Guys: Think. Just… think.
(Okay, it’s a commercial. But you won’t see it on TV — it’s too long.)
Leaving a Light On the Reality of Writing
[Don’t assume the above is the whole story. Click the image to see the
complete strip from Shannon Wheeler’s “How to Be Happy” series.]
Like me, you have probably heard more than once the assertion — pronounced in a gentle voice, at the end of a radio commercial (for the Motel 6 chain) consisting entirely of nothing but that gentle voice — “We’ll leave the light on for you.” Like me, you may have assumed that the speaker, self-identified as a “Tom Bodett,” either founded or at least owns or otherwise presides over Motel 6.
Not so. Here’s how Wikipedia summarizes his work: “…an American author, voice actor and radio host.” Far from having any official capacity for Motel 6, he’s just its “current spokesman.” (Many more details can be found at Bodett’s own site.)
In a commentary broadcast a couple years ago on Bob Edwards’s XM Radio program, Bodett talked about a side of “the writing life” which will be painfully familiar to just about anyone who’s attempted to take it seriously. Bodett himself is kidding. Sort of:
Everyday Matters
[Photo of a giant Archimedes screw. Funny, isn’t it — how
a giant screw can be both a problem and a solution?]
From whiskey river:
Starfish
This is what life does. It lets you walk up to
the store to buy breakfast and the paper, on a
stiff knee. It lets you choose the way you have
your eggs, your coffee. Then it sits a fisherman
down beside you at the counter who says, Last night,
the channel was full of starfish. And you wonder,
is this a message, finally, or just another day?Life lets you take the dog for a walk down to the
pond, where whole generations of biological
processes are boiling beneath the mud. Reeds
speak to you of the natural world: they whisper,
they sing. And herons pass by. Are you old
enough to appreciate the moment? Too old?
There is movement beneath the water, but it
may be nothing. There may be nothing going on.And then life suggests that you remember the
years you ran around, the years you developed
a shocking lifestyle, advocated careless abandon,
owned a chilly heart. Upon reflection, you are
genuinely surprised to find how quiet you have
become. And then life lets you go home to think
about all this. Which you do, for quite a long time.Later, you wake up beside your old love, the one
who never had any conditions, the one who waited
you out. This is life’s way of letting you know that
you are lucky. (It won’t give you smart or brave,
so you’ll have to settle for lucky.) Because you
were born at a good time. Because you were able
to listen when people spoke to you. Because you
stopped when you should have and started again.So life lets you have a sandwich, and pie for your
late night dessert. (Pie for the dog, as well.) And
then life sends you back to bed, to dreamland,
while outside, the starfish drift through the channel,
with smiles on their starry faces as they head
out to deep water, to the far and boundless sea.
(by Eleanor Lerman)
Momentary Semantic Vertigo
Please forgive an extended excerpt from a favorite scene in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass. Humpty Dumpty is here the initial speaker, and he is discussing birthdays vs. un-birthdays:
“…There”s glory for you!”
“I don”t know what you mean by ‘glory’,” Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t — till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!'”
“But ‘glory’ doesn”t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument’,” Alice objected.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that”s all.”
Alice was too much puzzled to say anything; so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. “They’ve a temper, some of them — particularly verbs: they’re the proudest — adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs — however, I can manage the whole lot of them! Impenetrability! That’s what I say!”
“Would you tell me please,” said Alice, “what that means?”
“Now you talk like a reasonable child,” said Humpty Dumpty, looking very much pleased. “I meant by ‘impenetrability’ that we’ve had enough of that subject, and it would be just as well if you’d mention what you mean to do next, as I suppose you don’t mean to stop here all the rest of your life.”
“That’s a great deal to make one word mean,” Alice said in a thoughtful tone.
“When I make a word do a lot of work like that,” said Humpty Dumpty, “I always pay it extra.”
“Oh!” said Alice. She was too much puzzled to make any other remark.
In the supermarket last night, I considered the flashlights displayed for sale. I’d been meaning to get a couple of little flashlights to distribute here and there in the house, for when we have power outages. (Not that we have a lot of them, but you never know.) I selected a couple of nice ones, each running on three triple-A batteries, and what I liked most about them was that their light came from this little cluster of bright LEDs instead of a conventional bulb. Five bucks each.
Took them home, and finally managed to cut through the insanely hard plastic bubble (invented, rumor has it, by the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s Division of Impermeable Wall Materials and then released to the private sector for its own use).
