Everyday Life – Page 78

Potpourri, June 18 (2013 ed.)

June 18, 2013 by John

[Continuing in what seems to have become an annual June 18 tradition, of commenting about whatever the heck I want to…]

[Video: Neil Gaiman signs 1200 copies of his newest novel, The Ocean at the End of the Lane.]

—

Medium-lukewarm: I’m still posting occasionally over at Medium. (Most recently, a brief appreciation of Carl Sagan.) But I still don’t get it, quite. The first time I posted there — the “Scribbling in Books” piece — was right after receiving the invitation to contribute to Medium. Within an hour or two of its posting, I got an email reporting that the thing had made a list of Editor’s Picks.

Exciting news, right? It certainly boosted the page’s view count (see image at right; click to enlarge.) And yet (as you can also glean from the image) there was little if any spillover to subsequent posts. I have no way to figure out why the drop-off, alas. All the possible reasons I can think of are sobering, if not depressing. If a post makes either the Editor’s Picks list, or a similar list of those most recommended by other Medium readers, you apparently can count on some good exposure. Otherwise…

Because of the way Medium is organized — very little information about those posting there — aside from their thumbnail photos (and, of course, the topics they choose to address) there is no way to know with any certainty the context in which they write. How old/young are they? What other sites, even what other Medium writers, do they read most often? (No blogrolls.) On what posts have they commented?

I can sorta tell that most of them are young, probably under 40 years of age. They tend to have professions rather than jobs. They’re politically astute. It’s almost charming how willingly they offer life advice: I’ve read numerous posts which begin, not in so many words, something like: Now that I’m 30 years old, I can say with assurance that X is true (whatever the X of the moment). I wonder if I ever had such confidence. (Probably not.)

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The Waking Moment

June 14, 2013 by John

[Image: Because of childhood associations, all I can think of when I see this is something like, “Come ON. It’s Saturday morning! Can I watch cartoons yet? Can I can I can I?!?”]

From whiskey river:

The Gate

I had no idea that the gate I would step through
to finally enter this world

would be the space my brother’s body made. He was
a little taller than me: a young man

but grown, himself by then,
done at twenty-eight, having folded every sheet,

rinsed every glass he would ever rinse under the cold
and running water.

This is what you have been waiting for, he used to say to me.
And I’d say, What?

And he’d say, This — holding up my cheese and mustard sandwich.
And I’d say, What?

And he’d say, This, sort of looking around.

(Marie Howe [source])

…and:

Annunciation

Even if I don’t see it again — nor ever feel it
I know it is — and that if once it hailed me
it ever does —
And so it is myself I want to turn in that direction
not as towards a place, but it was a tilting
within myself,
as one turns a mirror to flash the light to where
it isn’t — I was blinded like that — and swam
in what shone at me
only able to endure it by being no one and so
specifically myself I thought I’d die
from being loved like that.

(Marie Howe [source])

…and:

A lifetime may not be long enough to attune ourselves fully to the harmony of the universe. But just to become aware that we can resonate with it — that alone can be like waking up from a dream.

(David Steindl-Rast [source])

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Thought-Struck

June 7, 2013 by John

[Image: “Twinned meerkats,” by user amndw2 (Amanda L. Watson, whom I do not know) on Flickr. She received these small toys (only about an inch high) as gifts, independently, within months of each other. She does not know what, if anything, the coincidence might mean. I believe they’ve just twigged to the same idea, at the same time.]

From whiskey river:

Dangerous Considerations
(excerpt)

In our day, we confine ourselves at the best of times to discussing the imagination. The word “imagination” is beautiful and vast, but it doesn’t hold everything.

But what is the spirit, the spiritual life? If only I were up to defining such things! Robert Musil says that the spirit synthesizes intellect and emotion. It’s a good working definition, for all its concision.

In the case of poetry, literature, it’s simpler to say — theologians know a thing or two about this — what the spirit isn’t. It’s not psychoanalytic any more than it is behavioral, sociological, or political. It is holistic, and in it are reflected, as in an astronaut’s helmet, the earth, the stars, and a human face.

These are difficult and dangerous considerations.

(Adam Zagajewski [source])

…and:

The thought is not something that observes an inner event, but, rather it is this inner event itself. We do not reflect on something, but, rather, something thinks itself in us.

