Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

The Propagational Library (2): Kali

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[Here by accident? You might want to first read the Introduction and Chapter 1.]

After his next hour with them, Gabe sincerely hoped the Lanes would tell him something to summon up his sense of humor. He wondered if he’d ever laugh again.

Still not moving beyond the entry hall, Gabe asked them to provide one good reason — “Two would be better” — not to show them the door. They looked back and forth at each other, and then quickly dispensed with the formalities of introduction: identifying themselves beyond mere names, and establishing their bona fides. Adrienne went first.

“I’m a trust-fund baby,” she said. “My surname before marrying Eldon was Burghar — yes, with an h and an a.”

“No way. You—”

“Yep. My dad was Matt Burghar. That Matt Burghar.” Like ninety percent of the rest of the world, Gabe didn’t need to be told who that Matt Burghar had been: founder and chief of research for MagBurg Labs. (The “Mag” came from magnetic, popular theory supposed. In fact, it came from Magaziner, the maiden name of Matt’s wife Dolly.) Thirty-some years ago, MagBurg had introduced the world to the MagDrive Engine. Everybody thought it would reverse or at least slow the effects of centuries of hydrocarbon-burning machinery. Everybody was proved wrong, but in the meantime Matt and Dolly and, evidently, little Adrienne had become almost ridiculously wealthy.

“I don’t suppose you can offer me more than just your word of honor on that.”

She smiled, and pulled from the pocket of her coat two laminated-plastic cards. The first was a simple photo ID: a security badge for MagBurg Labs, identifying her as employee number 000003. The second was a standard state-supplied RFID card. “Got a swiper?”

Gabe gestured at a small table against the wall, close to the door. “The vase with the fake flowers there.”

Adrienne waved the RFID past the vase and a display lit up alongside the door jamb. Adrienne Lane, it confirmed, née Burghar, husband Eldon, current address out on the mountainside at the far side of the city, current employer MagBurg Laboratories LLC, date of birth thirty-seven years ago. She moved the card up to her right eye, held it there for a beat, and re-swiped the vase. CONFIRMED, said the display.

Not quite wanting to accept yet that Matt Burghar’s freaking daughter stood before him in his foyer, Gabe tried one more test: “You’re kinda young to be MagBurg employee number 3, aren’t you?”

“Dad’s little joke. It was my seventh-birthday present.”

“‘It’ the card?”

“No, ‘it’ the employee number. The card’s legitimate, don’t worry. It’s always worked there. And so have I.”

“How about you?” Gabe said, turning to Eldon. “You with MagBurg, too?”

Eldon laughed again. “Oh, heck no. I don’t have a job at all, just ride around on my wife’s coattails. A wastrel and a dilettante.”

“Don’t take him seriously,” said Adrienne. “He won’t let you if you try. He’s not—”

“She’s right, I’m sorry, I need to take you seriously — no: I’m not a MagBurg employee. I’m an amateur astronomer. Or let’s say, well, technically not an astronomer. Not so much stars and planets, you know, but galaxies and universes. Nebulas. Quasars, pulsars, black holes. All that.”

He moved to the table and vase before Gabe could ask him. His RFID confirmed his identity, too. Current employer: N/A. His readout, however, included a supplemental affiliation: the International Amateur Cosmological Union.

Now Gabe was really stumped. His rational mind knew that you could find harmless (or not so harmless) nutcases even among the idle (or not so idle) wealthy. But that didn’t quite explain the presence of this couple in his home. He stalled for time.

“My RFID’s upstairs—”

“We don’t need it,” said Eldon. “Full name Gabriel Mazarin Naude, photographer, late wife Carolyn, et cetera, et cetera, am I right?”

Whoa. They could’ve dug up the stuff on photography and Caro from any of dozens of public sources. But the middle name — the Mazarin? That was documented nowhere, not even on the RFID. His family had passed that middle name down for centuries…

“Okay,” he said, “let’s just take it for granted that we’re all who we say we are. Let’s move into the living room and you can tell me what you’re really here for. ‘Cause for the life of me, I can’t imagine what ‘help’ people like you think you can get from a guy like me.”

