Made Something New, Have You? Or Maybe You Just… Found It?

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[Image: “Stone & Stone Liberty Warehouse No. 2 (Drive In),” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH. This is in downtown Durham, NC; as you might expect, given the area’s history, the original building was a tobacco warehouse — the newer construction, though, has repurposed “the look” as, well, who knows: apartments, condominiums, offices… Ironically, I’m pretty sure — given more recent history — it’s a no-smoking facility.]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book (with two additional sentences from the source):

I’d like to be a Gecko, not permanently, but for ten minutes or so. Geckos are charming small lizardy creatures with suction pads for feet. They live vertically. Walls are their terra firma. For them trees grow sideways, hills are sky, pavements are walls. Our heads may be in the clouds but our feet are always on the ground and even if you wear spectacles which make you see the world upside down, you adjust in a day or so, and see everything the right way up. Take the glasses off and you’ll have another few upside-down days until everything reverts back to normal.

(Alan Fletcher [source])

…and:

Strangers

A man and a woman happened to sit next to one another on a train. The woman took out a book and began reading. The train stopped at a half dozen stations, but she never looked up once.

The man watched her for awhile, then asked, “What are you reading?”

“It’s a ghost story,” she said. “It’s very good, very spooky.”

“Do you believe in ghosts?” he asked.

“Yes, I do,” she replied. “There are ghosts everywhere.”

“I don’t believe in them,” he said. “It’s just a lot of superstition. In all my years I’ve never seen a ghost, not one.”

“Haven’t you?” the woman said — and vanished.

(Alvin Schwartz [source])

…and:

It rains during the morning. No visitors today. I feel lonely and amuse myself by writing at random. These are the words:

Who mourns makes grief his master.
Who drinks makes pleasure his master.

The fact that Saigyo composed a poem that begins, “I shall be unhappy without loneliness,” shows that he made loneliness his master. He also wrote:

In the mountain village
who are you calling, yobuko-bird?
I thought you lived alone.

There’s nothing so intriguing as living alone. Chosho, the recluse, said:

If one’s guest enjoys a half-day’s leisure,
His host loses a half-day’s leisure.

Sodo is always moved by these words. I, too, feel it.

Not this human sadness,
cuckoo,
but your solitary song.

(Basho [source])

From elsewhere:

I realise at this late stage — coming up to forty years of creative work – that you build a life over time – there is no rush. What matters is to do the work that interests you; find a way to pay your bills, shape everything you do around your core values, because every decision we make — and that’s the food on the plate to the people we work with — every decision either supports or undermines who you are, who you want to be.

We make mistakes, we all do, and it doesn’t matter unless those mistakes become a habit that pulls us further and further away from our course.

Take yourself seriously and don’t cut corners. You can move fast – that’s different. Go at the speed you need, but don’t cut corners.

(Jeanette Winterson [source])

…and:

Something New Under the Sun

It would have to shine. And burn. And be
a sign of something infinite and turn things
and people nearby into their wilder selves
and be dangerous to the ordinary nature of
signs and glow like a tiny hole in space

to which a god presses his eye and stares.
Or her eye. Some divine impossible stretch
of the imagination where you and I are one.
It would have to be something Martin Buber
would say and, seeing it, point and rejoice.

It could be the mouth of a Coca-Cola bottle
or two snakes rolling down a mountain trail.
It would have to leap up out of the darkness
of a theater and sing the high silky operatic
note of someone in love. And run naked

slender fingers through the hair of a stranger,
or your mother or father, or grandfather, or
a grassy hill in West Virginia. It would live
on berries and moss like a deer and roam
the woods at night like the secret life of

the woods at night and when the sun rises you
could see it and think it is yours and that
would be enough and it would come to you
as these words have come to me–slowly,
tenderly, tangibly. Shy and meanderingly.

(Steve Scafidi [source])

…and:

The world begins to exist when the individual discovers it.

(Carl Jung [source: here and elsewhere])

…and:

You can make a game out of the simplest things: a few rules and a goal. One of the more elegant modern game designs is The Mind. The game is comically simple. There’s a deck with a hundred cards in it, numbered from 1 to 100. For level one, you shuffle the deck and deal each player one random card. The goal is for all players to work together as a team to play the cards in order, from lowest to highest. But there is one single, glorious catch: You’re not allowed to communicate. You can’t talk, signal, grunt, or gesture to each other. You have to coordinate wordlessly to play those cards in order. If you can do it for level one, you go up to level two: Reshuffle the deck, and deal two random cards to each person. For a four-player game, you win the game if you can beat level eight—that’s eight random cards dealt to each person, to be played out in perfect order, in total silence.

The game asks you to do the seemingly impossible: to be telepathic. And then it teaches you how that’s actually possible. You play the game by developing a shared sense of timing for how long you should wait to play a given card. And you can get very good at it together. Your group can play these wild, precise sequences in lockstep tempo. It will start to feel like you can touch the inside of each other’s brains and hear a collective clock ticking.

(C. Thi Nguyen [source])

…and:

(I’m pretty sure I’ve used this video before here on RAMH, but once I chose today’s theme it just seemed an inescapable addition. And it does, after all, fit the theme, no?)

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A Quirky, er, No: an *Eclectic* Christmas Mix (2025 Ed.)

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[Video: I suspect many of us have experienced such a moment in our gift-giving lives — a moment when the giftee’s face, and perhaps their very words, say, “Oh! You’ve given me a… WHAT is this you have given me, exactly?”]

Per usual, let’s begin by putting the music itself at the top of the post (with some discussion to follow). Here are the ten selections for this year:

…and here’s the whole thing — up to 158 songs, totaling over eight hours, in this fifteenth year of this project:

[As before, I’m incredibly annoyed that you can’t shuffle the songs in an embedded playlist, like this one. But if you’ve got a Spotify account, you can open the playlist there… and shuffle it! To do so, click on the three little dots to the left of the “Play” arrowhead button; once in Spotify, just shuffle it to your heart’s content.]

