Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

Pagan Days

by 2 Comments

[Image at the right depicts Swedes celebrating Midsummer’s Day in a maypole dance. I found this at sweden.se, “The Official Gateway to Sweden.”]

By tradition, June 24th is Midsummer’s Day. (So you know what that makes the evening of June 23rd, right?) It’s a public holiday in Quebec and a handful of countries in Europe (although many of them no longer celebrate on the 24th itself but move it to the nearest weekend); among those with the strongest Midsummer’s Day tradition is Sweden.

Why the Swedes? and come to think of it, why June 24th, specifically?

Celebrating any mid-June day in general isn’t hard to understand, not for any land lying so close to (or crossing) the Arctic Circle. Here’s what Wikipedia says, in part, about Sweden’s tradition (which includes a maypole because, it is thought, it was impossible to find —  in Sweden in May — enough greenery to wrap a real maypole):

The earliest historical mention of the maypole in Sweden is from the Middle Ages. Midsummer was, however, linked to an ancient fertility festival which was adapted into St. John’s Day by the church, even though it retained many pagan traditions, as the Swedes were slow to give up the old heathen customs.

(The St. John there was John the Baptist; of course nobody really knows when his “birthday” was, but the Christian Bible says he was born six months before Jesus, so there you go. Just about everybody does know that the latter wasn’t really born in December, or even the winter — let alone December 25th — but since when has logic dictated the structure of liturgical calendars???)

YouTube has quite a few videos on the Swedish Midsummer celebration; many of these feature the maypole, of course, and also the so-called “Frog Dance” (Små grodorna, “the little frogs”) which people perform around it. E.g.:

As it happens, this video was shot in London’s Hyde Park “at the Swedish Midsummer’s celebrations” in 2007. According to Wikipedia, in the Frog Dance “participants dance around the maypole and try to imitate the behaviour of frogs.” Presumably this latter bit occurs at this point in the song:

Ej öron, ej öron, ej svansar hava de.
Ej öron, ej öron, ej svansar hava de.		 No ears, no ears no tails do they possess.
No ears, no ears no tails do they possess.

It’s arguable whether waggling fingers alongside the head or fluttering them from behind constitutes “try[ing] to imitate the behaviour of frogs,” since frogs possess neither (real) ears nor (real) tails. But, well, here’s to the clash of cultures. (Lord knows if I were Swedish, traditions like “don’t wear white before Easter” would leave me scratching my head.)

For no very good reason, while thinking about the Swedes I suddenly wondered if the original Noxzema shaving-cream commercial might be on YouTube — you know, the one which induced spontaneous puberty in an entire national population of 10- to 13-year-old boys in the 1960s. It’s there, of course:

The Swedish-born actress Gunilla Knutson was the “narrator” there, and I’ll bet she’s pretty sick of being asked about it. (Even on a day, like today, of good cheer and celebration and, well, heathen fertility celebrations.)

Share

Gratuitous Sunday Poem

by 3 Comments

(I love the word “gratuitous” — one of those ambiguous words, like “cleave,”
which hold multiple contradictory meanings until you put them in context.
In this post’s title, of course, gratuitous isn’t wearing its uncalled for or
unjustified persona; it’s meant to connote something like unasked for or
freely offered, since I seldom post on Sundays anymore.)

Just encountered this lovely bit in today’s edition of the Writer’s Almanac e-newsletter. It seems to fit, on a June Sunday on which the temperature threatens to go into triple digits for, like, the fifth or sixth straight day.

Rendezvous

Let’s meet in Santa Fe
where we can stroll holding hands
along the acequia madre [1]
then sip espresso
at the bookstore on Garcia Street.

Let’s meet in Santa Fe
and bask like lizards
on the rocks at Bandelier [2]
or explore the secrets
of remote creek beds.

Let’s meet in Santa Fe
to share our stories and let
the whisper of cottonwood leaves
fill the silences between.

Let’s meet in Santa Fe
and eat posole with our eggs
and laugh, and love, and turn
the calendar to the wall
for a few brief days.

