Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

Yeah, You and James Brown

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It won’t come as news to anybody that blogs — all the “citizen journalist” talk notwithstanding — aren’t where you typically find news. They’re where you find feelings: reactions to news, sure, but also just general reactions to family and work situations, reactions to human behavior, reactions of self-approval and -disillusion, and so on.

Somebody finally decided it was time to weigh all that emotion. (Which, among other things, allows bloggers to record how that information makes them feel.)

Warning: We’re entering time-sink territory here.

Here’s how the folks at We Feel Fine summarize their mission:

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 – 20,000 new feelings per day.

You may find this Orwellian. You may find it absurd. You may wonder what this says about the state of the world, the Internet, human nature…

All of which, of course, you should feel free to blog about.

The image at the top of this post shows a partial screen capture from one of WFF‘s “movements.” (Each movement is a different way of representing the underlying data.) Here, the site apparently takes forms of the phrase “I feel” and captures the word which follows. As you can see, as of the time the database was most recently updated, 3,950 bloggers felt strange, and “strange” was the 77th most common feeling. (This is probably a huge undercount; 100% of bloggers seem to feel strange close to 100% of the time, they just tire of writing about it.) At the moment, the project is taking the emotional pulse of over two million blogs.

Incidentally, I learned of WFF from the excellent ResearchBuzz newsletter. (Anyone interested in doing online research will probably faint dead away to learn of its existence.) Specifically, I picked up this item from the @researchbuzz Twitter feed; I don’t see anything about WFF on the ResearchBuzz Web site at the moment. That tweet led me to an article on Newswise, which (among other things) also introduced me to “the optimistic Irish economist Francis Edgeworth[, who] imagined a strange device called a ‘hedonimeter.'”

Which, um, makes me feel pretty good.

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Feedback to Stop the Heart

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I hope anyone reading this, or any of the other posts here, knows how dearly and sincerely I long for your approval as a reader; I want you to like my writing, and — just as importantly — I’ll never rarely ask for evidence of any of that. (I’ll just want you to keep coming back.)

That said, whoa, for a writer to get touched by a god, as it were — touched unbidden…

On this day in 1855, Ralph Waldo Emerson penned a little note to Walt Whitman. Emerson had apparently just finished reading the first printing of Leaves of Grass; he was so overcome by the experience that he had to sit down and just lay it out there for the poet. Here’s the full text of the letter (RWE being notably more pithy than, say, the average blogger):

21 July Concord Masstts. 1855

Dear Sir,

I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of “Leaves of Grass.” I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy. It meets the demand I am always making of what seemed the sterile & stingy nature, as if too much handiwork or too much lymph in the temperament were making our western wits fat and mean. I give you joy of your free brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment, which so delights us, & which large perception only can inspire. I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty. It has the best merits, namely of fortifying & encouraging.

I did not know until I, last night, saw the book advertised in a newspaper, that I could trust the name as real and available for a post-office. I wish to see my benefactor, & have felt much like striking my tasks, & visiting New York to pay you my respects.

R. W. Emerson

Mr. Walter Whitman.

(Love that my benefactor, eh? Emerson saying he’s not Whitman’s benefactor, but vice-versa!)

Whitman — not really a fool, but maybe just a tad bit, um, well, brash — immediately put this private letter to good public use, even going so far as to quote from it on the spine of a later edition (without asking Emerson first). I can’t imagine, even remotely, having the temerity to do something like that. Even assuming I could sufficiently gather my wits anytime in the succeeding months to try, y’know? I’d just be so flattened, immobilized, by a letter at all like this.

Which made me wonder: what author living today would have this effect on me? What author looms so large either in my own head, or in the culture at large, that I’d just about fall over, stunned, if I got a letter like this from him or her?

I don’t know. Toni Morrison, maybe? Stephen King? John Irving? J.K. Rowling? Michael Chabon or Jeffrey Eugenides? Thomas Pynchon? Ghostly writing, in mid-air or on lavatory wall, signed by E.B. White, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut?

I’m not talking career here — not “Of whom could I make the best use?” but rather, “Whose unsolicited, whole-hearted and unambivalent approval would send me into swooning ecstasy?”

Who’d do it for you?

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Your Favorite Bookish Blogs?