Inserted the batteries, tested them. Great. All was in working order.
Dropped one flashlight here, another in another room, then returned to extract the cardboard packaging inserts from the plastic bubbles in order to toss the inserts into the recycling stack. Before discarding them, though, I thought Okay, you already know what you just bought but what the heck, flipped one over, started to read the fine print on the back.
Here’s what I saw first:
Sounds great, right? Then I read further:
“Can I Kindleize that Velveteen Rabbit For Ya?”
Like most writing and reading households, The Missus and mine has books way in excess of the available bookshelf space. We’ve lived in this house for more than eight years now, yet still — still! — somewhere around six or eight cartons and big plastic tubs of books take up space in our (mercifully dry) garage.
On the one hand, as The Missus soberly points out, we’re never going to (re-)read all the books we’ve already got. Why not donate them to Goodwill, the Salvation Army, or just sell the damn things in a garage sale or on eBay?
And yet, and yet…
In just the six or or seven months I’ve been writing here on RAMH, on probably 15 or 20 occasions I have longed to put my hands on a book. Not just any book but a specific one for a specific occasion. A book containing a quote I know, sorta, but don’t know. Or a book containing some random fact which I don’t quite have the words for.
Every one of those books is in one box or another in the garage. I know exactly what their covers look like. Frustratingly, because some of them are in big translucent plastic containers, I can actually see some of them.
(Aside to The Missus: Don’t worry. I’m not about to start rummaging. We both know what will happen: I’ll find another book I wouldn’t mind having to hand, and then another, and then another… Within a half-hour I’ll have an empty box and even less space upstairs in the office for trivial activities like, oh, say, standing and sitting.)
Wouldn’t it be nice if I had all those books on… hmm… online, maybe? or digitized and placed on a little six-inch stack of Amazon Kindles?
A recent Op-Ed piece in the New York Times, by James Gleick*, tackles this problem. The piece begins by discussing the woes besetting the publishing industry (writers, agents, and editors as well as the faceless corporations themselves):
The gloom that has fallen over the book publishing industry is different from the mood in, say, home building. At least people know we’ll always need houses.
And now comes the news, as book sales plummet amid the onslaught of digital media, that authors, publishers and Google have reached a historic agreement to allow the scanning and digitizing of something very much like All the World’s Books. So here is the long dreamed-of universal library, its contents available (more or less) to every computer screen anywhere. Are you happy now? Maybe not, if your business has been the marketing, distributing or archiving of books.
If you’ve spent any time at all recently looking at the blogs of editors and agents, the angst will be familiar to you. It’s rampant not just among the bloggers and other opinion leaders, but among the commenters — often writers, nearly always passionate readers — upon their opinions.
Strangely, what is at stake — driving the panicky stampede over the cliff — isn’t the future of literacy, the real linchpin of civilization. It’s the future of books.
Letting Go, with Thanks
From whiskey river:
The wonder of a moment in which there is nothing but an upwelling of simple happiness is utterly awesome. Gratitude is so close to the bone of life, pure and true, that it instantly stops the rational mind, and all its planning and plotting. That kind of let go is fiercely threatening. I mean, where might such gratitude end?
(Regina Sara Ryan, Praying Dangerously)
Not from whiskey river:
Don’t pray when it rains if you don’t pray when the sun shines.
(Leroy “Satchel” Paige, New York Post, October 4, 1959)
…and:
My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it’s on your plate — that’s my philosophy.
(Thornton Wilder, “Sabiba,” The Skin of Our Teeth)
Finally, the song chosen to wrap up the Northern Exposure series. Not everyone is a fan of Iris Dement’s voice, but I think this is a great song. The performance was on Austin City Limits. (If you’d prefer to see the Northern Exposure version, it’s on YouTube as well — in a shorter and quite darkly lit video.)