(Ted McMahon, from The Uses of Imperfection)

________________________________

[1] The acequia madre — literally “mother ditch” — is an old Spanish-era irrigation canal in Santa Fe’s east side. See desert11sailor’s excellent Flickr photo gallery, from which the photo at the top of this post comes, for a walking tour to put you in the mood. (If you need help, I mean.) The Writer’s Almanac misspells the first word as acequina, which as far as I know doesn’t mean anything at all. (No idea how McMahon spelled it in the original — can’t find it anywhere online out of its Almanac context.)

[2] “Bandelier” is Bandelier National Monument.

Share

Writing and Silence

by 4 Comments

From whiskey river:

Learn how to meditate on paper. Drawing and writing are forms of meditation. Learn how to contemplate works of art. Learn how to pray in the streets or in the country. Know how to meditate not only when you have a book in your hand but when you are waiting for a bus or riding in a train.

(Thomas Merton, Illusory Flowers in an Empty Sky)

Not from whiskey river:

Silence

I have known the silence of the stars and of the sea,
And the silence of the city when it pauses,
And the silence of a man and a maid,
And the silence of the sick
When their eyes roam about the room.
And I ask: For the depths,
Of what use is language?
A beast of the field moans a few times
When death takes its young.
And we are voiceless in the presence of realities —
We cannot speak.

A curious boy asks an old soldier
Sitting in front of the grocery store,
“How did you lose your leg?”
And the old soldier is struck with silence,
Or his mind flies away
Because he cannot concentrate it on Gettysburg.
It comes back jocosely
And he says, “A bear bit it off.”
And the boy wonders, while the old soldier
Dumbly, feebly lives over
The flashes of guns, the thunder of cannon,
The shrieks of the slain,
And himself lying on the ground,
And the hospital surgeons, the knives,
And the long days in bed.
But if he could describe it all
He would be an artist.
But if he were an artist there would be deeper wounds
Which he could not describe.

There is the silence of a great hatred,
And the silence of a great love,
And the silence of an embittered friendship.
There is the silence of a spiritual crisis,
Through which your soul, exquisitely tortured,
Comes with visions not to be uttered
Into a realm of higher life.
There is the silence of defeat.
There is the silence of those unjustly punished;
And the silence of the dying whose hand
Suddenly grips yours.
There is the silence between father and son,
When the father cannot explain his life,
Even though he be misunderstood for it.

There is the silence that comes between husband and wife.
There is the silence of those who have failed;
And the vast silence that covers
Broken nations and vanquished leaders.
There is the silence of Lincoln,
Thinking of the poverty of his youth.
And the silence of Napoleon
After Waterloo.
And the silence of Jeanne d’Arc
Saying amid the flames, “Blesséd Jesus” —
Revealing in two words all sorrows, all hope.
And there is the silence of age,
Too full of wisdom for the tongue to utter it
In words intelligible to those who have not lived
The great range of life.

And there is the silence of the dead.
If we who are in life cannot speak
Of profound experiences,
Why do you marvel that the dead
Do not tell you of death?
Their silence shall be interpreted
As we approach them.

(by Edgar Lee Masters, about whom I first wrote not quite a year ago)

[Read more…]

Share

Public-Service Announcement: From Behind, Footsteps

by 7 Comments

Strange days…

The Employer announced last week that they’d be blocking access to Facebook and MySpace, due to some unspecified virus activity. That took effect immediately. Can’t speak for MySpace, but Facebook access seems to have been restored yesterday (haven’t checked yet today).

This morning, a strange combination of “Personal and Social Networking Sites” are also blocked, with no warning.

Included are Flickr, any site hosted at wordpress.org (some sites merely powered by WordPress software), and blogger.com — but not blogspot.com. (Or maybe vice-versa, hard to tell.)

Still, during the workday — so far — I can see all your blog postings via Google Reader. (Even though I can’t see any images from the blocked sites.)

But I can’t actually get to (i.e., comment at) many of them.

(Aside: If your blog posts use those little “– more –” gizmos which restrict viewing to just the first portion of a post, Google Reader likewise will show me only the first portion: I can’t click through to read what follows.)

