Writing – Page 130

I Can Has Library?

November 24, 2008 by John 8 Comments

I Can Has Library? (small dog in big library)

Somewhere within the last few weeks, I read a description of a dog’s-eye (or rather, -nose) view of the world. It went something like this: As a dog crosses the living room, it is reading the Doggy Daily News.

Pretty funny.

But since I’ve now had a few months’ practice walking a very olfactorily-oriented dog up and down the street, and around the yard, I think I’ve got to sharpen the analogy a little.

Here’s the way these walks go:

Trot out front door.
Sniff exploratorily at front porch.
Canter briskly up the sidewalk or, if the mood strikes you, detour across the shortcut to the driveway.
Trot up the driveway to the street.
Stop. Sniff the air. Look left, look right, turn around so as to look over your shoulder, turn around again.
Toss a doggy coin and face left or right, accordingly.
Apply nose to ground.
Go.

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How It Was: Rake’s Progress

November 22, 2008 by John 2 Comments

The number of reasons people start up blogs probably verges on uncountable. But the most common reason — wanna bet? — is surely, “Ummm… I don’t know.” If you dig deeper, you’ll probably get something like this: “Well, I didn’t know at first. But as it’s worked out, I’m actually blogging mostly about X.”

With Running After My Hat, I sort of reversed that process.

As of today, as you can tell just by lurking for a few days, the blog is pretty much about… umm… well…

*crickets*

But when I started it up in the spring, I had a grand vision of what I would accomplish. I meant to launch an experiment in electronic publishing — not that no one else had never done the same thing, but that I hadn’t.

Specifically, I wanted to introduce to some portion of the world a series of booklets which I wrote over a few years in the early 1990s. Collectively, the series goes by the title How It Was. (Several variants have popped up from time to time, the most durable being Jersey Boy: How It Was.) Each booklet is a quasi-memoir of growing up in a particular small town in a particular corner of southern New Jersey in a particular decade of the mid-20th century.

The protagonist of How It Was, identified only as The Boy, has an entirely secret inner life which he superimposes on his daily activities. A bicycle becomes a World War II bomber, for instance; and, for another instance, he views (many of) his teachers with a baffled but stubborn suspicion utterly at odds with his compliant exterior.

And yet, for all his self-fantasies as (alternately) a hero and a villain and a vacillating sprinter between those two extremes, The Boy remains consistently (and unconsciously) a soft-hearted romantic, touched with nostalgia decades before he deserves it.

Each booklet in the How It Was series describes events in a particular season of a single year — seasons as The Boy recognizes them: Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Christmas. Actual, “true” events interleave with ones which never happened, or happened much later; The actual Boy ranged in age from around eight to around twelve, while The fictional Boy ages no more than a year — he may be ten, plus or minus a year.

Early readers of the book (those outside The (actual) Boy’s family) sometimes are put off by what one once described as the “arch” tone. But The (actual) Boy is gratified by how easily they seem to get sucked in as they read along.

I posted an excerpt (a long one) from the Spring booklet early in RAMH‘s (so far) short life, but since then I’ve pretty much ignored the whole subject (and ignored electronic publishing, for that matter). Yet at this time of year, even (or especially) with North Florida temperatures dropping overnight into the 20s, I can’t help thinking of New Jersey in the fall, 40-odd years ago. And so now feels the right time to revisit How It Was, with an excerpt (a much shorter one) from the Autumn booklet.

This is a brief portion of the section called “Rake’s Progress.” By this time in the Autumn storyline, The Boy has successfully negotiated the first few months of the school year. He’s gotten through Halloween, triumphantly (in his own eyes).

And that secret inner life is running in high gear: trying, desperately, to justify the annual torture of raking up the leaves from the front yard, shifting them from the yard to the street, along the curb, where they will soon be burned. (More innocent times, those. Sigh.)

Enjoy.

Flange: The Gargoyle’s Back Story

November 20, 2008 by John 3 Comments

Flange, contemplating topics for first post [I introduced you to my new co-blogger, a gargoyle named (well, his name is pronounced this way) Flange, just the other day. In this, his inaugural post, Flange wanted to give you some idea how he got where he is, i.e., as a professional gargoyle. When and if needed, I’ll interject brief commentary and/or supply footnotes.]

