Everyday Life – Page 106

Gracias

January 1, 2010 by John 22 Comments

Thank you for 2009 and best wishes for 2010 to all in the RAMH universe (both visitors and, uh… visitees?) — especially to the proprietors of the following blogs: you collectively and separately inspired me, awed me, made me laugh out loud and ponder, stopped my breath, wonder what the hell I was doing calling myself a “blogger,” and wait eagerly for your next post, way out of proportion to my ability to return the favor.

In alphabetical order:

(Note: Many of you talented, industrious folks work with more than one site or blog, and your other presences are often just as powerful/meaningful as their main ones. Thanks for them, too, folks — especially Maggie for Violence Unsilenced, Marta for Words Are Art (etc., etc.), Moonrat for The Book Book, and Froog for Barstool Blues.)

The Watchful Mind

January 1, 2010 by John 3 Comments

[A museum’s 3D representation of Wilder Penfield’s so-called “cortical homunculus” depicting the relative importance of various senses, as measured by the percentage of our brains devoted to them. Photo by Robep on Flickr; click for original.]

From whiskey river:

Burning the Old Year

Letters swallow themselves in seconds.
Notes friends tied to the doorknob,
transparent scarlet paper,
sizzle like moth wings,
marry the air.

So much of any year is flammable,
lists of vegetables, partial poems.
Orange swirling flame of days,
so little is a stone.

Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,
an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.
I begin again with the smallest numbers.

Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,
only the things I didn’t do
crackle after the blazing dies.

(Naomi Shihab Nye [source])

…and:

Looking Around, Believing

How strange that we can begin at any time.
With two feet we get down the street.
With a hand we undo the rose.
With an eye we lift up the peach tree
And hold it up to the wind — white blossoms
At our feet. Like today. I started
In the yard with my daughter,
With my wife poking at a potted geranium,
And now I am walking down the street,
Amazed that the sun is only so high,
Just over the roof, and a child
Is singing through a rolled newspaper
And a terrier is leaping like a flea
And at the bakery I pass, a palm,
Like a suctioning starfish, is pressed
To the window. We’re keeping busy —
This way, that way, we’re making shadows
Where sunlight was, making words
Where there was only noise in the trees.

(Gary Soto [source])

…and (what the heck, the river was on a roll this week):

Do you have doubts about life? Are you unsure if it is really worth the trouble? Look at the sky: that is for you. Look at each person’s face as you pass them on the street: those faces are for you. And the street itself, and the ground under the street, and the ball of fire underneath the ground: all these things are for you. They are as much for you as they are for other people. Remember this when you wake up in the morning and think you have nothing. Stand up and face the east. Now praise the sky and praise the light within each person under the sky. It’s okay to be unsure. But praise, praise, praise.

(Miranda July, from “The Shared Patio” [source])

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Things Turned End-Over-End

December 25, 2009 by John 4 Comments

[From this page, which includes a YouTube tour of the interior: “The Upside Down House is a project created by a Polish businessman and philanthropist named Daniel Czapiewski… The house is also meant to be a profound statement about the Communist era and the state of the world.”]

From whiskey river:

Remember That Things Go
According to Your Karma
Whether You Like It or Not

One day, my dear,
you stop and look around you,
find yourself stuffing needs into a sack of thoughts,
realize you have talked your life to pieces,
scratched your self to bits,
that neither hope nor doubt
can protect you,
that you are not mistaken,
that you haven’t lost your grip —
it is dissolving.
Now you can speak about everything silently.

(Terrance Keenan, St. Nadie in Winter: Zen Encounters with Loneliness [source])

…and:

What is required of us is that we love the difficult and learn to deal with it. In the difficult are the friendly forces, the hands that work on us. Right in the difficult we must have our joys, our happiness, our dreams: there against the depth of this background, they stand out, there for the first time we see how beautiful they are.

(Rainer Maria Rilke, Selected Letters)

Finally, not from whiskey river: Theo (the constable of Pine Cove, California) gets his first glimpse of someone who will prove to be the title character in a “Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror” from Christopher Moore:

Theo was doing fifty up Worchester Street when the blond man stepped from behind a tree into the street. The Volvo had just lurched over a patched strip in the asphalt, so the grille was pointed up and caught the blond man about hip-high, tossing him into the air ahead of the car. Theo stood on the brake, but even as the antilocks throbbed, the blond man hit the tarmac and the Volvo rolled over him, making sickening crunching and thumping noises as body parts ricocheted into wheel wells.

Theo checked the rearview as the car stopped and saw the blond man flopping to a stop in the red wash of the brake lights. Theo pulled the radio off his belt as he leaped from the car, and stood ready to call for help when the figure lying in the road started to get up.

