Non-Holiday Holiday Reading

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I had occasion recently to hunt down a story by James Thurber which I hadn’t read in *counting*… uh, many years. But the first time I “read” it, I didn’t actually read it: I heard it, read aloud, by my seventh-grade English teacher.

The story itself has nothing to do with Christmas or even winter (as far as I can tell), but the day Mr. Krause read it to us and his other seventh-grade class was the last schoolday before Christmas break — when no one, teachers included, had much interest in academic matters. (An innocent time, eh?)

Mr. Krause’s voice had a flattened, slightly nasal quality to it; years later, as a teacher myself, I heard a recording of Kurt Vonnegut reading from Slaughterhouse-Five (“Overhead he heard the cry of what might have been a melodious owl, but it wasn’t a melodious owl. It was a flying saucer from Tralfamadore”) and thought I recognized in his voice my old teacher’s. As he read the story that day, grinning almost the whole time, he sat on the desk and kept having to stop and laugh. Indeed, even not counting the jokes, it must be a fun story to read aloud — all those smackings and tockings of all the k-sounds. But I’m surprised, in retrospect, that he read it to seventh graders; the diction and sentence structure, the almost literal slipperiness of the writing, seems to me a tad above listening-comprehension level.

(Most of all, I guess, I’m surprised that even one of those listeners still remembers as much about the day as he does.)

The title is “The Last Clock,” not to be confused with Thurber’s more well-known, full-length book, The Thirteen Clocks. Online, the story seems to be available nowhere except at the site of The New Yorker, which originally published it in February, 1959; to read it there, you’ll need either to be a New Yorker subscriber, or you’ll need to purchase (for $5.99) one-year access to the digital version of the issue.

Offline, the most obvious choice is to find the issue in some form at a library… or obtain a copy, one way or another, of the Thurber anthology called Lanterns and Lances.

In the meantime, as a little bit of a tasty holiday treat, I thought I’d transcribe the first section (and a bit more) into a page here at RAMH. (Links to both the New Yorker site and to some places to obtain Lanterns and Lances appear at the end of that excerpt.)

Enjoy!

Read “The Last Clock” (excerpt), by James Thurber

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Boyish Prankery

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Marta was wondering earlier this week about pranks, harmless or funny or otherwise. Coincidentally, at about the same time that she posted that, I received a funny reminder of a successful but harmless prank I’d been involved with from years ago. Thought I’d share the story with you (even though some of it, in retrospect, will embarrass me and make me wish that some things weren’t true).

Some background:

I attended a small high school in southern New Jersey in the late 1960s. Most school dances, at least back then (what do they do now, anyway?), were held in the gym, suitably transformed into romantic wonderlands by crepe paper and complicated lighting. But in our junior year, the prom — the Big Event — took place at a popular club some 10 or 15 miles away. Called the Latin Casino, it was a big deal, with big-name entertainers on the calendar, and at the time our prom took place the big name was big indeed: The Supremes, with Diana Ross.

So yes, we always got a rise out of telling people that we’d had The Supremes — The REAL Supremes — at our junior prom. We always got a rise out of that, even if we hadn’t gone to the prom ourselves. Which was the case with Yours Truly and most of his friends, none of us having yet fully (or at all) emerged from our cocoons of bachelor-boyhood.

(To be fair, it was a plain old economic calculation, too; two tickets to the Latin Casino cost a heck of a lot more than two tickets to the RHS gym. You practically had to believe you meant to marry the young lady in question.)

So that’s the background story. Now scroll the calendar forward, not quite a decade…

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Superstar in the Making

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Regular whiskey river Friday post coming up shortly. In the meantime, in case you haven’t seen it already, another of those going-/gone-viral instant Web sensation videos to put a Friday grin on your face:

To begin, if you don’t already know of the songwriter/performer Jason Mraz and his song “I’m Yours,” you might want to watch this:

With or without watching that one, though, you need to watch this one:

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What’s Your Story? (Are You Sure?)

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From whiskey river:

The Story, Around the Corner

is not turning the way you thought
it would turn, gently, in a little spiral loop,
the way a child draws the tail of a pig.
What came out of your mouth,
a riff of common talk.
As a sudden weather shift on a beach,
sky looming mountains of cloud
in a way you cannot predict
or guide, the story shuffles elements, darkens,
takes its own side. And it is strange.
Far more complicated than a few phrases
pieced together around a kitchen table
on a July morning in Dallas, say,
a city you don’t live in, where people
might shop forever or throw a thousand stories
away. You who carried or told a tiny bit of it
aren’t sure. Is this what we wanted?
Stories wandering out,
having their own free lives?
Maybe they are planning something bad.
A scrap or cell of talk you barely remember
is growing into a weird body with many demands.
One day soon it will stumble up the walk and knock,
knock hard, and you will have to answer the door.

