Paying Attention to History

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If you’ve been visiting Running After My Hat for more than a few days, you already know about what you might politely call my serial attentiveness. Theoretically, this is a blog about writing. But then, oh, yeah — there’s stuff about music. And true, I rattle on sometimes about reading, too, but isn’t that sorta kinda like about writing? Oh, well, all right, yes I do post — but less often! — about tech stuff, and politics, and art and photography and poetry…

When working on a large-scale project like a book, similarly, I sometimes wander off the main road, suddenly absorbed in distractions of landscape and weather and architecture.

Oddly, this sometimes works to the advantage of the book in question (although, all right all right fine, it sometimes does not — and probably just as oddly).

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Words Enough, and Time

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Clock Words, by Caroline Lisfranc

[The clock above was designed by Caroline Lisfranc, replacing the numbers on the clock face with a dozen French verbs. The English translation (starting with one o’clock and moving, duh, clockwise) is to divide, to give, to listen, to work, to love, to dream, to reflect, to laugh, to tinker, to travel, to grow, and to speak.]

Changing things up a little for a Friday post…

Here’s an audio track to accompany the rest of the entry. Start it now to play in the background as you read, or come back and listen later. The song is “Lakmé,” the first number on the uncanny and apparently never-to-be-followed-up album Coco de Mer. It’s almost four minutes long — much longer than it will take for you to read the selections. So feel free to listen for a while, then start reading, finish, and listen to the end.

[audio:lakme_cocodemer.mp3|titles=Lakmé|artists=Coco de Mer]

From whiskey river:

Enough. These few words are enough.
If not these words, this breath.
If not this breath, this sitting here.
This opening to the life
we have refused
again and again
until now.
Until now.

(David Whyte, “lassie and timmy”)

…and:

A Piece Of The Storm
For Sharon Horvath

From the shadow of domes in the city of domes,
A snowflake, a blizzard of one, weightless, entered your room
And made its way to the arm of the chair where you, looking up
From your book, saw it the moment it landed.
That’s all There was to it. No more than a solemn waking
To brevity, to the lifting and falling away of attention, swiftly,
A time between times, a flowerless funeral. No more than that
Except for the feeling that this piece of the storm,
Which turned into nothing before your eyes, would come back,
That someone years hence, sitting as you are now, might say:
“It’s time. The air is ready. The sky has an opening.”

(Mark Strand)

Not from whiskey river:

Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

(T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock)

…and, as long as we’re talking about having enough time (and words):

For a moment, nothing happened. Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen.

(Douglas Adams)

_______________________________________

More about Coco de Mer (from Rasa Music):

Conceived & produced by Adam Plack, Coco de Mer is a lush fusion of traditional French, Italian, and Latin arias, live orchestration, and instruments which are elegantly stitched together with sensual, downtempo dance grooves & modern music. Coco de Mer is a potent musical experience for the concert virgin. Australian born, New York based, Adam Plack has embraced his own childhood passion for opera, jazz, and the blues with the intention of taking opera from the perfumed arid halls of “Uptown” onto the funky street and into the heart of “Downtown.” Coco de Mer features the angelic vocals of acclaimed soprano Chen Reis [and] virtuoso pianist Ilan Rechtman under [the] direction of Plack. Although the arias written by the great classical composers Bach, Handel, Delibes, Bizet, Puccini and others are a hundred years old and beyond, in Adam Plack’s deft hand the emotions are deeply touching & ring true with us, the 21st Century listener.

As an aside, Adam Plack is a noted player of the Australian didgeridoo. I don’t know if that instrument is on the album as a whole, let alone in “Lakmé” — but wouldn’t be surprised.

Coco de Mer is available from Amazon as a plain-old CD, not as a download; but you can get it digitally, in whole or part, via iTunes.

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The Open-Heart-Surgery Theory of Writing

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Cover of D. Hoffman's 'Poe Poe Poe [etc.],' by Anita KunzFor Halloween last week, in their contribution to the weekly around-the-Web Poetry Friday, the folks at the Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast blog offered up Poe’s weird — and kind of forced — “Ulalume” (full title “To — — –. Ulalume: A Ballad”).