Theo let the radio fall to his side. “Hey, buddy, just stay right there. Just stay calm. Help is on the way.” He started loping toward the injured man, then pulled up.

The blond guy was on his hands and knees now; Theo could also see that his head was twisted the wrong way and the long blond hair was cascading back to the ground. There was a crackling noise as the guy’s head turned around to face the ground. He stood up. He was wearing a long black coat with a rain flap…

The blond man held an arm out toward Theo, then noticed that the thumb on the outstretched hand was on the wrong side. He grabbed it with his other hand an snapped it back into place. “I’ll be okay,” the blond man said, monotone.

“You know, if that coat dry-cleans itself while I’m watching, I’ll nominate you for governor my own self,” Theo said, trying to buy some time while he thought of what he was going to say to the dispatcher when he keyed the button on the radio.

The blond man was now coming steadily toward him — the first few steps limping badly, but the limp getting better as he got closer. “Stop right there,” Theo said. “You are under arrest for a two-oh-seven-A.”

(Christopher Moore, The Stupidest Angel)

A Quirky Eclectic Christmas Music Playlist (2009 ed.)

December 23, 2009 by John 3 Comments

Taking off from the first edition… All I’m going to do for the music portion here is just add ten songs (and pray that, over time, I won’t blow the little WordPress audio-player thingie out of the water).

As before, these artists and numbers appear, back-to-back, in the playlist:

Peter Robbins et al.: dialogue from A Charlie Brown Christmas
Anonymous 4: Hodie Christus Natus Est
Waverly Consort: Three Spanish Villancicos – Dadme Albcrecias
Perry Como: Home for the Holidays
Mannheim Steamroller: Joy to the World
George Winston: The Holly and the Ivy
Celtic Woman: O Holy Night
John Denver and the Muppets: The Twelve Days of Christmas
Al Hirt: Nutty Jingle Bells
The Roches: Deck the Halls
— 2009: —
Charlotte Church: Mary’s Boy Child
Madeleine Peyroux/k.d. lang: River
George Winston: Variations on the Kanon
Arthur Fiedler & The Boston Pops: The Toy Trumpet
Eartha Kitt: Santa Baby
Mannheim Steamroller: Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer
Celtic Woman: The Wexford Carol
The Brian Setzer Orchestra: Jingle Bells
Jimmy Boyd: I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus
Cumberland Gap Reunion: Silent Night

(Note: The playlist goes automatically from start to finish, once you click the little Play button. To fast-forward to the next number, once a song is playing you’ll find a little fast-forward button to the right of its progress meter. And a fast-rewind to the left, for that matter.)

[audio:00_dialoguefromacharliebrownchristmas.mp3, 01_hodiechristusnatusest_anonymous4.mp3, 02_threespanishvillancicos_dadme_albricias_waverlyconsort.mp3, 03_homefortheholidays_perrycomo.mp3, 04_joytotheworld_mannheimsteamroller.mp3, 05_thehollyandtheivy_georgewinston.mp3, 06_oholynight_celticwoman.mp3, 07_12daysofchristmas_denvermuppets.mp3, 08_nuttyjinglebells_alhirt.mp3, 09_deckthehalls_theroches.mp3, 11_marysboychild_charlottechurch.mp3, 12_river_peyrouxlang.mp3, 13_variationsonthekanonbypachelbel_georgewinston.mp3, 14_thetoytrumpet_fiedler.mp3, 15_santababy_earthakitt.mp3,
16_rudolphtherednosedreindeer_mannheimsteamroller.mp3, 17_thewexfordcarol_celticwoman.mp3, 18_jinglebells_briansetzerorchestra.mp3, 19_isawmommykissingsantaclaus_jimmyboyd.mp3, 20_silentnight_cumberlandgapreunion.mp3|titles=’A Quirky/Eclectic Christmas Music Playlist’|artists=Various Artists]

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Cold Words

December 18, 2009 by John 3 Comments

[See original at toothpastefordinner.com]

From whiskey river:

Report From A Far Place

Making these word things to
step on across the world, I
could call them snowshoes.

They creak, sag, bend, but
hold, over the great deep cold,
and they turn up at the toes.

In war or city or camp
they could save your life;
you can muse them by the fire.

Be careful, though: they
burn, or don’t burn, in their own
strange way, when you say them.

(William Stafford)

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Non-Holiday Holiday Reading

December 16, 2009 by John 4 Comments

I had occasion recently to hunt down a story by James Thurber which I hadn’t read in *counting*… uh, many years. But the first time I “read” it, I didn’t actually read it: I heard it, read aloud, by my seventh-grade English teacher.

