Running After My Hat

Real-Life Dialogue

March 23, 2009 by John 5 Comments

[The scene: a small quasi-hallway between garage and kitchen in a suburban house somewhere in North Florida.]

She: [pointing to weird, waist-high structure made of woven twigs and/or sticks, with four legs, a torso, and a head from which antlers sprout] Why is that still here?

He: [studiously ignoring the obvious] Why is what still here?

She: That. The reindeer.

He: Well, it’s a Christmas orn–

She: But Christmas was three months ago. Why is that reindeer still here?

He: Maybe it would help if you don’t think of it as a reindeer. Think of it as a stag.

She: It’s not a stag! Put it with the other Christmas stuff!

Everyday Heroes (Update #2)

March 21, 2009 by John 2 Comments

Things continue to pop on the real-life superhero front.

A few days ago, I posted an update to an earlier post about real-life people who don costumes, fight crime, have secret identities and sometimes superpowers, and so on. In that first post, from January, I featured (among other crusaders) one Entomo, a “Crime-fighting/Environmentalist/Detective” who “patrols the streets of Naples and promotes environmental awareness.”

So anyhow, earlier this week I got a comment to that January post, beginning, “This is Entomo. Please do not make fun of me.” Its author asserted that he takes very seriously the business of patrolling the streets, etc., is very sexy, and appeals to “the ladies… despite my bug size man proportions.” The comment ended with Entomo’s signature phrase: I inject justice.

Well, who was I to doubt? Accordingly, that comment was the focus of the news-update post from earlier this week. (You’re keeping the chain of events straight, right?)

Now I am in receipt of yet another comment… to the update! This one says:

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Dogs, Lions, and Fish (Oh My!)

March 20, 2009 by John 5 Comments

From whiskey river:

When you run after your thoughts, you are like a dog chasing a stick: every time a stick is thrown, you run after it. Instead, be like a lion who, rather than chasing after the stick, turns to face the thrower. One only throws a stick at a lion once.

(Milarepa)

Not from whiskey river:

The End Of March
For John Malcolm Brinnin and Bill Read: Duxbury

It was cold and windy, scarcely the day
to take a walk on that long beach
Everything was withdrawn as far as possible,
indrawn: the tide far out, the ocean shrunken,
seabirds in ones or twos.
The rackety, icy, offshore wind
numbed our faces on one side;
disrupted the formation
of a lone flight of Canada geese;
and blew back the low, inaudible rollers
in upright, steely mist.

The sky was darker than the water
—it was the color of mutton-fat jade.
Along the wet sand, in rubber boots, we followed
a track of big dog-prints (so big
they were more like lion-prints). Then we came on
lengths and lengths, endless, of wet white string,
looping up to the tide-line, down to the water,
over and over. Finally, they did end:
a thick white snarl, man-size, awash,
rising on every wave, a sodden ghost,
falling back, sodden, giving up the ghost…
A kite string?–But no kite.

I wanted to get as far as my proto-dream-house,
my crypto-dream-house, that crooked box
set up on pilings, shingled green,
a sort of artichoke of a house, but greener
(boiled with bicarbonate of soda?),
protected from spring tides by a palisade
of–are they railroad ties?
(Many things about this place are dubious.)
I’d like to retire there and do nothing,
or nothing much, forever, in two bare rooms:
look through binoculars, read boring books,
old, long, long books, and write down useless notes,
talk to myself, and, foggy days,
watch the droplets slipping, heavy with light.
At night, a grog a l’américaine.
I’d blaze it with a kitchen match
and lovely diaphanous blue flame
would waver, doubled in the window.
There must be a stove; there is a chimney,
askew, but braced with wires,
and electricity, possibly
–at least, at the back another wire
limply leashes the whole affair
to something off behind the dunes.
A light to read by–perfect! But–impossible.
And that day the wind was much too cold
even to get that far,
and of course the house was boarded up.

On the way back our faces froze on the other side.
The sun came out for just a minute.
For just a minute, set in their bezels of sand,
the drab, damp, scattered stones
were multi-colored,
and all those high enough threw out long shadows,
individual shadows, then pulled them in again.
They could have been teasing the lion sun,
except that now he was behind them
–a sun who’d walked the beach the last low tide,
making those big, majestic paw-prints,
who perhaps had batted a kite out of the sky to play with.

(Elizabeth Bishop [source (pages 15-16)])

…and:

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Everyday Heroes (UPDATE)

March 17, 2009 by John 9 Comments

You may remember my post from a couple months ago, about the real-life superheroes who have identified themselves via a site called the World Superhero Registry. I’ve recently heard from one of the superheroes featured in that post (or at least, from someone claiming to be that superhero): Entomo, the “Crime-fighting/Environmentalist/Detective” who “patrols the streets of Naples and promotes environmental awareness.”