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I first read about this on Twitter last week, via Travis Erwin: the second annual Book Blogger Appreciation Week, sponsored by Amy Riley of the My Friend Amy blog. Among other details at the site are these raisons d’etre:

WHAT A week where we come together, celebrate the contribution and hard work of book bloggers in promoting a culture of literacy, connecting readers to books and authors, and recognizing the best among us with the Second Annual BBAW Awards. There will be special guest posts, daily blogging themes, and giveaways.

WHY Because books matter. In a world full of options, the people talking about books pour hard work, time, energy, and money into creating a community around the written word. I, Amy, the founder of Book Blogger Appreciation Week love this community of bloggers and want to shower my appreciation on you!

Now, I don’t know what Running After My Hat is, exactly. But it would be a stretch to say it’s “about books.” So I feel perfectly non-conflicted — well, as much as I ever am, anyhow — in recommending that you stop by to (a) nominate your own favorites in any of the many different categories, and (b) register your own blog. (Registering makes you automatically eligible for the BBAW “grand prize,” whatever that is. I went ahead and registered RAMH just in case they use it to validate votes, minimize or eliminate ballot-stuffing, and so on.)

No idea what prizes or giveaways will be offered. And after a grand total of, uh, well, one previous prize year, we’re probably not talking about all-expenses-paid trips to tropical paradises, brand-new hybrid SUVs, kitchen makeovers, and so on.

But hey, who wouldn’t want to recognize and support the best blogs about books? We’ve all got favorites, right? Let ’em know!

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Looking Glass

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This week, a little something different: Usually, I start my Friday post by pulling something at random from the last seven days’ selections at whiskey river. Then I go on to include a handful of poems, quotations, film clips, and/or songs to which the whiskey river snippet led me (by whatever inscrutable chain of thoughts).

Today, I’ve already got some poetry which I encountered elsewhere (scroll down to see ) in the last week, poetry which I really liked.

With that already rustling in my head, then, I stopped by at whiskey river‘s archives, called whiskey river’s commonplace book, and just started to browse.

From whiskey river’s commonplace book (no specific link; it’s about halfway down the page):

Prayer

Over a dock railing, I watch the minnows, thousands, swirl
themselves, each a minuscule muscle, but also, without the
way to create current, making of their unison (turning, re-
infolding,
entering and exiting their own unison in unison) making of
themselves a
visual current, one that cannot freight or sway by
minutest fractions the water’s downdrafts and upswirls, the
dockside cycles of finally-arriving boat-wakes, there where
they hit deeper resistance, water that seems to burst into
itself (it has those layers), a real current though mostly
invisible sending into the visible (minnows) arrowing
motion that forces change —
this is freedom. This is the force of faith. Nobody gets
what they want. Never again are you the same. The longing
is to be pure. What you get is to be changed. More and more by
each glistening minute, through which infinity threads itself,
also oblivion, of course, the aftershocks of something
at sea. Here, hands full of sand, letting it sift through
in the wind, I look in and say take this, this is
what I have saved, take this, hurry. And if I listen
now? Listen, I was not saying anything. It was only
something I did. I could not choose words. I am free to go.
I cannot of course come back. Not to this. Never.
It is a ghost posed on my lips. Here: never.

(Jorie Graham [source])

Not from whiskey river:

[Read more…]

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Of Double Dactyls, Electric Velocipedes, and Hedgehogs

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Check out this TED video, of lexicographer Erin McKean (note the “View Subtitles” button — an option I wish were available everywhere, for obvious reasons):

Cool, huh?

Especially given that two years later, her new online super-duper improved version of the dictionary concept is actually online now. It’s called WordNik, and it’s very interesting.

I went to the WordNik site, and entered the word touchstone into the blank field. Here are some of the things I found out:

  • I got four examples of the word’s use in a sentence, drawn from Project Gutenberg texts of public-domain works. For instance:

    To answer this, we must consider the argument for conceivability as the touchstone which is to separate the “Knowable” from the “Unknowable.” The Arena Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891

  • The original, non-metaphorical meaning (per the American Heritage Dictionary) was: “A hard black stone, such as jasper or basalt, formerly used to test the quality of gold or silver by comparing the streak left on the stone by one of these metals with that of a standard alloy.”
  • The word had shown up in Twitter tweets twice (ha!) within the previous 20(ish) minutes.
  • My favorite, this image showing the word’s popularity over time:
    (The caption under the image explains, “Bubble size: how much this word was used in a year. Bubble height: unusualness in that year.”)

I don’t know. Maybe it’s just me. But this sort of thing isn’t just fun and cool; it feels like a leap, y’know?

