Everyday Life – Page 112

Looking Glass

July 17, 2009 by John 2 Comments

This week, a little something different: Usually, I start my Friday post by pulling something at random from the last seven days’ selections at whiskey river. Then I go on to include a handful of poems, quotations, film clips, and/or songs to which the whiskey river snippet led me (by whatever inscrutable chain of thoughts).

Today, I’ve already got some poetry which I encountered elsewhere (scroll down to see #4) in the last week, poetry which I really liked.

With that already rustling in my head, then, I stopped by at whiskey river‘s archives, called whiskey river’s commonplace book, and just started to browse.

From whiskey river’s commonplace book (no specific link; it’s about halfway down the page):

Prayer

Over a dock railing, I watch the minnows, thousands, swirl
themselves, each a minuscule muscle, but also, without the
way to create current, making of their unison (turning, re-
infolding,
entering and exiting their own unison in unison) making of
themselves a
visual current, one that cannot freight or sway by
minutest fractions the water’s downdrafts and upswirls, the
dockside cycles of finally-arriving boat-wakes, there where
they hit deeper resistance, water that seems to burst into
itself (it has those layers), a real current though mostly
invisible sending into the visible (minnows) arrowing
motion that forces change —
this is freedom. This is the force of faith. Nobody gets
what they want. Never again are you the same. The longing
is to be pure. What you get is to be changed. More and more by
each glistening minute, through which infinity threads itself,
also oblivion, of course, the aftershocks of something
at sea. Here, hands full of sand, letting it sift through
in the wind, I look in and say take this, this is
what I have saved, take this, hurry. And if I listen
now? Listen, I was not saying anything. It was only
something I did. I could not choose words. I am free to go.
I cannot of course come back. Not to this. Never.
It is a ghost posed on my lips. Here: never.

(Jorie Graham [source])

Not from whiskey river:

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The Mystery of Misplaceable Modifiers

July 11, 2009 by John 16 Comments

According to numerous sources, J.R.R. Tolkien offered this memory of his first story — not the plot, not (really) the characters, not the setting, but the language:

I first tried to write a story when I was about seven. It was about a dragon. I remember nothing about it except a philological fact. My mother said nothing about the dragon, but pointed out that one could not say “a green great dragon,” but had to say “a great green dragon.” I wondered why, and still do.

I wonder that kind of stuff all the time. Sometimes you can sort of make sense of the “rule”; for instance, in an animal breed or species name which includes a modifier, you can’t reasonably separate the modifier from the noun. A friendly wire-haired terrier works. A wire-haired friendly terrier doesn’t — even though it imparts exactly the same information.

Other times, maybe, something just “sounds right” one way but not another. It was the longest, most difficult journey I ever took: yeah, that’s all right. It was the most difficult, longest journey I ever took: if I wrote that sentence, I’d immediately want to revise it.

Even when the two adjectives are of similar lengths and/or sounds, one alternative chimes and the other thuds. A cold, clear morning: ding! A clear, cold morning: whoomp!

I can’t believe I have much of anything in common with Tolkien — and nothing at all uniquely in common. So: What’s up with this? Any theories?

_____________________

P.S. This sort of thing must drive copy editors — and ESL teachers — crazy.

Stories in the Trees

July 10, 2009 by John 8 Comments

[The artwork above comes from a fantastic — fantastically rich, but also just literally fantastic — Web site called The Hermitage, from the mind and imagination of artist Rima Staines. She and her companion Tui seem to have a life straight out of fiction, as you can see from her blog. Check out their “wandering house,” which is to a motor home as a cottage is to an office, and her handmade clocks (!).]

From whiskey river:

Generations

Our stories lie down in the orchard,
their time is not now, but something is
coming, something is going away. They

rise to the stars, and wait to be told.
There are listeners who know how little
we know, how much we are feeling.

We had to go our own way, a little off course,
always, no matter how specific the directions
seemed at the time. In this universe if we’re lucky,

we will live in our children’s stories,
their tales that will turn us to legend,
some absurd truth that has nothing to do

with our plans, our meticulous records.
No matter what stories we discard or keep,
they will give us a life we cannot imagine.

