Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so
Headline and lead-in from the msn.com home page as of this morning:
10 of the weirdest-
shaped homes aroundOne owner lives in a home modeled after Tolkien hobbit
houses & another used geometry to design her abode…
Yes, I know it’s nit-picking. But I am trying (and failing, in a major way) to conceive of a house whose design and construction did not rely on geometry. :)
Here in the US, January 21, 2013, presents a veritable bounty of reasons to celebrate. It’s the (celebrated) birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.; it’s the (celebrated) quadrennial ceremony of the inauguration of the President; and, Wikipedia tells me, it is also National Hug Day — when we are supposed to hug everyone we feel like hugging (and, presumably, everyone else can just go to hell… especially, presumably, if they try to hug us).
And (apparently since 2001, per the efforts of a wildlife professional named Christy McKeown) January 21 is also Squirrel Appreciation Day.
Here in our little well-treed suburban corner of north Florida, we live in a neighborhood pretty much owned and operated by squirrels. The Missus and I have come to identify particular favorites. Most recently, we focused on a little guy who had some horrible wound in his side — a long, apparently poorly-healing gash which didn’t seem to diminish his enthusiasm for life. The Pooch and I, for a time, often encountered a half-tailed squirrel; in my mind’s eye, I imagined that he’d lost the uttermost portion to a run-in with an automobile tire. (The squirrels here are madly jealous of cars’ monopoly of the streets and cul-de-sacs, and challenge it at every opportunity.) And every now and then, a new one seems to discover the joys of frequenting a house with large, stucco-exterior walls. They can spend hours walking around with their heads pointed straight up, down, or sideways, defying gravity, all Spiderman-like.
We also have our share of squirrel tragedies, of course. Some weeks, we seem to see more two-dimensional than -three-dimensional squirrels on the asphalt. And sitting out on our screened back deck, over which soar many tree limbs, we’ve seen what happens when one daredevil or another ever-so-slightly miscalculates a change in wind direction, a stirring of a branch, at just the wrong moment before leaping aboard the inter-tree mid-air express.
(A one-pound or less rodent may be a small animal. But when it drops to a wooden deck from thirty or forty feet up, I’ll tell ya: Wham! doesn’t do the sound justice. It always surprises us when they immediately jump to their feet, sort of shake their heads with little whubba-whubba-whubba cartoon movements, and scamper away.)
[Video: clip from Seinfeld episode #118. “The Pool Guy”]
From whiskey river:
Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to was never there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place. Nothing outside you can give you any place. In yourself right now is all the place you’ve got.
You needn’t look at the sky because it’s not going to open up and show no place behind it. You needn’t search for any hole in the ground to look through into somewhere else. You can’t go neither forwards nor backwards into your daddy’s time nor your children’s if you have them. In yourself right now is all the place you’ve got. If there was any Fall, look there, if there was any Redemption, look there, and if you expect any Judgment, look there, because they all three will have to be in your time and your body and where in your time and your body can they be?
(Flannery O’Connor)
…and:
A Valley Like This
Sometimes you look at an empty valley like this,
and suddenly the air is filled with snow.
That is the way the whole world happened —
there was nothing, and then . . .
But maybe some time you will look out and even
the mountains are gone, the world become nothing
again. What can a person do to help
bring back the world?
We have to watch it and then look at each other.
Together we hold it close and carefully
save it, like a bubble that can disappear
if we don’t watch out.
Please think about this as you go on. Breathe on the world.
Hold out your hands to it. When mornings and evenings
roll along, watch how they open and close, how they
invite you to the long party that your life is.
(William Stafford)
I am blessed that the readership of Running After My Hat is seems to comprise, by and large, a pretty intelligent and creative bunch of people. So perhaps you can figure out my relative online silence this week if I ask you to assemble forms of the following words and word-like objects into a sentence: sebaceous, cyst, infected, beltline, omigodsweetjesusandmarythatHURTS, Vicodin, zombification.
Finding this moving video (by way of an unread e-newsletter) afforded me a very nice welcome back to the Internet, a reassurance that the world probably did not go to hell in my absence:
Wright and the video were also featured in a December column in the New York Times‘s “Well” blog.
[Image: The Ultimate Answer, one of my few successful attempts at (representational) visual art]
From whiskey river:
The black sky was underpinned with long silver streaks that looked like scaffolding and depth on depth behind it were thousands of stars that all seemed to be moving very slowly as if they were about some vast construction work that involved the whole universe and would take all time to complete. No one was paying attention to the sky.
