Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

Do We Ever Really Get It?

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[Image: looking up into the Ring Around a Tree playspace/bus shelter in Fuji, Japan. Click to enlarge; see the note at the foot of this post for more information.]

From whiskey river:

I always gained something from making myself better,
better than I am, better than I was,
that most subtle citation:
to recover some lost petal
of the sadness I inherited:
to search once more for the light that sings
inside of me, the unwavering light.

(Pablo Neruda)

…and:

We must know that it is not enough just to see what the Mind is, we must put into practice all that makes it up in our daily life. We may talk about it glibly, we may write books to explain it, but that is far from being enough. However much we may talk about water and describe it quite intelligently, that does not make it real water. So with fire. Mere talking of it will not make the mouth burn. To know what they are means to experience them in actual concreteness. A book on cooking will not cure our hunger. To feel satisfied we must have actual food. So long as we do not go beyond mere talking, we are not true knowers.

(Takuan Soho)

…and:

If you were to put aside what you know because of what other people told you, how much of what you know do you truly know for yourself?

(John Tarrant)

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Spacestruck

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[Video: “The Voyager Interstellar Record,” a YouTube playlist of  all the sounds on the so-called “golden record” sent into space with the two Voyager interstellar spacecraft. For more information, see the note below.]

From whiskey river (italicized portion):

Lost in the Cosmos:
The Last Self-Help Book

or

The Strange Case of the Self, your Self, the Ghost which Haunts the Cosmos

or

How can you survive in the Cosmos about which you know more and more while knowing less and less about yourself, this despite 10,000 self-help books, 100,000 psychotherapists, and 100 million fundamentalist Christians

or

Why is it that of all the billions and billions of strange objects in the Cosmos — novas, quasars, pulsars, black holes — you are beyond doubt the strangest?

or

Why is it possible to learn more in ten minutes about the Crab Nebula in Taurus, which is 6,000 light-years away, than you presently know about yourself, even though you’ve been stuck with yourself all your life

[etc.]

(Walker Percy, from Lost in the Cosmos [source])

…and:

II

Our voice trembles
with its own electric,
we who mood like iguanas
we who breathe sleep
for a third of our lives,
we who heat food
to the steaminess of fresh prey,
then feast with such baroque
good manners it grows cold.

In mind gardens
and on real verandas
we are listening,
rapt among the persian lilacs
and the crickets,
while radio telescopes
roll their heads, as if in anguish.

With our scurrying minds
and our lidless will
and our lank, floppy bodies
and our galloping yens
and our deep, cosmic loneliness
and our starboard hearts
where love careens,
we are listening,
the small bipeds
with the giant dreams.

(Diane Ackerman, from “We Are Listening,” in Jaguar of Sweet Laughter [source])

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Pottermore

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From The Atlantic:

In a much-anticipated press event this morning, J.K. Rowling announced the launch of Pottermore, a new website meant to bring all-things-Harry Potter to the Web. It was revealed in a leaked memo yesterday that a central focus of the site would be an online gaming experience developed by the company Adam & Eve that will include real-world prizes such as magic wands secretly scattered throughout Britain and the United States. But the launch revealed that the site will be much more than that, though it does appear to include some gaming elements.

And here’s the woman herself:

More about JKR’s reasons for setting up Pottermore, and the interesting (to me!) discussion about which e-book format they’ll use, are at The Atlantic‘s site as well as elsewhere.

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Midweek Music Break: “One Shoe Blues” (Sandra Boynton via B.B. King)

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[Image: B.B. King and Boynton sock puppet]

I had occasion recently to be searching around for an image from the 1970s, the cover of possibly the biggest-selling greeting card in the planet’s (if not the universe’s) history. It was a cartoon, at the top of which was depicted a single hippopotamus, a small avian creature, and a pair of sheep. Beneath, in a charming apparently hand-lettered caption, it said:

Hippo   Birdy  Two Ewe

This search made me wonder what had happened to the artist, Sandra Boynton. I took it for granted she continued to work in some capacity, even though she — something like the J.K. Rowling of greeting-card creators — surely could have retired after her first few products hit the market.

She hasn’t retired, not at all. She’s certainly branched out, though. Among her other accomplishments, Wikipedia identifies her as a songwriter and I wondered what that was all about. Hence I came to her 2007 album (actually her fourth), Blue Moo: 17 Jukebox Hits from Way Back Never. The Boynton-crafted songs on it purport to be (per the subtitle) actual hits from some imaginary parallel universe’s past; the album as a whole is marketed as children’s music. The performers featured, though, include folks likely to be appreciated by adults in our own universe’s past (and present) — Steve Lawrence, Patti LuPone, Sha Na Na, Brian Wilson, and so on.

And buried in the middle, a true gem: “One Shoe Blues,” upon which B.B. King lavishes his signature attentions:

[Below, click Play button to begin One Shoe Blues. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 3:09 long.