Was born, me, a small granite child. Parents, mine, were three, very common among people, my: mother, father, bother. Please, not to insert “r” that word, in. “Bother,” just.

Humans not know, no they not, about habits, mating of people Flj, such as. Flj explain. Try to:

Mother, father, you know, same with you. Join together, sacred mating ritual But “bother” how pronounced, third parent type—

John: Flange, Flange, Flange — for crissake, this is painful to watch! Aside from which, you’re beating the hell out of my keyboard. Why don’t we do this — why don’t you just tell me what you want to say and I’ll key it in for you? Maybe translate a little as I go along—

Flange: That kay with Flj. Not change meaning, you, no? Flj’s voice, unique, preserve, you, right? Flj have pride, authorial, too! Kay. Your way, have it. The human, you are. “Boss,” ha ha ha.

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Attach Imagination to Mouth. Turn Ignition. GO.

November 19, 2008 by John 5 Comments

When my niece was a couple-three years old, she went through this engaging stretch of weeks, maybe months, during which she improvised neverending stories. For some reason these tended to involve creatures like the Frankenstein monster, Dracula, and so on. (That may have been attributable to my sister’s macabre sensibilities.)

For instance, a story (told, and told, and told… from the back seat of a car) might go something like this:

Once upon a time Frankenstein was walking through the woods AND THEN it started to rain AND THEN Dracula flew down and got Frankenstein AND THEN Dracula and Frankenstein went to a party and monsters were all there AND THEN the sun came out and it was like Sesame Street…

And so on, and on, and on, all the AND THENs providing the transitional links between hundreds of what might otherwise seem, to my unimaginative adult mind, to be discontinuous stories. (They also, and perhaps by unconscious intent, made the plot as a whole uninterruptible.)

I loved that.

This urge to free-associate stories seems a common phase which kids go through — not all kids, but many of them. Should you need evidence I offer, first, this brief and enormously popular (over nine million views and counting!) video from earlier this year: a three-year-old little girl summarizes the plot of Star Wars, Episode IV (this was the original film in the franchise, remember, first released in 1977 simply as Star Wars).

More recently, along came the next one — likewise destined for online-video classic status. (I encountered it the other day, among the weekly 7-Imp’s 7 Kicks entries.) The monologue (a little over four minutes long) is in French, but the clip also includes English subtitles. Some of the characters will be familiar (vaguely) to anyone who’s been around little kids in recent decades. But as far as I know the plot is based on nothing at all other than what emerged, spontaneously and moment-by-moment, from the storyteller’s mind.

Knock me over with a feather. Plucked from the wings of a hippopotamus — in HEAVEN.

Aging Gracefully, and Otherwise

November 15, 2008 by John 8 Comments

The Methuselah Tree, White Mountains CA: oldest known living tree (4800+ years old) At least in the drafts I’ve done so far, the work-in-progress, Grail, uses a rotating point of view from mostly elderly characters. Because I’m not elderly yet myself (though I will be if I don’t work on it faster!), and knock on wood still fairly healthy, it’s tricky to tell the stories from inside the heads of people whose experiences I can’t yet report first-hand.

Not that I’m looking forward to any of these psychological and physical experiences, but I’m forced to wonder: What does it feel like to have a stroke or heart attack, to start losing one’s memory, or to fall, be unable to get up, and have no little LifeCall pendant to summon aid? How does it feel to long for the company of not just one or two, but a lot of people who’ve passed on before you? How easy or difficult is it to shed preconceived notions you’ve clung to for sixty or seventy years — do you even know you still cling to them?

(The hardest characters to write are the ones you’ve never experienced from the inside. Which is why most writers start out with protagonists of the same sex and cultural background as the authors’ own, of no greater age. Disaffected adolescents, anybody?)

In the course of looking around for information — anecdotal as well as scientific and medical — about the experience of growing old, I came across an article on Slate from this past May, headlined Forever Young; the subtitle spells it out for us: Books and Web sites about how to avoid getting old, or at least looking old. The author, Emily Yoffe, describes a “two-prong strategy for trying to stop time. The first is to find the right combination of food, exercise, supplements, and medical interventions to extend your life into triple digits.”

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On the Inside, Looking Out

November 14, 2008 by John 6 Comments

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.