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Breaking WIP News: We Have a Title

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A couple weeks ago, I posted on the importance of selecting a good title for your work. Here’s what I said then, in part:

I’ve struggled for years, off and on, with the title of the WIP. When I tell you I’ve been calling it Grail, I know that instantly summons up certain… certain somethings in your head. Those somethings may or may not in fact apply to my story…
…
So no, it’s not going to be Grail in the long run. I don’t know what it’s going to be.

Well, I think I’ve found what I was looking for. Below, the story behind the new (and, I think, forever) title.

[Read more…]

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Department of Unintended Consequences
(Animals & Technology Division)

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The Missus and I are not alone in having a dog who barks rabidly during thunderstorms. But alone or not, we do. She may be little, and her bark may be a mere yip! compared to the more conventional woof! of full-size hounds, but she is determined to scare the storm away.

(And you know what? You can’t argue with results. The storm always leaves.)

For the record, she also barks when dogs on TV bark, and she barks when doors slam on TV, and when she’s anxious for dinner, and when someone opens the front door from outside, and she barks when she’s happy and excited about a new toy or t,r,e,a,t being unwrapped.

Still, she was doing this new thing in the last couple of weeks which I couldn’t understand: she’d suddenly start barking for no reason. It was like her storm-barking: frantic, maddened you-better-stay-away-from-my-family barking.

I couldn’t understand it, that is, until the moment over the weekend when I just happened to— well, let me explain.

The Missus and I have new “smart” phones. I don’t know what The Missus is up to with hers, but by default, when my own phone rings it just rings. Oh, I’d done the obvious thing already — downloaded a ringtone, and aren’t I hot stuff for having figured that out?

But then my former boss was telling me about her phone, which is roughly the same model, and she asked if I’d gotten into customizing ringtones: really customizing them.

“Like what?” I asked.

“Well,” she said, “I set mine up to ring as usual whenever someone calls, and I’ve got a different ringtone for my Mama, and one for my sisters…”

That sounded (ha, no pun intended) pretty cool to me. So I did some research. And then took action.

Now, I haven’t gone as far yet as my ex-boss. But on a lark, I did set the phone up to play my downloaded ringtone whenever a call comes in… and to vibrate whenever an email arrived in the Inbox.

That was it, you see:

Notifications from Facebook: bzzzzzzz, BarkBarkBark!

Spam arriving: bzzzzz, BarkYipBark!

E-newsletter subscriptions: bzzzzz, YipYipYipYip!

In short, the dog was being driven slowly but unambiguously mad by the male human’s flaky experiments in telecommunications.

And all it took for the male human to figure it out was to move the phone from the coffee table to his hip pocket. And then, of course, to make a connection between the bzzzz! against the thigh and the YipYipYip! in the ear. We won’t discuss how long this last step took.

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Pagan Days

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[Image at the right depicts Swedes celebrating Midsummer’s Day in a maypole dance. I found this at sweden.se, “The Official Gateway to Sweden.”]

By tradition, June 24th is Midsummer’s Day. (So you know what that makes the evening of June 23rd, right?) It’s a public holiday in Quebec and a handful of countries in Europe (although many of them no longer celebrate on the 24th itself but move it to the nearest weekend); among those with the strongest Midsummer’s Day tradition is Sweden.

Why the Swedes? and come to think of it, why June 24th, specifically?

Celebrating any mid-June day in general isn’t hard to understand, not for any land lying so close to (or crossing) the Arctic Circle. Here’s what Wikipedia says, in part, about Sweden’s tradition (which includes a maypole because, it is thought, it was impossible to find —  in Sweden in May — enough greenery to wrap a real maypole):

The earliest historical mention of the maypole in Sweden is from the Middle Ages. Midsummer was, however, linked to an ancient fertility festival which was adapted into St. John’s Day by the church, even though it retained many pagan traditions, as the Swedes were slow to give up the old heathen customs.

(The St. John there was John the Baptist; of course nobody really knows when his “birthday” was, but the Christian Bible says he was born six months before Jesus, so there you go. Just about everybody does know that the latter wasn’t really born in December, or even the winter — let alone December 25th — but since when has logic dictated the structure of liturgical calendars???)

