Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

Book Review: War, by Sebastian Junger

by 8 Comments

Habitués of Running After My Hat know, I think, that I resist the intrusion of politics into my posts here. And although I’ve never been tested on this, I’m pretty sure that’s one area in which I would likely resort to editing (or outright banning) comments of certain kinds. If you’re after debate, even of the reasoned sort, there are plenty of other sites around the Internet whose proprietors are more than happy (and better equipped than I) to offer it.

As my newest review at The Book Book begins:

Like (probably) most Americans, I have never fought in a war, and am unlikely ever to do so. Like (probably) most Americans, I nonetheless hold plenty of opinions about war in general as well as about specific conflicts. Those opinions are important to us, and we regard holding onto them in the face of opposing views as a matter of psychological — almost theological — life and death.

But civilian opinions one way or the other about war, any war, shred like tissue paper when you try to wrap them around the hard, spiky reality of soldiers’ experiences. It simply doesn’t matter what John Q. Public (let alone his favorite talk-show host) thinks.

War, by Sebastian Junger, is all about the daily lives of soldiers on the front line in the war in Afghanistan. (He spent a year embedded with a company there, in 2007-2008.) I won’t kid you: although it is a quick read, it’s not easy reading. What these young men have to deal with, and how they deal with it, is so far from the experience of civilian life that wanting it not to exist, or pretending it doesn’t, is completely understandable. Even if you’re open to knowing about it, I likewise understand the difference between that agreeability and a willingness to spend a few days reading about it.

But I think one thing Junger says, almost in passing, strikes me as one of the main reasons to read the book:

Perfectly sane, good men have been drawn back to combat over and over again, and anyone interested in the idea of world peace would do well to know what they’re looking for. Not killing, necessarily — that couldn’t have been clearer in my mind — but the other side of the equation: protecting. The defense of the tribe is an insanely compelling idea, and once you’ve been exposed to it, there’s almost nothing you’d rather do.

What soldiers are looking for: If you think it’s a desire to win their particular war, or to “get” the “enemy,” or, simply, a desire to get home ASAP (where the “S” represents Safely as well as Soon), you might want to at least sample some of Junger’s book.

Again, though, despite the title and the above quoted passage: this isn’t a book about war, but about battle — combat — and how men adapt to it. If you undertake reading War, prepare yourself for some moments of high intensity (also some low comedy, and emotionally moving passages).

Share

You Spoke from Midnight

by 3 Comments

From whiskey river:

Moonrise

And who has seen the moon, who has not seen
Her rise from out the chamber of the deep,
Flushed and grand and naked, as from the chamber
Of finished bridegroom, seen her rise and throw
Confession of delight upon the wave,
Littering the waves with her own superscription
Of bliss, till all her lambent beauty shakes towards us
Spread out and known at last, and we are sure
That beauty is a thing beyond the grave,
That perfect, bright experience never falls
To nothingness, and time will dim the moon
Sooner than our full consummation here
In this odd life will tarnish or pass away.

(D. H. Lawrence [source])

…and, from whiskey river‘s archives (the commonplace book):

Our existence is finite. The self that we have created through so many years of effort and suffering will die. And sustained though we may be by the idea, the hope, the certainty that some portion of us will eternally endure, we also must acknowledge that this “I” who breathes and loves and works and knows itself will be forever and ever and ever… obliterated.

So, whether or not we live with images of continuity — of immortality — we also will have to live with a sense of transience, aware that no matter how passionately we love whatever we love, we don’t have the power to make either it, or us, stay.

(Judith Viorst, Necessary Losses [source])

[Read more…]

Share

Book Review: Spook, by Mary Roach

by 8 Comments

I’ve just posted my latest review for The Book Book; it covers non-fiction author Mary Roach’s Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife.

This was Roach’s second book. The first, Stiff, was about what happens to the human body after death. You can see that she’s attracted to odd, even icky topics; and you may guess from the title, too, that she uses humor to distance the reader from the ick. She’s one of my favorite non-fiction writers, certainly among the most enjoyable.