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More Than Enough Room

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[Image: postcard, “The Big Shot” (the Big Room, Carlsbad Caverns, NM). For more information, see the note at the bottom of this post.]

From whiskey river:

Freedom means being able to choose how we respond to things. When wisdom is not well developed, it can be easily obscured by the provocations of others. In such cases we may as well be animals or robots. If there is no space between an insulting stimulus and its immediate conditioned response — anger — then we are in fact under the control of others. Mindfulness opens up such a space, and when wisdom is there to fill it one is capable of responding with forbearance. It’s not that anger is repressed; anger never arises in the first place.

(Andrew Olendzki)

…and (regarding February 29):

Today is an ephemeral ghost. A strange amazing day that comes only once every four years. For the rest of the time it does not exist.

In mundane terms, it marks a leap in time, when the calendar is adjusted to make up for extra seconds accumulated over the preceding three years due to the rotation of the earth. A day of temporal tune up.

But this day holds another secret — it contains one of those truly rare moments of delightful transience and light uncertainty that only exist on the razors edge of things, along a buzzing plane of quantum probability.

A day of unlocked potential.

(Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration)

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Heft

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It’s really hard sometimes to set aside time to read a looooong magazine article. I’ve subscribed to The New Yorker for many years, and I know how often I’m forced to put an issue aside because of pressure from the ticking clock. (Hint: way too often.)

But this — a new magazine, containing a single looooong article per issue, on topics I’m interested in — sounds too good to pass up. From the project’s Kickstarter page:

The web is the future of journalism, but let’s be honest: the future isn’t living up to expectations. Newspapers and magazines have cut back on in-depth reporting. Gossip sites have proliferated. The web has become a byword for fast and cheap. Why isn’t it synonymous with fearless, investigative and enthralling writing?

We think it can be…

MATTER will focus on doing one thing, and doing it exceptionally well. Every week, we will publish a single piece of top-tier long-form journalism about big issues in technology and science. That means no cheap reviews, no snarky opinion pieces, no top ten lists. Just one unmissable story.

MATTER is about brilliant ideas from all around the world, whether they come from professors at MIT or the minds of mad people. But most of all, it’s about getting amazing investigative reporters to tell compelling stories

I don’t know. Maybe too good to be true? But I figured it was worth laying at least a small bet on the table.

 

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“Basking in the Glow of an Imagined Future”

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[Image: illustration from a December 20101 post, “The Time Travelling Brain,” at the Neuroskeptic blog. The orange-highlighted region of the brain is apparently used both in remembering the past, and imagining the future. See also this article in Discover.]

in spite of everything
which breathes and moves, since Doom
(with white longest hands
neatening each crease)
will smooth entirely our minds

— before leaving my room
i turn, and (stooping
through the morning) kiss
this pillow, dear
where our heads lived and were.

(E.E. Cummings)

…and:

Those hours given over to basking in the glow of an imagined future, of being carried away in streams of promise by a love or a passion so strong that one felt altered forever and convinced that even the smallest particle of the surrounding world was charged with purpose of impossible grandeur; ah, yes, and one would look up into the trees and be thrilled by the wind-loosened river of pale, gold foliage cascading down and by the high, melodious singing of countless birds; those moments, so many and so long ago, still come back, but briefly, like fireflies in the perfumed heat of summer night.

