Clear

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Not unusually for a Sunday, I took The Pooch for a longish walk this morning. The temperature had broken this week, and it was only in the high 70s. A couple of neighbors took advantage of the opportunity to fire up lawnmower and chainsaw, but few people otherwise had yet ventured out.

It was such a nice walk.

Still, I couldn’t help wishing the sky were a little less immaculate, less perfect. More strangely, I found myself wishing that even a single airplane would cross it. I didn’t want to remember that other clear blue morning sky. I didn’t want to forget the airplanes.

____________________

Update: The day has also brought my politically more outspoken friend FLJerseyBoy out of whatever hole he’s been hiding in for three-plus years. He’s suddenly popped up again at A Dog Starv’d, with a different take on it.

Admin: Clearing Up Some RAMH Clutter, Part 3

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Sometime in the next couple of days, I’ll switch Running After My Hat over to its new look. For anyone interested in such matters, I’ve prepared some screen captures to give you an idea of what to expect. Below, I’ll include an annotated version of some of those screen captures in this post, highlighting various features.

If you’d prefer to test-drive it yourself, feel free to just head over to the test site. You’ll find it to be not particularly full-featured: for example, it includes only a few months’ posts, comments, categories, and so on.

And I don’t think you’ll be able to post comments, but am ready to be surprised :).

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Something in the Air

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[Image: at left, all the Earth’s water collected into a single ball, about 865 miles in diameter; at right, all the Earth’s atmosphere in a single ball, about 1240 miles in diameter, assuming sea-level pressure. (source)]

From whiskey river:

One final paragraph of advice: Do not burn yourself out. Be as I am — a reluctant enthusiast… a part time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it is still there. So get out there and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, encounter the grizz, climb the mountains. Run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, that lovely, mysterious and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to your body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much: I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those deskbound people with their hearts in a safe deposit box and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this: you will outlive the bastards.

(Edward Abbey [source])

…and:

All beings are encompassed within one all-encompassing great energy: So I understood from the coolness of this morning’s passing breeze.

(Mumon Ekai [source])

…and:

There is something to be learned from a rainstorm. When meeting with a sudden shower, you try not to get wet and run quickly along the road. But doing such things as passing under the eaves of houses, you still get wet. When you are resolved from the beginning, you will not be perplexed, though you will still get the same soaking. This understanding extends to everything.

(Yamamoto Tsunetomo [source])

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Midweek Music Break: Switched-On Bach

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If not for 1968’s Switched-On Bach, I’m not sure I’d ever have paid much attention to classical music. I don’t know why I bought the album, unless in fascination with the sheer weirdness of the concept. As far as I knew then, no one within shouting distance of my life listened to classical music. I didn’t read record reviews. I played no instruments. I knew even less about electronics than I did about music.

The album cover certainly caught the eye. That’s it at the right (click to enlarge), with slightly altered text, as originally approved by Walter (now Wendy) Carlos, the album’s creator. Bach stands before an unmistakably non-contemporaneous keyboard, which itself stands before an array of electronic boxes bedecked with switches, lights, meters, and input/output jacks. In his right hand he holds a pair of stereo headphones; on his face, a look of surpassing confidence which seems to say, Surprised? Don’t be. This makes so much sense, and I’m quite proud of it.

For this Midweek Music Break, I’ve selected not one or two, but three numbers from the album:

  • “Sinfonia to Cantata BWV 29”: The very first track on the album announces, from its first dizzying avalanche of notes through the nearly symphonic conclusion a few minutes later, If you think electronic music sounds like atonal, unmelodic, disharmonious beeps and squawks, think again.
  • “Air on a G String from Orchestral Suite No. 3, BWV 1068”: If the “Sinfonia” swept listeners up in the sheer exuberant joy of the Moog synthesizer’s (remixed, and re-remixed) multi-tracked sound, this piece (track ) calmed them down, reassured them, with what sounds like a lullaby of light woodwinds.
  • “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring”: If you had to choose Bach’s “greatest hit” for modern listeners, this might be it. At latter-day weddings it’s often played at a stately, formal, almost dirge-like pace. Carlos’s interpretation is more sprightly — not coincidentally, as Bach himself apparently preferred.

For those of you who might want to listen to the three selections back-to-back, I’ve set up the audio-player thingum that way first. If you just want to hear an individual piece, I’ve added separate, er, thingums below the playlist version.

[Below, click Play button to begin selections from Switched-On Bach. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. These pieces, taken together, are about nine minutes long.]

[audio:01sinfoniatocantatabwv29_waltercarlos.mp3, 02aironagstring_orchestralsuite3bwv1068_waltercarlos.mp3, 06jesujoyofmansdesiring_waltercarlos.mp3|titles=’Selections from Switched-On Bach’|artists=Walter/Wendy Carlos]

—-

[Below, click Play button to begin Sinfonia to Cantata BWV 29. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 3:27 long.