(Robert Musil [source])

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June 4th: Twenty-Five Years On

June 4, 2013 by John

Inadequate words, scraps of memories, images…

After a pause, a bigger boy — a teenager — appears. On his head is a ridiculous bolero hat, on his upper body a flashy silk shirt, on his upper lip a patently false pencil-thin mustache; tucked into the hat is what seems to be a bushel of thick black hair. He’s leaning over, striking a would-be “artistic” pose, something he picked up from dancing school, and he’s grinning — grinning, crookedly, for all he’s worth.

The older boy executes a sweeping bow, almost a curtsy, and sashays back into the trees…

I don’t have real pictures of my Dad to correspond to all these memories. But if I could keep only one of the real ones, I know which it would be: any of three or four taken at about the mid-point of his life. He’s got a Budweiser in one hand and a cigarette (a Tareyton: he hadn’t switched yet) in the other… He’s grinning, of course, and why not? His life is in place: he’s happily married, all four of us kids are on the scene, we’re living in the first and only house he and Mom would ever own or ever need.

Dad could be a lively conversationalist. When he talked, I loved his facial expressions, especially: the goggle eyes and slackened jaw of bogus shock; the steep, steep, steeply-angled furrows of his brow (we joked he could hold pencils there) that seemed to say, “What in the hell are you talking about?!?”; the fake teeth-gnashing as he pretended to bite his tongue at someone else’s idiotic remark that he’d only get in trouble for responding to… Dad was, in short, a great mugger.

…when Dad wanted you to pass him something, he’d just sort of look in its direction until someone finally asked, “Is this what you want?” (Our first guess was invariably wrong, and then he would say, all exasperation, “No, the salt!” or whatever. Few things annoyed him more profoundly than our failure to know when he wanted the salt.) …I hope we passed him whatever it was he wanted this time, although now (of course) we’ll never know for sure.

One of these years, I may get through an entire June 4th without thinking there’s anything special about the day — even without feeling foolish or sentimental otherwise. I will say, though, that over the years the fact or manner of his death seems ever less significant: we all die, after all, and the varieties of death are countless. But the fact that he lived, and how he dealt with it all (or didn’t) — yes, that. That.

__________________________________

Quotations in this post come from an unpublished essay,
“Crossing the Line,” first written in 1989 or 1990.

Story Up My Sleeve, May 2013: Wrapping Up

June 3, 2013 by John

I had no specific objectives at the outset: just wanted to post an excerpt from a different story — any story — on each day in May. My only real guideline was: don’t feature any author’s work more than once. Over time, though, some observations emerged:

Gender

I can’t remember the exact timing, but back around the beginning of the month I first heard about the online kerfuffle — the male Wikipedia editor, who was systematically working his way through the alphabetic list of “American authors” and moving any who happened to be women out of that general category and into the more specific “American female authors” category. (Not simply ensuring they were in both, mind you.)* I’m not generally quota-driven in such matters, but this whole thing appalled me. While brainstorming the Story Up My Sleeve selections, within a couple of days I decided I would alternate male-female authors throughout the month. I more or less stuck to this. (Final tally, not counting the Midweek Music Breaks: fourteen stories by men, thirteen by women.) But then I ran up against…

Medium

Most of the stories this month, obviously, were in prose form. But it occurred to me early on that I might easily interweave the Midweek Music Break series with the short-story one. So on May 8 through May 29, the Wednesday posts featured story songs. But this tripped me up gender-wise; my story list at that point had just featured Carson McCullers and was about to do Damon Knight, and my first song selection was Gordon Lightfoot… Totally confused at trying to work out the permutations, I decided to more or less relax when it came to the music. (For the record, it featured two songs by men; an “anthology” of songs sung by a musical-film cast of women; and a duet sung by a woman and a man.)

Genre

Something that surprised me: I probably could have done nothing but science-fiction stories all month. I kept thinking of other favorite SF (and fantasy) tales I wanted to include; what’s funny about this is that I haven’t read SF/F stories regularly for years. Finally, I just had to force myself to be disciplined. (For what it’s worth, stories from the American South presented me with the same dilemma — and solution. Hence, no Faulkner.) I also decided to mix things up some on this score, too, although literary/classic stories generally predominated.

Bottom line

In a tweet she posted after Friday’s entry, Jessica Francis Kane hinted that this Story Up My Sleeve project might become an annual one, undertaken by more than one individual (albeit on just one day in May, not throughout the entire month). I can’t offer an opinion about that. But I will say that doing it this way once certainly felt right to me. Coming up with roughly 30 stories felt difficult at first; obviously, or so I told myself, I’d bitten off too ambitious a chunk to chew, let alone swallow. By mid-month, though, I cringed every time I realized I’d run out of May before I ran out of stories.

