The Online World

Bibliobibuli

February 23, 2009 by John 9 Comments

Got a couple of words for you.

The first is the one in this post’s title. This is:

…a word coined by H. L. Mencken which means “people who read too much and so are generally oblivious to the world around them.”

Many of you probably know such people.

And then there’s dord. Yes: dee-oh-are-dee. Dord.

What an odd word, you’re thinking. It certainly doesn’t look like English. Well, it looks kinda like word. Especially if I tell you it’s a noun, meaning “density.”

There’s just one catch: it’s pretty much impossible to use it in a sentence — at least, if you’re not discussing dord AS a word. Why? Because it doesn’t exist.

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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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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.

Humatons, Arise

February 16, 2009 by John 2 Comments

A disaster which befalls the Internet from time to time is the expiration of Web sites tied not to any particular domain name, but to the sites’ owners.

I’m thinking here of generically-formed URLs, like:

www.someisp.com/~username

Generally, when you get an email address from an ISP you also get some nominal amount of Web space, like 10MB or so, whose address is something like the above. Inevitably, some users make better use of this facility than others. And it’s those odd little back corners of the Web in jeopardy.

I recently came across such a site, called The Kooks Museum. This is a site built by one Donna Kossy, in support of her 1994 book Kooks: A Guide to the Outer Limits of Human Belief. What does she mean by “kooks”? As she happily quotes from the introduction to the book:

What distinguishes “kook” from other dismissive and stigmatizing terms? The various words denoting insanity — “crazy,” “psychotic,” “schizophrenic,” etc. — are not, for my purposes, interchangeable with “kook.” An obsessed murderer may be considered psychopathic or crazy, but more often than not these words categorize action, not belief. The obsessed serial killer is not necessarily a kook.

We must also distinguish kooks from quacks, frauds and hoaxers, for kooks are invariably sincere. Their main intent is not to deceive or defraud; to the contrary, they are trying to impart an essential truth. A kook’s thoughts rarely turn to profit; some squander personal fortunes to investigate or spread The Word. A New Age personality who channels a wise entity from the Pleiades is not a kook if his channeled voice is designed to attract funds.

Finally, it is important to differentiate a kook from an eccentric. An eccentric is defined as someone with an unorthodox lifestyle, which may or may not include unorthodox beliefs. Is a hermit a kook? Can we call a scatological fetishist a kook? Not necessarily, especially if they haven’t codified their own preferences as an eternal truth.

Is this not a useful set of definitions? Is The Kooks Museum not a site worthy of a more permanent home?

I say yes to both questions. (God forbid someone clicking on that hyperlink above should someday be greeted with a dread “404 – Not Found” page.)

In the meantime, here are some samples of the, um, authors and their works commemorated there.

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I Tought I Taw…

February 11, 2009 by John 6 Comments

I’ll go out on a limb here: Twitter “tweets” are the Schrödinger’s cats of Internet phenomena. In general, they exist or do not exist as long as you ignore Twitter altogether; when you actively pay attention, though, each tweet instantly crystallizes into a state of aliveness (Whoa, How about that, Ha!, or Hmm…) or death — forgotten at once. (My own experience indicates that tweets, on average, have a half-life of about two-thirds of a second before the inevitable decay into memes, interstitials, youtubes, and other elementary particles.)

So I haven’t enthusiastically leapt aboard the USS Twitter yet. Life’s too ephemeral as it is, y’know? That said, I do like seeing what others get out of (and sometimes put into) it.

For example, there’s Jon, of the newly (to me) discovered Ransom Note Typography blog (subtitle: “Discontinue Use If Rash Develops”). In a late-December post, Jon exhaustively documents his favorite tweets from 2008. After a brief introduction describing his criteria for selection, he lays out his month-by-month catalog of several tweets per month.

Here’s a small sample:
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The Blogger as Essayist (and Lens)

February 10, 2009 by John 6 Comments

E.B. White, bemused to find himself here Real post for the day imminent. In the meantime, I think this quotation deserves a post of its own:

The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest. He is a fellow who thoroughly enjoys his work, just as people who take bird walks enjoy theirs. Each excursion of the essayist, each new “attempt,” differs from the last and takes him into new country. This delights him. Only a person who is congenitally self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays. There are as many kinds of essays as there are human attitudes or poses, as many essay flavors as there are Howard Johnson ice creams. The essayist arises in the morning and, if he has work to do, selects his garb from an unusually extensive wardrobe: he can pull on any sort of shirt, be any sort of person — philosopher, scold, jester, raconteur, confidant, pundit, devil’s advocate, enthusiast.
[…]
I think some people find the essay the last resort of the egoist, a much too self-conscious and self-serving form for their taste; they feel that it is presumptuous of a writer to assume that his little excursions or his small observations will interest the reader. There is some justice in their complaint. I have always been aware that I am by nature self-absorbed and egoistical; to write of myself to the extent I have done indicates a too great attention to my own life, not enough to the lives of others.

That’s E.B. White, talking to me (and maybe you) across the decades — about blogging.

And if White’s not talking to you, maybe the inimitable xkcd is:

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Ira Glass’s Half-Hour “Master Class in Storytelling”

February 5, 2009 by John 7 Comments

I’ve never attended the annual Gel Conference in New York City, but I always know it’s being held. Afterwards, I always look forward to learning about the year’s events. (Actually, I look forward to that before the conference, too. But I tamp down that particular form of expectation because it makes me wish I were going!)