The Internet and Dogs

November 14, 2008 by John 2 Comments

I was working on the weekly whisky river-driven rumination — which I’ll deliver a little later — when I came across something I just can’t keep to myself. Actually three somethings. And *WARNING*WARNING*: these are spit-take funny.

Most recently, and the item which led me to the other two, we have this: an Open Letter to President-Elect Obama, re: Goldendoodles. Excerpt:

I’m sure the first coupling of a Golden Retriever with a poodle was an accident, and likely the fault of the dogs themselves. Then, some idiot without a social conscience sold them by saying that the dog is similar to a Golden Retriever, only smarter.
…
A smarter Golden Retriever? This just means that you have a dog that is obsessive-compulsive about retrieving to the point where nothing else exists. Nothing. They don’t want affection, they want to chase a ball. Toby plays fetch while he’s eating — he has his own personal game of jacks where he drops his ball, grabs a mouthful of food, drops the food on the floor, and eats however many kibbles he can before the ball stops bouncing (For science, I once threw a ball while he was taking a dump… if you do acquire a Doodle I strongly advise against this).

A comment on that post led me to 2007’s I Has a Sweet Potato. This is simply an account of the author’s adventure at home while “Best Beloved,” the author’s S.O., is elsewhere. It is presented “in conversation form.” Excerpt:

Dog: I am starving.
Me: Actually, no. You aren’t starving. You get two very good meals a day. And treats. And Best Beloved fed you extra food while I was gone.
Dog: STARVING.
Me: I saw you get fed not four hours ago! You are not starving.
Dog: Pity me, a sad and tragic creature, for I can barely walk, I am so starving. WOE.
Me: I am now ignoring you.
Dog: STARVING.
Dog: Did you hear me? I am starving.
Dog: Are you seriously ignoring me? Fine.
[There is a pause, during which the dog exits the room in a pointed manner.] [From the kitchen, there comes a noise like someone is eating a baseball bat.]

Finally, reaching way back to 1999, there is the classic Dogs in Elk. This has been reproduced at various locations around the Web, but according to the author, originally appeared on Salon. (She also affirms that yes, it is true.) However, I read it here. It’s a transcript of a forum conversation; the subject is how to handle odd dog problems. Excerpt:

Anne V – 01:01 pm PDT – Sep 9, 1999 – Okay – I know how to take meat away from a dog. How do I take a dog away from meat? This is not, unfortunately, a joke.

AmyC – 01:02 pm PDT – Sep 9, 1999 – Um, can you give us a few more specifics here?

Anne V – 01:12 pm PDT – Sep 9, 1999 – They’re inside of it. They crawled inside, and now I have a giant incredibly heavy piece of carcass in my yard, with 2 dogs inside of it, and they are NOT getting bored of it and coming out. One of them is snoring. I have company arriving in three hours, and my current plan is to 1. put up a tent over said carcass and 2. hang thousands of fly strips inside it. This has been going on since about 6:40 this morning.

Have fun, but remember: swallow beverages first. No liability here.

“A Guy I Know Once Told Me…”

November 12, 2008 by John 2 Comments

The Internet’s rife with urban rumors. (Because, after all, the Internet isn’t just the information superhighway; it’s also the bullsh!t highway. The highway doesn’t care what sort of traffic it carries as long as every bit of it pays the proper toll.)

But this post isn’t about Internet-based urban legends. It’s about offline word-of-mouth urban legends.

I suspect I’m not alone in my certainty that many of these have influenced my understanding of the universe, of people, of life. And I may have lots of company, too, in having no idea what portion of it might actually be true, as opposed to simply fun, convenient, or dangerous — and little intention (or time) to check it all out.

In the rest of this post I thought I’d try a little experiment. What follows are three urban legends, two “true” (in the sense that “a guy I know once really DID tell me”), and one made up just for this post. Furthermore, I won’t tell you which are the real ones and which, the impostor.

(One interesting possibility: that someone, somewhere, will (a) find this post via a search on a keyword which figures prominently in the bogus urban legend, (b) do a “find” within the post itself, looking for the keyword and hence skipping over all this background, and eventually (c) spread the false rumor as his/her own bit of “a guy once told me” folklore. Ah, posterity…)

Here goes:

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The Eloquent Silence of Two Hands Flapping

November 11, 2008 by John 6 Comments

Yesterday’s post about languages which lack one or more tenses brought a couple of interesting comments from Jules (of the Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast blog). Among the other talents and skills and enthusiasms on ample display at the “7 Imp” site, Jules has worked as what she sometimes refers to in terms like a “hand-flapper”: a signer, an interpreter of ASL.

