Writing – Page 125

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

February 19, 2009 by John 13 Comments

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:

The full title of the song included, at the end, “(Except Sometimes)” — a phrase which appears nowhere in the lyrics.
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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What’s in a Song: I Get Along Without You Very Well
(Part 1)

February 17, 2009 by John 10 Comments

[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.

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Humatons, Arise

February 16, 2009 by John 2 Comments

A disaster which befalls the Internet from time to time is the expiration of Web sites tied not to any particular domain name, but to the sites’ owners.

I’m thinking here of generically-formed URLs, like:

www.someisp.com/~username

Generally, when you get an email address from an ISP you also get some nominal amount of Web space, like 10MB or so, whose address is something like the above. Inevitably, some users make better use of this facility than others. And it’s those odd little back corners of the Web in jeopardy.

I recently came across such a site, called The Kooks Museum. This is a site built by one Donna Kossy, in support of her 1994 book Kooks: A Guide to the Outer Limits of Human Belief. What does she mean by “kooks”? As she happily quotes from the introduction to the book:

What distinguishes “kook” from other dismissive and stigmatizing terms? The various words denoting insanity — “crazy,” “psychotic,” “schizophrenic,” etc. — are not, for my purposes, interchangeable with “kook.” An obsessed murderer may be considered psychopathic or crazy, but more often than not these words categorize action, not belief. The obsessed serial killer is not necessarily a kook.

We must also distinguish kooks from quacks, frauds and hoaxers, for kooks are invariably sincere. Their main intent is not to deceive or defraud; to the contrary, they are trying to impart an essential truth. A kook’s thoughts rarely turn to profit; some squander personal fortunes to investigate or spread The Word. A New Age personality who channels a wise entity from the Pleiades is not a kook if his channeled voice is designed to attract funds.

Finally, it is important to differentiate a kook from an eccentric. An eccentric is defined as someone with an unorthodox lifestyle, which may or may not include unorthodox beliefs. Is a hermit a kook? Can we call a scatological fetishist a kook? Not necessarily, especially if they haven’t codified their own preferences as an eternal truth.

Is this not a useful set of definitions? Is The Kooks Museum not a site worthy of a more permanent home?

I say yes to both questions. (God forbid someone clicking on that hyperlink above should someday be greeted with a dread “404 – Not Found” page.)

In the meantime, here are some samples of the, um, authors and their works commemorated there.

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Haunted by What’s Inside

February 13, 2009 by John 4 Comments

From whiskey river:

People talk about the discontent in the world and about existential anxiety as if it were something new! Everyone at every period in history felt it. You have only to read the Greek and Latin authors! It is not true that the individual with his emotional life no longer feels himself the center of the world! What do you think really interests people from morning to night if it isn’t their feelings, their work and love — especially love.

(Alberto Giacometti)

Not cited at whiskey river, but the above quotation continues:

…They read the newspaper maybe ten minutes a day, they see that a satellite is orbiting around the moon, and then they immediately start talking again about work, and love. And not only that: often somebody will commit suicide because of love problems. And that means that if an individual would rather die than live without a person he loves, then the power of emotion does still dominate the world.

(cited by Reinhold Hohl in Giacometti: A Biography in Pictures)

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“To Love Is to Suffer.” And So On.

February 12, 2009 by John 11 Comments

In Kate’s post today, she tackles Valentine’s Day a couple days early. (Determined to beat the rush, perhaps. You probably didn’t know the Internet charges a premium on Valentine’s-Day blog posts about love and sex.) But her post’s title reminded me of this film.

In the clip below, Diane Keaton’s character, Sonia, seems bored of the manifold loves-me/loves-me-not/loves-her/loves-him/does-not-either details in her cousin’s monologue. Yet it turns out she was listening all along and offers an analysis which cannot be refuted, if only because it can’t be understood.

I Tought I Taw…

February 11, 2009 by John 6 Comments

I’ll go out on a limb here: Twitter “tweets” are the Schrödinger’s cats of Internet phenomena. In general, they exist or do not exist as long as you ignore Twitter altogether; when you actively pay attention, though, each tweet instantly crystallizes into a state of aliveness (Whoa, How about that, Ha!, or Hmm…) or death — forgotten at once. (My own experience indicates that tweets, on average, have a half-life of about two-thirds of a second before the inevitable decay into memes, interstitials, youtubes, and other elementary particles.)

So I haven’t enthusiastically leapt aboard the USS Twitter yet. Life’s too ephemeral as it is, y’know? That said, I do like seeing what others get out of (and sometimes put into) it.

For example, there’s Jon, of the newly (to me) discovered Ransom Note Typography blog (subtitle: “Discontinue Use If Rash Develops”). In a late-December post, Jon exhaustively documents his favorite tweets from 2008. After a brief introduction describing his criteria for selection, he lays out his month-by-month catalog of several tweets per month.

Here’s a small sample:
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Impossibilities

February 10, 2009 by John 3 Comments

Let’s pretend you have never, but never (ridiculous, I know, but bear with me) wandered through the Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast blog which I often mention here. Consequently, you don’t know anything about their structured interviews with (mostly) children’s-book illustrators and authors.

Maybe even further, even more basically, you don’t know that the blog’s title alludes to Lewis Carroll. (In which case, go here* and scroll down a bit.)

Imagine now that you’re an author or illustrator who doesn’t know any of that stuff, and you’ve been approached for a 7-Imp online interview. So when you run into the very first sentence of the request, you’re immediately baffled. Mind you, now, I’ve no idea how the first sentence actually reads, but let’s suppose the request opens something like this:

Dear You,

We would like to feature you in an upcoming interview for the Seven Impossible Things blog…

What runs through your head then?

