Looking Backward

A Broken (Family) Tree

June 17, 2008 by John 2 Comments

A friend (Rick) was telling me last night about some genealogical research he’s been doing.

My understanding is that he may be writing up his findings himself. If so, I won’t steal his thunder by relating my (no doubt incomplete and/or flat-out wrong) version of the details. Just wanted to report one laugh-out-loud item.

Basically, Rick believes — or believed — himself to be a descendant of a branch of a sect known as the Harmonists (which, I am pretty sure, are covered here on Wikipedia). Why is this at all funny? Because among the principal beliefs of this sect was…

…celibacy.

Sing, Sing, Sing

June 13, 2008 by John Leave a Comment

Happy Father's Day This Sunday is Father’s Day in the US. Last week, 20 years ago, my Dad died. I thought a fitting tribute to both of these occasions would be to post here a short story which was, in many ways, a story of my Dad (although none of the actual events described in it occurred to him). That’s Dad in the photo at the left, circa 1943-44, when he was in training for a while at Texas A&M.

Below, I’ll excerpt the first couple-three pages of the quite old-fashioned story, whose title is “Sing, Sing, Sing.” It’s gone through many versions by now, the earliest written in the autumn of that year of 1988. The version which appears here is simply the most recent.

If you like that much of the story, feel free to download the complete version, in PDF form (146KB); a link to that appears at the end of the excerpt.

(Note: For what it’s worth, there has never to my knowledge been a newspaper named the New York Messenger. Should you go on to read the whole story, there’s never been a book called The Big Hall: The Good Times of Benny Goodman, either, or an author named Robert G. Ehling.)

Update (2008-08-07): I’ve done a more complete breakdown of the “Sing, Sing, Sing” performance, including full-length clips of the three main segments (which together make up a “triptych,” as the fictional Big Hall calls it).

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The Imprint of Books, One Life at a Time

June 11, 2008 by John 3 Comments

The Editorial Ass blog is running a fascinating series of posts. Collectively referred to as “Celebrate Reading Month,” each post in the series is written by a guest blogger, each describing a book which had an impact on the blogger’s life, understanding of books, reading habits — whatever.

MoonRat, who runs the blog, has made it convenient to see all the current posts at once, using a “celebrate reading” tag.

Of many interesting things about the series, there’s this, completely coincidental: it acts as a counterweight to those who might despair at the state of reading. (Including many of those reading and participating in Nathan Bransford’s current discussions, and subsequent comments, about e-readers, e-books, e-publishing, e-authoring and -agenting.)

Update: The sensory experience of reading — feel, smell, and so on — is one thing which people say holds them back from considering an e-reader. You might be interested in seeing this gallery of Kindle users’ photos of their new toys, many in quite inventive (and no doubt sensorily satisfying) covers.

Update 2: My contribution to Moonrat’s “Celebrate Reading Extravaganza” is up.

Forty Years On

June 5, 2008 by John Leave a Comment

Portion of artwork by Tina Berning, for the NY Times From the NY Times, RFK’s kids remember him:

Kerry Kennedy

But most of all, he believed it imperative to question authority, and those who failed that lesson did so at their peril.

Joseph P. Kennedy II

Robert Kennedy had a wonderful way of allowing others to tell him how the world looked through their eyes.

Kathleen Kennedy Townsend

The long table was set with linen, silver and crystal. Painted portraits of my brothers and sisters hung on the walls. And suddenly, my father entered. He looked haunted and started talking to me, shaking his head in distress as he described the people he’d met in the Delta. “I was with a family who live in a shack the size of this dining room,” he told me.

And yeah, I know: ANYBODY’s kids tend to look at their parents in a manner that’s biased, one way or another. And yeah, I know: children of privilege, easy for them to say, etc. etc.

But there was no one like him. I bet his kids would have had these kinds of memories no matter what station in life he and they had been born to (or how he exited).

(Also from the Times, here’s the obituary (1.2MB PDF).)