Poetry and novels get all the glamour and red-carpet walks; if we’re not paying attention, short stories can feel almost like afterthoughts — like conjunctions, prepositions, and other function words to the rest of literature’s complete sentences. A claim like “I’m about halfway through my next novel” fairly roars in people’s imaginations; saying you’re far through your next short story just squeaks.

But y’know, short stories are a wonderful form. (Even the conventional novel implicitly acknowledges as much: what’s a chapter, really, if not a short story?) If you seek breadth of reading — diversity of voice, style, and theme — you could do far worse than starting with an anthology… whether lifted from a bookshelf, or pulled from your sleeve.

__________________________

*I did read this guy’s account of his reasoning, and even sympathized and agreed with it on some levels; when doing research, it generally does help me to start with a more specific category (“beetles,” say, vs. “insects”), and drill down from there. But I can’t imagine requiring others to do so. Just for starters, non-native speakers of a given language may not know whether a given name says to start in the women’s list, or the men’s. (I myself can never remember without hesitation that Chinua Achebe was a man, or that Michiko Kakutani is a woman.) You might as well categorize authors by hair color or shoe size. And why not drill down even further? If you know that Faulkner was left-handed (no, I have no idea) and had brown hair, why label him simply as a male author? Why not move him into the list of southpaw brown-haired male authors from Mississippi, and leave the generalists to stumble around in the dark?

In the Right Light, Nothing Is Not Worth Looking At

May 31, 2013 by John

[Image: small portion of an infographic of intersecting timelines from films and television shows which feature time travel. (Click to enlarge.) The bright yellow line is that of time itself, and the lines which crisscross it represent the individual movies and shows. (No Dr. Who, though: presumably it would complicate things too much.) Lines are color-coded according to the means of time travel: bright blue for alien technology, red for time machine, and so on. The gray line terminating at a red dot, roughly in the center, is labeled “ULTRA PARADOX! Marty McFly meets the Star Trek crew and they both battle The Terminator.”
For more information, see the Information Is Beautiful site — especially, follow the link there to the
“how we made this image” page.]

From whiskey river:

You can’t understand, change, or improve something if you don’t even see it.

Start with looking. Open! Open! Open!

Then tilt your head and look again. Deeper…

Look from every angle. Don’t let one view satisfy your curiosity.

There is a beautiful wisdom found in seeing from a universal point of view.

(Danielle Marie Crume (“Dani”) [source])

…and:

We eat light, drink it in through our skins. With a little more exposure to light, you feel part of things physically. I like feeling the power of light and space physically because then you can order it materially. Seeing is a very sensuous act — there’s a sweet deliciousness to feeling yourself see something.

(James Turrell [source])

…and:

5.

We do one thing or another; we stay the same, or we change.
Congratulations, if
you have changed.

6.

Let me ask you this.
Do you also think that beauty exists for some
fabulous reason?

And if you have not been enchanted by this adventure —
your life —
what would do for you?

(Mary Oliver [source])

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Story Up My Sleeve #29 / Midweek Music Break: “Golden Ring,” by Tammy Wynette and George Jones

May 29, 2013 by John

Yeah: our hands and our cake. And our golden rings. [Don’t know what this is? See the Story Up My Sleeve background page. Today’s selection also serves as the final weekly Midweek Music Break featuring a “story song,” in keeping with the “May is National Short Story Month” theme.]

I don’t listen to a lot of country music. But even I know this: story songs lie as thick on the ground in Nashville as in any other musical landscape, and more thickly there than anywhere except over the ancient wooded hills and valleys of folk music. (The latter probably wins only because of a thousand-year head start.) You have no doubt seen those mind-boggling lists of country-music song titles, real and imagined; if you scan through any of them you’ll find entire story lines suggested in just the titles of, who knows, 90% of them.

I’ve never seen this phenomenon explained anywhere. (I’d like to believe it signifies something artsy and profound like “the powerful universal, cross-genre appeal of story-telling,” but who knows?) Whatever the reason, selecting a country song to feature during this month of story songs felt at first as though it might be almost too easy — so easy that I almost stayed away from country altogether. But today’s selection, “Golden Ring,” just — no pun intended — fit.

It fits, obviously, with the whole “month of stories” theme. George Jones, the male half of the original duet, died just a week or two ago. Its history suggests current events here in the US: as first conceived by the songwriter, Bobby Braddock, it was about the effects of a gun — not a wedding band — on the lives of a series of owners. Heck, the song even came out during the month of May, in 1976. (Wikipedia helpfully notes in a gossipy aside that this was 14 months after Wynette and Jones’s own real-life divorce.)