Now, on to the annual nattering (heh)…

Among the surprises in this year’s list, you’ll find Chris Rea’s “Driving Home for Christmas” — which (to my delight) describes an over-the-river-and-through-the-woods drive not in the United States, but in Britain.

And there’s also Máiréad Nesbitt’s lovely violin solo, “Ériu’s Dream.” This really stands out, for me, because… well, it’s not a Christmas song. The titular Ériu serves (per Wikipedia) as the “eponymous matron goddess of Ireland,” and I can find no reference to a dream of hers. (She apparently does feature in the dreams of other Celtic figures, though.) But, I dunno — the song just seemed to me to fit here.

Perhaps her dream was one which included holly, mistletoe, and magical figures emerging from a misty, snowbound landscape? I can hear that.

Finally, I must confess: my heart did not look forward to compiling this year’s list. The reasons are partly technological, and partly… well, other than technological.

Technology: yes, I’m comfortable with tech — maybe atypically, even weirdly comfortable with it, considering my age. But I could see the handwriting on the wall, thanks to my blogging platform’s age and increasing… inflexibility? A couple years ago, fed up with the laborious process of trying out yet another music-playing plugin when all the old ones were no longer working, I finally switched over to Spotify. Which does, yes, enormously simplify creating and sharing playlists…

…at a cost of its own.

No, I don’t mean the cost of my subscription; I gladly pay that if that’s what it takes to share music here. The cost in question isn’t monetary, it’s… well, political.

The truth is, yeah, 2025 is a very dispiriting year in which this leftie American blogger finds himself living. Politics saturates everything — ugly politics, politics interlaced with capitalism, politics soaking into the season like rotgut booze in an otherwise heavenly fruitcake.

And, it turns out, even simple pleasures like sharing music can, this year, stink of politics.

It turns out, see, that some of the advertising revenue which Spotify uses to support free Spotify accounts comes from the US Department of Homeland Security. Specifically, Spotify’s free accounts may occasionally feature recruitment ads for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, a/k/a ICE. (See here (Newsweek) for some background, and here for an official response to it from — in this case — the New York City Comptroller.)

Now, you yourself should not experience these odious ads by listening to this playlist on RAMH. The question really is: should I and other paying Spotify subscribers be directing our money into the music streamer’s coffers?

I don’t think so. But switching, at this point, means finding an “untainted” streamer which offers something like Spotify’s enormous library of music, so the playlist doesn’t need to be remade — yet again — with different music.

All of which is a problem for me, not for you. So for now, anyhow, I’m just — one more time, thank you, 2025! — screaming into the void.

On that sour note, for which sourness I sincerely apologize, please do enjoy this year’s selections! And I’ll see what I can do about the Spotify issue.

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Recognizing the Universe’s Hand When It’s Offered

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From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

Generosity is another quality which, like patience, letting go, non-judging, and trust, provides a solid foundation for mindfulness practice. You might experiment with using the cultivation of generosity as a vehicle for deep self-observation and inquiry as well as an exercise in giving. A good place to start is with yourself. See if you can give yourself gifts that may be true blessings, such as self-acceptance, or some time each day with no purpose. Practice feeling deserving enough to accept these gifts without obligation—to simply receive from yourself, and from the universe.

(Jon Kabat Zinn [source])

…and:

Swan

Did you too see it, drifting, all night on the black river?
Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air,
an armful of white blossoms,
a perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned
into the bondage of its wings; a snowbank, a bank of lilies,
biting the air with its black beak?
Did you hear it, fluting and whistling
a shrill dark music, like the rain pelting the trees.
    like a waterfall
knifing down the black ledges?
And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds—
a white cross Streaming across the sky, its feet
like black leaves, its wings Like the stretching light
    of the river?
And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?
And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?
And have you changed your life?

(Mary Oliver [source])

…and:

There is a hole in the universe.

It is not like a hole in a wall where a mouse slips through, solid and crisp and leading from somewhere to someplace. It is rather like a hole in the heart, an amorphous and edgeless void. It is a heartfelt absence, a blank space where something is missing, a large and obvious blind spot in our understanding of the universe.

That missing something, strange to say, is a grasp of nothing itself. Understanding nothing matters, because nothing is the all-important background upon which everything else happens.

(K. C. Cole [source])

…and:

Dust

Someone spoke to me last night,
told me the truth. Just a few words,
but I recognized it.
I knew I should make myself get up,
write it down, but it was late,
and I was exhausted from working
all day in the garden, moving rocks.
Now, I remember only the flavor —
not like food, sweet or sharp.
More like a fine powder, like dust.
And I wasn’t elated or frightened,
but simply rapt, aware.
That’s how it is sometimes —
God comes to your window,
all bright light and black wings,
and you’re just too tired to open it

(Dorianne Laux [source])

…and:

If you knew what I knew about generosity, you wouldn’t let one meal go by without sharing it.

(Buddha [source (in slightly different words)])

From elsewhere:

To foster your spiritual life, you need an effective method especially suited to you. Buddhists call it upaya, “skillful means.” When I first heard about upaya many years ago, I felt excited because it helped me make sense of the many odd things we do in the name of religion. It’s important to have good ideas, but you also need to be skillful in your method. The practice of religion requires precise and thoughtful action…

Some schools of Buddhism teach that upaya goes along with two other aspects of the spiritual life: compassion (karuna) and wisdom (prajna). I’d like to borrow this Buddhist trio of virtues for my own religion. What could be more perfect than basing your life on wisdom, compassion, and skillful means? What better way to describe religion than as a deep way of life that takes into account your mind, your heart, and your hands? In my own private book of spiritual practices, along with these three central ingredients I would add wonder and serenity, two items I borrow from Glenn Gould. That gives me a five-legged table on which to build my religion: wisdom, compassion, skillful methods, wonder, and serenity.