YouTube has quite a few videos on the Swedish Midsummer celebration; many of these feature the maypole, of course, and also the so-called “Frog Dance” (Små grodorna, “the little frogs”) which people perform around it. E.g.:

As it happens, this video was shot in London’s Hyde Park “at the Swedish Midsummer’s celebrations” in 2007. According to Wikipedia, in the Frog Dance “participants dance around the maypole and try to imitate the behaviour of frogs.” Presumably this latter bit occurs at this point in the song:

Ej öron, ej öron, ej svansar hava de.
Ej öron, ej öron, ej svansar hava de.		 No ears, no ears no tails do they possess.
No ears, no ears no tails do they possess.

It’s arguable whether waggling fingers alongside the head or fluttering them from behind constitutes “try[ing] to imitate the behaviour of frogs,” since frogs possess neither (real) ears nor (real) tails. But, well, here’s to the clash of cultures. (Lord knows if I were Swedish, traditions like “don’t wear white before Easter” would leave me scratching my head.)

For no very good reason, while thinking about the Swedes I suddenly wondered if the original Noxzema shaving-cream commercial might be on YouTube — you know, the one which induced spontaneous puberty in an entire national population of 10- to 13-year-old boys in the 1960s. It’s there, of course:

The Swedish-born actress Gunilla Knutson was the “narrator” there, and I’ll bet she’s pretty sick of being asked about it. (Even on a day, like today, of good cheer and celebration and, well, heathen fertility celebrations.)

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Public-Service Announcement: From Behind, Footsteps

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Strange days…

The Employer announced last week that they’d be blocking access to Facebook and MySpace, due to some unspecified virus activity. That took effect immediately. Can’t speak for MySpace, but Facebook access seems to have been restored yesterday (haven’t checked yet today).

This morning, a strange combination of “Personal and Social Networking Sites” are also blocked, with no warning.

Included are Flickr, any site hosted at wordpress.org (some sites merely powered by WordPress software), and blogger.com — but not blogspot.com. (Or maybe vice-versa, hard to tell.)

Still, during the workday — so far — I can see all your blog postings via Google Reader. (Even though I can’t see any images from the blocked sites.)

But I can’t actually get to (i.e., comment at) many of them.

(Aside: If your blog posts use those little “– more –” gizmos which restrict viewing to just the first portion of a post, Google Reader likewise will show me only the first portion: I can’t click through to read what follows.)

Anyhow, please don’t be alarmed (or insulted) if I seem to have gone all silent and unidirectional all of a sudden. If the blockade continues, I’ll try to figure out a way to visit more during off-hours

The Interwebs are our Precious. We hates the nasty hobbitses downstairs, we do — nasty hobbitses who steals from us the Precious.

Update: Nope, the doors are locked to Facebook, too. Also Twitter. I experimented a little last week with something called Posterous.com, which would allow me to update FB/Twitter status… but not to read/comment on anyone else’s status, which (for me) is 80% of the attraction. Sigh.

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Breaking It Down

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From whiskey river:

The states of mind or feelings that art can excite have been helpfully distinguished in Sanskrit aesthetics, where they are called rasas, from a word meaning “juice” or “essence”. A fully achieved work of art should flow with all nine of them: their names might be transposed into English as wonder, joy, sexual pleasure, pity, anguish, anger, terror, disgust and laughter.

(Marina Warner, Monsters of Our Own Making [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Naming of Parts

To-day we have naming of parts. Yesterday,
We had daily cleaning. And to-morrow morning,
We shall have what to do after firing. But to-day,
To-day we have naming of parts. Japonica
Glistens like coral in all of the neighboring gardens,
And to-day we have naming of parts.

This is the lower sling swivel. And this
Is the upper sling swivel, whose use you will see,
When you are given your slings. And this is the piling swivel,
Which in your case you have not got. The branches
Hold in the gardens their silent, eloquent gestures,
Which in our case we have not got.

This is the safety-catch, which is always released
With an easy flick of the thumb. And please do not let me
See anyone using his finger. You can do it quite easy
If you have any strength in your thumb. The blossoms
Are fragile and motionless, never letting anyone see
Any of them using their finger.

And this you can see is the bolt. The purpose of this
Is to open the breech, as you see. We can slide it
Rapidly backwards and forwards: we call this
Easing the spring. And rapidly backwards and forwards
The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers:
They call it easing the Spring.

They call it easing the Spring: it is perfectly easy
If you have any strength in your thumb: like the bolt,
And the breech, and the cocking-piece, and the point of balance,
Which in our case we have not got; and the almond-blossom
Silent in all of the gardens and the bees going backwards and
forwards,
For to-day we have naming of parts.

(Henry Reed, from Lessons of the War [source]; see an excellent film interpretation of the poem here.)

[Read more…]

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