As I say in the review, my only real reservation about her work has to do with that sense of humor. Sometimes she drops a punchline into the text just a little too insistently, and it falls flat.

Compare this approach to, say, Bill Bryson’s. He too loves to make people laugh, and he too never shies away from the humor in a situation. But the jokes are good ones, not limp asides inserted for the sake of comic timing.

But I don’t want to hammer at that point too hard; I don’t want you to think I don’t enjoy Roach’s writing. Whatever she comes up with, I expect to be among those happily reading it.

Share

Using a Kindle: Some First Impressions

by 6 Comments

[This is one of what will no doubt become a series on my experiences in using a Kindle 2. It’s not a drum I want to beat often — don’t want it to become one of those “I have X but you don’t, haha!” gloatfests. But it might be useful for people on the fence about the whole e-book deal.]

Frequent RAMH commenter DarcKnyt wondered recently over at his place: What are the pros and cons of e-readers? He asked for comments particularly from people who’ve used them. I probably gave him way more that he wanted/needed — it would’ve made for a long post here, and that’s saying something.

Here’s the bottom line, for me:

In general, I think the transition to e-books will resemble any other transition to a new/different technology. It will come with inconveniences and drawbacks… but ultimately people will learn to live with them (or the tech will advance to the point where they no longer apply), for the sake of the NEW conveniences and features they couldn’t even have faked the old way. (No doubt, when cavemen first started to light fires at night, a subset of them swaggered around, sniffed haughtily, and hitched up their fur loincloths, insisting that things were better when we kept watch by moonlight and the stars — and we sure didn’t have to keep getting up to dump another log on the moon every time the previous one burned down! And you couldn’t drop the moon in a river and put it out! It gave everything a much sleeker, more romantic look, than fire ever could! The moon didn’t threaten to get out of control and burn down the whole damn forest! Etc.)

(If you’d like to see the full thing, which includes more details of my experience so far, it’s resting comfortably over across the Web, at Darc’s place.)

I’ve since thought of a few other things I might have mentioned:

[Read more…]

Share

What’s in a Song: Simple Gifts (2)

by 18 Comments

[Above: portion of letter from Aaron Copland to Harold Spivacke, Chief of the Music Division at the Library of Congress. Original in the Library of Congress’s Aaron Copland Collection.]

[“Appalachian Spring (7th Movement)” (about 13:30 long)]

[…or, if you’d prefer, the whole thing (about 35:57)]

Note: If you’re interested in the early history of “Simple Gifts,” rather than its resurrection in the 20th century, you might want to begin with Part 1 of this two-part series, posted a few days earlier.

In late 1942, choreographer/dancer Martha Graham first approached composer Aaron Copland. She hoped he could score a new ballet for her troupe. She had a grant from the Library of Congress’s Coolidge foundation to fund the work, but at that point she didn’t know the details of the project — certainly not the title. She hoped to premiere it in the auditorium of the Library in Washington, DC, within a year.

As you can see from the portion of the letter reproduced at the top of this post, as of the following spring Copland had heard no more from her about the new ballet and moved on to other projects. But by June, 1943, he’d received Graham’s first notes; by July, he’d managed to compose the first third of the ballet. The premiere date was now set for October 30, at the Library of Congress as Graham had hoped. (One constraint: the orchestra would be limited to 13 musicians, because of the small size of the orchestra pit there.)

What Copland knew about the ballet at this point was the general story it would tell. It would be about a young farming couple in the hills of Pennsylvania, early in the 19th century. Graham hoped it might capture of the same spirit as Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town (1938). Of course, with the US and the world in the grip of war — and because the life of a pioneer farming couple would not have been easy — it could not be too sweet and sentimental. Importantly, it still had no title. (Copland settled on Ballet for Martha as his working title.)

But it did have a main theme, one which Copland had found almost by accident.