The Boy Hears Himself (Part 1)

May 16, 2008 by John Leave a Comment

A Recordio reel-to-reel recorder During an… odd few years in my younger life, my friend Dean and I became absorbed in experiments involving a reel-to-reel tape recorder. The brand name which Dean and I both “owned,” in those days when electronics were still manufactured domestically, was “Recordio.” (And yes, all right: we didn’t own them; our fathers did.)

What “odd few years” would these have been? I am pretty sure we first started doing this at around age 12. And — because of some of the “work” we did, particularly our parodies of popular TV shows — I know we must have continued at least to around age 15 or 16.

These experiments revolved around a fictional radio station, call letters CBX. Most CBX productions were ad-libbed “newscasts,” frequently starring the same two people: anchorman “Don Gurky” (played by Dean) and roving reporter “Quentin Frammistan” (guess who). I don’t have any idea how Dean came up with his character’s name; I know where Quentin Frammistan came from, though. The first name came from Quentin Reynolds (author of a series of Landmark Books — history for kids — whom I frequently cited back then as “my favorite author”); the word “frammistan,” which meant God only knows what, often appeared in the text of MAD Magazine.

In addition, two other friends put in occasional appearances. Alan’s character, Harry Two-Seven, had been so named by Dean for (I’m sure) no particular reason. Like Quentin, Harry was (most often) a field reporter; unlike Quentin, Harry tended to get caught up in situations of an embarrassing nature — something like Biff, on the Letterman show.

The other friend came along some time after we’d first started the “station” — yes, CBX endured for more than a few weeks — when we met him later in high school. His name was Tom, and his character’s name was Colonel Tom. Quite independently of us — he lived in the next town, which until we got to high school might as well have been the next planet — Tom had had his own imaginary radio station for a while. During the waning months of both stations’ life cycles, we swapped personnel every now and then.

In addition to the newscasts, CBX occasionally produced Special Events, such as (again, ad-libbed) parodies of Star Trek and Mission: Impossible. From the start, many of these Special Events featured a, umm, well, I guess you could call it a musical comedy troupe with the remarkably unembarrassed name “The Peenie Players.”

Hey, gimme a break: we had barely hit puberty yet. We certainly hadn’t heard of Dr. Freud. No, we chose the name strictly for its sound: nasal and plosive. And the reason this sound was important in the name was that it was important in the Peenie Players’ body of work, which consisted entirely of speeded-up versions (a la David Seville and The Chipmunks) of familiar songs and works of literature. (The latter ceased to be considered literature after the Peenies were through with them.)

Imagine my surprise and, well, delight (?) when a CD of some Peenie Players recordings came to me — delivered (I think) by my brother, from Dean.

More, including some samples, below.

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Boomer Memory

May 8, 2008 by John Leave a Comment

Aerial view (GMaps) of former Hickory St. School area The New York Times reported the other day on the frenzied efforts among Boomers to sharpen their minds — particularly the parts of their minds involving memory.

When David Bunnell, a magazine publisher who lives in Berkeley, Calif., went to a FedEx store to send a package a few years ago, he suddenly drew a blank as he was filling out the forms.

“I couldn’t remember my address,” said Mr. Bunnell, 60, with a measure of horror in his voice. “I knew where I lived, and I knew how to get there, but I didn’t know what the address was.”

Mr. Bunnell is among tens of millions of baby boomers who are encountering the signs, by turns amusing and disconcerting, that accompany the decline of the brain’s acuity: a good friend’s name suddenly vanishing from memory; a frantic search for eyeglasses only to find them atop the head; milk taken from the refrigerator then put away in a cupboard.

Yeah, feeling like you’re losing brain cells with each passing year isn’t fun, although (as the article mentions later on) it’s not really as bad as most people seem to think it is. But something needs to be noted about the uselessness of boomers’ declining memory: it’s not all our fault.

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How It Was / Spring: Where It Was

April 29, 2008 by John 1 Comment

(Here’s the first excerpt from the first booklet in the How It Was series. I do not plan to post the entire book this way, in regular blog posts spread out over time; what I do hope to do, I explain here.)