(Thomas Moore [source])

…and:

Mysticism for Beginners

The day was mild, the light was generous.
The German on the café terrace
held a small book on his lap.
I caught sight of the title:
Mysticism for Beginners.
Suddenly I understood that the swallows
patrolling the streets of Montepulciano
with their shrill whistles,
and the hushed talk of timid travelers
from Eastern, so-called Central Europe,
and the white herons standing—yesterday? the day before?—
like nuns in fields of rice,
and the dusk, slow and systematic,
erasing the outlines of medieval houses,
and olive trees on little hills,
abandoned to the wind and heat,
and the head of the Unknown Princess
that I saw and admired in the Louvre,
and stained-glass windows like butterfly wings
sprinkled with pollen,
and the little nightingale practicing
its speech beside the highway,
and any journey, any kind of trip,
are only mysticism for beginners,
the elementary course, prelude
to a test that’s been
postponed.

(Adam Zagajewski, translated by Clare Cavanagh [source])

…and:

Beach

The end, I think, will be a little like looking down as far as I can see to where the wind has kicked up the tide and turned it all the same—sea, spume, the air. There might even be someone walking toward me, the way in the edge-of-the-ocean blue light they’ll be obscure until the last moment. I think it’ll be late afternoon, the sky that luminous oyster white into which things disappear. I’ll stop to look at the sky, and the moment I do I realize I’m alone, I misunderstood the figure coming toward me, which, considering the time of day, is as it should be, especially now that the wind has kicked up a little and the white sun has almost dropped under the soft gray almost stillness of the water, it seems just the right hour to be, again, alive.

(Stanley Plumly [source])

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Potpourri: June 18 (2025 Edition)

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[I don’t know why I’ve had The Moody Blues playing through my head so much recently. But part of the appeal of these annual posts is that I don’t work too hard to figure out why, exactly, I’m writing about topics X, Y, or Z… About the album from which these three songs come, see the note, below]

Welcome to this year’s incarnation of the “Potpourri” series. Per usual, don’t expect cosmic insights into, well, anything. What follows will just be a partial brain dump — the results of my reaching into my head, grasping a handful of topics, and then opening my fist for your inspection.

I was thinking when I woke up today of a “listicle” of sorts: a list, with a bit of discussion, of N items along a common theme. In this case, it’d be a list of quinquennial memories — not necessarily memories of a specific day of the year, just of particular ages. Like this:

  • Age 5 (kindergarten, looking something as I did in that photo to the right): I vaguely remember crying on my first day, probably at the shock of being left to fend for myself. Which made sense, in retrospect: my two sisters were still at home, not yet in school, and my brother was still on the way, so to speak. (He’d be born about six-seven weeks later.) [Aside: you can see all four of us “kids” in this very recent photo.]
  • Age 10 (fifth grade): My fifth-grade teacher was at the school for only a year. (What I myself remember of him personally was centered on the frequent globs of blood-dotted tissue paper seemingly glued to his chin and cheeks.) At the end of fifth grade, I had about two weeks of freedom before going off to Boy Scout camp for the first time — and nearly drowning in the process.
  • Age 15 (sophomore, high school): Who was my homeroom teacher? Who, my English teacher? (My Latin teacher, oh yeah: him, I remember.) What did I write? What did I do?
  • Age 20 (sophomore, junior college): I was lucky that year to be in college at all, and very lucky to be at the junior college in question. But I didn’t know about my luck before I set foot in the door; it took a handful of profoundly influential professors to make it plain to me.
  • Age 25: Setting forth, alone, on an extremely rocky period of life for me. Lots of romantic and occupational confusion and upheaval.
  • Age 30: Finally on the brink of settling down… starting my real career, marrying a just-right woman… unfortunately oblivious to the prospect of future turmoil! (That just-right woman, you see, had married me.)
  • Age 35: [The future turmoil arrives, and lingers for a sad while.]
  • Age 40: Deep into the online world. My first book, and other writing excitement (including my first experiences with a fictional alter ego). My first home outside of NJ.
  • Age 45+: Everything else.

I dunno. Looks kinda… well, kinda thin and wispy for a personal history, doesn’t it?

One of the things that’s been most important to me in the last year: finishing another damned novel (by way of the Substack platform, more or less one chapter every week). [Note] Well, I say “finishing,” but what I really mean is finishing the first draft. I don’t want to belabor the point, but keying in the words “The End” felt major.

Among the many interesting side trips I took along the way: dipping a toe into the use of AI image-generating tools to create images with which to illustrate most chapters. I’d never, never, never do so for a “real” book, insisting instead on paying a real artist… On the other hand, I’m in no position to pay a real artist to do so… and on yet another hand, I really wanted to head each post in the 23kpc series with some kind of visual embellishment…

Anyway, I experimented with a few such tools. The one I came to rely on the most, once I got the hang of using them at all, was the Microsoft Bing Image Creator (itself based on the DALL-E 3 image-generation software). Bing, of course (?), is Microsoft’s answer to Google Search… which means that it seemed — to me, anyhow — more adept than other platforms at interpreting what I meant: it had the English-language smarts of a search engine.

There at the left, you see Bing’s first image from the prompt — just now — saying, “a writer finishes a novel.” Most of its defaults with a very simple prompt like this center around photo-realistic, literal-minded interpretations of the input; if you want to get fancier, you’ve got to provide more guidance.

For instance, as I expanded the prompt at the right: “a science-fiction writer finishes a novel while riding a subway.” As with every prompt at Bing, it coughed up four alternative interpretations, varying details in the setting, depictions of people (if any), and so on. Of the four it offered me this go-round, the other three all featured a partially robotic writer, which is weird, but okay… The subway looked pretty good in all four, but this was the only one in which the writer appeared to be, well, writing; in the others, the writer was reading. So right away we have an anomaly of language: I didn’t specify that the writer was finishing the task of writing a novel.

