Running After My Hat

Comment Madness

February 18, 2009 by John 9 Comments

Attention readers: exciting news!

Sorry, folks, the commpetition (snort, cackle) is now closed. The winner is Tessa, of Nuts & Mutton.

And heck, I’m feeling so expansive right now that I’ll even toss the pen I use to sign it into the box.

As you can see from the partial screen capture at the left, Running After My Hat has to date received 999 approved comments (including pingbacks).

For the author of the 1,000th comment, I’m giving away a prize: a signed copy of my next book.

Fire away!

_________________________

TERMS AND CONDITIONS:

Void where prohibited by law.
John reserves the right to do things like post-date comments or otherwise shuffle them around if, like, say, a complete stranger on a random drive-through just happens to catch this post and sprays the comment box with text.
…which isn’t to say he WILL, only that he MAY.
Family of RAMH crew members not eligible.
…or, possibly, eligible.
As any regular reader here knows, my “next book” is at this time merely a possibility.
It’s the thought that counts.

What’s in a Song: I Get Along Without You Very Well
(Part 1)

February 17, 2009 by John 10 Comments

[Another in an occasional series on popular songs with appeal across the generations. This post will be broken into two parts; Part 2, about this song’s composition, appears tomorrow [edit to add:] or the next day Thursday.]

There’s a trick performed by some songwriters — I don’t know the term for it, if there is one — in which they “overstuff” their lyrics’ lines with extra syllables.

This is similar to what, in poetry, is called sprung rhythm: “verse” which mimics the rhythm of natural speech.

It also calls to mind a sly little bit of business by Alexander Pope. In demonstrating the awkwardness of so-called alexandrine meter — twelve syllables per line — Pope once, as Wikipedia says, “famously characterized the alexandrine’s potential to slow or speed the flow of a poem in two rhyming couplets consisting of an iambic pentameter followed by an alexandrine.” One of these two couplets goes:

A needless alexandrine ends the song
that like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along.

See the way that second line seems overloaded with syllables? That’s pretty much the idea I’m getting at here.

In a song, though, the effect can be either subtler or more ponderous, as the words follow the underlying instrumentation — and depending on the singer’s skill. It’s not like we’re just reading the words on a page, free to imagine, if we want, that the line breaks and meter don’t count at all: it has to “sound right.”

So let’s start out with the lyrics, then, to “I Get Along Without You Very Well” (Hoagy Carmichael*, 1939):

I get along without you very well,
Of course I do,
Except when soft rains fall
And drip from leaves, then I recall
The thrill of being sheltered in your arms.
Of course, I do.
But I get along without you very well.

I’ve forgotten you just like I should,
Of course I have,
Except to hear your name,
Or someone’s laugh that is the same,
But I’ve forgotten you just like I should.

What a guy, what a fool am I.
To think my breaking heart could kid the moon.
What’s in store? Should I phone once more?
No, it’s best that I stick to my tune.

I get along without you very well,
Of course I do.
Except perhaps in spring.
But I should never think of spring,
For that would surely break my heart in two.

[Read more…]

Insufficient World and Time

February 9, 2009 by John 6 Comments

Jeez, when I get backed up from stuff at work and stuff at home and stuff everywhere in between, the first casualty is obviously the blog. I’ve got a couple things simmering in draft form but don’t know if I’ll get to one of them today.

In the meantime, please play quietly among yourselves.

And yes, I am watching you. So behave.

Finding What’s Important, Holding onto It Once Found

February 6, 2009 by John 4 Comments

From whiskey river:

Nothing is ever lost. If you have moved over vast territories and dared to love silly things, you will have learned even from the most primitive items collected and put aside in your life. From an ever-roaming curiosity in all the arts, from bad radio to good theatre, from nursery rhyme to symphony, from jungle compound to Kafka’s Castle, there is basic excellence to be winnowed out, truths found, kept, savored, and used on some later day. To be a child of one’s time is to do all these things.