Right. As it apparently ran through the great Ed Young’s head when invited to his recent interview there (#79!). Born in Tientsin, China, grown up in Shanghai, a survivor of the Japanese occupation in WW2, he is drawn to questions of philosophy. So his first response — even before Yes or No — is a simple question, but it comes out weighted with unintended significance:

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The Blogger as Essayist (and Lens)

February 10, 2009 by John 6 Comments

E.B. White, bemused to find himself here Real post for the day imminent. In the meantime, I think this quotation deserves a post of its own:

The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest. He is a fellow who thoroughly enjoys his work, just as people who take bird walks enjoy theirs. Each excursion of the essayist, each new “attempt,” differs from the last and takes him into new country. This delights him. Only a person who is congenitally self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays. There are as many kinds of essays as there are human attitudes or poses, as many essay flavors as there are Howard Johnson ice creams. The essayist arises in the morning and, if he has work to do, selects his garb from an unusually extensive wardrobe: he can pull on any sort of shirt, be any sort of person — philosopher, scold, jester, raconteur, confidant, pundit, devil’s advocate, enthusiast.
[…]
I think some people find the essay the last resort of the egoist, a much too self-conscious and self-serving form for their taste; they feel that it is presumptuous of a writer to assume that his little excursions or his small observations will interest the reader. There is some justice in their complaint. I have always been aware that I am by nature self-absorbed and egoistical; to write of myself to the extent I have done indicates a too great attention to my own life, not enough to the lives of others.

That’s E.B. White, talking to me (and maybe you) across the decades — about blogging.

And if White’s not talking to you, maybe the inimitable xkcd is:

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Finding What’s Important, Holding onto It Once Found

February 6, 2009 by John 4 Comments

From whiskey river:

Nothing is ever lost. If you have moved over vast territories and dared to love silly things, you will have learned even from the most primitive items collected and put aside in your life. From an ever-roaming curiosity in all the arts, from bad radio to good theatre, from nursery rhyme to symphony, from jungle compound to Kafka’s Castle, there is basic excellence to be winnowed out, truths found, kept, savored, and used on some later day. To be a child of one’s time is to do all these things.

(Ray Bradbury, from Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Inside You)

Not from whiskey river:

Happiness

Why, Dot asks, stuck in the back
seat of her sister’s two-door, her freckled hand
feeling the roof for the right spot
to pull her wide self up onto her left,
the unarthritic, ankle — why
does her sister, coaching outside on her cane,
have to make her laugh so, she flops
back just as she was, though now
looking wistfully out through the restaurant
reflected in her back window, she seems bigger,
and couldn’t possibly mean we should go
ahead in without her, she’ll be all right, and so
when you finally place the pillow behind her back
and lift her right out into the sunshine,
all four of us are happy, none more
than she, who straightens the blossoms
on her blouse, says how nice it is to get out
once in a while, and then goes in to eat
with the greatest delicacy (oh
I could never finish all that) and aplomb
the complete roast beef dinner with apple crisp
and ice cream, just a small scoop.

(by Wesley McNair, from The Town of No and My Brother Running)

…and — simply because Wesley McNair has landed in my mind, swooping in out of nowhere, and now I keep finding more of his stuff I love — this:

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Ira Glass’s Half-Hour “Master Class in Storytelling”

February 5, 2009 by John 7 Comments

I’ve never attended the annual Gel Conference in New York City, but I always know it’s being held. Afterwards, I always look forward to learning about the year’s events. (Actually, I look forward to that before the conference, too. But I tamp down that particular form of expectation because it makes me wish I were going!)

What is the Gel Conference? It’s one project of a company called Good Experience, which itself is an offshoot of a larger enterprise, Creative Good (founded by one Mark Hurst): “the world’s first user experience consulting firm.” For years, I’ve subscribed to Hurst’s weekly e-newsletter, also called Good Experience; nominally for computer- and other tech-type people, about how to improve a user’s experience of one’s software, Web site, product labeling, and so on, Good Experience actually is a general pack rat’s dream. A given issue generally begins with a mini-essay by Hurst such as the one from 2004 which began:

I walked into a Williams-Sonoma store here in New York a few days ago to return a gift that someone had sent me via the Williams-Sonoma website. When I got to the counter, I explained that I wanted to return the item – I already own something similar and just wanted cash back.

The clerk behind the counter said, “Sorry, sir, but we don’t sell this item in the store. This is going to have to go back.”

“What do you mean, ‘go back’?” I asked.

“It has to go back to the catalog. We don’t sell that item in the store.”

I showed the clerk the purchase receipt. “This *is* Williams-Sonoma, right?”

“Right. But as I told you, there are some items that the catalog sells and we don’t sell. This has to go back to the catalog.”

(Read the whole thing here.)

As for the Gel Conference, its site sums up the annual mission:

Short for “Good Experience Live”, Gel is a conference, and community, exploring good experience in all its forms — in business, technology, art, society, and life.

Instead of focusing on just one thing (design, technology, user experience, business, etc.) like many conferences, Gel touches on many things. This challenges attendees to find, and learn from, the patterns that underlie good experience, even in disciplines vastly different from their own.

Quite a grab bag, in short.

In 2007 one of the Gel speakers was Ira Glass, host of the NPR (and later PBS) program called This American Life. Just a couple days ago, they posted a video of his talk, “one of the most popular Gel talks ever.” In it, he discusses — with many examples from the show — the elements of a good story. On the surface, he’s discussing good broadcast stories, but I believe he’s really talking about story in general.

Here’s the video; it’s over a half-hour long, so give yourself a good block of time to listen. (Just pretend you’ve got NPR turned on in the background — there’s no particular reason to watch this).

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