——

Deep in his being, The Boy knew that somewhere out there existed a world wider than his own, and what The Boy thought he knew about this wider world was this:

Somehow, weirdly, this other world continued to spin on its axis even without The Boy at its core. Presidents, artists, convicts, detectives, and saints walked on this strange world’s uncracked pavement (their mothers’ backs forever safe). It was a world where movie musicals were filmed, where automobiles functioned as their manufacturers promised. A world where eating caramel candy by the bagful led straight to smiles — yes, as in The Boy’s own world — but never to a dentist’s chair. A world where he would fear neither the shadows of the night nor the heavy climbing rope of gym class, a world in which no one he loved would ever die, and there was no ham.

The people in this wider world spoke in exotic tongues, their melodic speech lacking the sweetly nasal twang and erratic rhythms to which The Boy was accustomed. Their hair (even beneath the helmets, war bonnets, and coonskin caps which many of them wore) was combed and coiffed immaculately. Some of these people had children, or were children themselves, some of whom were children that The Boy might eventually (in that murky future when he and they had ceased to be children) come to know and even to love.

This wider world lay not miles but whole light years of imagination from the town where The Boy lived, remote and untouchable, far beyond the range of his parents’ battered car (any of their half-dozen sputtering, wheezing, gear-grinding cars) which bore The Boy and his family through his own world’s dark heart.

Yet The Boy knew deep in his own heart that what separated that wider world from his own was not geography, but ignorance. Its people, even its children, knew nothing at all of his world. They did not (and would never) know of the boundaries of his life: the town, the neighborhood, the intricate web of human eccentricity which cross-hatched the map of The Boy’s daily wanderings.

They knew nothing, for starters, of the river and the creek which framed his existence.

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Where It Was

April 25, 2008 by John 2 Comments

As I’ve mentioned, the events of the How It Was series of booklets took place in the real world as well as in the world of The Boy’s imagination (then and now). The real town where all this happened is in southern New Jersey, on the Delaware River and a few miles north of Philadelphia.

The Missus knows how tightly I cling to memories of that place and time and, accordingly, has set up on eBay some kind of early-warning system for herself, to let her know that something tagged with the town’s highly unusual (almost certainly unique) name has come on the market.

This past Christmas, she came up with some winners: a series of maps, dated 1876, and a couple of postcards. (That’s a thumbnail of one of the maps at the top of this post; click on it for the original as scanned, which will open in a new window or tab.) My friend Jimmy still lives in that area, and occasionally drops me a line to let me know of some item of interest. Recently, the local post office celebrated its 150th anniversary, and issued a series of commemorative postcards — reproductions of the originals; Jimmy sent me a few of them.

One of the things I’d like to do sometimes here at Running After My Hat is to try filling in some background on the town — not necessarily what it’s like now, or even how it really was… but at least how it was in The Boy’s latter-day memory. I’m going to start with this map — a larger-scale, annotated version of -which you can see “below the fold.”

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Formative years, formative “places,” formative people

April 24, 2008 by John Leave a Comment

Over there on the right, in the “Family/Friends/Alter Egos” portion of the blogroll, you’ll see a couple names you may recognize.

The most likely such candidate would be Diana Gabaldon, creator of the hugely successful series of quote-unquote “romance” novels beginning with Outlander (original title, and title as published in the UK, Cross-stitch).

You may or may not know of Floyd Kemske, also an author — creator of a series of what he called “corporate nightmares”: fantastic (literally so) extrapolations of what the worst of business might wreak on society.

(For instance, Lifetime Employment, the first book in the series, concerns a company which — as the title suggests — guarantees lifetime employment to all its employees, managers, and so on. So then, with no real turnover or attrition, how do employees move up the career ladder? By killing their higher-ups.)

It’s been many years since I’ve talked to either Diana or Floyd — indeed, I’ve never spoken to Floyd, although I’ve known him for 17-18 years now. Occasionally, a brief flurry of email reassures me that they’re still out there. Diana, there’s little doubt of, in truth; the woman is everywhere. Floyd, well, I dunno; we last exchanged email a little over a year ago. If you follow the link to his Web site, you will find much that’s interesting, but nothing (as far as I can tell) more recent than a few years old.

My point in bringing these folks up — what I really have “in common” with them, aside from the loose association that we are all or have been writers — is where we met: on the “old” CompuServe Literary Forum.

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