(Ray Bradbury, from Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Inside You)

Not from whiskey river:

Happiness

Why, Dot asks, stuck in the back
seat of her sister’s two-door, her freckled hand
feeling the roof for the right spot
to pull her wide self up onto her left,
the unarthritic, ankle — why
does her sister, coaching outside on her cane,
have to make her laugh so, she flops
back just as she was, though now
looking wistfully out through the restaurant
reflected in her back window, she seems bigger,
and couldn’t possibly mean we should go
ahead in without her, she’ll be all right, and so
when you finally place the pillow behind her back
and lift her right out into the sunshine,
all four of us are happy, none more
than she, who straightens the blossoms
on her blouse, says how nice it is to get out
once in a while, and then goes in to eat
with the greatest delicacy (oh
I could never finish all that) and aplomb
the complete roast beef dinner with apple crisp
and ice cream, just a small scoop.

(by Wesley McNair, from The Town of No and My Brother Running)

…and — simply because Wesley McNair has landed in my mind, swooping in out of nowhere, and now I keep finding more of his stuff I love — this:

[Read more…]

Paying Attention to Bits of Everyday Life

January 31, 2009 by John 6 Comments

When writing-related blogs ask their writing audience when, exactly, they “knew” they were writers, the answer most commonly offered is: I’ve always wanted to write.

Not so, in my case. Up until seventh grade, I had no such ambition, although teachers and family members had often complimented me on my writing. (I remember one grandmother — this was probably when I was around ten years old — chuckling in her grandmotherly way at something I’d said. Then she stopped for a moment, looked at me, and said, It’s not so much what you say, Johnny. It’s how you say it. Obviously, I never forgot that moment.)

In high school, one of the teachers I became friends with was Mr. Hanlon, who taught trig, physics, and calculus. He kept telling me I needed to consider a career in engineering.

No, I’d say, engineering didn’t interest me. I wanted to be a writer.

A look of almost-mock horror would flash across his face. “A writer?” he’d exclaim. “What about engineering?!?”

[Read more…]

Shucks, Folks. I’m Speechless.

January 29, 2009 by John 12 Comments

I’m a godawful blogger in at least one sense: I don’t do much to promote RAMH, other than to visit sites I like — visit them regularly, for the most part — and just let this site be discovered, if the reader should choose, by (a) following the link to it from the “JES” in comments elsewhere, or (b) wandering in, all unawares, probably as the result of a misguided left turn in the halls of Google.

(When I do provide an explicit link to a post here, it’s always with a cringe and a hurried look away, in the other direction — almost hoping no one catches me in the act.)

Like, what’s wrong with me? Don’t I know how important it is that I suck in not only the intentional but also the accidental audience? Don’t I want to [insert gigundo-scaled objective here] sooner rather than later?

Apparently not.

Thus, positive attention from any quarter at all feels wondrous to me. It’s like waking up on a sunny morning to find a rainbow arching through the sliding-glass patio door and terminating mid-forehead.

So anyhow, generous Kate over at What Kate Did Next has seen fit to pass to me and four others this… this… “baton,” is it, Kate? This emblem, in any case, of something called the Superior Scribbler Award, first begun by The Scholastic Scribe in a post back in October. Here’s the driving motivation for the award, per the Scribe:

Diverting the internal traffic between the Writer as Angel of Light and the Writer as Hustler is the scribbling child in a grown-up body, wondering if anyone is listening.

(by Herbert Gold, elder statesman of The Beat Generation)

“Scribbling child in a grown-up body”: I can’t think of a nicer compliment, irrespective of anyone’s listening or not.

[Read more…]

Real-Life Dialogue

January 28, 2009 by John 5 Comments

He: So what kind of car did she get?

She: I don’t know, I forget. It starts with an “E.” Some kind of American car.

He: […prolonged thoughtful silence…]

[time passes]

She: I wish I could remember what kind of car it was.

He: Well, the only kind I could think of that started with an “E” is “Elantra,” but that’s a foreign—

She: I’m not sure it starts with an “E.”