Lyrics:
Our Town
(words and music by Iris Dement)And you know the sun’s settin’ fast
and just like they say nothing good ever lasts
Well, go on now and kiss it goodbye but hold on to your lover
’cause your heart’s bound to die
Go on now and say goodbye to our town, to our town
Can’t you see the sun’s settin’ down on our town, on our town
goodnight
Up the street beside that red neon light
that’s where I met my baby on one hot summer night
He was the tender and I ordered a beer
It’s been forty years and I’m still sitting hereBut you know the sun’s settin’ fast
and just like they say nothing good ever lasts
Well, go on now and kiss it goodbye but hold on to your lover
’cause your heart’s bound to die
Go on now and say goodbye to our town, to our town
Can’t you see the sun’s settin’ down on our town, on our town
goodnightIt’s here I had my baby’s and I had my first kiss
I’ve walked down Main Street in the cold morning mist
Over there is where I bought my first car
it turned over once but then it never went farAnd I can see the sun settin’ fast
and just like they say nothing good ever lasts
Well, go on now and kiss it goodbye but hold on to your lover
’cause your heart’s bound to die
Go on now and say goodbye to our town, to our town
Can’t you see the sun’s settin’ down on our town, on our town
goodnightI buried my Mama and I buried my Pa
They sleep up the street beside that pretty brick wall
I bring them flowers about every day
but I just gotta cry when I think what they’d sayIf they could see how the sun’s settin’ fast
and just like they say nothing good ever lasts
Well, go on now and kiss it goodbye but hold on to your lover
’cause your heart’s bound to die
Go on now and say goodbye to our town, to our town
Can’t you see the sun’s settin’ down on our town, on our town
goodnightNow I sit on the porch and watch the lightning-bugs fly
but I can’t see too good, I got tears in my eyes
I’m leaving tomorrow but I don’t wanna go
I love you my town, you’ll always live in my soulBut I can see the sun’s settin’ fast
and just like they say nothing good ever lasts
Well, go on I gotta kiss you goodbye but I’ll hold to my lover
’cause my heart’s ’bout to die
Go on now and say goodbye to my town, to my town
Can’t you see the sun’s settin’ down on my town, on my town
Goodnight, goodnight
Thankful for the War Chant
Despite having spent 40 years of my life in one area of New Jersey or another, and despite having gone into New York City many times, I’ve never seen the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade live.
Oh, it’s been tempting, all right. I do like going to parades — something about them, their not-quite-cheesy sentimentality, their infectious mass giddiness, the tinniness of the music and the general professionalism but occasional ineptitude of the performers, something about them always manages to stir my blood. (This would be blood shared with my late drum-and-bugle-corps Dad and erstwhile drum-majorette Mom, so perhaps it’s not just coincidence.)
But the Macy’s Parade — like Times Square on New Year’s Eve — just seems one of those crowd experiences enjoyed better from the comfort of one’s living room. The views are better. The sound is better. In recent years, with the advent of closed captioning, even more esoteric rewards can be found in the commentary and lyrics previously only guessed at.
Thought Music
What’s the deal with music, anyway?
Why does listening to music feel so much different from listening to anything else? Why does certain music make it easier to work — and certain music make it so much harder?
I’m not talking about coarse basics like volume, or instrumental-versus-vocal music. Apply enough volume, after all, and ANY music becomes mere (or not so mere) noise. No, I’m wondering about subtleties: rhythm, pace, melody, “feel.”
For the rest of this post, if you’d like, feel free to select one of the following three audio streams as your soundtrack. (Or leave them playing in this browser window or tab while you use another to go on doing something else.) They’re all instrumental. And there’s one for each of three genres: classical, jazz, and “post-rock,” a genre I myself wouldn’t have named (which probably just proves that I know nothing consequential about music).
Note: I also tacked on a bonus track; in the course of building this post, I couldn’t stop thinking of this number. It’s much longer than the others, though — 20+ minutes instead of only around six.
On the Inside, Looking Out
From whiskey river:
Stone
Go inside a stone
That would be my way.
Let somebody else become a dove
Or gnash his teeth inside a tiger.
I am happy with a stone.From the outside the stone is a riddle;
No one knows how to answer it.
Yet within, it must be cool and quiet
Even though a cow steps on it full weight,
Even though a child throws it in a river;
The stone sinks, slow, unperturbed
To the river-bottom
Where the fishes come to knock on it
And listen with eyes of dead roosters.I have seen sparks fly out
When two stones are rubbed.
So perhaps, it is not dark inside after all.
Perhaps, there is a moon shining
From somewhere, as behind a hill;
Just enough light to make out
The strange writings, the star-charts
On the inner walls.
(by Charles Simic)
Not from whiskey river:
I Often Contradict Myself
I often contradict myself.
Oh no, I never do.
I argue with me day and night.
That simply isnt true.Oh yes it is. Oh no it’s not.
I do this all day long.
Oh no I don’t. Oh yes I do.
That’s right. No way! It’s wrong.I’m really quite agreeable.
