Perfect Moments: The Boy, The Boy’s Father, The Sandwich
When The Boy grew up, he would tell people — with slight hesitation, thinking first of pizza — that his favorite food of all was sandwiches.
But there was a time when this was not true. There was a time when all that The Boy knew of sandwiches was what his mother made for him, and what he learned to make for himself:
Peanut butter and jelly, of course; tuna (with mayonnaise, lettuce optional); American cheese (in casual or formal versions, with jelly or mayonnaise respectively); ham and cheese (margarine and mustard); liverwurst (sometimes with cheese, always with mustard). Regardless of specific ingredients, these sandwiches all had one feature in common:
White bread.
Letting Go, with Thanks
From whiskey river:
The wonder of a moment in which there is nothing but an upwelling of simple happiness is utterly awesome. Gratitude is so close to the bone of life, pure and true, that it instantly stops the rational mind, and all its planning and plotting. That kind of let go is fiercely threatening. I mean, where might such gratitude end?
(Regina Sara Ryan, Praying Dangerously)
Not from whiskey river:
Don’t pray when it rains if you don’t pray when the sun shines.
(Leroy “Satchel” Paige, New York Post, October 4, 1959)
…and:
My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it’s on your plate — that’s my philosophy.
(Thornton Wilder, “Sabiba,” The Skin of Our Teeth)
Finally, the song chosen to wrap up the Northern Exposure series. Not everyone is a fan of Iris Dement’s voice, but I think this is a great song. The performance was on Austin City Limits. (If you’d prefer to see the Northern Exposure version, it’s on YouTube as well — in a shorter and quite darkly lit video.)
Lyrics:
Our Town
(words and music by Iris Dement)And you know the sun’s settin’ fast
and just like they say nothing good ever lasts
Well, go on now and kiss it goodbye but hold on to your lover
’cause your heart’s bound to die
Go on now and say goodbye to our town, to our town
Can’t you see the sun’s settin’ down on our town, on our town
goodnight
Up the street beside that red neon light
that’s where I met my baby on one hot summer night
He was the tender and I ordered a beer
It’s been forty years and I’m still sitting hereBut you know the sun’s settin’ fast
and just like they say nothing good ever lasts
Well, go on now and kiss it goodbye but hold on to your lover
’cause your heart’s bound to die
Go on now and say goodbye to our town, to our town
Can’t you see the sun’s settin’ down on our town, on our town
goodnightIt’s here I had my baby’s and I had my first kiss
I’ve walked down Main Street in the cold morning mist
Over there is where I bought my first car
it turned over once but then it never went farAnd I can see the sun settin’ fast
and just like they say nothing good ever lasts
Well, go on now and kiss it goodbye but hold on to your lover
’cause your heart’s bound to die
Go on now and say goodbye to our town, to our town
Can’t you see the sun’s settin’ down on our town, on our town
goodnightI buried my Mama and I buried my Pa
They sleep up the street beside that pretty brick wall
I bring them flowers about every day
but I just gotta cry when I think what they’d sayIf they could see how the sun’s settin’ fast
and just like they say nothing good ever lasts
Well, go on now and kiss it goodbye but hold on to your lover
’cause your heart’s bound to die
Go on now and say goodbye to our town, to our town
Can’t you see the sun’s settin’ down on our town, on our town
goodnightNow I sit on the porch and watch the lightning-bugs fly
but I can’t see too good, I got tears in my eyes
I’m leaving tomorrow but I don’t wanna go
I love you my town, you’ll always live in my soulBut I can see the sun’s settin’ fast
and just like they say nothing good ever lasts
Well, go on I gotta kiss you goodbye but I’ll hold to my lover
’cause my heart’s ’bout to die
Go on now and say goodbye to my town, to my town
Can’t you see the sun’s settin’ down on my town, on my town
Goodnight, goodnight
Flange: The Gargoyle’s Back Story
[I introduced you to my new co-blogger, a gargoyle named (well, his name is pronounced this way) Flange, just the other day. In this, his inaugural post, Flange wanted to give you some idea how he got where he is, i.e., as a professional gargoyle. When and if needed, I’ll interject brief commentary and/or supply footnotes.]
Was born, me, a small granite child. Parents, mine, were three, very common among people, my: mother, father, bother. Please, not to insert “r” that word, in. “Bother,” just.
