Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

Marching in Place After My Own Hat

by 5 Comments

Would I like to report that I’ve been so busy and preoccupied with my writing recently that I’ve skimped on blog posts — and comments on your blogs — for the last couple weeks or so?

Boy, wouldn’t I. But no. I’ve been so busy and preoccupied with everything else that I’ve been cutting corners online. Still, I thought you might appreciate a couple of items in the meantime, not that you need me to entertain you:

First, I’d never have guessed that enough “backwards music videos” have been made that someone reflecting on the matter could actually come up with a list of the top ten of “all time.” (By the way, the backwards here refers to the direction of motion — people running in reverse, fruit falling up into trees, and so on.) So I was surprised that Jason Newman, at the Urlesque site (“Exposing bits of the web”), could post just such a list. His number one selection interested me, all right: a “champion eater… unstuffs his face,” over a song called “From Your Mouth” by a group called God Lives Underwater. But my favorite — the only one I wanted to watch more than once — placed only third in his estimation:

Cibo Matto’s “Sugar Water”

One of Michel Gondry’s best videos involves split-screening Cibo Matto members Yuka Honda and Miho Hatori, running one member forward and the other backward before they meet and switch positions halfway through. Yeah, it’s complicated. Just watch.

What they said.


Alternatively, if you’ve got a little more time available, I highly recommend this hilarious (and ultimately sobering) account by Jo Walton of an entity she calls the Suck Fairy:

The Suck Fairy is an artefact of re-reading. If you read a book for the first time and it sucks, it’s nothing to do with her. It just sucks. Some books do. The Suck Fairy comes in when you come back to a book that you liked when you read it before, and on re-reading — well, it sucks. You can say that you have changed, you can hit your forehead dramatically and ask yourself how you could possibly have missed the suckiness the first time — or you can say that the Suck Fairy has been through while the book was sitting on the shelf and inserted the suck. The longer the book has been on the shelf unread, the more time she’s had to get into it.

For those of you who are writers, I don’t have to point out that your personal Suck Fairy especially loves exsanguinating your own work.

Share

One, and One, and One…

by 9 Comments

From whiskey river:

Dogs

Many times loneliness
is someone else
an absence
then when loneliness is no longer
someone else many times
it is someone else’s dog
that you’re keeping
then when the dog disappears
and the dog’s absence
you are alone at last
and loneliness many times
is yourself
that absence
but at last it may be
that you are your own dog
hungry on the way
the one sound climbing a mountain
higher than time

(W. S. Merwin, from Writings To An Unfinished Accompaniment)

…and:

I have figured for you the distance between the horns of a dilemma, night and day, and A to Z. I have computed how far is Up, how long it takes to get Away, and what becomes of Gone. I have discovered the length of the sea serpent, the price of priceless, and the square of the hippopotamus. I know where you are when you are at Sixes and Sevens, how much Is you have to have to make an Are, and how many birds you can catch with the salt in the ocean – 187,796,132, if it would interest you.

(James Thurber, Many Moons [source])

[Read more…]

Share

So — A Dream Lover, Are You?

by 14 Comments

[Video: Dream of the Wild Horses, an experimental short film by Denys Colomb Daunant, initially released in 1960. I first saw this in a film class in the 1970s and never forgot it, although “nothing happens.” I’ve always liked to think that the title doesn’t say this is a dream of someone — some human — about wild horses; rather, it says this is a dream which wild horses themselves have. The wild horses in the film apparently were among the Camargue.]

A subtle but complicated cloud of tension surrounds the topic of sleep at our house. The tension stems from two related facts: (a) The Missus has trouble sleeping, and (b) I myself have no trouble at all.

Confession: I love to sleep. I’d talk about sleep every day if I could do it without upsetting The Missus. (She’s not the only person I know with a sleep problem, which means I almost never bring the topic up because I never want to upset anybody. Which perhaps is your cue to tell me that you, too, don’t want to hear someone warbling a hymn to the infinite pleasures of sleeping. It also hints that I’m not really a good sleeper, but a sleep vampire. But that would be a different post, and a very different confession.)

One of the best things about sleep: dreams.