(Jeanne Lohmann, from The Light of Invisible Bodies [source])

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Sudden, Radiant Magic

July 3, 2009 by John 1 Comment

From whiskey river:

In the morning I mused
It won’t return, the magic of life
it won’t return

Suddenly in my house the sun
became alive for me
and the table with bread on it
gold
and the flower on the table
and the glasses
gold
And what happened to the sadness
In the sadness too, radiance.

(“Zelda” (Zelda Schneersohn Mishkovsky), from The Spectacular Difference)

….and:

Gazing at the Cascade on Lu Mountain

Where crowns a purple haze
A shimmer in sunlight rays
The hill called Incense-Burner Peak,
from far

To see, hung over the torrent’s wall,
That waterfall
Vault sheer three thousand feet, you’d say
The Milky Way
was tumbling from the heavens, star on star.

(Li Bai, a/k/a Li Po)

…and:

Stuff your eyes with wonder… Live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.

(Ray Bradbury)

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Breaking WIP News: We Have a Title

July 2, 2009 by John 11 Comments

A couple weeks ago, I posted on the importance of selecting a good title for your work. Here’s what I said then, in part:

I’ve struggled for years, off and on, with the title of the WIP. When I tell you I’ve been calling it Grail, I know that instantly summons up certain… certain somethings in your head. Those somethings may or may not in fact apply to my story…
…
So no, it’s not going to be Grail in the long run. I don’t know what it’s going to be.

Well, I think I’ve found what I was looking for. Below, the story behind the new (and, I think, forever) title.

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Department of Unintended Consequences
(Animals & Technology Division)

June 30, 2009 by John 2 Comments

The Missus and I are not alone in having a dog who barks rabidly during thunderstorms. But alone or not, we do. She may be little, and her bark may be a mere yip! compared to the more conventional woof! of full-size hounds, but she is determined to scare the storm away.

(And you know what? You can’t argue with results. The storm always leaves.)

For the record, she also barks when dogs on TV bark, and she barks when doors slam on TV, and when she’s anxious for dinner, and when someone opens the front door from outside, and she barks when she’s happy and excited about a new toy or t,r,e,a,t being unwrapped.

Still, she was doing this new thing in the last couple of weeks which I couldn’t understand: she’d suddenly start barking for no reason. It was like her storm-barking: frantic, maddened you-better-stay-away-from-my-family barking.

I couldn’t understand it, that is, until the moment over the weekend when I just happened to— well, let me explain.

The Missus and I have new “smart” phones. I don’t know what The Missus is up to with hers, but by default, when my own phone rings it just rings. Oh, I’d done the obvious thing already — downloaded a ringtone, and aren’t I hot stuff for having figured that out?

But then my former boss was telling me about her phone, which is roughly the same model, and she asked if I’d gotten into customizing ringtones: really customizing them.

“Like what?” I asked.

“Well,” she said, “I set mine up to ring as usual whenever someone calls, and I’ve got a different ringtone for my Mama, and one for my sisters…”

That sounded (ha, no pun intended) pretty cool to me. So I did some research. And then took action.

Now, I haven’t gone as far yet as my ex-boss. But on a lark, I did set the phone up to play my downloaded ringtone whenever a call comes in… and to vibrate whenever an email arrived in the Inbox.

That was it, you see:

Notifications from Facebook: bzzzzzzz, BarkBarkBark!

Spam arriving: bzzzzz, BarkYipBark!

E-newsletter subscriptions: bzzzzz, YipYipYipYip!

In short, the dog was being driven slowly but unambiguously mad by the male human’s flaky experiments in telecommunications.

And all it took for the male human to figure it out was to move the phone from the coffee table to his hip pocket. And then, of course, to make a connection between the bzzzz! against the thigh and the YipYipYip! in the ear. We won’t discuss how long this last step took.

Sublime

June 26, 2009 by John 5 Comments

From whiskey river (last two stanzas):

The American Sublime

How does one stand
To behold the sublime,
To confront the mockers,
The mickey mockers
And plated pairs?

When General Jackson
Posed for his statue
He knew how one feels.
Shall a man go barefoot
blinking and blank?

But how does one feel?
One grows used to the weather,
The landscape and that;
And the sublime comes down
To the spirit itself,

The spirit and space,
The empty spirit
In vacant space.
What wine does one drink?
What bread does one eat?