(Mark Strand)

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Midweek Music Break: Hayes Carll, “Another Like You”

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Thanks to all the new(ish) music I’ve been listening to over the last couple years, I’ve found myself a fan of a genre I didn’t even know existed. It’s sort of a loose super-genre, actually: Americana or “roots music,” incorporating elements of bluegrass, folk, country/western, blues, rock… The instrumentation and arrangement lean acoustic-wards, and often feature odd or surprising juxtapositions of sounds and traditions; a band might include banjos and saxophones, for instance, or a fiddle played lying across the seated performer’s legs, like a dulcimer. In other cases it’s just a singer-songwriter and a guitar or honky-tonk piano…

It’s probably easier to describe the opposite of roots music — the stuff which falls outside the Venn diagram. Among the exclusions: techno-electronic dance sounds, bubblegum-pop production values, things metal (as opposed to things wood), sampling and remixing of other artists’ work.

I’d never even heard the name “Hayes Carll” until a couple months ago, when his “Another Like You” topped American Songwriter‘s list of the best 50 songs of 2011. I mean, just look at the top ten to see some of the company he’s keeping: Drive-By Truckers, Wilco, Gillian Welch, Tom Waits…!

You can get a pretty good sense of what to expect (and what not to expect) from him just by glancing at the photo topping this post. His music seems to fall generally into the country/western valley of the roots landscape. On the other hand, his new album straddles categories like they don’t exist. From his Web site:

Fiery rock, twangy country, pensive folk and even a touch of gospel comprise KMAG YOYO‘s sonic palette… Rather than enter the studio with a batch of completed material, Carll and his band picked up where they’d left off onstage — jamming on riffs they’d developed on the road. “I wanted to challenge myself musically,” says Carll, “and see if I could capture that live dynamic. A lot of the songs came with the music first, with the music calling the lyrics.” After completing the instrumental tracks with the band, Carll set to work, his witty wordplay matching the temper of the instrumentation.

That album title, pronounced kay-mag yo-yo, is (says the site) a military acronym (in the same sense, I guess, as snafu). It stands for Kiss my ass, guys. You’re on your own. And its sense is captured in the title track, which tells the story of a disillusioned American soldier in Afghanistan. (The album itself has been well-received. The one review which most stands out in my mind is the one from about a year ago at No Depression.)

So, you think: Carll’s a political songwriter. Well, yes and no. In today’s Midweek Music Break selection, he paints a highly entertaining portrait of a hot romance born of hot disagreement between left and right. (With a surprise cameo at the end, featuring Mr. Left (even more pebbles-in-his-mouth than usual) and Ms. Right themselves — the poster children of political mismatches.)

[Lyrics]

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Swept Away by (and for) Books

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My Old Kentucky Blog recently highlighted two of the films nominated for this year’s Oscar in the short-animations category. One of them really struck me, and I think it will really strike you as well — if you are someone who’s ever had a little jolt of excitement at opening a new book… or dreamt of adding one to the bookshelves yourself: The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore. (Note: it’s fifteen minutes long — fifteen well-spent minutes long.)

The filmmakers, Moonbot Studios, explicitly grant credit to their sources of inspiration: “in equal measures… Hurricane Katrina, Buster Keaton, The Wizard of Oz, and a love for books.” (As MOKB notes, you can find traces of Up there, too.)

 

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Unquiet Large, Quiet Small

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From whiskey river:

In the point of rest at the center of our being, we encounter a world where all things are at rest in the same way. Then a tree becomes a mystery, a cloud a revelation, each man a cosmos of whose riches we can only catch glimpses. The life of simplicity is simple, but it opens to us a book in which we never get beyond the first syllable.

(Dag Hammarskjöld, from Markings [source])

…and:

The world — whatever we might think when terrified by its vastness and our own impotence, or embittered by its indifference to individual suffering, of people, animals, and perhaps even plants, for why are we so sure that plants feel no pain; whatever we might think of its expanses pierced by the rays of stars surrounded by planets we’ve just begun to discover, planets already dead? still dead? we just don’t know; whatever we might think of this measureless theater to which we’ve got reserved tickets, but tickets whose lifespan is laughably short, bounded as it is by two arbitrary dates; whatever else we might think of this world — it is astonishing.

