Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so
Soundtrack to today’s post: “Some Children See Him”
(piano solo by George Winston from his album December;
click Play button to start, and adjust volume with the little row of bars at the left):
From an appreciation of novelist (and biographer, etc.) Penelope Fitzgerald, by novelist (etc.) Julian Barnes, appearing in The Guardian in July:
Novels are like cities: some are organised and laid out with the colour-coded clarity of public transport maps, with each chapter marking a progress from one station to the next, until all the characters have been successfully carried to their thematic terminus. Others, the subtler, wiser ones, offer no such immediately readable route-maps. Instead of a journey through the city, they throw you into the city itself, and life itself: you are expected to find your own way. And their structure and purpose may not be immediately apparent, being based on the tacit network of “loans, debts, repayments and foreclosures” that makes up human relationships. Nor do such novels move mechanically; they stray, they pause, they lollop, as life does; except with a greater purpose and hidden structure. A priest in [Fitzgerald’s] The Beginning of Spring, seeking to assert the legibility of God’s purpose in the world, says “There are no accidental meetings.” The same is true of the best fiction. Such novels are not difficult to read, since they are so filled with detail and incident and the movement of life, but they are sometimes difficult to work out. This is because the absentee author has the confidence to presume that the reader might be as subtle and intelligent as she is.
[I’m working on a seasonal offering with my co-blogger. But, as you can perhaps imagine, complications abound in working on anything with a gargoyle. Communication problems, for one — we’re still getting used to each other’s language. And no computer “hard”ware known is meant for handling by someone with fingers of stone and eyes incapable of focusing on anything but the vague middle distance. So in the meantime, there will probably be a couple of brief posts here — like the one below — just to keep the site at a low simmer.]
Among the many dramatic narratives playing across the pop-culture landscape of recent years, one of the most dramatic — from a certain perspective — has been the South Park saga. Not that there’s really a continuing story line (each episode stands more or less on its own), no; the “dramatic arc” such as it is comes from the tension between what the show is and does, and what the broader culture implicitly says it may say and do.
(The popular saying “pushing the envelope” seems a little lame to describe South Park. The envelope in question isn’t just being “pushed” from inside; it’s actually bulging, rippling, threatening at every moment to tear itself from the addressee’s hands.)
The chief source of this tension, as in many works of, umm, art and literature, is the antagonist. The villain. The… resident evil.
Eric Theodore Cartman.
When I first started programming, both I and a brother-in-law worked for AT&T. This was back in the days before all the local phone networks got spun off into their own companies — when the entire US phone network was called, collectively, “the Bell System.”
My brother-in-law, whom I will here call The BiL, was at the time an electrical engineer. As such, he too knew some things about programming. Like me, he also had (has) a flair for, umm, let’s say for an anarchic sort of jokes. And so we entertained ourselves for a brief time with a a thought experiment: an idea for a proposed software package, never built, which we called “BellPorn.” (In the post below, rather than use the actual P-word and attract all manner of unseemly traffic, I will indicate it thusly: p*graphy.)
It was a simple idea, or so it seemed:
[Read more…]
Agent Jessica Faust of the BookEnds, LLC blog, on “Offering Representation to Published Authors,” seeks to reassure new authors that things could be worse for them: they might have a track record.
If a previously published author comes to me seeking representation, I need to, of course, look at the new work to see if it’s something I would even want to represent, and then if it passes that test I must consider the sales figures for the author’s previous work or works, and this is where things can get sticky. In case anyone has forgotten, this is a business, and when considering a new author a publisher’s, and therefore an agent’s, primary consideration needs to be how money can be made and how much. An author who only two years ago had incredibly poor sales numbers is going to have a hard time crawling out from under that. Bookstores are going to look at those numbers when placing orders and editors are going to look at those numbers when making an offer. So, unless the book is absolutely phenomenal, or a completely new direction for this author, it’s going to be a difficult sale for me.
Seems I have been “bookworm tagged” by Julie Weathers.
“Bookworm Award” rules:
With the assumption that “book” means “published book, not your own manuscript, Mr. or Ms. Writer,” followed immediately by the thought that it would be interesting, in fact, to apply to writing friends’ manuscripts, Julie has added another step:
4. Repeat steps 2 and 3 for your own manuscript.
So, umm… okay.
I’m going to disregard tech-reference books, which are stacked over and around my computer. The closest other book I can put my hands on without getting up and looking around is a well-thumbed 1967 paperback edition of Catch-22, which is still on my desk from when I reviewed it for MoonRat’s “celebrate reading” series back in June.
