I Tought I Taw…

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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)

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E.B. White, bemused to find himself hereReal 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”

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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.

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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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Forward Bravely, into the Past!

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Bogus RAND computer (click to enlarge)

This March — the 12th, and isn’t it interesting I remember the exact date? — marks my 30th year as a computer guy.

When I started out at AT&T, my job title was Member of Programming Staff (with a digression into Managerhood); at my present job, I’ve been a Distributed Systems Specialist, a Business Systems Analyst, and a Database Analyst. (Oh, and throw in whatever you call a departmental Webmaster, too. Probably exactly that.)

And then I’ve built and maintained other Web sites, as well, and RAMH is, like, my fourth or fifth blog since 1999-2000 or so.

By now, you might think, I’d be right up there in the vanguard doing the Pied Piper thing, urging everyone else to join the cyber/systems/virtual revolution.

Er, no.

Into my Inbox recently drifted a plaintive email from a young guy with a computing question. In purchasing a new computer, it seems that he had to choose between two options: a souped-up whiz-bang up-to-the-minute model? or scale back on the computer itself, and spring for a really nice monitor?

I counseled him to choose Door #2, introducing it with the (perhaps surprising) claim:

I tend to be conservative in matters of computer hardware: I don’t want my computer to make my heart race; I want it to be INVISIBLE.

That pretty much sums it up.

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Fire and Paper

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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.]

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“I Have un Gros Ventre.”

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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:

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

In short: How could I have resisted it?

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Smile After Smile

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JES, en mosaicThey say old habits die hard, and I guess it’s true.

But traditions are a sort of shared old habit, and traditions don’t die hard at all — although they don’t flat-out die, either. Traditions evolve. People come and go. What’s possible replaces what you could never do, and what you used to do all the time gets a lot harder as the muscle aches and stray indecisions of age set in.

So all right, I know: the “Christmas traditions” I remember from my four decades in New Jersey are probably long gone.

(Early in the week, I asked my mother what she’d be making for Christmas dinner — feeling all nostalgic, y’know, for turkey and pies and fruit cake and all that, to say nothing of the many-voiced family sit-down conversation around the table. “Meatball sandwiches,” she said. “What?!?” “Well,” she explained, “it was just getting too complicated trying to get everybody here at the same time, for the same length of time. This way they can drop in whenever they want and stay as long as they want.”)

But the one tradition that lives on — one that I haven’t been able to take part in, not for many years — is just seeing everyone at Christmas.

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A Quirky Eclectic Christmas Music Playlist

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Okay, let’s do this playlist thing… These artists and numbers appear, back-to-back, in the playlist:

  1. Peter Robbins et al.: dialogue from A Charlie Brown Christmas
  2. Anonymous 4: Hodie Christus Natus Est
  3. Waverly Consort: Three Spanish Villancicos – Dadme Albcrecias
  4. Perry Como: Home for the Holidays
  5. Mannheim Steamroller: Joy to the World
  6. George Winston: The Holly and the Ivy
  7. Celtic Woman: O Holy Night
  8. John Denver and the Muppets: The Twelve Days of Christmas
  9. Al Hirt: Nutty Jingle Bells
  10. The Roches: Deck the Halls

(Note: After some experimentation, I’ve found there doesn’t seem to be a simple way — like a single button to push — to fast-forward to the end of a number. What you do instead is drag the little progress-meter thing all the way to the right, to the end of the track; this cues up the next number in the list.)

Next: I can’t put a YouTube video into this audio-playlist thing, but Christmas music doesn’t get any better than this. Judy Garland, in Meet Me in St. Louis, introduces the world to “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” — and more or less ruins it for every succeeding performer:

(As Jordan Baker of the Dealing in Subterfuges blog recently reminded readers, the original version has none of this hang-a-shining-star/highest-bough stuff. What that verse actually — much more piercingly poignantly — says is:

Someday soon, we all will be together —
If the fates allow.
Until then, we’ll have to muddle through somehow…
So have yourself a Merry Little Christmas now.

Got that???)

Finally, the music of Christmas writing. Dylan Thomas reads his own A Child’s Christmas in Wales (in two parts, back-to-back — thanks, WordPress Audio Player plugin!):

(The complete text is here, if you’d like to follow along; link opens in a new window/tab, so you can move back and forth from the text to the audio stream.)

________________________

Bonus: Video from 1979’s Christmas Together special, which shows John Denver and The Muppets singing the Twelve Days of Christmas (audio only is in the above playlist, obviously):

Don’t you wish you could see the chaos “backstage” as all the Muppeteers, their arms waving, squeezed in around John Denver?

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Placeholder Post: Pre-Playlist

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At least one thing has surprised me about Running After My Hat so far: the extent to which I’m blogging about and incorporating music in my posts.

I mean, it’s not as though I actually know anything about the subject. I’m not a musician or musicologist or, well, much of anything regarding music — except maybe a dilettante fan, skipping from one genre to another…

Anyway, if you’ve visited (almost?) any of the posts in the Music category over there in the left sidebar, you’ve encountered a little gizmo which plays music. It’s got a couple of little VCR-style play/pause buttons, and you can adjust the volume up or down with a little slider (on the left) that looks like the reception-strength bars in a certain company’s cellular-service advertisements.

For instance, here’s the one from last Friday’s post, “A Gift of Frozen Words“:

[audio:somechildrenseehim_georgewinston.mp3|titles=’Some Children See Him’|artists=George Winston]

(For the information of those of you with WordPress-based blogs, for this purpose I use a plugin called, logically enough, the WordPress Audio Player. Find it here, if you’re interested, although here there’s a better set of usage examples and other notes.)

I’ve been meaning to explore using the audio-player thingum to play back an entire playlist, not just a single song. (I have long-term ulterior motives for knowing how to do this.) Christmas music seems an obvious choice for such a playlist, and that’s what I’m experimenting with at the moment.

Back soon. Hopefully with a playlist. :)

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