One more go-round, with this prompt: “a science-fiction author finishes writing a novel while riding a subway. sepia photograph, 1930s-style.” Those sorts of details (the medium, the style, and so on) are the ones I commonly added to get the right “feel” for a book the tone of which was modeled on the films inspired by Dashiell Hammet’s The Thin Man:

The one at the left has nothing science-fictiony about it, but it’s the right “feel.” The missing element, Bing seemed to feel for options 2 and 3, could be provided by garbing the writer in a gas mask. But then it’s like a light bulb went on in the AI’s head: No! Wait — I know — put one of the writer’s fellow passengers in a steam-punkish sort of space suit…! (I’m actually not sure if the “writer” here is the apparent subject — the Amish-bearded guy in the foreground — or the space-suited character, who seems to be clutching a laptop on their knees.)

And that seems to be it for 2025, I think. See you in a year (and, gods willing, many times over in between) — thank you as always for stopping by!

Note: about the Moody Blues album, On the Threshold of a Dream…

From Wikipedia:

[Producer Tony] Clarke adds, “This album set the standard for how we recorded future concept albums. It’s quite important in so many ways. It was the first time we had true freedom in the studio. This was our first chance at being left alone — no men in white coats or people with clipboards. It’s still quite lovely. I’m proud of a great deal of it. All in all, I’m glad we did it.”

(But be sure to see, too, the whole section of the article about the album’s songwriting process.)

This selection offers a fairly representative sample of the “Moodies” style — which, as I once summarized to my brother, is a sort of blend of pretentious and portentous: soaring instrumentation, and lyrics which seem to but ultimately don’t hold up under too-close inspection. Of course, for the time, this wasn’t all that uncommon, but I always thought the Moody Blues had developed the style to an especially florid level.

…and, as for these specific three songs:

“Have You Heard” dates from at least 1966, when an early version appeared in the band’s live set. Its lyrics repeat the album’s theme of enlightenment. The song bookends “The Voyage”, an instrumental piece that builds with Mellotron-produced orchestral strings and reaches a crescendo with a repeated melody on piano before cellos lead a transition back to a reprise of “Have You Heard”. [Engineer Derek] Varnals remembers the introductory section of “The Voyage” being influenced by Also sprach Zarathustra, having been used in 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was released several months before the album’s sessions. The track took three days to record, with Mike Pinder largely working alone on Mellotron, with overdubbed cellos, piano and other instruments played by the group.

At the end of the “Have You Heard” reprise, the album concludes with the droning electronic sound that opens the album. Produced by Mellotron, the sound plays continuously into the album’s run-out groove, causing it to play continuously until the record player’s tonearm is lifted.

Sui generis, the Moody Blues.

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RAMH@17: What Goes Around…

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Happy 17th birthday to Running After My Hat (with thanks to the visitors — some known, many anonymous, and quite a few with suspicious email addresses who really, really want my help in ways I’ll never be prepared to offer)!

My custom here over the years has been to open with a playlist you can listen to as you read through the balance of the post. Let’s try this one: the soundtrack to the 2019 miniseries (on the Hulu streaming service) of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. I wasn’t bowled over by the adaptation itself — it was okay, it did have some affecting moments, and I liked many of the performances, but as a whole I just found myself wanting, y’know, more. But the soundtrack: exceptional! The “official” soundtrack on Spotify, however, doesn’t include all the music, by all the same performers, which featured in the series as broadcast; this enterprising Spotify user did the hard work of pulling the thing together.

Also, it occurs to me now that finally catching the damn hat after 22 years would be a terrific blogging goal for me, eh?

Catch-22 has been a significant book in my life. Years ago, I wrote up a guest piece about it for a onetime blog about reading called, aptly, The Book Book… While the blog itself is shuttered, I’ve still got a copy of the text lying around; I should probably share it here, eventually. Eventually.

So, now: let’s talk about Running After My Hat as it is these days.

For starters, anyone who stops by here regularly knows not to expect anything other than a weekly whiskey river Fridays post: a sort of dialogue of quotations between that long-running blog (and its archive) and my own reading. If you get other stuff, I imagine, it shows up like a pixel-sized blip on the radar screen of your busy online life.

But anyone who actually reads those Friday posts on a regular basis, over time, may have noticed one thing about them: for some weeks now, I’ve been sampling only from the whiskey river archive, called whiskey river’s commonplace book — nothing from the main blog’s current offerings. Why is that? Because there have been no current offerings from whiskey river itself since December 4, 2024.

As I’ve said several times over the years — here and elsewhere — I know nothing of the whiskey river blogger(s): I have no names, no way of contacting them, and no idea if they might have simply decamped to another platform. I see hints now and then of their presence elsewhere, and of course I know of non-mysterious references to a “Whiskey River” without any certainty that it’s, well, my person(s). (There’s the Willie Nelson song, and at least one tavern chain, and the work of a wonderful professional photographer, and the gods know how many miscellaneous others. I do know how to use Google, y’know. Heh.) I once — four years ago — got a comment here from the blogger, which still counts as a primo highlight of my entire online life (now four decades old)… it felt like the touch of an Olympian finger.

I’m an adult, familiar with the vagaries of the online world; I know people can just drop out of sight without advance warning or after-the-fact explanation. I know there are — ever were — few truly unique blogs, and so I can always look to those others if I wish to strike up a similar conversation with one of them. (The whiskey river blogroll — called “the torrent” in its sidebar — and their blogrolls are a good starting point.)

My best guess about whiskey river‘s disappearance? The timing: one month after the calamitous 2024 US Presidential election. From what little I’ve been able to imagine about the persona(s) behind their blog, it’s pretty clear they must have been thunderstruck by the unconscionable stupidity (or naivete, if I’m inclined to charity) of a plurality of voters in that election. As was I; as were pretty much everyone in my first-hand experience.

But damn. I’m still heartbroken by the whiskey river blogger’s absence, and expect I will remain so for a long, long time.