Despite my own hearing impairment, I’ve never learned any form of sign language. So it fascinated me to read Jules’s description of what she called “simultaneous communication”:

There’s the sign for “day,” and there’s the sign for “three.” You can make the three handshape with one hand while, at the same time, signing day with the same hand to indicate “3 days.” Same for weeks, months, years, many other things. You can also use what are called classifiers in ASL […], which show the movement, location, and appearance of a thing. After a signer indicates a person or thing, a classifier can be used in its place to show where and how it moves, what it looks like, and where it is located. So, the classifier for “car” can be signed, and you can show the car swerving, swerving while driving quickly, while simultaneously showing the driver falling asleep….all of that, of course, indicating, say, someone falling asleep at the wheel and swerving from the road.

This leaves me dizzy, frankly. And it doesn’t begin to scrape the surface of the other notion which Jules introduced to me in her comments, to wit, “ABC stories” (or poems). Here’s how the term is defined at About.com’s deafness site:

ABC stories use each letter of the sign alphabet to represent something. For example, the “A” handshape is used to “knock” on a door.

(For reference, that’s the “A” handshape in the image at the top left of this post. See? Knocking on a door.)

Now, you might think that this limits the ASL “speaker” of an ABC story or poem to 26 words, concepts, expressions. You would think wrong.

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Knowing Only the Present

November 10, 2008 by John 6 Comments

M.C. Escher: Hand with Reflecting Sphere - what's behind you seems to be before you Since history is on my mind anyway…

From Jeff VanderMeer’s Ecstatic Days blog recently, by guest blogger Tero Ykspetäjä: the top five reasons “Why Finnish Is Cooler Than English.” Reason #5 (with slightly tongue-in-cheek coda):

There’s no future tense in the Finnish language. The present tense is used instead. “No future,” as the Tähtivaeltaja slogan says. This makes it easy to seize the day, to live in the moment and not worry about tomorrow. At least in theory. There are some who insist on trying to introduce a sort-of future tense by artificial constructs like “you will come to know this,” but they are clearly in the wrong and should stop immediately.

I jogged over to Wikipedia and found this example:

The future tense is not needed due to context and the telic contrast. For example, luen kirjan “I read a book (completely)” indicates a future, [while] luen kirjaa “I read a book (not yet complete)” indicates present.

(If you’re a native English speaker — perhaps especially so — contemplating following the link to Wikipedia’s article on telicity, and you are not a linguist, prepare yourself to learn more about the language than you ever picked up in Mrs. Grundy’s fifth-period class. Let alone on the playground.)

All of which got me wondering: are there any languages with no past tense?

Duh, what a question. I should have known this (emphasis mine):

All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphology — i.e., changes in form of a word — to indicate the word’s function in a sentence. In other words, Chinese has few grammatical inflections — it possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), only a few articles (i.e., equivalents to “the, a, an” in English), and no gender.

It’s a topic for a *cough* future post, maybe. But I’ve always been interested in the idea that knowing one language from birth, as opposed to another, might (does?) shape the way one thinks throughout life.

For instance, if you have no grammatical form to express the future tense, can you even think in terms of a time containing events which have not yet happened? If you can’t express the past, what goes through your mind the first time you see a timeline? If your language has no tenses at all, do you have clocks and calendars? What does “time” itself mean to you? If you forget something you mean to pick up on the way home from work, what is the context in which you fail to pick it up, vs. the context in which you formed your intention to remember it in the first place — is there a “when”? (And what on Earth do you make of bizarre concepts like “daylight savings time”?)

Surely it can’t be that you think of “time” only as what English speakers call the present, a sort of neverending concurrency. Surely you don’t think you may walk out your front door and eventually come within (say) a mile of where the Emperor Gaozu is currently taking a bath.

Er… can you?

I think I’m experiencing some sort of linguo-philosophical vertigo here. (Almost said “at the moment” but, well…)

[P.S. For the link to the post on Finnish-vs.-English which started this avalanche of paradox, thanks to the “Instant Distractions” sidebar at Colleen Lindsay’s blog.]