(Wallace Stevens)

Not from whiskey river, a reading of the above poem by Ken Worsley of Trans-Pacific Radio (over Ball and Biscuit by the White Stripes, as a background track):

(You might also be interested in reading Worsley’s account of how he came to read the poem this way, over this background music. That page is where I found the above podcast.)

Over the past week, whiskey river also cited a poem called, there, “Changing Places.” But, well, there isn’t any such poem in Rilke’s work*; it’s actually an excerpt from the start of his Ninth Elegy. In one translator’s version, from 1977 (and regardless of the title or the translation, yes, sublime):

Why, when this short span of being could be spent
like the laurel, a little darker than all
the other green, the edge of each leaf fluted
with small waves (like the wind’s smile) — why,
then, do we have to be human and, avoiding fate,
long for fate?

Oh, not because happiness,
that quick profit of impending loss, really exists.
Not out of curiosity, not just to exercise the heart
— that could be in the laurel, too…

But because being here means so much, and because all
that’s here, vanishing so quickly, seems to need us
and strangely concerns us. Us, to the first to vanish.
Once each, only once. Once and no more. And us too,
once. Never again. But to have been
once, even if only once,
to have been on earth just once — that’s irrevocable.

(Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by A. Poulin [source])

Now, something not from whiskey river…

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Pagan Days

June 24, 2009 by John 2 Comments

[Image at the right depicts Swedes celebrating Midsummer’s Day in a maypole dance. I found this at sweden.se, “The Official Gateway to Sweden.”]

By tradition, June 24th is Midsummer’s Day. (So you know what that makes the evening of June 23rd, right?) It’s a public holiday in Quebec and a handful of countries in Europe (although many of them no longer celebrate on the 24th itself but move it to the nearest weekend); among those with the strongest Midsummer’s Day tradition is Sweden.

Why the Swedes? and come to think of it, why June 24th, specifically?

Celebrating any mid-June day in general isn’t hard to understand, not for any land lying so close to (or crossing) the Arctic Circle. Here’s what Wikipedia says, in part, about Sweden’s tradition (which includes a maypole because, it is thought, it was impossible to find — in Sweden in May — enough greenery to wrap a real maypole):

The earliest historical mention of the maypole in Sweden is from the Middle Ages. Midsummer was, however, linked to an ancient fertility festival which was adapted into St. John’s Day by the church, even though it retained many pagan traditions, as the Swedes were slow to give up the old heathen customs.

(The St. John there was John the Baptist; of course nobody really knows when his “birthday” was, but the Christian Bible says he was born six months before Jesus, so there you go. Just about everybody does know that the latter wasn’t really born in December, or even the winter — let alone December 25th — but since when has logic dictated the structure of liturgical calendars???)

YouTube has quite a few videos on the Swedish Midsummer celebration; many of these feature the maypole, of course, and also the so-called “Frog Dance” (Små grodorna, “the little frogs”) which people perform around it. E.g.:

As it happens, this video was shot in London’s Hyde Park “at the Swedish Midsummer’s celebrations” in 2007. According to Wikipedia, in the Frog Dance “participants dance around the maypole and try to imitate the behaviour of frogs.” Presumably this latter bit occurs at this point in the song:

Ej öron, ej öron, ej svansar hava de.
Ej öron, ej öron, ej svansar hava de.

No ears, no ears no tails do they possess.
No ears, no ears no tails do they possess.

It’s arguable whether waggling fingers alongside the head or fluttering them from behind constitutes “try[ing] to imitate the behaviour of frogs,” since frogs possess neither (real) ears nor (real) tails. But, well, here’s to the clash of cultures. (Lord knows if I were Swedish, traditions like “don’t wear white before Easter” would leave me scratching my head.)

For no very good reason, while thinking about the Swedes I suddenly wondered if the original Noxzema shaving-cream commercial might be on YouTube — you know, the one which induced spontaneous puberty in an entire national population of 10- to 13-year-old boys in the 1960s. It’s there, of course:

The Swedish-born actress Gunilla Knutson was the “narrator” there, and I’ll bet she’s pretty sick of being asked about it. (Even on a day, like today, of good cheer and celebration and, well, heathen fertility celebrations.)