In other RAMH news, such as it is…

I mentioned in last year’s anniversary post that I’d recently dipped into the Substack world: a “long-form” social-media sort of world. (We could pick nits and point out that, duh, that’s what blogging used to be, but I’ve always believed that Internet publishing platforms — like people — are allowed to call themselves whatever they want, and to ask others to use the same terms.)

Essentially, what I’ve got over there at the moment is an extension of the Running After My Hat “brand,” so to speak. (Others include a Tumblr account (more or less used for crossposting from here), a recently moribund Facebook page (more or less used for crossposting from Instagram), a Bluesky account (still trying to figure this out), and maybe one or two other things I’ve experimented with.)

So what’s up specifically with me on Substack? Mostly, I’ve got two series running at the moment while I figure out my “identity” there:

  • #jesstorypix (“ambiguous microfictions in the service of strange photographs”): Each post consists of a photo I’ve taken at some time or another, and a little “microfiction” which the photo inspired. What’s the “micro-” prefix for? Pretty much, it just means a hundred words, maybe more, maybe less — and most of them are not even complete fictions, but simply invite the reader to fill in the gaps as they’d like. (Those gaps often occur at the end of the story, and are flagged with an ellipsis — as with this recent example.) All the #jesstorypix posts are publicly viewable — as far as I know, they don’t even require a Substack account.
  • 23kpc: according to the capsule description at the main archive page, “Science fiction for the non-SF reader: detectives from Hollywood’s Golden Age, solving mysteries… and transplanted to a cruise ship carved from an asteroid to sail the galaxy.” Each weekly post in this series contains a chapter (sometimes more) from a book I’ve been fiddling with for a long time. I’ve actually posted a couple of things about 23kpc here in the past — one from ten years ago (!), and one from just this past December. I’m using this series primarily to get me to “The End,” but I’m also using it to experiment with Substack’s paid-subscriptions model: the first seven chapters (and all of the story, “Open and Shut,” which inspired the full-length story) — they’re all free to read, but for anything beyond that you’ve gotta subscribe. The subscriptions are dirt cheap, $5/month (i.e., $1+ per chapter), but so far I have induced only a couple of people to pay for it. (On the other hand, a couple dozen-plus kind folks do maintain free subscriptions. Plus I’m a crap marketer — some things never change.) If you’re reading this, and you’d like a free one-month subscription — free access to all of 23kpc, and whatever else I post there — just shoot me an email (runningaftermyhat at johnesimpson dot com) with the subject JES23kpc and I’ll set you up.

I hope to get up to other things on Substack eventually; it’s a heck of a lot easier to find new subscribers that way, free or paid, than it is to find new readers of the original RAMH. Or maybe I won’t, who knows?

In the meantime, as I say every year: thank you (whoever you are) for even intermittently — even once! — reading Running After My Hat!

_______

P.S. Sharp-eyed readers (which of course includes all of you) will notice that this post has been cleverly — okay, okay, deceptively — back-dated to make it seem to be “dated” as tradition dictates.

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Lost in the World

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[Video: “Dirty Old Town,” by The Pogues. Lyrics here.]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

Blind Belief

We are conscious of ourselves through a constant flow of thoughts. These thoughts might not even be our own; we have picked them up from someone else. And they had picked them up after they had been well-used before. All questions of belief are programs of pre-set, ready made, answers. They can never be a real quest for truth.

The paradox of the human mystery is that without a storehouse of knowledge in the form of language and symbols there can be no human phenomenon. Yet when that knowledge is used as if it is the actual direct experience of the individual, that selfsame storehouse becomes a graveyard turning humans into humanoids. When beliefs and symbols are identified as if they are the experiential world itself, then man becomes alienated from both himself and the world about him. Not only does he then live in a plastic universe, but he feels he does not need to explore it for himself. All a child has to do is look up his question in the answer book of the species and no further personal responsibility or curiosity is needed.

But truth is not so cheap. It needs courage and intelligence to explore unknown frontiers. Beliefs are cheap and they do seem great bargains at first. Ready-made answers are free. However, there is one small problem – there is no room for doubt. Doubt is the worm in the apple.

It is always the fear of a true-believer that somewhere, somewhen, someone will come along to disturb his cherished and borrowed ideas. Believers have to burn books, or heretics. At all costs they must repress that threat to their belief. If you have experienced the sunrise in the morning you don’t announce, “I believe the sun.” You have seen it. You know. Knowing is a direct experiential understanding, vibrant with life, authentic and individual. How can there be any doubt? You have seen the sun rise. But belief and knowledge can never be quite so sure; there’s always a niggling doubt.

Beliefs are rigid, dead and frozen fish. If they ever did swim with life it was in the mind of the original innovator, who knew it. It was truth for him, without doubt or belief.

Truth is always individual, anyone else’s truth is worthless. Truth is a non-transferable ticket which only bears one name.

(Yatri, Unknown Man [source])

…and (italicized portion):

The confusion got worse every moment, and Alice was very glad to get out of the wood into an open place, where she found the White King seated on the ground, busily writing in his memorandum-book.

“I’ve sent them all!” the King cried in a tone of delight, on seeing Alice. “Did you happen to meet any soldiers, my dear, as you came through the wood?”

“Yes, I did,” said Alice: “several thousand, I should think.”

“Four thousand two hundred and seven, that’s the exact number,” the King said, referring to his book. “I couldn’t send all the horses, you know, because two of them are wanted in the game. And I haven’t sent the two Messengers, either. They’re both gone to the town. Just look along the road, and tell me if you can see either of them.”

“I see nobody on the road,” said Alice.

“I only wish I had such eyes,” the King remarked in a fretful tone. “To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance, too! Why, it’s as much as I can do to see real people, by this light!”