The story itself has nothing to do with Christmas or even winter (as far as I can tell), but the day Mr. Krause read it to us and his other seventh-grade class was the last schoolday before Christmas break — when no one, teachers included, had much interest in academic matters. (An innocent time, eh?)

Mr. Krause’s voice had a flattened, slightly nasal quality to it; years later, as a teacher myself, I heard a recording of Kurt Vonnegut reading from Slaughterhouse-Five (“Overhead he heard the cry of what might have been a melodious owl, but it wasn’t a melodious owl. It was a flying saucer from Tralfamadore”) and thought I recognized in his voice my old teacher’s. As he read the story that day, grinning almost the whole time, he sat on the desk and kept having to stop and laugh. Indeed, even not counting the jokes, it must be a fun story to read aloud — all those smackings and tockings of all the k-sounds. But I’m surprised, in retrospect, that he read it to seventh graders; the diction and sentence structure, the almost literal slipperiness of the writing, seems to me a tad above listening-comprehension level.

(Most of all, I guess, I’m surprised that even one of those listeners still remembers as much about the day as he does.)

The title is “The Last Clock,” not to be confused with Thurber’s more well-known, full-length book, The Thirteen Clocks. Online, the story seems to be available nowhere except at the site of The New Yorker, which originally published it in February, 1959; to read it there, you’ll need either to be a New Yorker subscriber, or you’ll need to purchase (for $5.99) one-year access to the digital version of the issue.

Offline, the most obvious choice is to find the issue in some form at a library… or obtain a copy, one way or another, of the Thurber anthology called Lanterns and Lances.

In the meantime, as a little bit of a tasty holiday treat, I thought I’d transcribe the first section (and a bit more) into a page here at RAMH. (Links to both the New Yorker site and to some places to obtain Lanterns and Lances appear at the end of that excerpt.)

Enjoy!

Read “The Last Clock” (excerpt), by James Thurber

Boyish Prankery

December 12, 2009 by John 8 Comments

Marta was wondering earlier this week about pranks, harmless or funny or otherwise. Coincidentally, at about the same time that she posted that, I received a funny reminder of a successful but harmless prank I’d been involved with from years ago. Thought I’d share the story with you (even though some of it, in retrospect, will embarrass me and make me wish that some things weren’t true).

Some background:

I attended a small high school in southern New Jersey in the late 1960s. Most school dances, at least back then (what do they do now, anyway?), were held in the gym, suitably transformed into romantic wonderlands by crepe paper

and complicated lighting. But in our junior year, the prom — the Big Event — took place at a popular club some 10 or 15 miles away. Called the Latin Casino, it was a big deal, with big-name entertainers on the calendar, and at the time our prom took place the big name was big indeed: The Supremes, with Diana Ross.

So yes, we always got a rise out of telling people that we’d had The Supremes — The REAL Supremes — at our junior prom. We always got a rise out of that, even if we hadn’t gone to the prom ourselves. Which was the case with Yours Truly and most of his friends, none of us having yet fully (or at all) emerged from our cocoons of bachelor-boyhood.

(To be fair, it was a plain old economic calculation, too; two tickets to the Latin Casino cost a heck of a lot more than two tickets to the RHS gym. You practically had to believe you meant to marry the young lady in question.)

So that’s the background story. Now scroll the calendar forward, not quite a decade…

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Discoveries

December 11, 2009 by John 8 Comments

[Photo above taken by the Hubble Wide-Field Camera 3 and released a few days ago by NASA. Several thousand galaxies are visible in the original, “a peek at the universe as it looked about 600 million years after the Big Bang.” More info here and here.]

From whiskey river (which excerpted from this poem, in different words, via translation):

The startling reality of things

The startling reality of things
Is my discovery every single day.
Every thing is what it is,
And it’s hard to explain to anyone how much this delights me
And suffices me.

To be whole, it is enough simply to exist.

I’ve written a good many poems.
I shall write many more, naturally.
Each of my poems speaks of this,
And yet all my poems are different,
Because each thing that exists is one way of saying this.

Sometimes I start looking at a stone.
I don’t start thinking, Does it have feeling?
I don’t fuss about calling it my sister.
But I get pleasure out of its being a stone,
Enjoying it because it feels nothing,
Enjoying it because it’s not at all related to me.

Occasionally I hear the wind blow,
And I find that just hearing the wind blow makes it worth having been born.

I don’t know what others reading this will think;
But I find it must be good since it’s what I think without effort,
With no idea that other people are listening to me think;
Because I think it without thoughts,
Because I say it as my words say it.

I was once called a materialist poet
And was surprised, because I didn’t imagine
I could be called anything at all.
I’m not even a poet: I see.
If what I write has any merit, it’s not in me;
The merit is there, in my verses.
All this is absolutely independent of my will.

