Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

The Sky Calls to Us

by 6 Comments

From whiskey river (italicized portion):

The landscape opens its eyes and sits up,
sets out walking followed by its shadow,
it is a stela of dark murmurs
that are the languages of fallen matter,
the wind stops and hears the clamor of the elements,
sand and water talking in low voices,
the howl of pilings as they battle the salt,
the rash confidence of fire,
the soliloquy of ashes,
the interminable conversation of the universe.
Talking with the things and with ourselves
the universe talks to itself:
we are its tongue and ears, its words and silences.
The wind hears what the universe says
and we hear what the wind says,
rustling the submarine foliage of language,
the secret vegetation of the underworld and the undersky:
man dreams the dream of things,
time thinks the dream of men.

(Octavio Paz [source])

…and (italicized portion):

If you had never been to the world and never known what dawn was, you couldn’t possibly imagine how the darkness breaks, how the mystery and color of a new day arrive. Light is incredibly generous, but also gentle. When you attend to the way the dawn comes, you learn how light can coax the dark. The first fingers of light appear on the horizon, and ever so deftly and gradually, they pull the mantle of darkness away from the world.

(John O’Donohue [source])

[Read more…]

Share

Perfect Moments: The Boy, the Wintry Day, the Film, the Flash of Panic

by 11 Comments

On a recent wintry day, The Boy (Who Was No Longer a Boy) and The Missus decided to go to a movie.

Now, because the day was in fact wintry, and because “wintry” seldom applied to weather conditions where The Boy and The Missus lived, they needed to undertake certain careful preparations in advance. Warm clothing needed to be retrieved from dusty closet recesses. Human bodies needed to be tanked up with caffeine and/or cocoa.

And then there was the matter of The Boy’s hands.

Especially in chilly, dry conditions, the skin of The Boy’s hands — more precisely, his fingers — tended to dry and chap and split rather painfully. Depending on his mood and energy level and the available time, he might choose to ignore the problem; to “lotion up”; or to go the whole hog — applying ointment and BandAid(s) to the affected digit(s). On the afternoon in question, The Boy decided to go the whole hog. Indeed, not only did he swath his index finger in two BandAids, he actually sealed the edges and the fingertip with waterproof tape: the finger wasn’t merely bandaged, it was sheathed in what the Crayola people used to call (in benighted non-PC days of yore) “flesh-colored” plastic.

And then he and The Missus embarked.

[Read more…]

Share

There’s Got to Be a Morning After

by 4 Comments

Centuries after the Eastern Orthodox Church began celebrating the Epiphany, the Roman Catholic Church decided to start doing so too. But for some reason, the Western Church really latched on to this image of the Persian priests bringing gifts of frankincense, myrrh, and gold to the infant Jesus, guided from their homeland of Iran by a shining star. The Magi are mentioned only in Matthew’s Gospel and he never specified how many magi there were — just that there were three gifts. In 1857, the Reverend John Henry Hopkins Jr. wrote some lyrics for a seminary Christmas pageant, a song that begins: “We three kings of Orient are / Bearing gifts we traverse afar / Field and fountain, moor and mountain / Following yonder star.”

(The Writer’s Almanac, January 6, 2010)

The scene: a roadside on the outskirts of a small town in the Middle East. It is morning, lots of years ago. Three travelers sit beside a fire, waiting for a pot to boil, warming their hands, rubbing the sleep from their eyes. Their names are Balthasar, Melchior, and… uh… The Other Guy.

Balthasar: So… so that’s it, then?

[Read more…]

Share

Avatar and the Uncanny Valley

by 21 Comments

We saw Avatar the other day, and did the whole 3D, IMAX nine yards. It complicated things a little — there are many more showings of the plain-old 2D version, and for that matter of the 3D in non-IMAX theaters. But after all we’d heard about the experience, it seemed the only way to go.

My original intention with this post was just to provide a thumbnail review, along these lines:

James Cameron, damn him, has done exactly what he said he’d do: delivered a kickin’-good movie with mind-blowing special effects and cinematography. He may not be king of the world — any more than Orson Welles was in 1940 — but…

Etc., etc.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized I was interested mostly in one thing: one facet in which the film didn’t disappoint, exactly, but also didn’t (probably couldn’t) quite succeed. Before getting into that, though, let me say:

  • The 3D effects in Avatar — at least, as viewed in an IMAX theater — go way beyond the lame, unimaginative poke-the-audience-with-a-sword precursors. When little flies and moths beset the characters in the jungle, you may have to fight the impulse to try swatting the bugs away. Or, like me, you may find yourself looking over your shoulder to draw the projectionist’s attention to the need for an exterminator.
  • Motion-capture technology, likewise, has leapt ahead since even the (justly) celebrated tools which Peter Jackson and Andy Serkis employed to bring Gollum to life in The Lord of the Rings — particularly in capturing facial expressions.
  • Technology aside, you’ll recognize Avatar‘s plot and love story from numerous “civilized man goes native” films that came before (Dances with Wolves, anyone?)…
  • Yet, you may still find yourself welling up from time to time.
  • I thoroughly enjoyed every second of the film. Thoroughly. (At some moments, indeed, I felt that I may have been undercharged despite the almost $14-a-pop admission price.)