[Read more…]

Share

What’s in a Song: Simple Gifts (1)

by 14 Comments

The great tangled rope of popular music (American and otherwise) includes so many disparate strands that to speak of it as a single “thing” invites ridicule: show tunes and jazz, bluegrass and ragtime, country, folk, rock, metal, rap, and hip-hop… And then what about “easy listening”? and popular classical music, like Gershwin’s and Copland’s? New Age? Heck, what about Christmas music?

So in declaring (as I did) that this What’s in a Song series would explore “American popular songs with long histories,” well, I might as well have announced upfront that anything listenable was fair game.

Under the circumstances, inevitably, I’d find myself bumping into the category known loosely as “sacred music” — at least, those bits of it which have percolated out into pop culture. Off the top of my head, only two songs in this category appealed to me as subjects. The first, “Amazing Grace” — okay, that’s been tackled by an impressive roster of pop artists. But I have one problem with celebrating “Amazing Grace,” beautiful though it is: few performers seem able to resist milking its very “sacredness.” What emerges from the throats of such performers isn’t a song about grace, even about the special grace of music: it’s a song about the singer.

But almost by definition, the other song has resisted manipulation at the hands of the lugubriously self-righteous. That song is the subject of this two-part post.

[Read more…]

Share

Destiny Has No Beeper

by 5 Comments

[See Note at bottom of this post for information about this image.]

From whiskey river:

Almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of Pssst that you usually can’t even hear because you’re in such a rush to or from something important you’ve tried to engineer.

(David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest)

…and:

Have you watched your thinking? I watched that car go by, it was a blue car. Can I watch my thought in the same way, as it moves from one thing to another? And if it does, find out if it can end; instead of it being a long thread, break it, see what happens. Can you break a thought and say, “Well, that’s enough, enough is enough” and just end that thought and see what happens before the next thought is waiting. Before it springs on you, watch it. In that space, in that interval, what happens?

(Jiddu Krishnamurti, As the River Joins The Ocean)

[Read more…]

Share

JES Has Come Unstuck in Time (by Choice and Training)

by 10 Comments

[See note at bottom of the post for information about this image.]

One of these days, if I’m feeling very ambitious, I might expand this dream (from the other morning) into a whole story or book. Until then, feel free to use it for your own purposes. Should you take it to publication, I’m sure we can work out some sort of suitable deal. Just contact my attorney — and prepare to negotiate.

I’m with a team of adventurers — you know, one of those ragtag bunches of (probably) misfits who go around the world solving problems — digging up treasure, recovering stolen loot, righting wrongs, and so on.

Unlike other teams of adventurers, though, this one has a special talent: it travels in time.

Now, as you surely know from various pop-culture references, time travel is possible… but only if you have superpowers or other almost impossible resources. For instance:

  • If you’re Superman, you can zip around Earth in a direction opposite to the planet’s rotation, at a speed faster than light. All you have to do is, uh, be Superman.
  • Or, like the guy in H.G. Wells’s story, you can build a time machine to move backward and forward.
  • If you’re Claire Randall (née Beauchamp) in Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series of books, all you have to do is sort of walk through the right group of standing stones in Scotland at the right time (it helps if you swoon); just be in WW2-era Scotland, be a nurse, be brilliant, and be attractive. Also wry.
  • Dr. Who travels around time and space more or less at will — thanks to the TARDIS and its impossible geometry.

But this dream team doesn’t need any of that. It needs no machinery. Its members have no superpowers. All they have which you lack is one critical piece of information, and the training to use it: every human being is born with the ability to time-travel.

The leader of the team (think the Richard Attenborough character in Jurassic Park) made this discovery starting with a simple realization: that human memory and hope/expectation are simply diluted expressions of time travel. And the training? You just practice focusing the portion of your brain most responsible for memory (the hippocampus); you just rehearse sharpening the details of your hopes and expectations.

…and that was the sum of the dream. I didn’t remember any details of the group’s adventures or anything (ironic in light of what I did remember, eh?).

Would you time-travel if you could?