[audio:oneshoeblues_bbking.mp3|titles=’One Shoe Blues’|artists=B.B. King]

Lyrics:

One Shoe Blues
(by Sandra Boynton; performance by B.B. King)

Well, I woke up this morning
Couldn’t find my shoe
Yes, I woke up this morning and I couldn’t find my shoe.
Although the right one is here, I need the left one too
(Yes, I do)
I can hear my mama calling.
She says it’s time to go.
Yes, I can hear my mama calling.
She says:
Really now, it’s time to go.
I say:
Mama, I can’t find one of my shoes!
And she says, Oh no. Not again.
I’ve got the one shoe blues
It seems they’re never gonna stop.
Yes, those one shoe blues.
Oh, they might never ever stop.
Mama says,
Just come along now!
One shoe.
Do you expect me to hop?
Did you look in the closet and under the bed?
Yes, I did
Did you look carefully in the closet and under the bed?
Yes, yes I did.
Try and think where you left it.
That’s what my mama said.
Last night I left it right here next to my other shoe.
I know I put it right here next to my other shoe.
I think somebody took it.
But I don’t know who.
No, I don’t.
I’ve got the
One shoe blues.
That’s why I’m singing this song.
I’ve got the
One shoe blues!
And so I’m singing this sad song.
You know it’s been
At least twenty minutes
That I’ve been looking in every possible place
For that…
Huh.
There it is.
I guess it was on my foot all along.
Okay, I’m ready to go now.
Anybody seen my coat?

If you prefer action, you can also see on YouTube a Boynton-directed video of the performance.

Boynton’s Web site, by the way, really impressed me. No flash, no dazzle (except that from the artwork). Just well-written, funny, unpretentious, and altogether artless in the very best sense.

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The Writers’ Word-Time Equivalency Scale

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Let’s suppose you are a writer, and value your time spent writing, and measure your success in a given writing session in terms of words written. So far so good. This describes about ninety percent of the writers I know.

Let’s take it to another level. Suppose you are behind — or perceive yourself to be so — in recently attained word count. So you take a day off from your paying job to catch up. You get out of bed, heat up the teakettle, walk The Pooch, see your loving spouse out the door to his or her own day job. You pour the first cup of tea or coffee. You sit down at the computer keyboard. You inhale. You crack your knuckles…

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Midweek Music Break: Josephine Baker and “J’Ai Deux Amours”

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Froog posted the other day on great movie songs, taking inspiration from the American Film Institute’s (AFI’s) “100 Years – 100 Songs” list of 2004. He pointed out some strange omissions (even considering the raw list of four hundred nominees from which the hundred were selected).

I’m not much surprised that no songs from the soundtrack of 1991’s Henry & June made either list. (It was probably considered a non-American and maybe even “non-fictional” film, violating some of the criteria listed at the foot of this page.) A pity. No matter what you thought of the film’s NC-17 rating — the first ever! — or of its caliber as a film, the music which accompanied everything onscreen was (I thought) a model of how to match musical sensibility to a particular film’s time, place, and “feel.”

Nowhere does this match seem truer than in the recording of Josephine Baker’s “J’Ai Deux Amours” (“I Have Two Loves”) which closed the film.

It made a canny signature song for Baker in general, and (sixty years later) for Henry & June in particular. The title — in English, “I Have Two Loves” — cuts in several directions at once. The “two loves” (per the song’s lyrics) are not human loves but geographic and cultural ones: “my country and Paris.” Baker herself was a black American who utterly bloomed in pre-World War II France, especially Paris. Still, says Ethan Mordden’s The Guest List:

Baker’s two loves were not, as one might think, America and Paris. The number was introduced at the Casino de Paris, in 1930, in a scene laid on the African shore, where Adrien Lamy played a French colonist who wants to take native girl Baker back to France. Composer Vincent Scotto and lyricists Géo Koger and the Casino’s producer, Henry Varna, wrote this number for Baker as a woman torn between Paris and Africa. Further, to the French, “mon pays” means “my province” as much as “my country.” Thus, Baker’s two loves never included America.

But even without the full lyrics, “things” are happening with the title alone:

  • The film (based on Anaïs Nin’s book of the same name) is about Nin’s relationships with American author Henry Miller and his wife, June: Anaïs to Henry, Henry to June, and Anaïs to June (all vice-versa, of course).
  • Baker was (fairly famously) bisexual; for her to declare in song I have two loves was virtually an open wink at this reputation.

Yet I fell in love with this song — this performance of it — way before I knew any of that. I’m not especially one way or the other about it until about two minutes into its three-plus-minute length. But suddenly, Baker’s trilling voice is joined by a man’s (Adrien Lamy, mentioned above, and pictured at left), and for most of the rest of the song he assumes responsibility for the lyrics. Baker “merely” accompanies him, in a wordlessly vocalized run of counterpoint and harmony which twines sinuously — like some exotic Beaux-Arts species of vine — around and within the pauses of Lamy’s voice. It’s really, for me, among the most memorable ninety seconds of music I know — especially given that I understand no French myself!