I argue night and day.
I love to be around myself.
I wish I’d go away.So if you see me arguing,
it’s certain that you won’t.
I like to contradict myself.
I promise you I don’t.
(by children’s poet Kenn Nesbitt)
Finally: The Missus and I saw the group Celtic Woman on tour a couple-three years ago. Although their voices are almost unbearably sweet, one of my favorite numbers — actually a back-to-back pair of numbers — was instrumental: “Ashoken Farewell” and “Contradiction.” Of those two, the first really sang to me; if you remember the PBS/Ken Burns The Civil War series, you’ll probably recognize the tune.
Again, this is an instrumental performance. (It’s by fiddler Máiréad Nesbitt of Celtic Woman — through most of the show, a manic dancing dervish of a leprechaun-like presence, but not here… not at all.) Nonetheless, the piece does have lyrics (added some time after the tune itself was composed), and these appear below the video.
Ashokan (or Ashoken) Farewell
(music by Jay Ungar, lyrics by Grian McGregor)The sun is sinking low in the sky above Ashokan,
The pines and the willows know soon we will part.
There’s a whisper in the wind of promises unspoken,
And a love that will always remain in my heart.My thoughts will return to the sound of your laughter,
The magic of moving as one.
And a time we’ll remember long ever after
The moonlight and music and dancing are done.Will we climb the hills once more?
Will we walk the woods together?
Will I feel you holding me close once again?
Will every song we’ve sung stay with us forever?
Will you dance in my dreams or my arms until then?Under the moon the mountains lie sleeping,
Over the lake the stars shine.
They wonder if you and I will be keeping,
The magic and music, or leave them behind.
From an interview (at the PBS site linked above) with Jay Ungar, who wrote the music:
“Ashokan Farewell” is a tune that I wrote unintentionally, really. It was a moment of deep emotion after the summer camps at Ashokan had ended. It was the third summer, and it was an experiment every summer, you know, pulling this together. And it had been such a deeply moving experience and the community of people and the feeling of unity that we had had through music, and being away from the regular world was so important to me that when I’d gotten home, I had a sense of loss and longing; and I was looking for a Scottish lament, you know, that would express how I felt. And I couldn’t think of one, so I just started playing, and this tune came out. And it brought me to tears. And every time I played the beginning of it, for months afterward, I was brought to tears.
Bart Seinstein
Today’s going to be one of those days, I can feel it already, with a dozen smallish separate workloads (worklets?) piled like rubble against the non-existent door of my office at the day job…
A major embarrassment of my life as a pop-culture geek, TV watcher, animation fan, admirer of anarchic humor, etc. etc., is that I’ve seldom seen an entire episode of The Simpsons.
(Once they learn my last name, even people who don’t know me take it on faith that I must be a fan. When I was living in Virginia, pre-The Missus, I had a Saturday-night ritual which in part involved placing a pizza order at the Domino’s in the center of town, and then driving in to pick it up a few minutes later. The first time the kid who took phone orders asked my name, he busted out laughing. “Bart,” he said without explanation, “is that you?” I probably went to that Domino’s at least fifty times thereafter and every time — whether taking my order or when I arrived to pick it up — he greeted me with a hearty “Bart!” When I moved away, I should have stopped by Domino’s one last time to give him a token of some kind — a used copy of Crossed Wires, at least, the pages marked here and there with greasy thumbprints and a bookmark of crust or pepperoni. But, duh, I didn’t.)
Anyway, although I haven’t seen the show that much, I have picked up plenty of the in-jokes and recurring elements which have made their way into the general culture, elements like the very last view of the family, sitting on the couch at the end of the opening credits, in an apparently infinite number of variations of the same pose(s). I’ve seen plenty of Simpsons quotes used in email and forum sigs. I know that the exclamation “D’oh!” doesn’t translate to Duh, as one might expect, but more like something on the order of Oh, CRAP.
(Naturally, I’m expecting to be descended upon by show geeks to point out the nuances — why Homer doesn’t, for instance, simply say Oh, CRAP because in Season 2, Episode 11, he was etc. etc. etc.; and/or why, for another instance, D’oh! doesn’t mean Oh, CRAP! exactly, as I certainly could have figured out on my own if I’d just done some simple research, even Wiki-freaking-pedia got that much right, dude!)
Anyway, again, at least I knew enough about the show to be surprised that no one else, using one of the online time-sink toys at hetemeel.com, had apparently thought of this:
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