[Read more…]

Share

Pocketing the Key to Your Own Cage (or Not)

by 5 Comments

(Yes, I know: a day late…)

From whiskey river (italicized portion):

[Skeptics, on why they dislike dogma] mean that the universe is itself a universal prison; that existence itself is a limitation and a control; and it is not for nothing that they call causation a chain. In a word, they mean quite simply that they cannot believe these things; not in the least that they are unworthy of belief. We say, not lightly but very literally, that the truth has made us free. They say that it makes us so free that it cannot be the truth. It is like believing in fairyland to believe in such freedom as we enjoy. It is like believing in men with wings to entertain the fancy of men with wills. It is like accepting a fable about a squirrel in conversation with a mountain to believe in a man who is free to ask or a God who is free to answer. This is a manly and a rational negation, for which I for one shall always show respect. But I decline to show any respect for those who first of all clip the bird and cage the squirrel, rivet the chains and refuse the freedom, close all the doors of the cosmic prison on us with a clang of eternal iron, tell us that our emancipation is a dream and our dungeon a necessity; and then calmly turn round and tell us they have a freer thought and a more liberal theology.

(G.K. Chesterton, from The Everlasting Man [source])

…and:

Three-fourths of philosophy and literature is the talk of people trying to convince themselves that they really like the cage they were tricked into entering.

(Gary Snyder [source])

[Read more…]

Share

In Absentia

by 11 Comments

It has been one hell of a week. Not a bad one, but an extremely busy one.

And it’s not over yet. As it happens, I’ve been summoned to jury duty tomorrow. As these things go, most likely I will spend a good part of the day in an uncomfortable chair, actually waiting to be called upon — or not — as a real live jury member. But it threatens to jeopardize my regular Friday whiskey river-inspired post. I’ve worked on it some, but it’s not ready; I might but probably can’t wrap it up tonight or tomorrow morning. We’ll see.

In the meantime, please enjoy the music haunting me from the playlist of the moment: Patty Larkin, “Anyway the Main Thing Is” (lyrics below).

(It’s a shame that this is a static video: if you’ve never witnessed Larkin actually play the guitar, you’re missing the great pleasure of witnessing someone do effortlessly, yet perfectly, something she doesn’t even have to stop and think about.)

Lyrics:

Anyway the Main Thing Is
(by Patty Larkin)

I took the train
Just for the view
I took my boyfriend’s last name
For something to do
I took advice
Now I regret it
I took my time
Cause I could get it

I shook my head
And it woke me up
I shook a strange hand in my bed
And that was enough
I shook the truth
Out of the tree
It shook my faith up good
But it satisfied me

Anyway the main thing is
Regrooving the dream
Regrooving the…

Love doesn’t think
Love doesn’t look
Love takes a flying leap off the brink
Love swallows the hook
Love doesn’t sleep
Love is out of control
Love is only human it can swallow you whole

Share

Paying Attention to the Momentous

by 5 Comments

With apologies to Mr. Thoreau, I don’t honestly believe that the great mass of humanity lead lives of quiet desperation. Most people, I have come to think, live lives of simple routine, blended with dollops of making-it-up-as-you-go-along. They come to crossroads in their lives and turn one way or the other not because they’re desperate and not because they’re dazzled by a sunbeam highlighting a particular path. They choose a direction based on whatever information and other resources they’ve got available right then. Only in hindsight does it become “obvious” that they had to go straight, or left, or in sudden reverse, or whatever.

But fictional characters: ah, yes, things are a bit different with them. They plod along, unaware they’ve been ascending a ramp rather than a simple road, and suddenly they realize they’re at a fulcrum. The course of their lives hasn’t been up a mountainside to a peak. It’s been up a see-saw: to take one step further will throw them off-balance, if not dump them entirely (as Dad used to say) ass-over-teakettle.

[Read more…]

Share

For Lack of Better Words

by 7 Comments

[Image: “Zip Your Lips,” from A New Me’s photostream at Flickr]

From whiskey river (italicized portion):

The Peninsula

When you have nothing more to say, just drive
For a day all around the peninsula,
The sky is tall as over a runway,
The land without marks, so you will not arrive

But pass through, though always skirting landfall.
At dusk, horizons drink down sea and hill,
The ploughed field swallows the whitewashed gable
And you’re in the dark again. Now recall

The glazed foreshore and silhouetted log.
That rock where breakers shredded into rags,
The leggy birds stilted on their own legs,
Islands riding themselves out into the fog.