(Flannery O’Connor [source])
…and (italicized portion):
I can often sense the spirit of a place, but I’m not entirely convinced such spirits have an existence separate from their environment. In that sense I’m both believer and skeptic; I’d like to believe, but keep searching for that elusive proof.
I do believe in an everyday sort of magic—the inexplicable connectedness we sometimes experience with places, people, works of art and the like; the eerie appropriateness of moments of syncronicity; the whispered voice, the hidden presence, when we think we’re alone. These are magics that many of us experience, parts of a Mystery that can’t—and perhaps shouldn’t—be explained.
I should add that often the magical elements in my books are standing in for elements of the real world, the small and magical-in-their-own-right sorts of things that we take for granted and no longer pay attention to, like the bonds of friendship that entwine our own lives with those of other people and places. When one of my characters becomes aware of a magical element, it might be because the world is wider than we assume it to be, but it might also be a reminder to pay attention to what is here already, hidden only because it’s been forgotten.
(Charles de Lint [source])
…and:
Passing Remark
In scenery I like flat country.
In life I don’t like much to happen.In personalities I like mild colorless people.
And in colors I prefer gray and brown.My wife, a vivid girl from the mountains,
says, “Then why did you choose me?”Mildly I lower my brown eyes —
there are so many things admirable people do not understand.
(William Stafford [source])
[Image: Texas longhorn cattle drive, as depicted by Nick Eggenhofer.
The horse may or may not be old but it is not, alas, a paint.]
Let’s get the music going right at the outset, and save the background for a moment. Here’s Linda Ronstadt singing “Old Paint,” which closes her great 1977 album Simple Dreams:
[Lyrics]
Pretty, no? Now, about that song:
On long trail drives, the old cowboys — so goes the legend — used to calm cattle’s nerves at night by riding around the herd’s perimeter, whistling or singing softly.* It’s a nice story, one I myself choose to accept (regardless of its truth) because it tells about good, kind, simple — and interesting — people and their relationship with animals.Whether the story is factually true or not, there’s a whole genre of music, “cowboy songs” or “Western music,” characterized by stories of life moving cattle around on the Plains, sleeping under the stars, sharing everyday life with horses and longhorns, and dreaming about (sometimes) women — often, women the singers had voluntarily left behind. Wikipedia currently lists over sixty such songs, although this is far from complete; one collection devoted to the genre includes music and lyrics for two hundred of them. Lyrics aside, the songs are notable for their easy melodies and their rhythms, which seem geared to a capella renditions sung from the back of a horse. Indeed, Wikipedia notes:
Otto Gary, an early cowboy band leader, stated authentic Western music had only three rhythms, all coming from the gaits of the cowpony — walk, trot, and lope.
One of my favorite recent examples of the “lope” rhythm was Norah Jones’s take on “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” (written by Bob Dylan), featured here at RAMH in a whiskey river Friday post a couple of years ago. The guitar comes in first, repeating a seven- or eight-beat rhythm over and over… My first-hand experience with horses — limited to fairground pony rides and such (and I’m not sure it ever included loping) — stopped sometime in the ’60s, but even to me that rhythm feels like the rippling roll of a saddled horse’s back beneath the rider.
As for the walk…
No one knows when “(I Ride an) Old Paint” originated, or to whom it should be credited. It was collected for several studies of cowboy music around the turn of the 19th to the 20th centuries, so it goes back at least that far. Poet/Historian Carl Sandburg assembled an anthology of American folk tunes in 1927, called The American Songbag; in it, he wrote:This arrangement is from a song made known by Margaret Larkin of Las Vegas, New Mexico, who intones her own poems or sings cowboy and Mexican songs to a skilled guitar strumming, and by Linn Riggs, poet and playwright, of Oklahoma in particular and the Southwest in general. The song came to them at Santa Fe from a buckaroo who was last heard of as heading for the Border with friends in both Tucson and El Paso.
(Margaret Larkin — per Wikipedia — was was by no means some mere local folkie wandering from saloon to auditorium, as this description makes her out to be, but a well-published author and activist. Likewise, “Linn” Riggs was actually one (Rollie) Lynn Riggs, whose play Green Grows the Lilacs provided the source material for Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!)