[audio:01sinfoniatocantatabwv29_waltercarlos.mp3|titles=’Sinfonia to Cantata BWV 29’|artists=Walter/Wendy Carlos]

—-

[Below, click Play button to begin Air on a G String from Orchestral Suite No. 3, BWV 1068. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 2:33 long.

[audio:02aironagstring_orchestralsuite3bwv1068_waltercarlos.mp3|titles=’Air on a G String from Orchestral Suite No. 3, BWV 1068’|artists=Walter/Wendy Carlos]

—-

[Below, click Play button to begin Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 2:58 long.

[audio:06jesujoyofmansdesiring_waltercarlos.mp3|titles=’Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring’|artists=Walter/Wendy Carlos]

Not only a musician and musical technician, Carlos also demonstrates great skill as a photographer of solar eclipses (she’s a self-confessed “coronaphile”) — and holds a deep and abiding interest in maps, especially as projected to or from a sphere. Her Web site is a favorite of mine just to wander around in, on all these (and other) topics.

______________________

Note: About the album cover… You may have noticed the weasel-wording, “as originally approved by its creator.” The cover shown above was not the very first one, though. In that one, as you can see over there at the left, Bach was seated, not standing. Click on that image for a blow-up, and you’ll see why Carlos didn’t like it. Yeah. Bach’s got his lips pursed and eyes a-goggle — apparently bemused in the extreme, if not outright horrified. Remember “Look What They’ve Done to My Song”? (If not, see here; scroll to the video at the bottom.) Yeah. That.

Furthermore, the headphones he’s wearing? They’re plugged into the synthesizer… specifically, to an input jack. Carlos, an electronics wizard as well as a musician, must’ve about keeled over.

On the “A” Word

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[Image: “Left-Hand Rule.” For an explanation about something other than the subject of this post, see this page at the University of Maryland’s Department of Physics site.]

…or: what It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World has to do with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

(Well, no, not really. The post started out to connect that movie and that book, and I may return to that intention at some point. But it morphed out from under me as I worked on it. In the meantime, one of the signal virtues of the Brain Pickings site, I think, are the “…or what [X] has to do with [Y]” subtitles on many posts. I’ve always wanted to do that; the opportunity presented itself; and, well…)

The RAMH regular who comments here as whaddayamean –short for her blog’s charming mouthful of a moniker, Whaddaya mean, do I have room for dessert? — has been mulling over The “A” Word. It is, of course, about. As in:

What’s your book about?

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Admin: Clearing Up Some RAMH Clutter, Part 2

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Briefly: for anyone who’s interested, I’m going to be experimenting with various new “looks” at a special subsite of this one. (I’ll make a bigger announcement when I’m ready to take this live.)

Currently, I’ve imported to the test site only posts and comments and so on from January 1 2011 through the “Admin: Cleaning Up Some RAMH Clutter” post of a week go. Thus, some links to older posts won’t work. Audio files won’t work, at all (although the little “play” widgets appear onscreen). And other stuff will be just plain weird until I fix it. (E.g., a lot of themes seem to have non-hierarchical/nested category lists. I hate that.) Remember that whatever you see there will be transient, until it’s not. :)

In the meantime, feel free to post any comments here if you see anything you like, or anything you don’t like. I probably won’t be paying much attention to comments over at the other place, especially since I haven’t set up reCaptcha or other anti-sp*m measures.

 

Walking Around Empty

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[Image: still from Man Made Monster (1941).]

From whiskey river:

I don’t want to go on being a root in the dark,
vacillating, stretched out, shivering with sleep,
downward, in the soaked guts of the earth,
absorbing and thinking, eating each day.

(Pablo Neruda, from “Walking Around” [source])

…and:

You’ve heard “Don’t believe everything you read.” Here are some useful spinoffs: Don’t believe everything you think. Don’t believe everything you tell yourself. And most especially, don’t believe everything you feel.

(Rev. O. M. Bastet [source unknown])

…and:

As long as we have practiced neither concentration nor mindfulness, the ego takes itself for granted and remains its usual normal size, as big as the people around one will allow.

(Ayya Khema [source])

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Midweek Music Break: “Bad Moon Rising”

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Creedence Clearwater Revival’s classic gets most of its airtime around Halloween, maybe for obvious reasons: its association with John Landis’s great 1981 horror film An American Werewolf in London. Interestingly, in the film the song doesn’t get played in its entirety. Instead, the soundtrack plays just a few lines from the opening — almost as a joke — leading into the onscreen (and non-CGI) transformation of actor David Naughton from cute and charming lad to homicidal creature of the night.