He: Oh… Well, since she got it from a Chevrolet dealer, is it a Chevrolet at least?

She: I don’t know!… Name some kinds of Pontiac. A sporty Pontiac.

He: Well, there’s the Firebird but I don’t think they make them anymore.

She: They don’t. And it’s not a Firebird anyway.

He: […]

She: Name some more Pontiacs. Sporty ones.

He: Uh… Grand Prix?

She: No, it’s not a Grand Prix… Maybe it is a Grand Prix.

[dials phone, talks briefly]

She: Yes. It’s a Grand Prix.

The Satisfactions of the Small, Found in the Large

January 23, 2009 by John 5 Comments

From whiskey river:

Only horizon and sky are given up easily. Take the numbing distance in small doses and gorge on the little details that beckon.

(William Least Heat-Moon)

Not from whiskey river (one of The Missus’s favorite poems):

I Am Too Near

I am too near to be dreamt of by him.
I do not fly over him, do not escape from him
under the roots of a tree. I am too near.
Not in my voice sings the fish in the net,
not from my finger rolls the ring.
I am too near. A big house is on fire
without me, calling for help. Too near
for a bell dangling from my hair to chime.
Too near to enter as a guest
before whom walls glide apart by themselves.
Never again will I die so lightly,
so much beyond my flesh, so inadvertently
as once in his dream. Too near.
I taste the sound, I see the glittering husk of this word
as I lie immobile in his embrace. He sleeps,
more accessible now to her, seen but once,
a cashier of a wandering circus with one lion,
than to me, who am at his side.
For her now in him a valley grows,
rusty-leaved, closed by a snowy mountain
in the dark blue air. I am too near
to fall to him from the sky. My scream
could wake him up. Poor thing
I am, limited to my shape,
I who was a birch, who was a lizard,
who would come out of my cocoons
shimmering the colors of my skins. Who possessed
the grace of disappearing from astonished eyes,
which is a wealth of wealths. I am near,
too near for him to dream of me.
I slide my arm from under the sleeper’s had
and it is numb, full of swarming pins,
on the tip of each, waiting to be counted,
the fallen angels sit.

(Wislawa Szymborska;
translation by Czeslaw Milosz)

Finally, an undisputed master at the reverse: finding large things in the small (click Play button to start):

[audio:billcosbychickenheart.mp3|titles=’Chicken Heart’|artists=Bill Cosby]

Placeholder Post: Update on Caboodle Ranch

January 15, 2009 by John Leave a Comment

Those of you who read the “Extreme Ailurophilia” post of last week and worried about the long-term fate of Caboodle Ranch’s hundreds of cats might find comfort in two items:

Nanette, of Pet Palaces in North Carolina, offered a couple of reassuring comments to help explain why some of the worry is misplaced. She comes down once a month, for 7-10 days at a time, to give Craig Grant a hand with the ranch. She and her husband build the “gingerbread houses” for the cats and, she says, are effectively in training to take over for Grant in the event he can’t continue to do the work himself.
At the time my post went up, the article I’d read about Caboodle Ranch had not yet been posted at the magazine’s site. It has now. (Also note the two sidebars, offering more information about feral cats in general.)

[A “real” post coming later today, the gods of the clock willing.]

Paying Attention to Meaning

January 14, 2009 by John Leave a Comment

I wanted to try something… something different for our writing workshop back then.

Not something funny (or was it?). Not something in the psychological horror line. Not a genre piece, not an obviously literary piece. For that matter, none of the things that would pop into workshoppers’ heads when they sat down to read it and started to answer the question, What sort of story has John written?

I wanted to overturn expectations. They knew what sort of story I wrote, after all, or so they thought: a story with some quirky protagonist at center stage, acting out some strange mental drama in a world which stubbornly resisted his or her preconceived ideas of the way the world should work. A story with a lot of… of… thwarting going on.

They’d expect a story, furthermore, that went on for thousands of words.

[Read more…]