(Naomi Shihab Nye [source])

…and (italicized portion):

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea. The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be “interesting” to know which. We tell ourselves that it makes some difference whether the naked woman is about to commit a mortal sin or is about to register a political protest or is about to be, the Aristophanic view, snatched back to the human condition by the fireman in priest’s clothing just visible in the window behind her, the one smiling at the telephoto lens. We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience. Or at least we do for a while.

(Joan Didion, The White Album [source])

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Loitering in Mind

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A somewhat slapdash whiskey river Friday post this week, its author having been pretty much laid low by the stupidest of ailments — a cold — since Tuesday night.

From whiskey river’s commonplace book (a thematic archive):

Can You Imagine?

For example, what the trees do
not only in lightning storms
or the watery dark of a summer’s night
or under the white nets of winter
but now, and now, and now — whenever
we’re not looking. Surely you can’t imagine
they don’t dance, from the root up, wishing
to travel a little, not cramped so much as wanting
a better view, or more sun, or just as avidly
more shade — surely you can’t imagine they just
stand there loving every
minute of it, the birds or the emptiness, the dark rings
of the years slowly and without a sound
thickening, and nothing different unless the wind,
and then only in its own mood, comes
to visit, surely you can’t imagine
patience, and happiness, like that.

(Mary Oliver [source])

From whiskey river:

The time is ripe for looking back over the day, the week, the year, and trying to figure out where we have come from and where we are going to, for sifting through the things we have done and the things we have left undone for a clue to who we are and who, for better or worse, we are becoming. But again and again we avoid the long thoughts. We cling to the present out of wariness of the past. And why not, after all? We get confused. We need such escape as we can find. But there is a deeper need yet, I think, and that is the need — not all the time, surely, but from time to time — to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as a part of the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive ourselves to turnings and to where our journeys have brought us. The name of the room is Remember — the room where with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we have lived.

(Frederick Buechner [source: quoted many places online])

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Losing Our Heads Over Modest Gods

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[Above, a set of miniature Egyptian canopic jars depicting, according to the retailer, “Anubis, Horus, Monkey God, Prince.”* Click image for original.]

From whiskey river (which this week celebrated eight years of bringing to the Web wisdom about things we generally know, but generally do not speak of):

Shinto

When sorrow lays us low
for a second we are saved
by humble windfalls
of the mindfulness or memory:
the taste of a fruit, the taste of water,
that face given back to us by a dream,
the first jasmine of November,
the endless yearning of the compass,
a book we thought was lost,
the throb of a hexameter,
the slight key that opens a house to us,
the smell of a library, or of sandalwood,
the former name of a street,
the colors of a map,
an unforeseen etymology,
the smoothness of a filed fingernail,
the date we were looking for,
the twelve dark bell-strokes, tolling as we count,
a sudden physical pain.

Eight million Shinto deities **
travel secretly throughout the earth.
Those modest gods touch us —
touch us and move on.

(Jorge Luis Borges)

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Starting and Restarting

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[Image above is captioned: “Hoagy Carmichael* pretending to crank start a car.”
From the Hoagy Carmichael Collection at Indiana University.]

From whiskey river, still mining the William Stafford vein (and no complaints from this quarter):

The Gift

Time wants to show you a different country. It’s the one
that your life conceals, the one waiting outside
when curtains are drawn, the one Grandmother hinted at
in her crochet design, the one almost found
over at the edge of the music, after the sermon.

It’s the way life is, and you have it, a few years given.
You get killed now and then, violated
in various ways. (And sometimes it’s turn about.)
You get tired of that. Long-suffering, you wait
and pray, and maybe good things come — maybe
the hurt slackens and you hardly feel it any more.
You have a breath without pain. It is called happiness.

It’s a balance, the taking and passing along,
the composting of where you’ve been and how people
and weather treated you. It’s a country where
you already are, bringing where you have been.
Time offers this gift in its millions of ways,
turning the world, moving the air, calling,
every morning, “Here, take it, it’s yours.”

(William Stafford [source])

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Confuse-a-Dog

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An old Monty Python skit posits a service called “Confuse-a-Cat.” (Veterinarian to anxious elderly couple: “I think I can definitely say that your cat badly needs to be confused.”) I started to explain the whole thing but was laughing too hard to type properly; I’ll include the seven-minute routine in its entirety at the foot of this post, for those of you who don’t know of it — or just want to see it again.

I remembered this skit this morning, after an episode of complicated human-canine choreography. (A cat was involved as well, peripherally — and perhaps in confusion.)