And then drive back home, still with nothing to say
Except that now you will uncode all landscapes
By this; things founded clean on their own shapes
Water and ground in their extremity.

(Seamus Heaney [source])

…and:

It’s impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances; too many gestures, which could mean this or that, too many shapes which can never be fully described, too many flavors, in the air or on the tongue, half-colors, too many.

(Margaret Atwood, from The Handmaid’s Tale [source])

[Read more…]

Share

The “Thud” of Adult Cool

by 13 Comments

Once, when I was teaching, I had this fabulous idea for a series of lessons. I just knew it would be a hit with the kids. I just knew I’d love teaching it. It would dazzle my peers. And quite possibly I’d get written up in the local paper — in a, y’know, good way. I could even imagine the headline: Local Teacher “Rocks” Poetry.

Yes. I cringe with you.

Especially do I cringe in memory of some of my selections. This was the mid-1970s, for gods’ sake. It’s not like there wasn’t any, y’know, actual rock music to choose from. So what did I think would happen when I played for my high-school juniors and seniors the Kingston Trio, performing “MTA”? If you don’t  know the song, its lyrics, in part, go like this (and by the way, “MTA” is an acronym for Metropolitan Transit Authority):

Let me tell you the story
Of a man named Charlie
On a tragic and fateful day
He put ten cents in his pocket,
Kissed his wife and family
Went to ride on the MTA

Charlie handed in his dime
At the Kendall Square Station
And he changed for Jamaica Plain
When he got there the conductor told him,
“One more nickel.”
Charlie could not get off that train.

Chorus:
Did he ever return,
No he never returned
And his fate is still unlearn’d
He may ride forever
‘neath the streets of Boston
He’s the man who never returned.

…

Charlie’s wife goes down
To the Scollay Square station
Every day at quarter past two
And through the open window
She hands Charlie a sandwich
As the train comes rumblin’ through.

Yes: a socially-conscious folk song, accompanied by banjos, about a long-forgotten political issue in Boston, of a nickel increase in subway/train fares… in a well-to-do suburb in New Jersey with absolutely no subway/train service of its own.

When it finished playing through, I lifted the needle from the turntable (!) and said something like, “So…” (I had no idea what to say.) “…What’d you think?”

The quick-thinking football player a couple rows back, sprawled carelessly at his desk, growled: I thought it sucked.

I couldn’t help it; I burst out laughing. “What… sucked about it?”

Football Player: Why’d she hand him a sandwich? Why’n’t she just hand him some more money?

And thus ended that lesson.

[Read more…]

Share

Sky-Blessed

by 13 Comments

[Image: ‘Untitled, Hateruma-jima, Okinawa, 1971,’ by Shomei Tomatsu]

From whiskey river:

How to Grow Clouds

It takes a lot of work: it is necessary to weed very carefully, to toss out muck and small stones by hand, to kneel on the earth, bend over, dig about in the soil, water profusely, collect caterpillars, exterminate aphids, loosen the ground and serve the earth; when your back hurts from all this and you straighten up and look at the sky, you will have the prettiest clouds.

(Karel Capek, translated by Andrew Malcovsky)

…and:

Postscript

And some time make the time to drive out west
into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
in September or October, when the wind
and the light are working off each other
so that the ocean on one side is wild
with foam and glitter, and inland among stones
the surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
by the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you’ll park and capture it
more thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
a hurry through which known and strange things pass
as big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
and catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

(Seamus Heaney, from The Spirit Level [source])

[Read more…]

Share

What You’ll Never Know

by 3 Comments

This utterly breaks with the whiskey river Fridays tradition here. But the most recent post there seems to demand passing around among ourselves. From whiskey river:

I had hardly begun to read
I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can’t

you can’t you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don’t write

(W. S. Merwin)

For what it’s worth, the above are the closing stanzas of his “Berryman,” which you can read in full here, courtesy of The Writer’s Almanac.

Share
Verified by MonsterInsights