Here are Josephine Baker and Adrien Lamy, singing of their two loves:

Lyrics:

J’Ai Deux Amours
(by Vincent Scotto and Geo Koger; performance by Josephine Baker and Adrien Lamy)

On dit qu’au delà des mers
Là-bas sous le ciel clair
Il existe une cité
Au séjour enchanté
Et sous les grands arbres noirs
Chaque soir
Vers elle s’en va tout mon espoir

J’ai deux amours
Mon pays et Paris
Par eux toujours
Mon cœur est ravi
Ma savane est belle
Mais à quoi bon le nier
Ce qui m’ensorcelle
C’est Paris, Paris tout entier
Le voir un jour
C’est mon rêve joli
J’ai deux amours
Mon pays et Paris

Quand sur la rive parfois
Au lointain j’aperçois
Un paquebot qui s’en va
Vers lui je tends les bras
Et le cœur battant d’émoi
A mi-voix
Doucement je dis “emporte-moi!”

J’ai deux amours…

Translation (approximate, of course :) — corrections more than welcome!):

I Have Two Loves

It is said that above the seas,
Over there under the clear sky,
Exists a city, where the stay is enchanted,
And under the big black trees,
Every evening,
Towards it tend all my hopes.

I have two loves
My country and Paris.
By them always
Is my heart ravished.
My savannah* is beautiful,
But why deny that
what puts a spell on me is Paris,
Paris in its entirety.

Seeing it one day
Is my pretty dream.
I have two loves,
My country and Paris.

(Repeat)

My savannah is beautiful,
But why deny that
what puts a spell on me is Paris,
Paris in its entirety.
Seeing it one day
Is my pretty dream.
I have two loves,
My country and Paris.

When at the distant shore
I sometimes see a ship depart
To him I extend my arms
And heart beating with excitement,
Whisper softly, I say, “Take me!”

I have two loves…

_____________________________
* “My savannah“? Yeah. I think this probably refers to the home of the African “native girl” described by Mordden’s interpretation. Generalized, if so, you can probably just read this phrase as something like “my home” or “the place I came from.” (In Madeleine Peyroux’s cover of the song, My savannah becomes Manhattan.)

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What You Miss When You Don’t Look Up… and Don’t Stand Still

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At the page at the Popular Science site where I first saw this video, the author says:

The video below was captured by Stephane Guisard and Jose Francisco Salgado at the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile’s Atacama Desert. And it might make you cry.

What makes this time lapse particularly amazing — because we’ve all seen plenty of time lapse videos of the night sky — is the four telescopes in the foreground. Watching these instruments work against a black background would be endlessly fascinating on its own. Unfortunately you won’t be able to pay them too much attention. Because damn, what a sky.

Yes. Damn. What a sky.

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“An Echo That Did Not Die Away”

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[Image: a communications “satelloon.” For more information,
see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river:

There have been times when I think we do not desire heaven but more often I find myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have ever desired anything else. You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words: but most of your friends do not see it at all, and often wonder why, liking this, you should also like that. Again, you have stood before some landscape, which seems to embody what you’ve been looking for all your life; and then turned to the friend at your side who appears to be seeing what you saw — but at the first words a gulf yawns between you, and you realize that this landscape means something totally different to him, that he is pursuing an alien vision and cares nothing for the ineffable suggestion by which you were transported. Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of — something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat’s side? Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it — tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest — if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself — you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say “Here at last is the thing I was made for.” We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.

(C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain [source])

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Savage Beasts

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A first for Running After My Hat: a guest blogger!

Kate Lord Brown is already familiar to some of you as the curator of the blog What Kate Did Next. (She also instigated the Burning Lines experiment in collaborative online fiction of a couple years ago.) More recently, though — and the reason she’s feeling celebratory — she’s published her first novel, The Beauty Chorus.

New Year’s Eve, 1940: Evie Chase, the beautiful debutante daughter of a rich and adoring RAF commander, listens wistfully to the swing music drifting out from the ballroom, unable to join in the fun… 5th January, 1941: Evie curses her fashionable heels as they skid on the frozen ground of her local airfield. She is here to join the ATA, the civilian pilots who ferry Tiger Moths and Spitfires to bases across war-torn Britain.

When Kate volunteered her services as a guest blogger, I thought at once of her own blog posts: light, downright lissome bundles of everyday slices of life, nostalgia, ruminations on and prompts for writing, and… music. All genres. All smoothly worked into the theme of the post du jour. So I asked her what role music had played in The Beauty Chorus itself, or in its author’s mind while writing it. Here’s how she responded.

Charms, eh? The woman hath charms.

[Videos below selected, by me with Kate’s blessing, from The Beauty Chorus‘s YouTube playlist.]

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