Humans not know, no they not, about habits, mating of people Flj, such as. Flj explain. Try to:
Mother, father, you know, same with you. Join together, sacred mating ritual But “bother” how pronounced, third parent type—
John: Flange, Flange, Flange — for crissake, this is painful to watch! Aside from which, you’re beating the hell out of my keyboard. Why don’t we do this — why don’t you just tell me what you want to say and I’ll key it in for you? Maybe translate a little as I go along—
Flange: That kay with Flj. Not change meaning, you, no? Flj’s voice, unique, preserve, you, right? Flj have pride, authorial, too! Kay. Your way, have it. The human, you are. “Boss,” ha ha ha.
Meet the Co-Blogger
So, all right — I didn’t post an entry yesterday.
Well, let’s just say that after last week, when I posted not one but TWO entries on not one but TWO separate days*, I thought, y’know, I could afford to relax.
As those of you who (like me) try to post something every day already know, the world sometimes gets in the way. Family must be attended to. Bills must be paid and, uh, well, wages must be earned with which to pay them — we’re not just talking about writing checks here. Meals must be prepared. And yes, sadly, sleep must be had. To say nothing of writer’s block and the occasional drying-up of the well of draft posts.
None of that was responsible for my absence yesterday. No, yesterday my blogtime was given over entirely to training an helpmeet, as the expression goes — someone to stand in for me when Things Happen. In today’s post, I simply introduce him to you.
Knowing Only the Present
Since history is on my mind anyway…
From Jeff VanderMeer’s Ecstatic Days blog recently, by guest blogger Tero Ykspetäjä: the top five reasons “Why Finnish Is Cooler Than English.” Reason #5 (with slightly tongue-in-cheek coda):
There’s no future tense in the Finnish language. The present tense is used instead. “No future,” as the Tähtivaeltaja slogan says. This makes it easy to seize the day, to live in the moment and not worry about tomorrow. At least in theory. There are some who insist on trying to introduce a sort-of future tense by artificial constructs like “you will come to know this,” but they are clearly in the wrong and should stop immediately.
I jogged over to Wikipedia and found this example:
The future tense is not needed due to context and the telic contrast. For example, luen kirjan “I read a book (completely)” indicates a future, [while] luen kirjaa “I read a book (not yet complete)” indicates present.
(If you’re a native English speaker — perhaps especially so — contemplating following the link to Wikipedia’s article on telicity, and you are not a linguist, prepare yourself to learn more about the language than you ever picked up in Mrs. Grundy’s fifth-period class. Let alone on the playground.)
All of which got me wondering: are there any languages with no past tense?
Duh, what a question. I should have known this (emphasis mine):
All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphology — i.e., changes in form of a word — to indicate the word’s function in a sentence. In other words, Chinese has few grammatical inflections — it possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), only a few articles (i.e., equivalents to “the, a, an” in English), and no gender.
It’s a topic for a *cough* future post, maybe. But I’ve always been interested in the idea that knowing one language from birth, as opposed to another, might (does?) shape the way one thinks throughout life.
For instance, if you have no grammatical form to express the future tense, can you even think in terms of a time containing events which have not yet happened? If you can’t express the past, what goes through your mind the first time you see a timeline? If your language has no tenses at all, do you have clocks and calendars? What does “time” itself mean to you? If you forget something you mean to pick up on the way home from work, what is the context in which you fail to pick it up, vs. the context in which you formed your intention to remember it in the first place — is there a “when”? (And what on Earth do you make of bizarre concepts like “daylight savings time”?)
Surely it can’t be that you think of “time” only as what English speakers call the present, a sort of neverending concurrency. Surely you don’t think you may walk out your front door and eventually come within (say) a mile of where the Emperor Gaozu is currently taking a bath.
Er… can you?
I think I’m experiencing some sort of linguo-philosophical vertigo here. (Almost said “at the moment” but, well…)
[P.S. For the link to the post on Finnish-vs.-English which started this avalanche of paradox, thanks to the “Instant Distractions” sidebar at Colleen Lindsay’s blog.]
Paying Attention to History
If you’ve been visiting Running After My Hat for more than a few days, you already know about what you might politely call my serial attentiveness. Theoretically, this is a blog about writing. But then, oh, yeah — there’s stuff about music. And true, I rattle on sometimes about reading, too, but isn’t that sorta kinda like about writing? Oh, well, all right, yes I do post — but less often! — about tech stuff, and politics, and art and photography and poetry…
When working on a large-scale project like a book, similarly, I sometimes wander off the main road, suddenly absorbed in distractions of landscape and weather and architecture.
Oddly, this sometimes works to the advantage of the book in question (although, all right all right fine, it sometimes does not — and probably just as oddly).