(Lewis Carroll [source])

From elsewhere:

Imagine that a future version of me, perhaps not so far away, offers you the deal of a lifetime. I can replace your brain with a machine that is its equal in every way, so that from the outside, nobody could tell the difference. This new machine has many advantages—it is immune to decay, and perhaps it will allow you to live forever.

But there’s a catch. Since even future-me is not sure how real brains give rise to consciousness, I can’t guarantee that you will have any conscious experiences at all, should you take up this offer. Maybe you will, if consciousness depends only on functional capacity, on the power and complexity of the brain’s circuitry, but maybe you won’t, if consciousness depends on a specific biological material—neurons, for example. Of course, since your machine-brain leads to identical behavior in every way, when I ask new-you whether you are conscious, new-you will say yes. But what if, despite this answer, life—for you—is no longer in the first person?

(Anil Seth [source])

…and:

Senior Discount

I want to grow old with you.
Old, old.

So old we pad through the supermarket
using the shopping cart as a cane that steadies us.

I’ll wait at register two in my green sweater
with threadbare elbows, smiling
because you’ve forgotten the bag of day-old pastries.

The cashier will tell me a joke about barbers as I wait.
He repeats the first line three times
but the only word I understand is barber.

Over the years we’ve caught inklings
of our shrinking frames and hunched spines.

You’re a little confused
looking for me at the wrong register with a bag
of almost-stale croissants clenched in your hand.

The first time I held your hand it felt enormous in my own.
Sasquatch, I teased you, a million years ago.

Over here, I yell, but not in a mad way.

We’re laughing.
You have a bright yellow pin on your coat that says, Shalom!

Senior Discount, you say.
But the cashier already knows us.
We’re everyone’s favorite customers.

(Ali Liebegott [source])

…and:

All people have their own living road to heaven. Until they walk on this road, they are like drunkards who cannot tell which way is which.

Then when they set foot on this road and lose their confusion, it is up to them which way they shall go — they are no longer subject to the arbitrary directions of others.

(Mi-An [source])

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A Quirky, er, No: an *Eclectic* Christmas Mix (2024 Ed.)

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[Video: Billie Eilish, Kate McKinnon, and Ego Nwodim recount — in cabaret-jazz style — their… unusual experiences with Santa.]

Want to visit the pages for earlier playlists, which include videos, other songs, and some background material not in the “official” current list? Here y’go:

2008 2009
2010 2011
2012 2013
2014 2015
2016 2017
2018 2019
2020 2021
2022 2023

Welcome to this year’s installment of a favorite long-running series! As in the past, I’ve added to an existing Christmas playlist ten more tracks which I’m remembering fondly (usually from childhood) or have recently found… interesting, for one reason or another.

If you’ve been around here in past years, you may recall that in 2023 I switched to Spotify as my music player of choice, and I’ll continue with that this year. This carries the same advantages and disadvantages as it did then. Particularly annoying: an embedded Spotify playlist doesn’t offer a “shuffle” option to randomize the sequence of songs… (Come on, Spotify — get with the program!) Of course, you don’t need RAMH to listen to such a playlist… But you will need at least a free Spotify account. If you’ve got that much, you can listen to this year’s selections via either of these links:

In past years, I could at least direct you to the old-style playlists which didn’t require Spotify at all. Apparently, though, last week’s crash, lockup, and recovery managed to nuke all the playlists themselves (although the posts in which they used to be embedded are still up — see the list of years in that box above and to the right, if you’re curious). And yes, I am mouthing emojis and dingbats to have just discovered that…

Anyway, here are the two embedded playlists, which don’t require a Spotify account at all — but if you have none, it will interrupt your listening with occasional ads and nagging to create an account.

2024 only:

2008-2024:

As ever, if all you really want to know is what tracks/performers were added each year, you can follow this link. Note that I was unable to add new tracks in December 2021 and 2022, while we were on our cross-country road trip during those years.

This year’s ten additions include two slightly, uh, offbeat? tracks: they’re both vocals (okay…) — but not in English. I’ve done this sort of thing before but not recently, I think, and the tunes are different enough to warrant bringing them aboard.

First, there’s “Il Est Né / Ca Berger” (track in the 2024 list), performed by The Chieftains, with Anna and Kate McGarrigle’s ethereal voices. I recognized the opening of the tune immediately, but not its name. And of course — shamefacedly monolingual here — I couldn’t make out the words. But the track is apparently a mashup of two separate French songs: “Ile Est Né” (“He Is Born”) and “Ca [actually Ça, with the inflected capital C] Berger.” As far as I can tell, mostly from this page with the full lyrics, the complete title of the latter is: “Ça, Bergers, Assemblons-Nous” — that is to say, “Come, Shepherds, Let Us Gather.” So that’s that track, then: a solidly traditional Christmas carol.

Second, and at the other end of the sacred-to-secular spectrum, is track : an old favorite, “Santa Baby,” in Spanish. (The title itself is sung in English.) I confess: while I love the rendition, what actually drew me to the track at first was the name of the artist: the multiple Grammy-winning Mariachi Divas de Cindy Shea. (You can read more about the group at their own site, and of course also at Wikipedia.) I regret only that the performance, charming though it is, has none of the, y’know, stereotypically mariachi feel I thought I might find.

That wraps up the 2024 edition of this series. I apologize for the inconveniences which last week’s crash may cause for anyone, but promise I’ll try to correct the problem for future Decembers (however many I’ve got left!). Have a wonderful few weeks, everyone!

__________

Footnote: Sharp-eyed observers will notice that this post’s title departs from a tradition established 16 years ago… to wit, the word “quirky” is not struck through, like this: Quirky. For some mysterious reason, the gods of WordPress (the blogging software behind this and thousands of other sites) have removed the ability to style individual title words differently. I first noticed this a couple of months ago, when I could no longer italicize individual words — hence, my trying to retain both (a) the doubt and confusion surrounding the original word quirky (is it a criticism of something to say it’s “quirky”???), and (b) the emphasis, sans italics, on the more “polite” synonym: eclectic…

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The Gods Were Gone, Then You Opened Your Eyes

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(Image: “The ballad of Marie Curie (Army of Lovers,” by Pablo (Gulin) Kopec; found it on Flickr (and used here under a Creative Commons license — thank you!). The image’s title refers to this song, the lyrics to which you can find here.)