What is the Gel Conference? It’s one project of a company called Good Experience, which itself is an offshoot of a larger enterprise, Creative Good (founded by one Mark Hurst): “the world’s first user experience consulting firm.” For years, I’ve subscribed to Hurst’s weekly e-newsletter, also called Good Experience; nominally for computer- and other tech-type people, about how to improve a user’s experience of one’s software, Web site, product labeling, and so on, Good Experience actually is a general pack rat’s dream. A given issue generally begins with a mini-essay by Hurst such as the one from 2004 which began:

I walked into a Williams-Sonoma store here in New York a few days ago to return a gift that someone had sent me via the Williams-Sonoma website. When I got to the counter, I explained that I wanted to return the item – I already own something similar and just wanted cash back.

The clerk behind the counter said, “Sorry, sir, but we don’t sell this item in the store. This is going to have to go back.”

“What do you mean, ‘go back’?” I asked.

“It has to go back to the catalog. We don’t sell that item in the store.”

I showed the clerk the purchase receipt. “This *is* Williams-Sonoma, right?”

“Right. But as I told you, there are some items that the catalog sells and we don’t sell. This has to go back to the catalog.”

(Read the whole thing here.)

As for the Gel Conference, its site sums up the annual mission:

Short for “Good Experience Live”, Gel is a conference, and community, exploring good experience in all its forms — in business, technology, art, society, and life.

Instead of focusing on just one thing (design, technology, user experience, business, etc.) like many conferences, Gel touches on many things. This challenges attendees to find, and learn from, the patterns that underlie good experience, even in disciplines vastly different from their own.

Quite a grab bag, in short.

In 2007 one of the Gel speakers was Ira Glass, host of the NPR (and later PBS) program called This American Life. Just a couple days ago, they posted a video of his talk, “one of the most popular Gel talks ever.” In it, he discusses — with many examples from the show — the elements of a good story. On the surface, he’s discussing good broadcast stories, but I believe he’s really talking about story in general.

Here’s the video; it’s over a half-hour long, so give yourself a good block of time to listen. (Just pretend you’ve got NPR turned on in the background — there’s no particular reason to watch this).

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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.

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Fire and Paper

January 8, 2009 by John 5 Comments

A project pretty easy for a writer to empathize with: rebuilding another writer’s house, post-fire, brick by brick by brick.

Coming as this does on the heels of yesterday’s post about the cat man of Caboodle Ranch, I’ll just say: I know, I know. So many needs… I’m embarrassed to have overdrawn a check recently myself; I know what things are like right now.

But this just feels different — sharper and even more personal — to me. I’ll get back to the regular business of RAMH, whatever the hell that is, later today but in the meantime wanted to deal with this.

You may remember that Toni Morrison lost her house in a Christmas Day fire some 15 years ago. In an interview with Salon, she replied to a question about the fire:

It was just a routine, stupid Christmas fire, in the fireplace, with the coals and the pines smoldering. The wreaths, you know — the detritus, the dried needles were around on the floor and not swept up. And the fire leaped to one of those and leaped to the couch, where it smoldered, and no one knew. I wasn’t there. One of my kids was there. And by the time he got downstairs, it was shooting through the roof. So he called the fire department, but it was a terrible winter, and the water was frozen in the pipes. And I lost … I write by hand … I was able to save some books, but I had all my manuscripts, notes from old books, in my bedroom on the second floor, in a little trundle underneath the bed, where there was some storage space. It went up first. I said to somebody later, “Why did I think that having those things near me was safer than having them in the basement?”

My manuscripts, I didn’t care, I mean, I’m never going to look at that stuff again, so that wasn’t the hurtful part to me. They had a value, I think, to my children. As an inheritance. But I know I would never look at that stuff again. I would never look at “The Bluest Eye” — seven versions, in hand, of it — again. So I was not that upset about that. Other people might be interested in that. For me, it was the pictures of my children and of myself. Family. And I have nothing. Everything’s gone. So, I’m sorry about my children’s report cards, I’m sorry about my jade plants, certain clothes.

Travis Erwin, whom I don’t know, would probably happily insist he’s not a Toni Morrison. Nor am I. But philosophic though I might be about it (as Irwin is), my skin crawls now when I think of how much can be lost when someone who lives by paper experiences a fire.

[Heard about this from MoonRat’s blog yesterday;
Janet Reid followed up with her own thoughts.
Travis’s own account of the fire made it truly immediate.]

“I Have un Gros Ventre.”

January 5, 2009 by John 5 Comments

I see Moonrat is dipping one of those little furry paws into the deep sparkling waters of Yiddish. Reminds me of one of my own forays into non-Englishdom…

When we first became acquainted, online, in 1991,The Missus and I decided for reasons that probably made sense at the time that we wouldn’t exchange photos until (and of course unless) we’d actually met already.

At the time, The Missus had written a short story whose protagonist, a woman named Alice, was taking French lessons and liked to try out new words and phrases by dropping them at random into conversation. As I recall, The Missus herself either was taking a course in French at the time, or had already taken one and was renewing her interest in the language.

I had never taken French (my high-school and college “foreign language” was Latin). But in my travels somewhere, I think at a bookstore on Rockefeller Plaza in New York City, I’d once picked up a reference book called Harrap’s Slang Dictionary: Anglais-Français/Français-Anglais.

Why that book?

Exhibit A: On the front cover, people at a cartoon cocktail party were saying, in English, things like “One for the road,” “Go jump in the lake,” “It’s my shout,” and “Up yours.”

Exhibit B: On the back cover appeared a mini-quiz, labeled “Test your English slang.” For each of the five English phrases, it offered three possible French phrases — from among which, one was supposed to choose the correct translation. But my eye was caught by the nature of the English phrases:

To get tanked up
Pull your finger out! (This one cracked me up right there in the bookstore. Loudly.)
The grapevine
To frame someone
A nice bit of stuff

In short: How could I have resisted it?

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