In this passage, the protagonist, Yossarian, is talking with his friend Hungry Joe about nightmares. Hungry Joe is speaking sentence #5 on page 56, and the conversation continues:
[Image above is a “Kitty Kitsch” sculpture by C. David & Ferbie Claudon,
depicting feline versions of Jeanette McDonald and Nelson Eddy
serenading each other in the Canadian wilderness. Click image for more info.]
From whiskey river:
Strange Life
It’s as if you are alone in a room
in an empty house and there’s music
playing somewhere, the kind of
music that you always knew would
accompany a moment like this
The air is heavy. The water in
the pool outside looks like glass
The color of everything can be
described as in the blue hour,
which eventually fades to gray
Yes, it’s a strange life
But wait. It’s getting stranger still
(by Eleanor Lerman)
Not from whiskey river:
The Mystery of Meteors
I am out before dawn, marching a small dog through a
meager park
Boulevards angle away, newspapers fly around like blind
white birds
Two days in a row I have not seen the meteors
though the radio news says they are overhead
Leonid’s brimstones are barred by clouds; I cannot read
the signs in heaven, I cannot see night rendered into fire
And yet I do believe a net of glitter is above me
You would not think I still knew these things:
I get on the train, I buy the food, I sweep, discuss,
consider gloves or boots, and in the summer,
open windows, find beads to string with pearls
You would not think that I had survived
anything but the life you see me living now
In the darkness, the dog stops and sniffs the air
She has been alone, she has known danger,
and so now she watches for it always
and I agree, with the conviction of my mistakes.
But in the second part of my life, slowly, slowly,
I begin to counsel bravery. Slowly, slowly,
I begin to feel the planets turning, and I am turning
toward the crackling shower of their sparks
These are the mysteries I could not approach when I was younger:
the boulevards, the meteors, the deep desires that split the sky
Walking down the paths of the cold park
I remember myself, the one who can wait out anything
So I caution the dog to go silently, to bear with me
the burden of knowing what spins on and on above our heads
For this is our reward:Come Armageddon, come fire or flood,
come love, not love, millennia of portents —
there is a future in which the dog and I are laughing
Born into it, the mystery, I know we will be saved
(also by Eleanor Lerman*)
Finally, this: If you’re familiar with Mel Brooks’s 1974 film Young Frankenstein, you know the scene in which Madeline Kahn’s character — Elizabeth, Dr. F’s fiancee — first meets up with The Monster (played by Peter Boyle). Or rather let’s say, the scene in which The Monster first makes himself known to her. The scene which, uh, climaxes with Kahn’s operatically ecstatic warbling of the first few lines of the song “Sweet Mystery of Life.”
The YouTube clip below takes a different approach with the song. Here, the singer is Mario Lanza; over that glorious voice are interleaved a host of scenes fom Young Frankenstein (except, interestingly, any scenes featuring Madeline Kahn or Peter Boyle).
(By the way, if you’d like to see the Kahn-Boyle moment itself, of course it’s on YouTube as well.)
Update, a little later on 2008-12-12: Over at the inestimable Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast site, coincidentally, Jules is also thinking about great movie-music moments.
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* Eleanor Lerman’s work has now made three appearances in two consecutive Friday posts here. (Here‘s last week’s, which includes Lerman’s lovely “Starfish.”) This pretty much makes her the only candidate for the title of RAMH Poet Laureate. I didn’t even know there was such a title.
The time: late fall, 1990.
The place: Ashland, Virginia.
A young(ish) man sits at a card table by his bedroom window. He is temporarily jobless, by choice, and living on accumulated savings while he writes what will become his first book.
And he is panicking, inwardly, because nowhere in his budget is there sufficient flexibility for anything like Christmas presents for his family…
I think back on it now and know, know with certainty, that the panic was silly (if not foolish). Nevertheless, panicky I was.
And then I suddenly thought to myself: Well, self, you are after all presuming to be a writer. Surely you can put that to use. Give them something unique, something written, something true (if fuzzily factual)…
Wow — four hundred years, and (many) people still don’t even furrow their brows when you say the name “John Milton.” Most of us aspire to be remembered for one-fourth of that span, if that much.
Today, Milton’s memory is honored (if not read, exactly) principally for his epic works, Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained — and, to a lesser extent, for his other poetry.
But in his time he was also something of a political gadfly. Wikipedia speaks of his “radical, republican politics and heretical religious views,” which — coming, as they did, before, during, and after the English Civil War — ensured either his popularity (during Cromwell’s Commonwealth) or his ostracism (during the monarchy).
Among the forward-thinking issues which Milton made a point of espousing was freedom of written expression (what we’d call freedom of the press, today).