_______________

Note: The photo at the top of this post shows a sand sculpture by the artistic team known collectively as Duthain Dealbh (“fleeting sculpture” in Gaelic). The subject of the sand sculpture is the Australian aboriginal legend of the dreamtime. From Wikipedia (quoting a line from Peter Weir’s film The Last Wave):

Aboriginals believe in two forms of time; two parallel streams of activity. One is the daily objective activity, the other is an infinite spiritual cycle called the “dreamtime,” more real than reality itself. Whatever happens in the dreamtime establishes the values, symbols, and laws of Aboriginal society. It was believed that some people of unusual spiritual powers had contact with the dreamtime.

Find more information about Duthain Dealbh at their site.

Share

A** Over Teakettle

by 7 Comments

As a reminder — not that you doubted! — I’ll be intensely preoccupied tomorrow, for the 2010 edition of the New York Writers Coalition’s Write Your A** Off Day.

I’ve mentioned before that this year, they’re sponsoring an online “write-a-thon.” Participants are urged to take the 3K Challenge: to shoot for a goal of 3,000 words’ output on the day. With a certain number and/or volume of qualms, I’m in.

I say “qualms” there because, as I’ve also mentioned, I’ve been in a cavernous creative slump for weeks.

Nonetheless, I’ll play along. I don’t expect to work on Seems to Fit, though. (I feel especially tender and protective about my putative work-in-progress; if my slough of despond drowns it, I’ll really be ready to hang up my keyboard and LaserJet.) Instead, over the course of the last few days I laid the groundwork for a new story; it’s got a fairly interesting plot hook, which I’d like to believe will propel me across the 3K mark at some point tomorrow.

We’ll see. In the meantime, if you catch me frolicking in your neighborhood or elsewhere around the Internet tomorrow, feel free to shy something* at me, and/or yell (à la many a childhood neighbor) something like, “Hey you — get the hell off the playground and get back to work!”

___________________

* Shy me a brickbat, please. I’d love to know what a brickbat looks like. Especially one that’s been shied.

___________________

Update, 2010-06-12, 2:55(ish) p.m.: So I crossed the 3K word mark at around 12:30. The current word count, after some tidying up, is 3,123 words. I’ll post what I got done today in a subsequent entry. This is just my placeholder announcement for anyone who stumbles in and wonders what the heck happened.

Share

A Moment, a Moment Long…

by 3 Comments

[Image: The Meteor of 1860, by Frederic Edwin Church]

This summer marks the 150th anniversary of a remarkable celestial event: an Earth-grazing meteor procession of interest not just to the scientific world, but to the literary one as well. It wasn’t just notable: it was flat-out forgotten until recently.

First, some definitions:

  • An Earth-grazing meteor is one which enters the Earth’s atmosphere at a shallow angle, and exits the atmosphere a few moments later without actually striking the ground. Of course, during those brief few seconds or minutes, it flares up just like any other fast-moving object from the heavens.
  • The term meteor procession refers to a phenomenon in which an Earth-grazing meteor hits the atmosphere and bursts into fragments, which then become multiple smaller meteors traveling in parallel with one another.

These events are exceedingly rare, countable on the fingers of one hand if you go back several centuries. In fact, the 1860 occurrence had been utterly forgotten until about ten years ago — even though (from all contemporary reports) it was one of the more spectacular. Its very, um, forgottenness created a problem for literary scholars with an OCD bent. To wit: what was Walt Whitman nattering on about in poem #100 of Leaves of Grass, entitled “Year of Meteors, 1859-’60“?

Here’s the relevant passage:

…the comet that came unannounced out of the north,
flaring in heaven;
Nor the strange huge meteor procession, dazzling and clear,
shooting over our heads,
(A moment, a moment long, it sail’d its balls of unearthly light
over our heads,
Then departed, dropt in the night, and was gone;)

In the upcoming July issue of Sky & Telescope magazine, a physicist (a “forensic astronomer”) explains how he made the connection (thanks to the painting featured at the top of this post) — and “discovered” the 1860 procession. If you don’t want to wait for that issue, you can read about the whole matter here (in an interview at the New Scientist site) and here (Texas State University news service).

I just love stuff like this.

Share
Verified by MonsterInsights