The Missus and I share one car, which works well for us (with some periodic adjustments) maybe 97% of the time. But boy, that remaining 3% is a killer, and today definitely fell into the 3% basket. Without getting into the details, here’s what had to happen:

  • The Missus needed to use the car for an hour or two, starting at 8 a.m.
  • Our Yorkshire terrier Sophie — who normally goes to work with The Missus — had to stay home. She’s done this before, so it wasn’t exactly a crisis in itself. But there was a catch, or maybe two:
  • We have a housecleaning service come in every couple of weeks…
  • …and while Sophie is much much better at dealing with strangers than she was a year ago, she still completely loses it when a stranger first enters the house. (Translation: high anxiety for both dog and housecleaning personnel.)

The solution I came up with: I’d stay home with Sophie until The Missus got back with the car; this would help keep Sophie calm, or at least distracted. And because that part of the plan required separating dog and housecleaner as much as possible, we’d stay isolated in the upstairs offices (which we clean ourselves). And that part of the plan required that I get not just Sophie, but all her… her appurtenances upstairs with us. (This would be the same upstairs area where our dog-phobic cat lives, by the way. And where Sophie never visits, therefore, except accidentally.)

Some of the appurtenances involved:

  • a collapsible gate which I could set up at the top of the stairway, to keep Sophie upstairs
  • food dish and water bowl (and food and water, of course)
  • bouncy ball
  • dog bed (in the unlikely event that she’d want to sleep)
  • treats A, B, and C
  • the hard-rubber doggy gizmos into which we insert treat A, B, or C and thus make Sophie work for them, by God
  • various materials to enable prompt, sanitary handling of what we might call “dog spillage”

I also needed to take my shower and get dressed for work, pack up the various bags we bring with us each day, get a few things out of the housecleaner’s way, leave a note for her on the front door so she wouldn’t be freaked out by the footsteps and (probable) barking and yelping and reprimanding and pleading overhead, write a check for her, be sure I had a bottle of water for myself — and ditto my Blackberry, to keep me entertained (on the Web) while, as I hoped, Sophie would be entertaining herself.

I had one hour to do all the above. And I wanna tell you, I was sweating when done.

And you know what? If you want to completely reverse the behavior of a hyperactive little dog, this appears to be a great approach: disappear into the bathroom for a half hour and emerge clean and completely dressed; run around furiously, snatching up all of said dog’s everyday sacred objects and carrying them off to forbidden territory; setting up the hated collapsible gate at the top of the stairs; grabbing said dog herself and depositing her on the far side of said collapsible gate, in said forbidden territory; clamber over the gate yourself; flop (soaked and interestingly perfumed) onto the floor, alongside said dog; and there pluck from your shirt pocket a small black rectangular object which you immediately start poking at, madly, with your thumbs.

Worked great, I tell you. Instant and total physical inertia of the canine sort — the opposite of confusing a cat, in fact. And even though it didn’t last, it was thoroughly satisfying for those few minutes.

__________________

Here are the Pythons and their Confuse-a-Cat skit (and here’s the transcript, if you’d like to follow along):

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#wordsfail

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Somewhere, in the so-far unseen pages of your work in progress — or the pages of WIPs gone by — somewhere lurks a phrase so graceless, a metaphor so aluminum-foil-on-dental-fillings, a sentence so raggedy-ass, a title so forgettable or a character’s name so laughable, something that made you realize you may be a writer but you’re also a doofus. Come on. You know it’s there. Maybe you’ve got to rummage through old rough drafts, crusty short stories and anguished poems from high-school or college days. Or maybe you found it in a paragraph you wrote just the other day but didn’t find until revising this morning (and, when you came to, immediately hacked out with scissors or carving knife).

‘Fess up — in the comments here, or on Twitter with the #wordsfail hashtag.

Groans encouraged — groans of empathy, damn it. Because if you’ve written nothing like this, it’s only because you’ve forgotten the key word: yet.

To kick things off, here’s one from me. This excerpt comes from close to 30 years ago, a faux-Irish-brogue poem called “Sodden, Betrodden, and Noddin’.”

I was leanin’, it seems, besides on me dreams,
Rather close to the fellow next to me.
Full six foot he sat (when not wearin’ his hat),
And his face it was tired and gloomy.

Note especially the way you need to read the second line to force the rhyme with the fourth: next TO me. Alas, at that point in the stanza you don’t even know line 4 is coming up. So you’ve gotta get to the last line, realize your mistake, and back up.

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Surprises in Store

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From whiskey river:

For My Young Friends Who Are Afraid

There is a country to cross you will
find in the corner of your eye, in
the quick slip of your foot — air far
down, a snap that might have caught.
And maybe for you, for me, a high, passing
voice that finds its way by being
afraid. That country is there, for us,
carried as it is crossed. What you fear
will not go away: it will take you into
yourself and bless you and keep you.
That’s the world, and we all live there.

(William Stafford [source])

…and:

So strange, life is. Why people do not go around in a continual state of surprise is beyond me.

(William Maxwell)

…and:

Life is mostly froth and bubble,
Two things stand like stone,
KINDNESS in another’s trouble,
COURAGE in your own.

(Adam Lindsay Gordon [source])

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