“Bad Moon Rising” is also a favorite of disaster groupies, maybe for even more obvious — literal — reasons. Natural calamities have figured prominently in the news of late, and that business about rivers overflowing, earthquakes and lightning, well, it’s almost too perfect.

(If you’ve not been following the extinction-level-disaster/government-coverup-conspiracy chatter about the comet and/or brown and/or “dark” star Elenin, well, oh dear. You may have missed your last chance to survive. I recently saw a lengthy YouTube video, uploaded a few months ago, with a timeline of coming events. The fellow who made it claims that August 1 was the cutoff date — the last practical day to head for a cavern in the Ozarks to join with other believers prepared to live underground for at least a year. Even if you left on time, though, if you don’t arrive with an RV or U-Haul full of food, tough. They have no room for hungry, screaming, latecoming leeches.)

[Below, click Play button to begin Bad Moon Rising. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 2:20 long.

[audio:badmoonrising_ccr.mp3|titles=’Bad Moon Rising’|artists=Creedence Clearwater Revival]

Lyrics:

Bad Moon Rising
(Creedence Clearwater Revival)

I see the bad moon arising.
I see trouble on the way.
I see earthquakes and lightning.
I see bad times today.

[chorus:] 

Don’t go around tonight,
Well, it’s bound to take your life,
There’s a bad moon on the rise.

I hear hurricanes ablowing.
I know the end is coming soon.
I fear rivers over flowing.
I hear the voice of rage and ruin.

[chorus] 

All right!

Hope you got your things together.
Hope you are quite prepared to die.
Looks like we’re in for nasty weather.
One eye is taken for an eye.

[chorus] 

[repeat chorus] 

And for those who haven’t seen American Werewolf in London, here’s the five-minute lead-in to the transformation scene, right up to the point where Landis (having had his little laugh) abruptly cuts off the song:

The transformation scene itself took a little over two minutes, and you can find several clips of that here and there around the Web. (This one superimposes the full song over the scene, which in fact simply included sound effects and the character’s, um, vocalizations.)

Death Scenes

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[Image: Death in the Sickroom, by Edvard Munch]

Well, now. Could that title be any starker? Maybe it should be all caps?

(Aside to Jules, if you’re reading this: I actually put that header in a marquee tag for a moment. It was just too, too weird.)

Some of the most interesting online content for writers, I believe, can be found at the blog of YA author Livia Blackburne. I don’t think I’ve ever left a comment there (he said, his toe digging at the ground in shame), but from the first visit I was hooked. I’d probably keep returning, if for no reason other than to savor the site’s slogan:

A Brain Scientist’s Take on Writing

How can I resist that? From her “About” page:

By day I’m a neuroscience graduate student at MIT, conducting research on the neural correlates of reading. On evenings and weekends, I write fantasy stories for young adults… I like to take the analytical approach I use for my experiments and apply it towards the process of writing and publishing. This is what I will attempt in this blog: study pieces of writing, break it down into component pieces, and try to see what makes it work.

A recent post offered some interesting peeks into the mind of a reader (Blackburne herself) coming upon a death scene in a novel — and then re-reading it, even though it tore her up on the first pass and continued to do so on the second. I’d love to have that sort of detachment. But if Blackburne is there to provide it, maybe I can just trail along in her wake. Sample advice:

  1. Emphasize the good qualities of the dying character…
  2. Draw a connection to a previous tragedy…

More here (caveat: includes spoilers about the book she was reading!).

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Admin: Cleaning Up Some RAMH Clutter

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Running After My Hat, like certain real-world counterparts, has always had a back room or two into which its proprietor secretly hopes no one will stumble, because they’re filled with old junk, and sometimes even with new junk. Broken knick-knacks and furniture. Tumbled piles of books. Telephone handsets which lack base stations and/or wires. Family photos, fifty-year-old report cards, greeting cards from people who no longer share the faintest remembered connection with you, paintbrushes stiff with dried varnish, board games which have lost their dice or their, um, actual boards.

One such back room has always been the “About” page.

I’ve spent some time sprucing that up. It looks much the same, but the verbiage has been cleaned up. And it’s a little less preciously self-conscious, if you know what I mean. If you’ve been visiting here for a while, I doubt that you’ll find anything new, except new expressions of what you already knew. But for anyone who’s a stranger, or imagines him/herself to be, I’ve added four new and (I hope) not-too-preciously-self-conscious pages about me.

(Aside to those of you who do visit regularly, and expect to continue: this will save you from many tedious first-person-POV posts in the future.)

The new pages are:

We now resume our regular broadcast schedule, such as it is. Until the next interruption.

Which may, or may not, have something to do with how the joint looks. (I’m still terrified to touch it.)

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