The ensuing discussion got me thinking once more about Poe — “once more” because it seems to be a topic my thoughts revisit every few years. (My favorite book about Poe is Daniel Hoffman’s Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe (yes, seven Poes); the picture at the right is by Anita Kunz, from the cover of the cover of the 1985 paperback Vintage Books edition.)

Here’s Poe laying out a challenge for writers, in a passage often quoted — especially by writers:

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Rome, and the Day It Wasn’t Built In

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My head keeps saying This isn’t a political blog… this isn’t a political blog…

My heart, though, can’t deny the huge chunk of me myself which is political…

Short version: I have voted in ten Presidential elections. That’s 36 years. For nine of those elections, I have watched the returns on TV and read about them the next day and thought to myself, alternatively:

  • Oh no. The evil bastard won…!
    OR
  • Well, maybe he’s not perfect — but at least the evil bastard didn’t win…!

We were at a “watch party” last night. When the clock rolled over at 11:00 — when the West Coast polls closed — and the networks started making their calls, I completely lost it: sobbing, laughing, fighting the sobs and giving into the laughter. (The Missus finally suggested that I go into the bathroom and splash some cold water on my face. It helped.) But the tremors continued, off and on, until I fell asleep at around 1:30am. (They resumed this morning, every time the reality struck me anew.)

[getting a grip on self]

I just want to share a little bit of classical history with you right now. It goes back to at least the third century BC, in the ancient city of Rome.

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From Keith Knight’s Mouth to God’s Ear, Please

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Cartoonist Keith Knight is a regular contributor to my favorite monthly magazine, The Funny Times. To break the routine from his main comic strip, called The K Chronicles, he occasionally does a strip called “Life’s Little Victories.” He builds these strips from ideas submitted by readers — little one- or two-panel ideas describing the little things that make life worth living.

From the weekly Funny Times “Take a Break” cartoon email newsletter, here’s a recent and highly relevant collection of such victories (numbers 265 through 270), applicable across the political spectrum:

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What’s in a Song: Blue Moon

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[This is the first in a series of every-now-and-then posts about popular songs with long lives.]

Some great songs go through subtle changes over time: the original lyrics are updated to correspond to more modern diction and taste; rhymes get improved or dropped altogether; refrains are added and subtracted; and of course new arrangements can, with the slightest addition of an instrumental passage, change our very understanding of what a song means.

“Blue Moon” didn’t begin as a classic — not in the form it eventually acquired. While the music remained unchanged, its lyrics didn’t simply evolve: they mutated almost overnight, going through three versions before finally settling down into their fourth and (more or less) final variation.

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Perfect Moments: Stone Harbor; Late ’70s; Night

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Stone Harbor beach

A series of professional and personal disappointments. A young man on the brink of his 30s. No idea where his life is bound — forward, over the precipice? or backward, over that one? — or what he’ll find once he gets there. A motorcycle.

The details of the disappointments aren’t important. (Once you reach a certain age, they never do — and not just because the memory isn’t as reliable as it once was.) Suffice it to say, I really had no freaking idea what was going to become of me. It wasn’t quite despair, this feeling — not the stereotypical “my life is in the toilet,” you know. More like fear, maybe: was my life in the toilet?

Nothing seemed to be working out quite as I’d imagined it would, and a large part of that failure translated to: I myself wasn’t working out quite as I’d imagined.

Nothing doing on the writing front. Interesting but crapola jobs, plus an interesting but decidedly not crapola job that I’d still managed to fail at. Friends and classmates settling in to comfortable niches. One marriage flushed away after just a couple years. Nothing like a satisfying relationship within the horizons I could see. I had the bike, yeah, but I’d already taken the “finding-myself” tour on the road with it, camping around New England. Found some great photographs on that trip, and then of course I’d found New England itself (which I still love). But myself…?

