Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

These Eyes…

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Just got back from Chris & Jess’s wedding weekend…

The Missus and I stayed at a lovely hotel in DC, the Sofitel on Lafayette Square. The bathroom was especially well appointed, and among its attractions was the mirror over the sink — which, as I understand it [cough], had obviously been designed by someone who sometimes needed to apply makeup. What made it suitable for this activity was the lighting: the mirror was a large square, and every single edge was brightly lit.

At first, though, it sort of disturbed me to use the mirror but I couldn’t quite figure out why. I just wanted to conduct my business (none of it, I hasten to add, involving makeup) and get the hell away from it. It just sort of… sort of… creeped me out.

Then I realized the problem.

To wit: see anything unusual here?

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While on the Subject of Bad Memory…

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'Burning Memories' c2006 by Gerla Brakkee (sxc.hu)…as I was earlier:

In this case, however, the subject isn’t “bad memory” in the sense of “Huh? Did I just say something?” It’s more along the lines of, “Holy sh!t. Did I actually live through that?!?”

Via the MAD about Words blog (discovered, in turn, via DCWYTBMA), we have word of a definitive list — from Entertainment Weekly, of all unlikely sources — of an enormous range of recent memoirs and autobiographies:

The genre shows no signs of slowing down, though it’s difficult to imagine a narrative that’s left unexplored. ”The bar keeps going higher,” says Sara Nelson, editor in chief of Publishers Weekly. ”Well, you were a drug addict, but did you kill anybody? Well, you killed somebody, but did you do it with your bare hands? Well, you were hungry, but were you as hungry as Frank McCourt?…”

What follows is a selective list — believe it or not, we actually left some stuff out — of memoirs that have been written since 1995. (Sorry, Ms. Walters, one of the things we’ve omitted is celebrity autobiographies.) So take a look and see if your life, or something resembling it, has already been spoken for.

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Like a Candle in the Wind

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God, do I love moments of unintended poetry.

God, do I hate the ravages of age which, within minutes, can scatter those moments to the far edges of memory. Then you have to mount a whole frigging safari to recover them…

The Missus and I were on the way home from work yesterday. (We don’t work at the same place, but we do carpool. Which gives us a chance to talk, to share moments of drama and outrage from the past eight hours, to be present when the other bursts into song or, yes, poetry.)

Her boss and his wife are doing us a favor which, if they can manage it, will be done ideally sometime the next 24 hours. I hadn’t heard if it was still “on,” though, so I asked TM if she knew what the status was Actually, she said, actually, no I haven’t. She had me punch her office’s phone number into her cell phone (she was driving) so she could briefly remind her boss about it. It took 10 seconds, if that.

But the end of the conversation cracked me up. Her half of it went something like, “Uh-huh… Okay. Thanks. Just remind me in the morning, in case I forget to ask.” And then she hung up.

She saw me laughing. “What?”

“Oh, you know. Suddenly I just thought of a saying.” Which was:

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Living for Books

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Wall of books - Gianni Botsford Architects

I. Want. This. Wall. (Found here, at the Arch Daily site.)

The house, perhaps predictably, is the house of a writer. The Missus says — when she’s trying to pick me up from the doldrums — that she believes I can write almost anything. To which I say, “How do I find out what this writer writes? And how do I write the same stuff?”

Of course the name of the client is confidential, although we know the house is in Costa Rica. Probably turn out to be a Nobel laureate or something, and damn but there go my hopes.

Wonder if s/he has a BookRabbit.com account?

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The Others Next Door

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The Orange and the GreenStewart Neville (who participates as “Conduit” in the blogalogue at various writerly sites) is an Irishman with a hard-boiled fictional voice and a voice of sweet reason — or at least reason, period — when not constrained by a “Once upon a time… The End” frame.

His post yesterday offers up a case in point.

Here in the USA — which at least used to be an open-minded melting pot (maybe not in these days of fences and quotas and such) — we of course celebrate, for good or ill, a handful of ethnicity-inspired holidays: St. Patrick’s Day, Columbus Day, Kwaanza, Bastille Day. But the Twelfth of July? Here’s Stuart:

One day in the Northern Irish calendar is more divisive than any other. A few words of explanation for my American friends: The 12th of July is a national holiday in Northern Ireland that commemorates the victory of the Protestant King William of Orange over the Catholic forces of King James at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690.