Surprising (But Welcome) (But SURPRISING) News
Okay, okay. We could quibble with the wording. Shouldn’t that be “the average blogger‘s“? Does “81% shorter than” mean “81% as long as” or does it mean “19% as long as”? And who knows how accurate this is, or how they calculate the average length of a blogger (or his/her posts)? Surely it can’t mean “…as compared to the entire universe of blogs”?
Still, the word “shorter” is inarguably seductive. (In this context, anyhow.)
And then of course, for you anarchists out there, it’s easy enough to manipulate the results, just by goofing around with the underlying HTML:
Reassuring, though. Even if it IS a fantasy.
(Click the image to check your own blog posts’, er, stature.)
Update: Be sure to read Kate Lord Brown’s comment, below — and my reply — to understand why you almost certainly should not panic about this. I’m pretty sure the results, well, verge on the bogus. Misleading, let’s say.
Words Enough, and Time
[The clock above was designed by Caroline Lisfranc, replacing the numbers on the clock face with a dozen French verbs. The English translation (starting with one o’clock and moving, duh, clockwise) is to divide, to give, to listen, to work, to love, to dream, to reflect, to laugh, to tinker, to travel, to grow, and to speak.]
Changing things up a little for a Friday post…
Here’s an audio track to accompany the rest of the entry. Start it now to play in the background as you read, or come back and listen later. The song is “Lakmé,” the first number on the uncanny and apparently never-to-be-followed-up album Coco de Mer. It’s almost four minutes long — much longer than it will take for you to read the selections. So feel free to listen for a while, then start reading, finish, and listen to the end.
[audio:lakme_cocodemer.mp3|titles=Lakmé|artists=Coco de Mer]
From whiskey river:
Enough. These few words are enough.
If not these words, this breath.
If not this breath, this sitting here.
This opening to the life
we have refused
again and again
until now.
Until now.
(David Whyte, “lassie and timmy”)
…and:
A Piece Of The Storm
For Sharon HorvathFrom the shadow of domes in the city of domes,
A snowflake, a blizzard of one, weightless, entered your room
And made its way to the arm of the chair where you, looking up
From your book, saw it the moment it landed.
That’s all There was to it. No more than a solemn waking
To brevity, to the lifting and falling away of attention, swiftly,
A time between times, a flowerless funeral. No more than that
Except for the feeling that this piece of the storm,
Which turned into nothing before your eyes, would come back,
That someone years hence, sitting as you are now, might say:
“It’s time. The air is ready. The sky has an opening.”
(Mark Strand)
Not from whiskey river:
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
(T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock)
…and, as long as we’re talking about having enough time (and words):
For a moment, nothing happened. Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen.
(Douglas Adams)
_______________________________________
More about Coco de Mer (from Rasa Music):
Conceived & produced by Adam Plack, Coco de Mer is a lush fusion of traditional French, Italian, and Latin arias, live orchestration, and instruments which are elegantly stitched together with sensual, downtempo dance grooves & modern music. Coco de Mer is a potent musical experience for the concert virgin. Australian born, New York based, Adam Plack has embraced his own childhood passion for opera, jazz, and the blues with the intention of taking opera from the perfumed arid halls of “Uptown” onto the funky street and into the heart of “Downtown.” Coco de Mer features the angelic vocals of acclaimed soprano Chen Reis [and] virtuoso pianist Ilan Rechtman under [the] direction of Plack. Although the arias written by the great classical composers Bach, Handel, Delibes, Bizet, Puccini and others are a hundred years old and beyond, in Adam Plack’s deft hand the emotions are deeply touching & ring true with us, the 21st Century listener.
As an aside, Adam Plack is a noted player of the Australian didgeridoo. I don’t know if that instrument is on the album as a whole, let alone in “Lakmé” — but wouldn’t be surprised.
Coco de Mer is available
What’s in a Song: Blue Moon
[This is the first in a series of every-now-and-then posts about popular songs with long lives.]
Some great songs go through subtle changes over time: the original lyrics are updated to correspond to more modern diction and taste; rhymes get improved or dropped altogether; refrains are added and subtracted; and of course new arrangements can, with the slightest addition of an instrumental passage, change our very understanding of what a song means.
“Blue Moon” didn’t begin as a classic — not in the form it eventually acquired. While the music remained unchanged, its lyrics didn’t simply evolve: they mutated almost overnight, going through three versions before finally settling down into their fourth and (more or less) final variation.
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 123
- 124
- 125
- 126
- 127
- …
- 129
- Next Page »