But it carries a hidden subtext, as well — at least for today, and at least for me. None of the lyrics are relevant for this purpose except the chorus’s last line, the one that suggests the twining of love around that simple bit of jewelry. About that line, I’ll just say: happy anniversary, Baby.

[Lyrics]

Sorta-Kinda Blogging, on medium.com

May 27, 2013 by John

Medium logo I’ve posted my first entry at a new “blogging” site, called Medium. From the post’s title and subtitle — “Scribbling in Books: To ‘deface’? or to ‘annotate’?” — you’ll pretty much know what it deals with: my (evolving) approach to “enhancing” the existing text of books by underlining, highlighting, and adding marginalia of my own.

Less obviously, the post is also about blogging on a new platform. Why bother? Why not stick to Blogger and WordPress?

Medium has been open, on a limited basis, since September 2012. I don’t know if I heard of it back then, but my first actual visit there took place just a few weeks ago, in the days immediately after the Boston Marathon “bombing.” I found the site more or less by accident, when someone or other whom I follow on Twitter posted a link to a piece called “Racing News: Hunting the Manhunt in Watertown.”

On one level — as information, as news — that article didn’t break any new ground: I’d pretty much read and absorbed the important “facts” elsewhere. On another level, it bowled me over. The author, a young man named Taylor Dobbs, says he is a journalism student at Northeastern University; I was impressed not just by the writing, the story-telling of his first-person account, but by, well, by the way it looked. (I’m never so absorbed in current events that I lose susceptibility to superficial distractions.) Was this, I don’t know… was it some kind of magazine? What else were they featuring? What was this?

[Read more…]

Getting Around

May 24, 2013 by John

Rocket dog

[Image: well, that’s one way to do it. I’m not really sure what this represents, but it got my attention.]

From whiskey river:

The Meadow

As we walk into words that have waited for us to enter them, so
the meadow, muddy with dreams, is gathering itself together

and trying, with difficulty, to remember how to make wildflowers.
Imperceptibly heaving with the old impatience, it knows

for certain that two horses walk upon it, weary of hay.
The horses, sway-backed and self important, cannot design

how the small white pony mysteriously escapes the fence every day.
This is the miracle just beyond their heavy-headed grasp,

and they turn from his nuzzling with irritation. Everything
is crying out. Two crows, rising from the hill, fight

and caw-cry in mid-flight, then fall and light on the meadow grass
bewildered by their weight. A dozen wasps drone, tiny prop planes,

sputtering into a field the farmer has not yet plowed,
and what I thought was a phone, turned down and ringing,

is the knock of a woodpecker for food or warning, I can’t say.
I want to add my cry to those who would speak for the sound alone.

But in this world, where something is always listening, even
murmuring has meaning, as in the next room you moan

in your sleep, turning into late morning. My love, this might be
all we know of forgiveness, this small time when you can forget

what you are. There will come a day when the meadow will think
suddenly, water, root, blossom, through no fault of its own,

and the horses will lie down in daisies and clover. Bedeviled,
human, your plight, in waking, is to choose from the words

that even now sleep on your tongue, and to know that tangled
among them and terribly new is the sentence that could change your life.

(Marie Howe, The Good Thief [source])

…and:

Time is not a straight line, it’s more of a labyrinth, and if you press close to the wall in the right place you can hear the hurrying steps and the voices, you can hear yourself walking past on the other side.

(Tomas Tranströmer [source])

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The Line Between Should and Do

May 17, 2013 by John

[Image: The English translation — with original emphasis — is, “Daughter, you have to go out and become rich.” Found it at the Grimm Grammar site of the University of Texas, which uses 36 characters from the classic fairy tales to illustrate how German grammar works; the characters above are Cinderella’s stepmother and a (bored, dissolute) stepsister. This illustration accompanies the discussion of modal verbs.]

From whiskey river:

We continually look and hope for a new, special thing that is going to last or make us happy, fulfill our needs, answer all our questions. In actuality, what are we going to get? We will get more seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, and thinking. That’s it. That’s what life is.

(Jack Kornfield [source])

…and:

What the Living Do
(excerpt)

…We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss — we want more and more and then more of it.

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless:
I am living…

(Marie Howe [source])

…and:

The Moment

Oh, the coming-out-of-nowhere moment
when, nothing
happens
no what-have-I-to-do-today-list

maybe half a moment
the rush of traffic stops.
The whir of I should be, I should be, I should be
slows to silence,
the white cotton curtains hanging still.

(Marie Howe [source])

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