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Seeing Things

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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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Oblig Region-of-Birth-Loyalty Post

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I don’t pay much — well, all right, any — attention to baseball. In practice, this means for example that in the photograph at the left, if you masked the team names and logos, for all I knew I’d be looking at… gee, what are those other teams with red in their uniforms? Cardinals? (I hear they’re not in St. Louis anymore, right?) Red Sox? Braves? (Uh… Milwaukee? Atlanta? When did that happen?)

They are, of course, none of those other teams. They are the Philadelphia Phillies, 2008 last-game-of-World-Series edition.

Not only the city of Philadelphia itself, but within a wide circle around William Penn’s statue atop City Hall — into other areas of Pennsylvania, probably Delaware and Maryland — there is much rejoicing. Including South Jersey, my ancestral (and until 1990 or so, my real) home.

As of several weeks ago, I had a vague sense that the team was involved in something-or-other in the postseason. So I’m pretty embarrassed. (Well, not really. Just help me out here wouldja, I’m trying to save face.)

Here’s what a message from one of my siblings said, at 10:42 last night. (I myself had been asleep for an hour by then.)

THE PHILLIES WON!!!! OH MY GOD! Mom’s probably havin’ to have her heart checked! Can you believe it!!!

(I didn’t even know our mother ever even watched baseball, let alone to the point of rooting for someone. Football, heck yeah. But baseball?)

And then we have the following. This is from a nephew, recently transplanted from the East Coast to the West. The title over this blog post (time-stamped 12:40 this morning, presumably Pacific time and not Eastern) is, “And Nearly Three Decades Later…”:

BAM! The Philadelphia Phillies are 2008 World Champions! Neither rain nor snow nor Bud Selig nor Joe Buck could stop the most efficient and charismatic team in baseball from claiming what was rightfully theirs. 28 years in the making, goddamn… CONGRATULATIONS, PHILLIES!!

More to come in the sober – but still glorious, because THE PHILLIES WON THE WORLD SERIES – morning. See you then!

I don’t know. Maybe I — or they — have some sort of rare mutant recessive gene.

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The Flames. The Smoke. The Highway. The Terror.

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[Today’s post is my contribution to travel writer Angela Nickerson‘s Blogapalooza blog party. The theme of Angela’s Halloween Blogapalooza is “What a Strange Trip It’s Been,” for which her instructions are:

…put a photo of a pumpkin at the top of your post and tell us the story of your strangest or scariest trip ever.

Be sure to visit Angela’s site and explore the other participants’ pages, listed in the right-hand menu under “Blogs-a-Palooza-ing on October 29.” And keep your eyes open for blog posts today headed with the blog party’s signature pumpkin — even if they’re not listed on Angela’s site.]

Flaming pumpkin in the woodsIt was the year of the wildfires.

Everywhere in Florida and south Georgia the forests burned, blazes started by God, Nature, human accident or intent. In the quiet of the nights, even from dozens of miles away, you could hear the distant roar of the flames, the whir of the helicopter blades, the shouts and screams of the firemen. The smell of smoke clung to every surface.

The Man and The Woman did not know in advance that this would be a time of fire from which they might need to escape. They had planned in advance not an escape, but a simple weekend trip. A celebration. An anniversary.

It was early June, 2007.

The trip itself had been pleasant, uneventfully pleasant. Fun. Their destination was a charming old harbor city in the Deep South. The Man and The Woman had eaten their fill on more than one night; they had toured the old river plantations nearby; they saw the headlines about the wildfires, but the fire and smoke and ash were too far distant to concern them. They were on vacation. Nothing could frighten them on vacation. Nothing could harm them.

Oh, there were signs that things were not normal. There was the evening walking tour of the old cemeteries, during which ghostly lights bobbed and flickered above the ground until you looked directly at them. There were the scraps of conversation overheard at nearby restaurant tables, from behind the hotel’s front desk: Interstate… still burning… shut down… no end…

But nothing could harm The Man and The Woman. The trip had been a success. They were untouchable. They were loading up their luggage; they were setting forth on the trip home.

[Read more…]

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