Richard Howard [source])

…and:

The world of the arts is by no means always comfortable, but neither is it likely ever to be boring. It is full of surprises, humor, traps for the unwary, and challenges to smugness. It is a world of moods as well as of revelation, of beliefs and fears, of unpleasant truth as well as of delicious fantasy. Perhaps it is arrogant to say that anyone who does not venture into this world is only half-interested in life. I say it, nonetheless.

(Russell Lynes, The Fine Edge of Awareness)

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Looking Glass

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This week, a little something different: Usually, I start my Friday post by pulling something at random from the last seven days’ selections at whiskey river. Then I go on to include a handful of poems, quotations, film clips, and/or songs to which the whiskey river snippet led me (by whatever inscrutable chain of thoughts).

Today, I’ve already got some poetry which I encountered elsewhere (scroll down to see ) in the last week, poetry which I really liked.

With that already rustling in my head, then, I stopped by at whiskey river‘s archives, called whiskey river’s commonplace book, and just started to browse.

From whiskey river’s commonplace book (no specific link; it’s about halfway down the page):

Prayer

Over a dock railing, I watch the minnows, thousands, swirl
themselves, each a minuscule muscle, but also, without the
way to create current, making of their unison (turning, re-
infolding,
entering and exiting their own unison in unison) making of
themselves a
visual current, one that cannot freight or sway by
minutest fractions the water’s downdrafts and upswirls, the
dockside cycles of finally-arriving boat-wakes, there where
they hit deeper resistance, water that seems to burst into
itself (it has those layers), a real current though mostly
invisible sending into the visible (minnows) arrowing
motion that forces change —
this is freedom. This is the force of faith. Nobody gets
what they want. Never again are you the same. The longing
is to be pure. What you get is to be changed. More and more by
each glistening minute, through which infinity threads itself,
also oblivion, of course, the aftershocks of something
at sea. Here, hands full of sand, letting it sift through
in the wind, I look in and say take this, this is
what I have saved, take this, hurry. And if I listen
now? Listen, I was not saying anything. It was only
something I did. I could not choose words. I am free to go.
I cannot of course come back. Not to this. Never.
It is a ghost posed on my lips. Here: never.

(Jorie Graham [source])

Not from whiskey river:

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The Mystery of Misplaceable Modifiers

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According to numerous sources, J.R.R. Tolkien offered this memory of his first story — not the plot, not (really) the characters, not the setting, but the language:

I first tried to write a story when I was about seven. It was about a dragon. I remember nothing about it except a philological fact. My mother said nothing about the dragon, but pointed out that one could not say “a green great dragon,” but had to say “a great green dragon.” I wondered why, and still do.

I wonder that kind of stuff all the time. Sometimes you can sort of make sense of the “rule”; for instance, in an animal breed or species name which includes a modifier, you can’t reasonably separate the modifier from the noun. A friendly wire-haired terrier works. A wire-haired friendly terrier doesn’t — even though it imparts exactly the same information.

Other times, maybe, something just “sounds right” one way but not another. It was the longest, most difficult journey I ever took: yeah, that’s all right. It was the most difficult, longest journey I ever took: if I wrote that sentence, I’d immediately want to revise it.

Even when the two adjectives are of similar lengths and/or sounds, one alternative chimes and the other thuds. A cold, clear morning: ding! A clear, cold morning: whoomp!

I can’t believe I have much of anything in common with Tolkien — and nothing at all uniquely in common. So: What’s up with this? Any theories?

_____________________

P.S. This sort of thing must drive copy editors — and ESL teachers — crazy.

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Stories in the Trees

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[The artwork above comes from a fantastic — fantastically rich, but also just literally fantastic — Web site called The Hermitage, from the mind and imagination of artist Rima Staines. She and her companion Tui seem to have a life straight out of fiction, as you can see from her blog. Check out their “wandering house,” which is to a motor home as a cottage is to an office, and her handmade clocks (!).]

From whiskey river:

Generations

Our stories lie down in the orchard,
their time is not now, but something is
coming, something is going away. They

rise to the stars, and wait to be told.
There are listeners who know how little
we know, how much we are feeling.

We had to go our own way, a little off course,
always, no matter how specific the directions
seemed at the time. In this universe if we’re lucky,

we will live in our children’s stories,
their tales that will turn us to legend,
some absurd truth that has nothing to do

with our plans, our meticulous records.
No matter what stories we discard or keep,
they will give us a life we cannot imagine.

(Jeanne Lohmann, from The Light of Invisible Bodies [source])

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Sudden, Radiant Magic

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From whiskey river:

In the morning I mused
It won’t return, the magic of life
it won’t return

Suddenly in my house the sun
became alive for me
and the table with bread on it
gold
and the flower on the table
and the glasses
gold
And what happened to the sadness
In the sadness too, radiance.

