Being Here (Today)

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Pogo: Churchy's paraskavedekatriaphobia (click for full strip)

From whiskey river (first 3+ lines not included there):

from The Ninth Duino Elegy

Why, if this interval of being can be spent serenely
in the form of a laurel, slightly darker than all
other green, with tiny waves on the edges
of every leaf (like the smile of a breeze)–: why then
have to be human–and, escaping from fate,
keep longing for fate?. . .

Oh not because happiness exists,
that too-hasty profit snatched from approaching loss.
Not out of curiosity, not as practice for the heart, which
would exist in the laurel too. . . . .

But because truly being here is so much; because everything here
apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some
strange way
keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.
Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too,
just once. And never again. But to have been
this once, completely, even if only once:
to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.

(Rainer Maria Rilke, c. 1922 [source])

…and:

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then one of them looks over at the other and says, “What the hell is water?”

(David Foster Wallace, 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College [source])

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Pay No Attention to the People in Front of the Curtain

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Dear Turner Classic Movies (TCM):

I fell in love with you years ago. Who wouldn’t love a cable channel that broadcasts (and re-broadcasts (and, all right, re-re-broadcasts)) timeless movies, often in black-and-white, that otherwise would have faded into obscurity years ago?

True, I had moments of doubt (they happen in the best of relationships).

Mostly, you didn’t seem to care that I had to change the channel. Not because I didn’t want to see the feature (I did! I did!), no. Rather, I had to change the channel because I couldn’t hear what anyone was saying, or could hear only sporadically. I could often read lips in the closeups but eventually I’d tire. I’m no spring chicken anymore, you know. So I’d sigh melodramatically — you never noticed, did you? — and switch over to something ghastly like SPIKE or SciFi or even the Hallmark Channel… at least until they, too, turned a cold shoulder to me.

But you kept winning me back. More and more films would be close-captioned — even the oldest ones from early in the sound era. And I know, I know — the studios and distributors probably paid for the captioning. So maybe it was out of your hands, not your decision anyway.

Still, I think maybe you were just toying with my affections.

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Morning Instructions

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From whiskey river:

On Angels

All was taken away from you: white dresses,
wings, even existence.
Yet I believe you,
messengers.

There, where the world is turned inside out,
a heavy fabric embroidered with stars and beasts,
you stroll, inspecting the trustworthy seams.

Short is your stay here:
now and then at a matinal hour, if the sky is clear,
in a melody repeated by a bird,
or in the smell of apples at close of day
when the light makes the orchards magic.

They say somebody has invented you
but to me this does not sound convincing
for the humans invented themselves as well.

The voice — no doubt it is a valid proof,
as it can belong only to radiant creatures,
weightless and winged (after all, why not?),
girdled with the lightning.

I have heard that voice many a time when asleep
and, what is strange, I understood more or less
an order or an appeal in an unearthly tongue:

day draws near
another one
do what you can.

(Czeslaw Milosz)

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Night Plus Light Makes Right

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From the toxel.com design blog:

Light writing is a form of stop motion animation wherein still images captured using the technique known as light painting are put in sequence thereby creating the optical illusion of movement for the viewer.

Two examples:

Impacto Criativo (Creative Impact)

Created by Propague and MidiaEffects with 2 cameras, 1700 clicks, 18 people, 20 nights, 35 flash lights, and 234 batteries.

…and:

Light Paint Piano Player

Created by Ryan Cashman with a small green LED keychain light. The frames were photographed with a Canon Rebel using 20-30 second exposure time.

See them all. (Warning: visiting the toxel.com home page can be hazardous to one’s productivity.)

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Department of Barely Restrained Comment
(Jane Austen Desk)

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From Variety (courtesy of The New Yorker‘s “The Book Bench” blog):

Rocket launches ‘Predator’
Clark to direct aliens vs. Jane Austen pic
By MICHAEL FLEMING

Elton John’s Rocket Pictures hopes to make the first Jane Austen adaptation to which men will drag their girlfriends.

Will Clark is set to direct “Pride and Predator,” which veers from the traditional period costume drama when an alien crash lands and begins to butcher the mannered protags, who suddenly have more than marriage and inheritance to worry about.

[…]

“It felt like a fresh and funny way to blow apart the done-to-death Jane Austen genre by literally dropping this alien into the middle of a costume drama, where he stalks and slashes to horrific effect,” [Rocket Pictures’ David] Furnish said.

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What’s in a Song: I Get Along Without You Very Well
(Part 2)

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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:

  1. The full title of the song included, at the end, “(Except Sometimes)” — a phrase which appears nowhere in the lyrics.
  2. 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

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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.
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What’s in a Song: I Get Along Without You Very Well
(Part 1)

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[Another in an occasional series on popular songs with appeal across the generations. This post will be broken into two parts; Part 2, about this song’s composition, appears tomorrow [edit to add:] or the next day Thursday.]

There’s a trick performed by some songwriters — I don’t know the term for it, if there is one — in which they “overstuff” their lyrics’ lines with extra syllables.

This is similar to what, in poetry, is called sprung rhythm: “verse” which mimics the rhythm of natural speech.

It also calls to mind a sly little bit of business by Alexander Pope. In demonstrating the awkwardness of so-called alexandrine meter — twelve syllables per line — Pope once, as Wikipedia says, “famously characterized the alexandrine’s potential to slow or speed the flow of a poem in two rhyming couplets consisting of an iambic pentameter followed by an alexandrine.” One of these two couplets goes:

A needless alexandrine ends the song
that like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along.

See the way that second line seems overloaded with syllables? That’s pretty much the idea I’m getting at here.

In a song, though, the effect can be either subtler or more ponderous, as the words follow the underlying instrumentation — and depending on the singer’s skill. It’s not like we’re just reading the words on a page, free to imagine, if we want, that the line breaks and meter don’t count at all: it has to “sound right.”

So let’s start out with the lyrics, then, to “I Get Along Without You Very Well” (Hoagy Carmichael*, 1939):

I get along without you very well,
Of course I do,
Except when soft rains fall
And drip from leaves, then I recall
The thrill of being sheltered in your arms.
Of course, I do.
But I get along without you very well.

I’ve forgotten you just like I should,
Of course I have,
Except to hear your name,
Or someone’s laugh that is the same,
But I’ve forgotten you just like I should.

What a guy, what a fool am I.
To think my breaking heart could kid the moon.
What’s in store? Should I phone once more?
No, it’s best that I stick to my tune.

I get along without you very well,
Of course I do.
Except perhaps in spring.
But I should never think of spring,
For that would surely break my heart in two.

[Read more…]

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