Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so
[Working today on tomorrow’s post — my contribution to tomorrow’s Halloween Blogapalooza blog party, hosted by travel writer Angela Nickerson.
In the meantime, I thought you might find this useful. For, y’know, when They land and we have to, like, fight our way out of impending intergalactic apocalypse and stuff. Dude, these people know.]
You know how in the Warner Brothers “Road Runner” cartoons, the coyote is forever running (or riding a rocket, or pogo-sticking, or being launched by an ACME Giant Slingshot) off a cliff? and at some moment he realizes that he’s done so, and as soon as he realizes it he loses all forward motion, waves morosely to the audience, and drops out of the bottom of the frame?
For this Friday’s meditations from whiskey river and elsewhere, I wanted to do a “theme post.” This is a tribute to people who’ve recently shot off the edge of a personal or professional cliff, with plenty of forward momentum — and who know better than to look down.
From whiskey river:
It is hard to let old beliefs go. They are familiar. We are comfortable with them and have spent years building systems and developing habits that depend on them. Like a man who has worn eyeglasses so long that he forgets he has them on, we forget that the world looks to us the way it does because we have become used to seeing it that way through a particular set of lenses. Today, however, we need new lenses. And we need to throw the old ones away.
(Kenichi Ohmae)
…and:
Nothing can hold you back — not your childhood, not the history of a lifetime, not even the very last moment before now. In a moment you can abandon your past. And once abandoned, you can redefine it.
If the past was a ring of futility, let it become a wheel of yearning that drives you forward. If the past was a brick wall, let it become a dam to unleash your power.
The very first step of change is so powerful, the boundaries of time fall aside. In one bittersweet moment, the sting of the past is dissolved and its honey salvaged.
(Tzvi Freeman, The Illlustrated Encyclopedia of an Imaginary Universe)
…and:
Withered vines, gnarled trees, twilight crows,
river flowing beneath the little bridge,
past someone’s home.
The wind blows from the west
where the sun sets, it blows
across the ancient road,
across the bony horse,
across the despairing man
who stands at heaven’s edge.
(Ma Chih-Yuan, “Meditation in Autumn”)
Finally (lyrics below — not from whiskey river), a sort of meditation on dilemmas in general:
Crossfire
(words & music by Tommy Shannon, Chris Layton,
Reese Wynans, B.Carter, and Ruth Ellsworth;
performance by Stevie Ray Vaughan)Day by day, night after night,
blinded by the neon lights
Hurry here, hustlin’ there,
no one’s got the time to spare
Money’s tight, nothin’ free,
won’t somebody come and rescue me
I am stranded, caught in the crossfire
Stranded, caught in the crossfireTooth for tooth, eye for an eye,
sell your soul, just to buy buy buy,
Beggin’ a dollar stealin’ a dime,
come on can’t you see that I
I am stranded, caught in the crossfire
I am stranded, caught in the crossfireI need some kind of kindness,
some kind of sympathy — oh no
We’re stranded, caught in the crossfireSave the strong, lose the weak,
never turning the other cheek,
Trust nobody, don’t be no fool,
whatever happened to the golden rule?
We got stranded, caught in the crossfire
We got stranded, caught in the crossfire
We got stranded, caught in the crossfire
Stranded, caught in the crossfire
Help me
There’s a particular category of human experience unlike any other. It’s got nothing to do with personality or intelligence; it crosses geographic and linguistic borders as if they didn’t exist (because they don’t, except in our minds and on the paper where we record the products of those faulty machines). Such an experience comes and goes so quickly that a single blink of the eye, the least distraction can cause us to miss it. It’s grounded in the senses, not in words — nor even in the heart, except in retrospect.
There’s really no way to sum up this category except via the facile phrase the perfect moment.
The work of the late, great photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson came to be associated with the phrase “the decisive moment.” He adopted it as the title of his 1952 collection (all of which is online), having borrowed it from a seventeenth century Cardinal de Retz:
There is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment.
I’ve been considering a series of occasional posts on this subject for a couple of months now. The essence of what I hope to get at with these perfect-moment posts is embodied in a passage from Cartier-Bresson’s introduction to the great book:
…the world is movement, and you cannot be stationary in your attitude toward something that is moving.
He was speaking of photography, of course, and therefore speaking of the visual sense. But we’re awash in sensory experiences of all kinds, tumbling through them as though bobbing and thrashing about in whitewater rapids. Every now and then, without conscious thought, we grab hold of a rock. For a fraction of a second, we’re completely engaged with it — the way the light darts over its wet surface, the feel of its grainy bumpy surface beneath our fingertips or against the palm of our hands, the background roar of water and its smell as it floods our nostrils and its taste in our screaming mouth, perhaps the sixth-sense fear of what will happen when we lose our hold on the rock…
Then we’re moving on, tugged away by the rush of events and voices, the sheer force of all the moments still blasting by. We never go back to that rock. But we never forget it, either.
Those are the perfect moments I’m going to be seeking out here.
[This post continues yesterday’s. I won’t redefine any of the terminology here, so if you find yourself a little confused it probably just means you need to read that one.]
In the fall of 2003, The Missus and I were preparing to host her sisters, brother, and their families for Thanksgiving.
At the time, the four families were holding annual “reunions” like this, one purpose of which was to remember their parents, Mabel and Tom, who had died a few years earlier. “Events” (such as they were) thus were frequently on a Mabel-and-Tom theme; for instance, since Mabel loved playing Bingo, there was an annual “Mabel Bingo” night. They also gave out prizes for this sort of thing, such as used books by people named Mabel or Lyndall (which was Tom’s real first name).