As I think I’ve always heard it, the song consists of three verses, alternating with three choruses. Verse 1 briefly states the singer’s circumstances — roaming the plains on an old pony, heading to Montana for a roundup — and the final verse, borderline mawkish, asks that his lifeless body be saddled up one last time and released to roam the land. The second verse, though, is an oddball: not a general sentimental statement, but a story in lurid pulp miniature. That verse’s subject, one “old Bill Jones,” seems to have fathered a daughter and a son, and his wife “died in a poolroom fight.” (Oh, America: you sure do know what to sing about!) But that doesn’t stop old Bill, who still wanders the West, singing as he goes…
I really like the song’s language, especially in the first verse. It’s a saddlebag from beneath whose flaps protrude raggedy bits of trail jargon:
The paint referred to here is a type of spotted pony, a pinto.My favorite twist in the lyrics, though, comes in that odd second verse: one went to Denver, the other went wrong. This stands as an actually pretty good example of a figure of speech called a zeugma: a series of terms, the last one of which ostensibly follows but actually breaks the syntactic/grammatical pattern established earlier. (The example I’ve most often seen goes like this: He took his hat, his coat, and his leave.)
And, well, whaddaya know: Carl Sandburg himself recorded some of the songs in that “songbag,” including this week’s selection:
(If you followed the link to Sandburg’s Songbag book, a few paragraphs back, you may have noticed his claim that the lyrics say old Bill Jones had two daughters and a song. I’m sure this made sense in a poetry-technical sense, as a more exact rhyme for “…and the other went wrong.” But it doesn’t make a lot of sense on other grounds!)
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* The steers probably didn’t get the same consideration once they’d arrived at the stockyard.
From whiskey river:
Indeterminacy means, literally: not fixed, not settled, uncertain, indefinite. It means that you don’t know where you are. How can it be otherwise, say the Buddhist teachings, since you have no fixed or inherent identity and are ceaselessly in process? Life is filled with uncertainty. Chance events happen to all of us. Each of us must take responsibility and make decisions. None of us should be imposing our ego image on others.
There’s another way to live. Accept indeterminacy as a principle, and you see your life in a new light, as a series of seemingly unrelated jewel-like stories within a dazzling setting of change and transformation. Recognize that you don’t know where you stand, and you will begin to watch where you put your feet. That’s when the path appears.
(Kay Larson, on John Cage [source])
…and (from whiskey river’s commonplace book — not counting the lovely epigraph, which walks a line between mysterious and profound):
Nothing is too wonderful to be true.
— Michael FaradayThere is a hole in the universe.
It is not like a hole in a wall where a mouse slips through, solid and crisp and leading from somewhere to someplace. It is rather like a hole in the heart, an amorphous and edgeless void. It is a heartfelt absence, a blank space where something is missing, a large and obvious blind spot in our understanding of the universe.
That missing something, strange to say, is a grasp of nothing itself. Understanding nothing matters, because nothing is the all-important background upon which everything else happens.
(K. C. Cole [source])
…and:
To the Reader
As you read, a white bear leisurely
pees, dyeing the snow
saffron,and as you read, many gods
lie among lianas: eyes of obsidian
are watching the generations of leaves,and as you read
the sea is turning its dark pages,
turning
its dark pages.
(Denise Levertov)
I possibly liked the idea of this more than its execution. But I did get a kick out of the execution, too — and certainly the cameos:
So good to see an airline treating the routine with an interesting, light-hearted twist. The video was uploaded back in October: I do hope they’ve actually shown this on planes while preparing for takeoff, and didn’t just do it as a media stunt.
[Image: stylized tanuki, a/k/a Japanese raccoon dog, in the form of a kumadori mask
for use in kabuki performance. (Thus: a kabuki tanuki.) I found it here, among a collection of other kumadori.]
Not everybody shares your memories — in fact, few people do. But don’t write off your memories as lively (or misshapen) childhood inventions, either. The Internet tells us so.
Like many stories, the story behind today’s post is longer than the simple facts (or mere common sense) might indicate. I recently received a comment on one of my old (mostly two-part) What’s in a Song posts, the one about “Cry Me a River” (Part 1 of which was here). In the course of replying to the comment, I got involved in re-reading what I’d already posted, checking the links and so on. Naturally, some of these — especially YouTube videos — had broken in the last three years, so I looked around for more current links to the same (or similar) content.
Which got me looking back at the Julie London version of the Mickey Mouse Club‘s sign-off song (“M-i-c, k-e-y…”). Suddenly, unbidden, a mini-avalanche of memories tumbled out of my subconscious, into the full light of awareness — all related to the songs on an old phonograph album, of music featured on the original TV series.
One of the songs on this album was an odd little number partially in some Oriental language — Chinese, I thought, or maybe Korean. It was a song about (according to the English verses) a raccoon, a raccoon who was always hungry. And because he was always hungry he sang — in particular, he sang something which sounded like koink-koink-koink! But that couldn’t be right, could it?