So what didn’t succeed?

[Read more…]

Share

Hoppin’ Kudos

by 2 Comments

Okay, I know I’m at risk of exhausting your patience with all the recent round of congratulations, thanks, trophy-giving, and so on. I just want to point you in the direction of one more nice little feather in the cap of an RAMH regular. It’s especially nice to be able to do so via a post at Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast (a/k/a “7-Imp”) — whose innkeeper, Jules, also frequents the corridors here.

Sundays at 7-Imp are always special. Besides celebrating (as usual) the work of wonderful authors and illustrators of books for children, the blog also asks commenters to chime in with their own lists of seven impossibly great, hilarious, etc. things which happened to them in the previous week.

The first Sunday of each month focuses on an up-and-coming artist and illustrator (of kids’ books or otherwise) whose work has especially caught Jules’s eye, or outright dazzled her.

Which is why the 7-Imp post today is so cool, because it’s all about the artwork of Marta Pelrine-Bacon — RAMH‘s commenter with the longest tenure, having first shown up out of the blue a couple of months after I started the blog.

Very nice, Marta, to find yourself featured in the first post of the year at a blog which has also featured the work of the likes of Ed Young, Grace Lin, Daniel Pinkwater, et al…. what company!

Share

The Watchful Mind

by 3 Comments

[A museum’s 3D representation of Wilder Penfield’s so-called “cortical homunculus” depicting the relative importance of various senses, as measured by the percentage of our brains devoted to them. Photo by Robep on Flickr; click for original.]

From whiskey river:

Burning the Old Year

Letters swallow themselves in seconds.
Notes friends tied to the doorknob,
transparent scarlet paper,
sizzle like moth wings,
marry the air.

So much of any year is flammable,
lists of vegetables, partial poems.
Orange swirling flame of days,
so little is a stone.

Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,
an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.
I begin again with the smallest numbers.

Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,
only the things I didn’t do
crackle after the blazing dies.

(Naomi Shihab Nye [source])

…and:

Looking Around, Believing

How strange that we can begin at any time.
With two feet we get down the street.
With a hand we undo the rose.
With an eye we lift up the peach tree
And hold it up to the wind — white blossoms
At our feet. Like today. I started
In the yard with my daughter,
With my wife poking at a potted geranium,
And now I am walking down the street,
Amazed that the sun is only so high,
Just over the roof, and a child
Is singing through a rolled newspaper
And a terrier is leaping like a flea
And at the bakery I pass, a palm,
Like a suctioning starfish, is pressed
To the window. We’re keeping busy —
This way, that way, we’re making shadows
Where sunlight was, making words
Where there was only noise in the trees.

(Gary Soto [source])

…and (what the heck, the river was on a roll this week):

Do you have doubts about life? Are you unsure if it is really worth the trouble? Look at the sky: that is for you. Look at each person’s face as you pass them on the street: those faces are for you. And the street itself, and the ground under the street, and the ball of fire underneath the ground: all these things are for you. They are as much for you as they are for other people. Remember this when you wake up in the morning and think you have nothing. Stand up and face the east. Now praise the sky and praise the light within each person under the sky. It’s okay to be unsure. But praise, praise, praise.

(Miranda July, from “The Shared Patio” [source])

[Read more…]

Share

Awards Season, at a Distance (and Highly Concentrated)

by 4 Comments

Heartiest congratulations to RAMH regular visitor and blog-friend Froog, who has performed the hat trick and then some in garnering — all at once — five best-of-the-year awards for his online presences:

  1. Most Prolific Blogger,
  2. Most Alcoholic Blog,
  3. Most Uncomfortably Personal Blog,
  4. China-Basher of the Year, and (the one I really envy him for)
  5. Most Diverse Blog

It’s about time someone gave him his due!

I understand Joan Rivers has begun making plans for the presentation ceremony. If she can just find a red carpet in his neighborhood which isn’t fluttering from a flagpole, she should be all set.

Share

Okay, I Still Hate the Name “SyFy”…

by 5 Comments

…and probably always will. But this is a pretty damned impressive advertisement/trailer:

It sort of compresses all the memes from the SyFy cable network’s distinctive bumper spots into a big ol’ nearly coherent 2:40 whole (and avoids the corny-CGI temptations to which the network’s special-effects guys all too often succumb in the actual programs). Nice.

(Anybody know what song is on the soundtrack? Musically, it reminds me a lot of the song whose adorable video I featured in this post back in June, but the lyrics don’t seem the same.)