From whiskey river:

When I Am Among the Trees

When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness.
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.

I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.

Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, “Stay awhile.”
The light flows from their branches.

And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say,
“and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine.

(Mary Oliver [source])

…and:

Dust

Someone spoke to me last night,
told me the truth. Just a few words,
but I recognized it.
I knew I should make myself get up,
write it down, but it was late,
and I was exhausted from working
all day in the garden, moving rocks.
Now, I remember only the flavor—
not like food, sweet or sharp.
More like a fine powder, like dust.
And I wasn’t elated or frightened,
but simply rapt, aware.
That’s how it is sometimes—
God comes to your window,
all bright light and black wings,
and you’re just too tired to open it.

(Dorianne Laux [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Happiness

There’s just no accounting for happiness,
or the way it turns up like a prodigal
who comes back to the dust at your feet
having squandered a fortune far away.

And how can you not forgive?
You make a feast in honor of what
was lost, and take from its place the finest
garment, which you saved for an occasion
you could not imagine, and you weep night and day
to know that you were not abandoned,
that happiness saved its most extreme form
for you alone.

No, happiness is the uncle you never
knew about, who flies a single-engine plane
onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes
into town, and inquires at every door
until he finds you asleep midafternoon
as you so often are during the unmerciful
hours of your despair.

It comes to the monk in his cell.
It comes to the woman sweeping the street
with a birch broom, to the child
whose mother has passed out from drink.
It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing
a sock, to the pusher, to the basketmaker,
and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots
in the night.
It even comes to the boulder
in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,
to rain falling on the open sea,
to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.

(Jane Kenyon [source])

…and:

Passing a Truck Full of Chickens at Night on Highway Eighty

What struck me first was their panic.

Some were pulled by the wind from moving
to the ends of the stacked cages,
some had their heads blown through the bars—

and could not get them in again.
Some hung there like that—dead—
their own feathers blowing, clotting

in their faces. Then
I saw the one that made me slow some—
I lingered there beside her for five miles.

She had pushed her head through the space
between bars—to get a better view.
She had the look of a dog in the back

of a pickup, that eager look of a dog
who knows she’s being taken along.
She craned her neck.

She looked around, watched me, then
strained to see over the car—strained
to see what happened beyond.

That is the chicken I want to be.

(Jane Mead [source])

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Midweek Music Break: “The Fantasticks”

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Among many, many other things that can be said about the Boomer generation is this: we lived constantly on one cusp or another — at the winding-down of one era, at the start of another, even as the lifespans of each succeeding era narrowed, and narrowed, and narrowed… While it’s true that we’re now woefully out of step with popular culture, basically all that’s happened is: we got tired of keeping up.

Anyhow, each of us seems able to recall at least one cultural pivot moment, some time when a fragment of the former world managed to touch us deeply just before that thing, whatever it was, went fully out of style. For me, one such moment was my first listen to the soundtrack of The Fantasticks.

Musical theater and films had never (as the expression goes) done it for me. They were all so cooooorny, y’know, their “plots” and “sentiments” almost ridiculously easy to lampoon: people meeting and falling in love, falling out of love, falling back in love again; the collision of worldly upper-crust characters with innocent young ingenues and songboys; aspiring singers and dancers getting their Big Chances in ridiculously overproduced numbers (any excuse, really, for the frequent, manifestly implausible burstings-into-song which the genre required); all the absurd reworkings of old classic non-musical genres (Westerns, especially) into misshapen pastiches of easy plot devices stitched together with music…

One of my sisters had latched onto musicals early on, and frequently played their Broadway original-cast soundtrack albums (around the house, where I could not escape the experience) — especially of My Fair Lady. (Ye gods, how many times must I have heard Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews warbling about Spainish weather?!?)

But here’s the thing: I could easily scorn all those tropes… because, well, I had almost no idea what was actually going on, onstage or -screen. I couldn’t hear a lot of what was being said, let alone sung, especially in musical numbers which often delivered their goods in rapid-fire fashion. (Missed that last line? Whoops, sorry, too late — here’s the next one!) Furthermore, I had close to zero life experience (especially with anything like romance, or, all right, with emotion in general). And finally, the culture itself was edging into cynicism and “cool.”

So then I got all the way to college, where an admired professor adroitly mocked my mockery, punctured my balloon: she simply observed the obvious. Which was: if I’d never really paid attention to the form at more than an eye-rolling dismissive level, then sorry, I had no idea what I was talking about. If I wanted to badmouth musicals, then fine, badmouth away… as long as I borrowed, listened to, and (very important!) returned to her this, her treasured original-cast soundtrack album of The Fantasticks.

It probably helped that I knew pretty much nothing about The Fantasticks at the time.

What little I did knew about it came from the pages of The New Yorker. I’d recently started picking up occasional copies of the magazine and would soon start subscribing to it. In the front of each issue, a section headed “Goings On About Town” simply listed — page after page after page — capsule details about art galleries, films being shown, dance performances, library events, concerts, and of course stage productions. About The Fantasticks it included the theater name and performance times, of course, but nothing at all about the plot; it simply said, like, “[Some ridiculous number in the thousands] performances and counting.” (From the start of its Off-Broadway run to its closing, it ultimately played at the same theater for 42 years — over seventeen thousand performances.)

But of the plot and music, the cast and so on: a complete blank space in my head: a blank space — a malleable hollow just ripe for filling.