(Wislawa Szymborska, from her Nobel lecture The Poet and the World [source])

…and:

The Sciences Sing a Lullabye

Physics says: go to sleep. Of course
you’re tired. Every atom in you
has been dancing the shimmy in silver shoes
nonstop from mitosis to now.
Quit tapping your feet. They’ll dance
inside themselves without you. Go to sleep.

Geology says: it will be all right. Slow inch
by inch America is giving itself
to the ocean. Go to sleep. Let darkness
lap at your sides. Give darkness an inch.
You aren’t alone. All of the continents used to be
one body. You aren’t alone. Go to sleep.

Astronomy says: the sun will rise tomorrow,
Zoology says: on rainbow-fish and lithe gazelle,
Psychology says: but first it has to be night, so
Biology says: the body-clocks are stopped all over town
and
History says: here are the blankets, layer on layer, down and down.

(Albert Goldbarth [source])

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The Absorbing and the Absorbed

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[Image: a Menger sponge overgrown with vines, found here. Wikipedia explains how
to construct a real Menger sponge, noting — without elaboration — that the resulting
object “simultaneously exhibits an infinite surface area and encloses zero volume.”*]

From whiskey river:

You know when you see something like a marvelous mountain against the blue sky, the vivid, bright, clear, unpolluted snow, the majesty of it drives all your thoughts, your concerns, your problems away. Have you noticed that? You say, “How beautiful it is,” and for two seconds perhaps, or for even a minute, you are absolutely silent. The grandeur of it drives away, for that second, the pettiness of ourselves. That immensity has taken us over. Like a child occupied with an intricate toy for an hour; he won’t talk, he won’t make any noise, he is completely absorbed in that. The toy has absorbed him. So the mountain absorbs you and therefore for the second, or the minute, you are absolutely quiet, which means there is no self. Now, without being absorbed by something — either a toy, a mountain, a face, or an idea — to be completely without the me in oneself, is the essence of beauty.

(Jiddu Krishnamurti, On Love and Loneliness [source])

…and:

… It’s 1500
in the book of Chinese watercolors: scholar-artist T’ang Yin
is asleep inside his mountain cottage, dreaming that a self of him,
that looks like him, is floating in the air above
the highest peaks, that looks like air we’d have
if lakes of milk gave off a vapor.
… From the Everfloating Void
above our world, a human image slowly drifts back down
and joins its earthly body once again, reenters
days and nights of wine shop, scandal, lawyers
— for such (in part) is the life of T’ang Yin.
He’s been dreaming. And now he’s going to set it down
on a wafer of unrolled rice paper. Writing:
Rain on the river. That’s all. That’s his poem.
He’s writing:

Rain on the river.

(Albert Goldbarth [source])

…and:

I’m for mystery, not interpretive answers… The answer is never the answer. What’s really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you’ll always be seeking. I’ve never seen anybody really find the answer, but they think they have. So they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer.

(Ken Kesey [source])

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It’s Right in Front of You

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[Image: unretouched photograph of an anamorphically-painted building interior, by French artist George Rousse; I found it here. As suggested at that site, be sure to see the video about Rousse’s “Durham (NC) project.” And while you’re at it, check out the similar but sometimes entire city-sized work of Swiss artist Felice Varini. I couldn’t decide which artist’s work to feature here and finally flipped a coin.]

From whiskey river:

Flaws

I had been worrying once again
about sad lives
and almost perfect art, Van Gogh,

Kafka, so when that voice on the radio
sang about drinking
a toast to those who most survive

the lives they’ve led, I drank that toast
in the prayerless
sanctum of my room, I said it

out loud in a hush. Then I thought
of Dr. Williams
who toward the end apologized

to his wife for doing everything
he had loved to do.
He was speaking of course to death,

not to her, though death instructed him
how valuable she was.
I thought of a lamp the neighbor’s child

had broken, then pieced back together
with wires and glue.
And my friend, the good husband,

kissing the scars his wife brought home
after the mastectomy.
I drank that toast again, though silently.