Anyhow, please don’t be alarmed (or insulted) if I seem to have gone all silent and unidirectional all of a sudden. If the blockade continues, I’ll try to figure out a way to visit more during off-hours

The Interwebs are our Precious. We hates the nasty hobbitses downstairs, we do — nasty hobbitses who steals from us the Precious.

Update: Nope, the doors are locked to Facebook, too. Also Twitter. I experimented a little last week with something called Posterous.com, which would allow me to update FB/Twitter status… but not to read/comment on anyone else’s status, which (for me) is 80% of the attraction. Sigh.

Share

29° 57′ N, 90° 4′ W

by 2 Comments

As you know if you’ve been here for a while — even if you haven’t read the explanation of the blog’s title; just from reading the content — the mission of Running After My Hat might be summed up, sorta, like this:

Despite the inherent ridiculousness of the act, to pursue in deadly earnest whatever weird little distraction catches my interest.

You could hardly pick a more appropriate city than New Orleans for pursuits like this. And I guess the obvious place to start doing so literally would be at Meyer the Hatter’s establishment. Says my little Frommer’s guide book:

Meyer’s opened more than 100 years ago and has been in the same family ever since. Today the haberdashery has one of the largest selections of fine hats and caps in the South… Go outfit yourself like a proper gentleman caller.

(No, sorry, I didn’t go into the store. I think that word “proper” discouraged me from entering.)

[Read more…]

Share

Breaking It Down

by 6 Comments

From whiskey river:

The states of mind or feelings that art can excite have been helpfully distinguished in Sanskrit aesthetics, where they are called rasas, from a word meaning “juice” or “essence”. A fully achieved work of art should flow with all nine of them: their names might be transposed into English as wonder, joy, sexual pleasure, pity, anguish, anger, terror, disgust and laughter.

(Marina Warner, Monsters of Our Own Making [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Naming of Parts

To-day we have naming of parts. Yesterday,
We had daily cleaning. And to-morrow morning,
We shall have what to do after firing. But to-day,
To-day we have naming of parts. Japonica
Glistens like coral in all of the neighboring gardens,
And to-day we have naming of parts.

This is the lower sling swivel. And this
Is the upper sling swivel, whose use you will see,
When you are given your slings. And this is the piling swivel,
Which in your case you have not got. The branches
Hold in the gardens their silent, eloquent gestures,
Which in our case we have not got.

This is the safety-catch, which is always released
With an easy flick of the thumb. And please do not let me
See anyone using his finger. You can do it quite easy
If you have any strength in your thumb. The blossoms
Are fragile and motionless, never letting anyone see
Any of them using their finger.

And this you can see is the bolt. The purpose of this
Is to open the breech, as you see. We can slide it
Rapidly backwards and forwards: we call this
Easing the spring. And rapidly backwards and forwards
The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers:
They call it easing the Spring.

They call it easing the Spring: it is perfectly easy
If you have any strength in your thumb: like the bolt,
And the breech, and the cocking-piece, and the point of balance,
Which in our case we have not got; and the almond-blossom
Silent in all of the gardens and the bees going backwards and
forwards,
For to-day we have naming of parts.

(Henry Reed, from Lessons of the War [source]; see an excellent film interpretation of the poem here.)

[Read more…]

Share

Crossing the Line

by 10 Comments

For me, the last few days of May and the first few of June, in most years, are veined with ambivalence.

First, there’s May 29. As you may have put together by your own clever self, that’s The Missus’s and my anniversary. This has always been an easy date for me to remember, because it was also my Dad’s birthday. Somewhere around here was also my maternal grandmother’s birthday. And finally, because I have many happy childhood memories of Memorial Day — which used to fall every year on May 31 — the very end of the month always seems to carry with it an assertive whiff of celebration and commemoration.

But then we come to the small matter of June 4, 1988…

[Read more…]

Share

There Are Some Cures for Pre-Summertime Blues

by 5 Comments

Wanted to draw your attention to a couple of recent donations to the “life is complex and frustrating, so let’s go have some fun!” cause.

First, you can generally look to the Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast blog for a pick-me-up. (And before breakfast, say researchers, is when 99% of the populace most needs picking up. (The other 1% need it most while they’re sitting on barstools and fantasizing about Mr. or Ms. Right, as the case may be.))