Well, I’m not gonna try to convince you that it’s high art. (It never pretended to be.) It’s outdated in its attitudes about men, about women, about women-and-men, about children and parenting. Two songs in particular jar today — jar so much that the show’s creators struggled for years with how to completely rework them; they jar so much that if I’d come to the soundtrack for the first time at any point in the last 20-30 years, I’d be horrified. (The songs, for what it’s worth, are “It Depends on What You Pay” and “Rape Ballet,” and while the lyrics make plain the meaning — “rape” in the old, antiquated sense of “abduction,” as here — well, there it is: sticking up in the middle of the playlist like an upraised middle finger.)

But The Fantasticks meant something to twenty-year-old me. I’d recently tried my hand at poetry and discovered, you know: writing to a rhyme-and-rhythm form is hard as bejeezus… Primarily, though, it’s easy to be glib and cynical about love if you’ve never been in love. But when you’ve started — oh so tentatively — for the first time to feel something magnetic about one other person, and when you’re suddenly forced to listen to lyrics clever enough to appeal to your language-loving mind, and grateful for a work’s occasional, self-aware nod in the direction of its own genre’s artificiality…

…well, then, it’s easy to remember that kind of September, or March, or Tuesday, or year.

___

A handful of additional resources, if you care to follow up:

  • The show’s home page (still active, after a fashion)
  • Wikipedia, inevitably
  • Lyrics
  • YouTube: the 1964 Hallmark Hall of Fame TV broadcast, complete with advertising (I vaguely remember this playing in our house, but 13-year-old me certainly wasn’t “into it”)
  • Variety: interview with librettist Tom Jones (no relation!), published after his death last year at age 95
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Where in Your Time and Your Body

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[Video: Janice Ian performs “At Seventeen” on The Old Gray Whistle Test, a British music show broadcast back in the 1970s-80s. I included this song in a “Midweek Music Break” post some years ago about “haunting” music, and still think it deserves that descriptor.]

From whiskey river (last stanza):

Mother Talking in the Porch Swing

Inside the river is there a river?—
it could follow slow water the way
the real current follows a stiller
shore. And in your life the life that
hurries could pass, and pass its
open neighbor the earth, and its shore
the sky. To be here, and always to find
places in the current, the dreams
the river has—surely we bubbles
ought to tell about it?

Listen: One of the rooms the river has
after its bridge and its bend in the mountains
is a place waiting for the sun every
afternoon, when the sun dwells
at a slant under a log and finds
that little yellow room and a waterbug
trying to learn circles but never making
one its shadow approves. Miles later
the river tries to recall that dream,
turning with all of its twisting self
that found gravel and found it good.

Just before the ocean that river
turns on its back and side and slowly
invites the world and the air and the sky,
trying to give away everything, everything.

(William Stafford [source])

…and:

You needn’t to search for any hole in the ground to look through into somewhere else. You can’t go neither forwards nor backwards into your daddy’s time nor your children’s if you have them. In yourself right now is all the place you’ve got. If there was any Fall, look there, if there was any Redemption, look there, and if you expect any Judgment, look there, because they all three will have to be in your time and your body and where in your time and your body can they be?

(Flannery O’Connor [source])

Not from whiskey river:

XIII

Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were
behind you, like the winter that has just gone by.
For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter
that only by wintering through it will your heart survive.

Be forever dead in Eurydice—more gladly arise
into the seamless life proclaimed in your song.
Here, in the realm of decline, among momentary days,
be the crystal cup that shattered even as it rang.

Be—and yet know the great void where all things begin,
the infinite source of your own most intense vibration,
so that, this once, you may give it your perfect assent.

To all that is used-up, and to all the muffled and dumb
creatures in the world’s full reserve, the unsayable sums,
joyfully add yourself, and cancel the count.

(Rainer Maria Rilke [source])

…and:

She had read an article on this café in a magazine. The article had the headline “Uncovering Truth Behind ‘Time-Traveling Café’ Made Famous by Urban Legend.” The gist of the article was as follows.

The café’s name was Funiculi Funicula. It had become famous, with long queues each day, on account of the time-traveling. But it wasn’t possible to find anyone who had actually gone back in time, because of the extremely annoying rules that had to be followed. The first rule was: The only people you can meet while in the past are those who have visited the café. This would usually defeat the purpose of going back. Another rule was: There is nothing you can do while in the past that will change the present. The café was asked why that rule existed, but their only comment was that they didn’t know.

As the author of the article was unable to find anyone who had actually visited the past, whether or not it was actually possible to go back in time remained a mystery. Even supposing it was possible, the sticky point of not being able to change the present certainly made the whole idea seem pointless.

The article concluded by stating that it certainly made an interesting urban legend, but it was difficult to see why the legend existed. As a postscript, the article also mentioned there were apparently other rules that had to be followed but it was unclear what these were.

(Toshikazu Kawaguchi [source])

…and:

The Best Slow Dancer

Under the sagging clotheslines of crepe paper
By the second string of teachers and wallflowers
In the school gym across the key through the glitter
Of mirrored light three-second rule forever
Suspended you danced with her the best slow dancer
Who stood on tiptoe who almost wasn’t there
In your arms like music she knew just how to answer
The question mark of your spine your hand in hers
The other touching that place between her shoulders
Trembling your countless feet lightfooted sure
To move as they wished wherever you might stagger
Without her she turned in time she knew where you were
In time she turned her body into yours
As you moved from thigh to secrets to breast yet never
Where you would be for all time never closer
Than your cheek against her temple her ear just under
Your lips that tried all evening long to tell her
You weren’t the worst one not the boy whose mother
Had taught him to count to murmur over and over
One slide two slide three slide now no longer
The one in the hallway after class the scuffler
The double clubfoot gawker the mouth breather
With the wrong haircut who would never kiss her
But see her dancing off with someone or other
Older more clever smoother dreamier
Not waving a sister somebody else’s partner
Lover while you went floating home through the air
To lie down lighter than air in a moonlit shimmer
Alone to whisper yourself to sleep remember.

(David Wagoner [source])

…and:

How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you was?

(Satchel Paige [source])

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