(Fernando Pessoa [source])

…and:

Your beloved and your friends were once strangers. Somehow at a particular time, they came from the distance toward your life. Their arrival seemed so accidental and contingent. Now your life is unimaginable without them. Similarly, your identity and vision are composed of a certain constellation of ideas and feelings that surfaced from the depths of the distance within you. To lose these now would be to lose yourself.

(John O’Donohue [source])

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Navigating My Subconscious

December 7, 2009 by John 10 Comments

When I was a boy, among my adventure fantasies was being a fighter pilot. There was something tremendously exciting to me in the idea of traveling at superhigh speeds and concentrating not just on the flight path ahead, but on the split-second change in circumstances in all three dimensions at once. You’d have to keep looking up, behind, down, to both sides… and never, ever relax.

(One obvious fallacy seems never to have occurred to me: if Dad’s characteristic high-speed highway driving gave me the willies, as it did, in actual aerial combat I’d almost certainly bail out more often than not.)

Later, fresh out of college, I first worked not as the English teacher I’d been trained to become, but as a cab driver — a position for which, excuse the boast, I was eminently suited.

Two apparently unrelated factoids about my life, separated from each other (and from now) by decades. But if you let your conceptual vision blur just a bit, you might discern the connection: spatial relationships; geography.

For whatever reason, I’ve always been interested in, not to say obsessive about, how one gets from here to there. Even now, I can spend hours poring over maps and atlases; Google Maps (and its macro-offspring, Google Earth and Google Sky) would be like a crack pipe to me if I let it. Furthermore, I’m blessed (or cursed) with a good intuitive sense of direction, so after I’ve driven someplace once I can almost always get back to it without conscious thought. (I say “cursed” only because this sometimes makes me impatient with others’ reluctance to venture into unfamiliar territory.) I actually hold a mental map of the route, including landmarks, traffic bottlenecks, relationship to other routes to other nearby destinations, and so on.

This obsession extends, bizarrely, even into my dreams. I notice and generally remember how I’ve “gotten” from one place to another. As my dream life goes on over the course of years, I recognize intersections I’ve “been to” before (although I’ve never seen them in real life). And, what’s more, I sometimes record these routes — write them up the morning after, in the course of recording especially notable dreams.

(Yes, I’ve tried to keep paper and pen by the bedside so I can jot them down at the moment, so to speak. It never works for me: I’m too caught up in my dreams to want to wake up.)

The most recent such report took me about an hour to write on Saturday morning, when I should have been working on Seems to Fit instead. You can read it here (irrelevant, non-setting-related portions excised, and hyperlinks to real-world places added (because — ha ha — doing so gives me a chance to use Google Maps)).

In the meantime: how about you? Is there any ongoing thread to what happens between your ears as you sleep? Consider the common “Color or black-and-white?” question. Beyond that, though, think of your dreams as a very particular sort of fiction. Do you tend to remember the plots the next morning? or are you a character specialist? what about dialogue?

Have you had the deja vu moment in which you come to a real place for the first time… and realize you’ve already been there in your dreams? Do you find yourself dreaming about the same things, people, places, even in non-recurring dreams, even spread out over years or decades?

C’mon. Spill.

What’s Your Story? (Are You Sure?)

December 4, 2009 by John 11 Comments

From whiskey river:

The Story, Around the Corner

is not turning the way you thought
it would turn, gently, in a little spiral loop,
the way a child draws the tail of a pig.
What came out of your mouth,
a riff of common talk.
As a sudden weather shift on a beach,
sky looming mountains of cloud
in a way you cannot predict
or guide, the story shuffles elements, darkens,
takes its own side. And it is strange.
Far more complicated than a few phrases
pieced together around a kitchen table
on a July morning in Dallas, say,
a city you don’t live in, where people
might shop forever or throw a thousand stories
away. You who carried or told a tiny bit of it
aren’t sure. Is this what we wanted?
Stories wandering out,
having their own free lives?
Maybe they are planning something bad.
A scrap or cell of talk you barely remember
is growing into a weird body with many demands.
One day soon it will stumble up the walk and knock,
knock hard, and you will have to answer the door.

(Naomi Shihab Nye [source])

…and (italicized portion):

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea. The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be “interesting” to know which. We tell ourselves that it makes some difference whether the naked woman is about to commit a mortal sin or is about to register a political protest or is about to be, the Aristophanic view, snatched back to the human condition by the fireman in priest’s clothing just visible in the window behind her, the one smiling at the telephoto lens. We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience. Or at least we do for a while.

(Joan Didion, The White Album [source])

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