(That’s Entomo’s logo over there at the right. According to a page at the Entomo Resource Center, this is “‘Broken Time’,” that is, “A stylized capital sigma resembling an hourglass.” Earlier, we knew only that he had chosen the sigma because (a) “I sum up all the powerful, silent and venomous small creatures inhabiting this world,” and (b) “I’m a synthesis, the human-like swansong of millions of races.”)

I knew something was up when my blog stats started to zoom over the last couple days — only on the “Everyday Heroes” page, and nearly all of them Google Image searches for entomo… and from various places around Europe, but nowhere else.

Still, I was surprised to hear from the man himself. Here’s what he said (which appears as a comment on that earlier post):

This is Entomo-
Please do not make fun of me. I am a Superhero. I have no time for child games. I patrol the dark streets of Naples, even though all my pictures are of me in my living room. I also have a partner. Pay no attention to the fact there is not a picture of the both of us together. So… do not make any comments. I am a very sexy Superhero and the ladies love me, despite my bug size man proportions.
I inject Justice

Update (2009-03-21): Curioser and curioser… For more about the above passage, see this comment, below, and my post of today.

I want to reassure Entomo and any other superheroes — as well as their everyday alter egos — that I was not “making fun.” (Regular readers here know that I rarely make fun of anyone, really, but myself.) As Entomo himself says in his writeup about the reasons why people adopt a superhero persona:

…you’re providing people with a real symbol, and yourself with somewhat of a “self-avatar”, one million of times stronger than your former “civilian-self”.

Inspiration plays a major role in this, of course. You can inspire people to believe in a symbol. You can inspire people to believe they can create themselves a symbol and embody it… and it’s not a lie. It’s all true. It’s the projection of an internal truth.

Everyone can lead his/her own destiny. We’re pawns of ourselves on the great, universal chessboard. It’s up to us to establish if the great game of reality must end in good or evil.

So no, I was not amused. On the other hand, I was (both originally, and now) what you might call bemused. Which is to say: confused; bewildered; perplexed.

In short, remember yesterday’s post, which concluded with the head-tilting dog? I think I just feel like that dog.

Being Here (Today)

March 13, 2009 by John 16 Comments

From whiskey river (first 3+ lines not included there):

from The Ninth Duino Elegy

Why, if this interval of being can be spent serenely
in the form of a laurel, slightly darker than all
other green, with tiny waves on the edges
of every leaf (like the smile of a breeze)–: why then
have to be human–and, escaping from fate,
keep longing for fate?. . .

Oh not because happiness exists,
that too-hasty profit snatched from approaching loss.
Not out of curiosity, not as practice for the heart, which
would exist in the laurel too. . . . .

But because truly being here is so much; because everything here
apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some
strange way
keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.
Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too,
just once. And never again. But to have been
this once, completely, even if only once:
to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.

(Rainer Maria Rilke, c. 1922 [source])

…and:

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then one of them looks over at the other and says, “What the hell is water?”

(David Foster Wallace, 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College [source])

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Call Me Unreliable

March 9, 2009 by John 8 Comments

My fairly regular posting schedule here at RAMH — averaging a post a day — is about to run off the rails.

This is a good thing, as it happens. See, I’m just about ready to start spending my morning writing sessions in writing, all over again, the book I refer to as my Work In Progress. Since August or so, I’ve been plowing through the three earlier drafts (written over the course of almost 15 years) — getting my head wrapped around the characters, and the twisty plot, and the background (real) history and how the WIP’s story line weaves in and out of it, and… and… and…

Now the time has come to put aside the tools of critical reader, of careful researcher (if you will) into the mysteries of a story much of which I’d forgotten. It’s time to face again a blank screen, tremble just a bit, and start hammering at the keyboard.

I’ll still be posting here, from time to time. In the first place, I’ve still got something like a couple dozen draft posts in the pipeline (including one to appear later today), and plenty of ideas for others. And, for sure, I’ll continue to post the Friday whiskey river-driven meditations. For those of you with blogs of your own, I’ll still be stopping by to lob comments over your transoms. And for those of you on Facebook (and, to a lesser extent, on Twitter), I’ll still be around there as well.

Finally, I’ve done this kind of thing often enough that I know I will need distraction every now and then.

But, well, duty beckons. :)

Paying Attention to I-Don’t-Know-What

February 24, 2009 by John 4 Comments

When telling people about my flipping back and forth from technical writing to fiction, I usually say I went for five years without writing anything at all.

That’s not exactly true. Truth is, after about four years I’d had enough. I couldn’t stand it anymore. I didn’t have anything specific I meant to write, but just sitting around — I wasn’t, really, but you know what I mean — was starting to make me a little crazy.

So I told The Missus I meant to get up early the next morning and I did. Staggered to the computer, bleary-eyed, with a cup of tea in hand. Opened the word processor. Let my hands hover over the keyboard and typed:

It’s 1927, late on a mid-June morning.