Now, The Missus and I love games: cards, PC and console-video games, board games, and yes, Bingo. She tends to be the more aggressively competitive one; I like to win, of course, but also tend more to trying to figure out in advance how best to achieve victory.
So we decided that year that we would come up with a new “game” for the four families to play. We called it Tom’s Snipe Hunt.
In the second part of this two-part series, I’ll introduce you to a handsome fellow named Mickey Tom. I’ll tell you where he started out, where he is now, how he got to where he is now, and where he’s headed.
But before I can do any of that, I need to provide some background for readers who might not be familiar with a particular, some would say peculiar… hmm… pastime? hobby? obsession? adventuring nerd’s side quest?
Any of those terms might suffice as a descriptor for the mysterious word geocaching.
If you’ve paid attention to car commercials in the last couple of years, you probably already know the phrase “GPS unit.” This is a small boxy electronic gizmo, typically mounted on the dashboard, which displays a real-time map of the route you’re currently driving. Sophisticated GPS units allow you to specify a destination, for which the machine will select an optimal route to follow; some of them even “talk,” instructing you audibly to (for instance) “Turn left here.”
The main technology which allows car GPS units to work is a network of satellites, collectively called the Global Positioning System. The idea is fairly simple; at root, it’s just geometry: If you know the positions of at least three objects, and can determine your distance from each of them, then you can determine your own position. As the GPS satellites circle the globe, they beam down to earth a signal reporting their current positions. Any device which can receive those transmissions thus can figure out — to a more or less accurate degree — the device’s own latitude and longitude.
That’s all you need to understand in order to “understand” how geocaching works. But that still doesn’t say much about geocaching itself, does it?
Read on.
I’m working on a two-part series of posts at the moment, with Part 1 due up tomorrow. In the meantime, I thought you’d appreciate this. It’s a promotional video for the New York Public Library Photography Collection:
Among the photographers discussed, you can find more information at these Web sites (besides Wikipedia, of course):
And of course, if you’re interested in documentary photography, you could do much worse than visit the Library’s own online Digital Images Collection.
A new addition to the blogroll here, one “Cuff” of the Countersignature blog, recently made what I think is a stupendous find: a 1914 book, by one MacGregor Jenkins, entitled The Reading Public, available via Google Books.
Here’s how Cuff introduces the book’s content:
Jenkins divides the “reading public” into book readers and magazine readers. He further subdivides the book readers into three categories from least to greatest numbers: the sponge reader, the sieve reader, and the duck-back reader. The sponge reader reads “fewer and better books than his fellows” — resulting, according to Mr. Jenkins, in his being ignored by authors and publishers. The sieve reader reads quite a bit and is full of surface facts and plots and literary gossip, but doesn’t have the critical acumen of the sponge reader. Meanwhile, the lowly duck-back reader, while great in number, absorbs absolutely nothing and is entirely unchanged by reading because reading is for the duck-back simply a way to kill time (Jenkins believes the swelling of this number to be caused by the increasing phenomenon of commuting).
I wonder what kind of reader I am? Sad to say, it feels more sieve-like (although I’d love to be a sponge). The Missus would say this has something to do with my being a Gemini, and/or being born in a Chinese Year of the Rabbit. Grasshopper, not an ant. All that.
Interestingly, Jenkins’s book — despite the title — also has quite a bit to say to authors. (He was apparently a magazine editor.) Remember again that this is from, well, a century ago, to all intents and purposes. Bear in mind all that Maxwell Perkins, golden-age-of-authors-editors stuff. And, of course, make some allowances for the pre-World War I syntax:
Like many — most? — people who like to think of themselves as creative, I’ve had my share of disappointments with the success of others‘ ideas:
And then there are ideas which don’t fall into the disappointing category at all. You think to yourself, Why didn’t I think of that myself? or at least, Why didn’t SOMEBODY think of that sooner? (Think Harry Potter here, kiddies.) All you can do is applaud in wonder.
And finally there are the ideas — especially combinations of two or more other ideas — which are so bizarre that you’re surprised anyone at all ever thought to put them together.
I think this falls into that category. I give you the Ukelele Orchestra of Great Britain, performing… the theme from Shaft:
(Part 1 of this N-part series was here.)
Let’s see, where were we… Oh. Right. I’d just posted excerpts from the Prologue to Crossed Wires, my 1992 mystery, and Chapter 1 from its never-published sequel, Trapdoor. And I said that the differences between those two excerpts sprang from “something” that happened in the roughly one year that elapsed between their two writings — something whose principal result was to relax me.
This isn’t the story of how I came to write Crossed Wires. (A lot of that crosses over into autobiography — not relevant right now.) No, it’s the story of what happened after I wrote it.
[In a post a few days ago, I started to nose around my “issues” with writing mysteries, thrillers, and the like. This is the perfect time do something I really don’t like to do, much — to lay out the story behind one of my formative experiences as a writer: the publication, in 1992, of my first book. In a couple days, in part 2, I’ll cover how it got to print. In this part, I’ll try to purge myself of some second thoughts about the book itself. And maybe, in the process, I’ll get the damned monkey off my back.]
Crossed Wires didn’t get many really good reviews, a fact which stunned and wounded its author. On the other hand, I learned that even when reviewers found some honest-to-God fatal flaw, they were nearly always generous enough to close their reviews on an “up” note.
I’ve got a folder of Crossed Wires reviews sitting on the desk here, right by my hand. But I’m not (for now) going to quote specifics. Instead, I’m going to talk in generalities — categories of things which bothered reviewers. The complaints were of three kinds (not all equally easy to dismiss):
It’s this third sort of critique which I want to talk about here. And I’m not going to argue the point, either. I’m going to agree with it.