The radio was playing something old
and bad
I once thought was good.

Flaws. Suddenly the act of trying
to say how it feels
to live a life, to say it flawlessly,

seemed more immense than ever. Then
I remembered
those Persian rug makers built them in,

the flaws, because only Allah was perfect.
What arrogance to think
that otherwise they wouldn’t be there!

I allowed myself to wonder
about the ethics
of repair, but just for a while.

Sleep, too, was on my mind
and I knew
the difficulty that lay ahead:

how hard I’d try when I couldn’t,
how it would come
if only I could find a way

to enter and drift without concern
for what it is.

(Stephen Dunn [source])

…and:

I keep following this sort of hidden river of my life, you know, whatever the topic or impulse which comes, I follow it along trustingly. And I don’t have any sense of its coming to a kind of crescendo, or of its petering out either. It is just going steadily along.

(William Stafford [source])

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Midweek Music Break: James & Bobby Purify, “I’m Your Puppet”

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So there was this front-page headline in the morning paper:

Music legend Robert Dickey dies at age 72

Er, I thought; Who?!? I mean, I hardly know every (well, possibly any) music legend in town. But I’ve been here for almost 20 years and couldn’t recall the name at all.

As it happens, Dickey — that’s him over there at the right, in an undated and uncredited file photo from the newspaper story — was the “Bobby” half of a late-1960s soul duo called James & Bobby Purify. More precisely: he was the first of three singers to play brother “Bobby” to James Purify, and turned over the role (and the pseudonym) to Ben Moore in 1971.

But before Dickey moved on, the pair recorded several hits, the biggest of which (#6 on Billboard’s “Hot 100”) was 1966’s “I’m Your Puppet.”

It’s not, y’know, a profound song. In fact, when I first read the article I couldn’t remember the song at all. (Hence, my second “Huh?” moment: the subhead, “I’m Your Puppet” sold millions in the late ’60s.) But then I hunted around online for an audio clip. And of course one listen — with that signature ding-ding-DING-ding-ding triangle, especially — was all it took to bring it back to me.

Dickey himself apparently didn’t care for the song (excerpt from the article (may be hidden behind a paywall for non-subscribers)):

“I didn’t even like it,” Dickey said in October 2000, when he was honored as part of “Follow That Dream: Florida’s Rock & Roll Legends” exhibition at the Museum of Florida History. “I hated it. It was originally intended to be the B-side. But things got changed… I sang it for 23 hours straight (in the studio), that’s why I hate it. And the last one, the last take was the one they decided to go with.”

Ha!

Here’s James & Bobby Purify, then, performing “I’m Your Puppet” on some unidentified television show; I think Dickey/”Bobby” is the one on the right:

Lyrics:

I’m Your Puppet
(by Spooner Oldham and Dan Penn; performed by James & Bobby Purify)

Pull the string and I’ll wink at you, I’m your puppet
I’ll do funny things if you want me to, I’m your puppet

I’ll be yours to have and to hold
Darling you’ve got full control of your puppet

Pull another string and I’ll kiss your lips, I’m your puppet
Snap your finger and I’ll turn you some flips, I’m your puppet

Your every wish is my command
All you gotta do is wiggle your little hand
I’m your puppet, I’m your puppet

I’m just a toy, just a funny boy
That makes you laugh when you’re blue
I’ll be wonderful, do just what I’m told
I’ll do anything for you
I’m your puppet, I’m your puppet

Pull them little strings and I’ll sing you a song, I’m your puppet
Make me do right or make me do wrong, I’m your puppet

Treat me good and I’ll do anything
I’m just a puppet and you hold my string, I’m your puppet
Yeah, I’m your puppet

Walking, talking, living, loving puppet
I’m hanging on a string girl, I’ll do anything now

I’m a walking, talking, living, loving puppet, and I love you…

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