A few things about this very brief sentence:

I just about never write in the present tense. From the first word, I was already surprising myself.
What the hell did — do — I know about 1927? My only connection to that year remains tenuous: my dad had been three years old then. But I had no stories about his life as a little kid that I was preparing to channel. (Really, I had no such stories at all.)
The morning on which I wrote those words was not in mid-June, and the time was certainly earlier than later. But we’d been wallowing in one of those weeks of high heat and humidity which periodically drag their lazy way through North Florida regardless of season. And that environmental influence, in retrospect, certainly had something to do with that first sentence and what followed.

The story which came out of that brief fling with an early-morning routine — it lasted maybe a week, maybe two — is called “The Running Boy.” I never finished it; got a little over 6,000 words into it and just ran out of steam. Not abandoned by the Muse, not tired of the story itself. Just plain tired. (I hadn’t adjusted my bedtime to allow for the early morning schedule, instead counting on the adrenaline rush of writing again to carry me through a day on four hours’ sleep. Say it with me: Duh.)

But “The Running Boy” continued to interest me for a number of reasons (some of them hinted at in that opening sentence).

The plot itself — or rather, the thing-which-the-plot-seemed-to-be-about, what Hitchcock used to call the MacGuffin — caught me completely unawares. I wish I knew how it turned out.

I experimented (again, no idea why) with writing dialect. While I often give my characters characteristic rhythms of speech and other little verbal tics of their own, what I’ve got of “The Running Boy” represents my only attempt to give characters what you might call accents. And I don’t think it’s too heavy-handed. (We’re not talking Joel Chandler Harris here.)

The story has three main characters — probably two too many for a short story. But while it lasted, I had great fun working out their relationships. (In the back of my mind, they’re continuing their adventures with one another somewhere.)

Finally, the genre is one which I’d never seriously attempted. At that, the genre itself was a sort of MacGuffin; “The Running Boy” — at least its first 6K words — has even less to do with the genre than it does with, say, computers and the Internet. The story more or less announces its genre within the first few paragraphs and then more or less forgets it; the point, as it happens, seems to have been the characters after all.

Anyway, for what it’s worth — and for the sake of whatever my mind thought itself to be achieving — here are the first 1700+ words of “The Running Boy.” (I haven’t edited this at all, just copied-‘n’-pasted it from the document, so it doesn’t take long to make me cringe at stuff I wish I’d rewritten.)

Enjoy!

The Look of a Writer’s Blog: Putting Readers at Ease

February 21, 2009 by John 12 Comments

[This borders on “for geeks only” territory. But I think it’s worth at least some attention if you aspire to get — and keep — a reading audience for your words on the Web.]

A highly respected site for Web-site designers, typographers, and so on, is called A List Apart. It’s been around for years, freely dispensing advice and information from various experts on how to make pages look good and behave properly.

You may or may not know that a given page looks differently when viewed in one Web browser vs. another (Firefox vs. Internet Explorer vs. Safari vs. Opera vs. whatever); even if you know that, though, you may not know why you perhaps should care… let alone what to do about it. If that bothers you, and if you’re not too intimidated by tech subjects presented gracefully, A List Apart needs to be in your bookmarks list.

Regardless of your expertise, I want to draw your attention to a recent article by Mandy Brown, “In Defense of Readers.” It will be of interest to anyone placing his or or her words online, in an environment — like a blog — where one hopes or expects to attract readers as well as mere visitors.

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Of Time, Things Small, and Things Green

February 20, 2009 by John 6 Comments

From whiskey river:

The Moment

Walking the three tiers in first light, out
here so my two-year-old son won’t wake the house,
I watch him pull and strip ragweed, chicory, yarrow,
so many other weeds and wildflowers
I don’t know the names for, him saying Big, and Mine,
and Joshua — words, words, words. Then
it is the moment, that split-second
when he takes my hand, gives it a tug,
and I feel his entire body-weight, his whole
heart-weight, pulling me toward
the gleaming flowers and weeds he loves.
That moment which is eternal and is gone in a second,
when he yanks me out of myself like some sleeper
from his dead-dream sleep into the blues and whites
and yellows I must bend down to see clearly, into
the faultless flesh of his soft hands, his new brown eyes,
the miracle of him, and of the earth itself,
where he lives among the glitterings, and takes me.

(Len Roberts)

Not from whiskey river:

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What’s in a Song: I Get Along Without You Very Well
(Part 2)

February 19, 2009 by John 13 Comments

Excerpt from Hoagy Carmichael's 1st draft of 'I Get Along Without You Very Well' [This is another in an occasional series on popular songs with long histories. Part 1 — on the song itself as finally recorded by numerous artists — appeared on Tuesday.]

Hoagy Carmichael published “I Get Along Without You Very Well” in 1938. (The copyright date was November 18.) But the song’s history stretched back over 15 years earlier, and the sheet music as published bore two signs of this past:

The full title of the song included, at the end, “(Except Sometimes)” — a phrase which appears nowhere in the lyrics.
Following Carmichael’s name as the songwriter appeared the note, “Words inspired by a poem by J.B. (?)”

Why “Except Sometimes”? Who was J.B.? And why that trailing question mark?

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