(Hat tip: Speak Coffee to Me)

Share

When Good Things Happen to Good Book Bloggers

by 6 Comments

You probably already know the movie A Christmas Story, released in 1983 and based on the stories (and featuring the voiceover narration) of Jean Shepherd.

And if you’ve been hanging around here for a while, you may also know of my own childhood Christmas memories — and if so, you’ll know I share what seems to have been Shepherd’s take on Christmas.

To wit: holiday cheer, sentiment, wintertime hearths, great food, ornaments, family — yes, all that makes the holiday traditionally wonderful… but from the point of view of a kid, Christmas can elicit a certain hilarious cynicism.

It’s rather like that moment in A Christmas Story when Ralphie opens up the giftbox from Aunt Clara to find that she has sent him an oversized pink bunny suit. (“Aunt Clara had for years labored under the delusion that I was not only perpetually 4 years old, but also a girl.”) Ralphie’s Mom is delighted; Ralphie himself is horrified at the gift itself, and positively mortified when she insists that he try it on.

In this spirit of the dark, funny things underlying the sentimental, I’m excited to tell you of a book currently scheduled for release in 2012 by Candlewick Press, tentatively titled Wild Things! and subtitled The True, Untold Stories Behind the Most Beloved Children’s Books and Their Creators.

Especially, I’m excited to tell you about this because among its three co-authors will be friend of RAMH Julie Danielson, who comments here as Jules and, more importantly, curates the fabulous kidlit blog Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast.

Says Jules:

…sophisticated (and even jaded) adults to get sentimental and dewey-eyed at the mere mention of children’s books. Now, if they didn’t, we wouldn’t have a book to write, so we’re not exactly complaining. But it’s still a curious phenomenon to us, that, for many, the topic conjures up a world of gumdrops, rainbows, and fluffy little bunnies that love you forever and like you for always. Our book aims to debunk the notion that all children’s book authors and illustrators live in such a world.

Here’s how Betsy Bird, another co-author and a blogger for School Library Journal, describes the project:

…we take an irreverent, but affectionate, look at the world of children’s books, noting how this once niche market has, in recent years, achieved mainstream interest and appeal. The wide-ranging text examines the history of subversive books (sometimes it’s all about who gets to eat and who gets eaten), uncovers a few literary mysteries (what, exactly, is inside the real Winnie-the-Pooh’s gastro-intestinal tract?), and delivers the scoop on nasty little things that cagey writers have slipped right past their editors. We’ll also tell you which author murdered her mum and which one wrote hardcore porn. There are tales about famous feuds and lawsuits, information on banned books, and descriptions of titles that were quietly changed after publication to remove offensive stereotypes. Oh, and did you know that Courtney Love’s grandmother is an award-winning children’s writer?

No word on whether Jules, Betsy, and third co-author Peter Sieruta (of the Collecting Children’s Books blog) — cagey writers all — will be trying to slip any little nasties past their own editor.

But these three seem to have the collective sensibilities of Ralphie viewing his bunny suit for the first time and, in the image at the right (cribbed from Peter Sieruta’s announcement), of Ramona Quimby in pink-bunny slippers. So we can hope!

Share

Discoveries

by 8 Comments

[Photo above taken by the Hubble Wide-Field Camera 3 and released a few days ago by NASA. Several thousand galaxies are visible in the original, “a peek at the universe as it looked about 600 million years after the Big Bang.” More info here and here.]

From whiskey river (which excerpted from this poem, in different words, via translation):

The startling reality of things

The startling reality of things
Is my discovery every single day.
Every thing is what it is,
And it’s hard to explain to anyone how much this delights me
And suffices me.

To be whole, it is enough simply to exist.

I’ve written a good many poems.
I shall write many more, naturally.
Each of my poems speaks of this,
And yet all my poems are different,
Because each thing that exists is one way of saying this.

Sometimes I start looking at a stone.
I don’t start thinking, Does it have feeling?
I don’t fuss about calling it my sister.
But I get pleasure out of its being a stone,
Enjoying it because it feels nothing,
Enjoying it because it’s not at all related to me.

Occasionally I hear the wind blow,
And I find that just hearing the wind blow makes it worth having been born.

I don’t know what others reading this will think;
But I find it must be good since it’s what I think without effort,
With no idea that other people are listening to me think;
Because I think it without thoughts,
Because I say it as my words say it.

I was once called a materialist poet
And was surprised, because I didn’t imagine
I could be called anything at all.
I’m not even a poet: I see.
If what I write has any merit, it’s not in me;
The merit is there, in my verses.
All this is absolutely independent of my will.

(Fernando Pessoa [source])

…and:

Your beloved and your friends were once strangers. Somehow at a particular time, they came from the distance toward your life. Their arrival seemed so accidental and contingent. Now your life is unimaginable without them. Similarly, your identity and vision are composed of a certain constellation of ideas and feelings that surfaced from the depths of the distance within you. To lose these now would be to lose yourself.

(John O’Donohue [source])

[Read more…]

Share
Verified by MonsterInsights