Gratuitous Sunday Poem

June 21, 2009 by John 3 Comments

(I love the word “gratuitous” — one of those ambiguous words, like “cleave,”
which hold multiple contradictory meanings until you put them in context.
In this post’s title, of course, gratuitous isn’t wearing its uncalled for or
unjustified persona; it’s meant to connote something like unasked for or
freely offered, since I seldom post on Sundays anymore.)

Just encountered this lovely bit in today’s edition of the Writer’s Almanac e-newsletter. It seems to fit, on a June Sunday on which the temperature threatens to go into triple digits for, like, the fifth or sixth straight day.

Rendezvous

Let’s meet in Santa Fe
where we can stroll holding hands
along the acequia madre ^[1]
then sip espresso
at the bookstore on Garcia Street.

Let’s meet in Santa Fe
and bask like lizards
on the rocks at Bandelier ^[2]
or explore the secrets
of remote creek beds.

Let’s meet in Santa Fe
to share our stories and let
the whisper of cottonwood leaves
fill the silences between.

Let’s meet in Santa Fe
and eat posole with our eggs
and laugh, and love, and turn
the calendar to the wall
for a few brief days.

(Ted McMahon, from The Uses of Imperfection)

________________________________

^[1] The acequia madre — literally “mother ditch” — is an old Spanish-era irrigation canal in Santa Fe’s east side. See desert11sailor’s excellent Flickr photo gallery, from which the photo at the top of this post comes, for a walking tour to put you in the mood. (If you need help, I mean.) The Writer’s Almanac misspells the first word as acequina, which as far as I know doesn’t mean anything at all. (No idea how McMahon spelled it in the original — can’t find it anywhere online out of its Almanac context.)

^[2] “Bandelier” is Bandelier National Monument.

Writing and Silence

June 19, 2009 by John 4 Comments

From whiskey river:

Learn how to meditate on paper. Drawing and writing are forms of meditation. Learn how to contemplate works of art. Learn how to pray in the streets or in the country. Know how to meditate not only when you have a book in your hand but when you are waiting for a bus or riding in a train.

(Thomas Merton, Illusory Flowers in an Empty Sky)

Not from whiskey river:

Silence

I have known the silence of the stars and of the sea,
And the silence of the city when it pauses,
And the silence of a man and a maid,
And the silence of the sick
When their eyes roam about the room.
And I ask: For the depths,
Of what use is language?
A beast of the field moans a few times
When death takes its young.
And we are voiceless in the presence of realities —
We cannot speak.

A curious boy asks an old soldier
Sitting in front of the grocery store,
“How did you lose your leg?”
And the old soldier is struck with silence,
Or his mind flies away
Because he cannot concentrate it on Gettysburg.
It comes back jocosely
And he says, “A bear bit it off.”
And the boy wonders, while the old soldier
Dumbly, feebly lives over
The flashes of guns, the thunder of cannon,
The shrieks of the slain,
And himself lying on the ground,
And the hospital surgeons, the knives,
And the long days in bed.
But if he could describe it all
He would be an artist.
But if he were an artist there would be deeper wounds
Which he could not describe.

There is the silence of a great hatred,
And the silence of a great love,
And the silence of an embittered friendship.
There is the silence of a spiritual crisis,
Through which your soul, exquisitely tortured,
Comes with visions not to be uttered
Into a realm of higher life.
There is the silence of defeat.
There is the silence of those unjustly punished;
And the silence of the dying whose hand
Suddenly grips yours.
There is the silence between father and son,
When the father cannot explain his life,
Even though he be misunderstood for it.

There is the silence that comes between husband and wife.
There is the silence of those who have failed;
And the vast silence that covers
Broken nations and vanquished leaders.
There is the silence of Lincoln,
Thinking of the poverty of his youth.
And the silence of Napoleon
After Waterloo.
And the silence of Jeanne d’Arc
Saying amid the flames, “Blesséd Jesus” —
Revealing in two words all sorrows, all hope.
And there is the silence of age,
Too full of wisdom for the tongue to utter it
In words intelligible to those who have not lived
The great range of life.

And there is the silence of the dead.
If we who are in life cannot speak
Of profound experiences,
Why do you marvel that the dead
Do not tell you of death?
Their silence shall be interpreted
As we approach them.

(by Edgar Lee Masters, about whom I first wrote not quite a year ago)

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