A quick Google search led me straight to this post by someone identified as Mama Lisa — and her many commenters. A gold mine of reassurance!
Turns out that “Sho-Jo-Ji” wasn’t written for the Mickey Mouse Club (as I’d assumed). It’s actually a fairly old Japanese children’s song, about a creature called a Japanese raccoon dog — or tanuki. The song made its appearance during the first season of the Mickey Mouse Club, in November, 1955 (too early for even me to have seen and remembered it from that source). This version doesn’t seem to be available in any commercial form (MP3, iTunes…), but I have found what is darned close to the version I remember (if not the actual thing). The specific signature touch I recall: the prolonged trilling/warbling/musical-free-association between verses.
The uploader tags this with the year 1957 but I assume that’s the date of the album. (I got the November 1955 date from this page, which seems pretty confident about it.)
As I said, the song has a history. Here’s a vintage (apparently real vintage) Japanese black-and-white cartoon featuring dancing raccoon dogs:
But the oddest little tidbit I found while looking into this was the discovery of a recording by Eartha Kitt, from just about the same time that the song appeared on the Mickey Mouse Club:
By the way, if you’ve got children of your own who are capable of Internet research, you might want to guide their search on this topic. The tanuki stories of Japan, in general form, seem vaguely reminiscent of Native American stories of the entity called Coyote. (You can find a few of them in translated form here.) Tanuki, personified, is a mischievous trickster capable of changing shape at will, often for no particular reason than that he enjoys it. Wikipedia:Compared with kitsune (foxes), which are the epitome of shape-changing animals, there is the saying that “the fox has seven disguises, the tanuki has eight”… The tanuki is thus superior to the fox in its disguises, but unlike the fox, which changes its form for the sake of tempting people, tanuki do so to fool people and make them seem stupid. There is also the theory that they simply like to change their form.
So far so good. Still cute, right? (I mean, just look at the photo over there on the right. Raccoons themselves cute as a button, of course — but add The Pooch Factor and it can just about make a small-dog lover swoon.)
But the tanuki tales have a somewhat kinkier side, too (kinkier to American readers, anyhow): male tanuki are supposedly blessed with enlarged testicles, which (so goes the legend) bring financial good luck. Some of the artwork playing up this angle carries the hope for good luck to an extreme; the creature itself may occupy a little tiny corner of a two-page spread, say, while the testicles fill the entire remainder. I know I’m revealing a Philistine nature here, but, well… it can be a little, um, ick.
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Edit to add: The English-language versions above both feature — if I’m not mistaken — the rhyme:
Macaroons and macaroni
Jelly beans and beef baloney
Which, if I haven’t misheard the lyrics, probably signals a non-literal translation. (It also sort of drags my head in another direction — towards the Chef Boy-Ar-Dee Beefaroni theme song — but please, don’t let me get started on the subject of commercial jingles from the ’50s and ’60s!)
Further edit to add (2017-07-13): a new comment, from someone going by the handle “Gnemec,” challenged my always-iffy hearing of the “jelly beans and beef baloney” lyrics. As it happens, though both Gnemec’s and my own versions are probably wrong. You can see Gmec’s comment and my reply (which I think led me to the correct version) below.
[Video: the first 2-1/2 minutes of the 2006 Hogfather mini-series]
A few weeks ago, a post here shared this one’s title. (At the time, I didn’t intend to do a follow-up, so the earlier one wasn’t numbered.) That post considered… well, the point of the fiction in fiction. If the underpinning of what happens in a story is “real” — the laws of physics and so on — then why make up any important details? (Other than special cases like keeping the material non-libelous, of course.) Writers invent not just names but entire casts of characters, family histories, geographies, historical events (both the core facts and the marginalia), languages…
And when you get into the fantasy and science-fiction genres — “speculative fiction,” as they say despite the tautology — well, even the laws of physics go out the window.* History gets re-written. Facts we know now are replaced by other facts we will know only in some particular version of the future. Things turn into other things (or seem to) just because someone waves in their direction with a hand, a wand of miraculous construction, or an infernal machine…
As I said in that first post, I didn’t intend to debate whether the use of impossibilities presented as commonplace was good or bad. I wasn’t trying to make a case for or against fantasy and/or science fiction. And the post drew substantial thoughtful comments from Froog and Marta (which I thought might happen, in both cases). I continued to think about the topic myself, too, since I hadn’t really drawn any conclusions.
And then the Christmas holiday drew near…
