Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so
Knowing me to be a fan of director Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso, she brought home his 1998 English-language debut, The Legend of 1900. Which we (well, I) watched last night.
What an interesting premise, with all sorts of opportunities for metaphor and sentiment:
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)…
When The Boy grew up, he would tell people — with slight hesitation, thinking first of pizza — that his favorite food of all was sandwiches.
But there was a time when this was not true. There was a time when all that The Boy knew of sandwiches was what his mother made for him, and what he learned to make for himself:
Peanut butter and jelly, of course; tuna (with mayonnaise, lettuce optional); American cheese (in casual or formal versions, with jelly or mayonnaise respectively); ham and cheese (margarine and mustard); liverwurst (sometimes with cheese, always with mustard). Regardless of specific ingredients, these sandwiches all had one feature in common:
White bread.
Yesterday would have been William Shakespeare’s and Anne Hathaway’s 426th anniversary. Whew.
Per yesterday’s Today in Literature newsletter, which I’ve just got around to reading, we have this excerpt from Chapter 3 of Mrs. Shakespeare: The Complete Works, “Richard Nye’s fictional send-up of their marriage”:
When Mr William Shakespeare asked me that idle question as to whether I desired him to compare me to a summer’s day, and I said thank you no, we were standing together on the bank by London Bridge. I say together because together is worth remark in a marriage like ours was.
Himself had been picking his nose for at least five minutes, dreaming. As for me, I was counting the heads of the traitors up there on the poles. It was cold, I might tell you….
“Winter,” my husband said suddenly.
He swept off his hat with a flourish, as if he had just discovered some important new truth. I thought he’d read my mind about the day not knowing what season it belonged to. Then, from the green spark in his eyes, I knew there was worse to come.
“Winter what?” I demanded.
“Winter you,” Mr Shakespeare said. “Anne Hathawinterway with her,” he went on, grinning. “You’re more like a day in December,” my husband concluded.
I hit him.
Well, what would you have done?
What a great exercise: inventing dialogue — a whole life — for a famous person whose biography is documented poorly, or not at all.
…no, not important to you. (Er, not to denigrate your importance.) This is important to me.
See, I’ve got this one recipe I cook once, sometimes twice every year. It’s a recipe for Sour Cream Pumpkin Pie. I’ve made it every year since first finding it in a “holiday recipes” brochure from an actual God-do-they-still-exist? A&P grocery store in Clinton, NJ, in 1986 or so. So you’d think I’d have committed it to memory by now.
You would think wrong. (Er, not to denigrate your intelligence.) After all (I tell myself, by way of excuses), I make it only once a year.
In any case, every year around now I go through the same torture of not having the recipe on hand. After, oh, eight years or so, the brochure started to fall apart. Eventually that specific page did become separated from the others, and for a few years it managed to get lost in a stack of recipes (mostly culled by The Missus) from newspapers and magazines — whence I would excavate it, after a half-hour or more of feverish fieldwork.
Finally, worried that I might lose it altogether, I typed it up and made about a dozen copies, which I then proceeded to secure in various locations around the house where I might think to look for them every year: inside other cookbooks, in various pantries and cupboards, even upstairs on the shelf over my computer. “Just in case,” you see, and a good thing too because as far as I know I am now down to my last copy. (It’s the one I found just this morning — the day of the Thanksgiving-grocery-shopping excursion — on the shelf over my computer.)
So this is for me: a permanent place for me to find the recipe every year.
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.)
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.
(1) Me — during work hours. Just came up for a breath of air. |
(2) It’s me again. Actually working! See, I told you so! |
(3) Here I am still working. I don’t know how I can work so hard!! |
The above photos (taken somewhere in France, sometime in 1944), their captions penned in ink on the back, the handwriting in which the captions appear, and the voice in which I can hear the captions spoken — all are exquisitely familiar and completely alien to me. And I bet they are to some of you, too, even if the faces, places, and years are different.
Thanks, Dad.
From whiskey river:
Then away out in the woods I heard that kind of a sound that a ghost makes when it wants to tell about something that’s on its mind and can’t make itself understood, and so can’t rest easy in its grave, and has to go about that way every night grieving.
(Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn)
Shadow
So the dead are among us again
even here where Halloween is not celebrated
and the moon flies through the skeletons of trees
and men in rowboats fish for souls on the river
There is a woman with spidery hair swinging a lantern
disappearing down the colonnade
a row of buildings tilted like gravestones
in which a single window is lit
a wall from whose depths shadows emerge
assuming the contours of bodies they will follow
all night and abandon at dawn:
a revelation to you
that each day we take on a new shadow
(Nicholas Christopher, from Crossing the Equator: New and Selected Poems 1972-2004)
Not from whiskey river:
Fezzik: Why do you wear a mask? Were you burned by acid, or something like that?
Man in Black: Oh no, it’s just that they’re terribly comfortable. I think everyone will be wearing them in the future.
(The Princess Bride)
Also not from whiskey river: Jim Carrey’s not to everyone’s taste. But this is pretty memorable:
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