Yep, more than three hundred years have passed, and we still haven’t let it go.

The day is marked by parades throughout Northern Ireland, organised by Orange Lodges, featuring marching bands, much flag waving, and general bluster. When I was a little boy, the Twelfth was one of the highlights of the year, bettered only by Christmas and Easter. It’s hard to describe the feeling of a big bass drum being hammered to within an inch of destruction, the way it pounds your chest, along with the crackle of side drums, and the piercing melodies of dozens of not-quite-in-tune flutes. If you’re walking along, you can’t help but fall into step with the music.

What I don’t know about Irish history could fit in a stadium. (Think about it.) But there was something very familiar to me in this description of parades from Stuart’s childhood.

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Love and Laughter

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Yesterday I went into a soapbox-lecture rant, shall we say? (yes, let’s — rants seem to be another thing that’s done a lot), about some of the comments to a recent post on Nathan Bransford’s blog.

At the end of every week, Bransford posts a “This Week in Publishing” entry summing up recent industry news and often alluding to the conversation on his own blog. Yesterday’s “This Week,” naturally, referred to the hypothetical questions he’d posed earlier — and to the answers, answers, answers, answers it elicited. And one of the mini-conversations resulting from the “This Week” post caught my eye.

It took place between someone identifying herself as Thomma Lynn, and someone with the moniker “a paperback writer” (evocative, for those of us Of A Certain Age). In the midst of a lot of hard-eyed appraisals of the harsh realities of art, the harsher realities of business, the naivete of writing newcomers, and the thick skins of writing veterans, Thomma Lynn and a paperback writer suddenly found themselves talking about — of all things — love:

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We Interrupt This Routine…

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Pitch black - scary, isn't it?

Since I started working on Merry-Go-Round last August, I’ve been sticking more or less to the same morning routine: shut off alarm (which goes off between 4 and 5am); stagger into the bathroom — the path illuminated, faintly, by a night light; slip back into the bedroom (carefully, mustn’t awaken The slumbering Missus); grope around on my nightstand for glasses and hearing aid and the stretchy thingum I use to keep my hair out of my eyes; stoop down to pick up the lap desk and current reading material and (usually) Merry-Go-Round excerpt I’m working on at the time; tiptoe out of the bedroom; proceed to kitchen to heat up hot water for tea; etc.

This morning, things didn’t quite work out that way. This morning, just as I returned from the bathroom to the nightstand, the power went off. I couldn’t see a thing. Total blackness. Burgeoning panic.

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Writing on Purpose

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1st edition: The Man Who Folded HimselfIn the summer of 1990, I took my first steps away from a soft-cubicled work day. I had some money available, and my employer at the time offered an extended-leave-without-pay benefit that I decided would fit me just fine for a year, anyhow. I was desperate, see, to learn if I really could write — not just for my eyes and my family’s and friends’, but for the eyes of complete strangers.

(There was a secondary purpose, too — what I once described as my potatoes-in-a-colander purpose. I may write about that later. Not now.)

As I’ve written before, by then I’d been subscribing to the Compuserve Information Service, or CIS, for a couple years. There I’d “met” people from all across the country, especially writerly sorts of people. A lot of them gave me a lot of good ideas where I might want to live during my year’s experiment.

I wasn’t familiar with many of these places (sheltered life to that point, dontcha know: 40 years in New Jersey, and that was about it). So I opted to take a week or two simply to visit the ones that seemed most interesting. And then I’d decide.

At the top of the list was a small city in Oregon. I didn’t move there, as it happened. But I figured as long as I was going to be on the west coast, I might as well make a real trip of it. Happily, another of my CIS acquaintances would be running a weekend writing workshop in southern California, at the very start of the trip.

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A Broken (Family) Tree

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A friend (Rick) was telling me last night about some genealogical research he’s been doing.

My understanding is that he may be writing up his findings himself. If so, I won’t steal his thunder by relating my (no doubt incomplete and/or flat-out wrong) version of the details. Just wanted to report one laugh-out-loud item.

Basically, Rick believes — or believed — himself to be a descendant of a branch of a sect known as the Harmonists (which, I am pretty sure, are covered here on Wikipedia). Why is this at all funny? Because among the principal beliefs of this sect was…

…celibacy.

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