But today’s post, “Some Cartoons for You,” just made me grin from ear to ear. (It might even have made the grin wrap around to the back of my neck — an alarming sight, no doubt, for the people behind me in the elevator this morning.) As is usually the case at 7-Imp, the focus is on children’s books and illustrators — specifically, in this case, illustrators who favor a cartoon-like style of art.

It’s pretty darned hard for me to look at this without smiling, and it’s not even the whole image (from “Mr.” [Tom] Warburton’s 1000 Times No — see a reproduction of the entire page at the 7-Imp site):

[Read more…]

Share

Very Dead Things, and a Small Box of Chocolate Bunnies

by 11 Comments

If you’ve read my most recent Friday post, you’ve probably figured out that the early-1990s TV series Twin Peaks looms large in The Missus’s and my collective imagination.

(Actually, we have a habit of latching onto odd, off-center network series which don’t have a chance in hell of surviving past the first season or two — simply because of the confusion and venality of network executives. Don’t even get us started on American Gothic.)

When we met, online, in 1991, the show was in its first season. Prior to the premier, I’d read a review by — of all people — Pauline Kael, in The New Yorker, and it made up my mind that I just had to watch that episode, even if none of the later ones. I can’t find this review online anywhere (even though, with my subscriber’s credentials, I’ve got access to the magazine’s entire archives; maybe I read it somewhere else?). But Kael was nuts about the premier episode; she wrote of the first glimpse of Laura Palmer as something like “quite possibly the deadest thing you will ever see on network television.”

[Read more…]

Share

Her Little Voice

by

[Above is the longer version of the Twin Peaks opening title sequence, including a fairly
 complete cast listing (at least for the recurring characters). The “official” and higher-
quality version, with a truncated theme song and cast listing, is here.]

[Note: Comments disabled for this post, for what will eventually be obvious reasons. :)]

From whiskey river:

And then the kicker is this: in passing from the real to the imagined, in following that trail, you learn that both sides have a little of the other in each, that there are elements of the imagined inside your experience of the “real” world — rock, bone, wood, ice — and elements of the real — not the metaphorical, but the actual thing itself — inside stories and tales and dreams.

(Rick Bass)

Not from whiskey river:

your little voice
Over the wires came leaping
and i felt suddenly
dizzy
With the jostling and shouting of merry flowers
wee skipping high-heeled flames
courtesied before my eyes
or twinkling over to my side
Looked up
with impertinently exquisite faces
floating hands were laid upon me
I was whirled and tossed into delicious dancing
up
Up
with the pale important
stars and the Humorous
moon
dear girl
How i was crazy how i cried when i heard
over time
and tide and death
leaping
Sweetly
your voice

(E.E. Cummings)

…and:

Love one another, but make not a bond of love
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.
Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup.
Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf.
Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you
be alone,
Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with
the same music.

(Kahlil Gibran)

And finally, who could argue with this?

One woman can make you fly like an eagle, another can give you the strength of a lion, but only one in the Cycle Of Life can fill your heart with wonder and the wisdom that you have known a singular joy.

(Deputy Tommy “Hawk” Hill, Twin Peaks)

…Okay, I said “finally” up there but, heck, as long as we’re on the theme we may as well go for broke:

[Below, click Play button to begin. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is about 5½ minutes long.

[audio:falling_juleecruise.mp3|titles=Falling|artists=Julee Cruise]

Falling
(lyrics by David Lynch; music by Angelo Badalamenti;
performance by Julee Cruise)

Don’t let yourself be hurt this time.
Don’t let yourself be hurt this time.

Then I saw your face
Then I saw your smile

The sky is still blue
The clouds come and go
Yet something is different
Are we falling in love?

Don’t let yourself be hurt this time.
Don’t let yourself be hurt this time.

Then your kiss so soft
Then your touch so warm

The stars still shine bright
The mountains still high
Yet something is different
Are we falling in love?

Falling
Falling

Are we falling in love?

Happy anniversary, Baby. ♥

Share
Verified by MonsterInsights