(“Zelda” (Zelda Schneersohn Mishkovsky), from The Spectacular Difference)

….and:

Gazing at the Cascade on Lu Mountain

Where crowns a purple haze
A shimmer in sunlight rays
The hill called Incense-Burner Peak,
from far

To see, hung over the torrent’s wall,
That waterfall
Vault sheer three thousand feet, you’d say
The Milky Way
was tumbling from the heavens, star on star.

(Li Bai, a/k/a Li Po)

…and:

Stuff your eyes with wonder… Live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.

(Ray Bradbury)

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Breaking WIP News: We Have a Title

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A couple weeks ago, I posted on the importance of selecting a good title for your work. Here’s what I said then, in part:

I’ve struggled for years, off and on, with the title of the WIP. When I tell you I’ve been calling it Grail, I know that instantly summons up certain… certain somethings in your head. Those somethings may or may not in fact apply to my story…
…
So no, it’s not going to be Grail in the long run. I don’t know what it’s going to be.

Well, I think I’ve found what I was looking for. Below, the story behind the new (and, I think, forever) title.

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Department of Unintended Consequences
(Animals & Technology Division)

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The Missus and I are not alone in having a dog who barks rabidly during thunderstorms. But alone or not, we do. She may be little, and her bark may be a mere yip! compared to the more conventional woof! of full-size hounds, but she is determined to scare the storm away.

(And you know what? You can’t argue with results. The storm always leaves.)

For the record, she also barks when dogs on TV bark, and she barks when doors slam on TV, and when she’s anxious for dinner, and when someone opens the front door from outside, and she barks when she’s happy and excited about a new toy or t,r,e,a,t being unwrapped.

Still, she was doing this new thing in the last couple of weeks which I couldn’t understand: she’d suddenly start barking for no reason. It was like her storm-barking: frantic, maddened you-better-stay-away-from-my-family barking.

I couldn’t understand it, that is, until the moment over the weekend when I just happened to— well, let me explain.

The Missus and I have new “smart” phones. I don’t know what The Missus is up to with hers, but by default, when my own phone rings it just rings. Oh, I’d done the obvious thing already — downloaded a ringtone, and aren’t I hot stuff for having figured that out?

But then my former boss was telling me about her phone, which is roughly the same model, and she asked if I’d gotten into customizing ringtones: really customizing them.

“Like what?” I asked.

“Well,” she said, “I set mine up to ring as usual whenever someone calls, and I’ve got a different ringtone for my Mama, and one for my sisters…”

That sounded (ha, no pun intended) pretty cool to me. So I did some research. And then took action.

Now, I haven’t gone as far yet as my ex-boss. But on a lark, I did set the phone up to play my downloaded ringtone whenever a call comes in… and to vibrate whenever an email arrived in the Inbox.

That was it, you see:

Notifications from Facebook: bzzzzzzz, BarkBarkBark!

Spam arriving: bzzzzz, BarkYipBark!

E-newsletter subscriptions: bzzzzz, YipYipYipYip!

In short, the dog was being driven slowly but unambiguously mad by the male human’s flaky experiments in telecommunications.

And all it took for the male human to figure it out was to move the phone from the coffee table to his hip pocket. And then, of course, to make a connection between the bzzzz! against the thigh and the YipYipYip! in the ear. We won’t discuss how long this last step took.

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Sublime

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From whiskey river (last two stanzas):

The American Sublime

How does one stand
To behold the sublime,
To confront the mockers,
The mickey mockers
And plated pairs?

When General Jackson
Posed for his statue
He knew how one feels.
Shall a man go barefoot
blinking and blank?

But how does one feel?
One grows used to the weather,
The landscape and that;
And the sublime comes down
To the spirit itself,

The spirit and space,
The empty spirit
In vacant space.
What wine does one drink?
What bread does one eat?

(Wallace Stevens)

Not from whiskey river, a reading of the above poem by Ken Worsley of Trans-Pacific Radio (over Ball and Biscuit by the White Stripes, as a background track):

(You might also be interested in reading Worsley’s account of how he came to read the poem this way, over this background music. That page is where I found the above podcast.)

Over the past week, whiskey river also cited a poem called, there, “Changing Places.” But, well, there isn’t any such poem in Rilke’s work*; it’s actually an excerpt from the start of his Ninth Elegy. In one translator’s version, from 1977 (and regardless of the title or the translation, yes, sublime):

Why, when this short span of being could be spent
like the laurel, a little darker than all
the other green, the edge of each leaf fluted
with small waves (like the wind’s smile) — why,
then, do we have to be human and, avoiding fate,
long for fate?

Oh, not because happiness,
that quick profit of impending loss, really exists.
Not out of curiosity, not just to exercise the heart
— that could be in the laurel, too…

But because being here means so much, and because all
that’s here, vanishing so quickly, seems to need us
and strangely concerns us. Us, to the first to vanish.
Once each, only once. Once and no more. And us too,
once. Never again. But to have been
once, even if only once,
to have been on earth just once — that’s irrevocable.

(Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by A. Poulin [source])

Now, something not from whiskey river…

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