Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

The Writers’ Word-Time Equivalency Scale

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Let’s suppose you are a writer, and value your time spent writing, and measure your success in a given writing session in terms of words written. So far so good. This describes about ninety percent of the writers I know.

Let’s take it to another level. Suppose you are behind — or perceive yourself to be so — in recently attained word count. So you take a day off from your paying job to catch up. You get out of bed, heat up the teakettle, walk The Pooch, see your loving spouse out the door to his or her own day job. You pour the first cup of tea or coffee. You sit down at the computer keyboard. You inhale. You crack your knuckles…

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Higher Mathematics (Department of Personal Chronology)

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Too many years ago now to count, I once calculated my personal “magic number.” It was pretty stupid: all I did was gather my birthdate, my phone number, my address, my ZIP code, my Social Security Number — any numbers I could think of which applied to me — and added up all their digits. Then I added up all the digits in the result, and so on, boiling it down, until I’d reduced the whole mess to a single digit. The result: 6.

I don’t remember why I did this. (Note hidden, unsupported assumption that I in fact had a reason. Surely not because I thought I could somehow use the result to improve my life?!?)

And it was, as I said, pretty stupid. No matter what else I hoped to achieve — even assuming any vaguely touchy-feely mystical validity to the exercise — who among us knows or can even find out all the meaningful numbers in his/her life? If I’d used the digits in the current time, for instance, as soon as I wrote them down (using a twelve- or twenty-four-hour clock? and in which time zone?) they’d be wrong. At that point in my life, I had both a motorcycle and a car: why not include their odometer readings, and/or their engine displacements? (But, hmm, the motorcycle’s was expressed in cubic centimeters; the car’s, in cubic inches…) Et cetera.

So I was pretty obviously confused on the whole magic-number thing. I could’ve simplified the whole project immeasurably if I’d just stopped at my birthday.

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The Shape of What You Live

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[Image: “Angular Momentum,” from xkcd.com. The tooltip/”hover title” at the original page says: “With reasonable assumptions about latitude and body shape, how much time might she gain them? Note: whatever the answer, sunrise always comes too soon. (Also, is it worth it if she throws up?)”]

From whiskey river:

Remembering

And you wait. You wait for the one thing
that will change your life,
make it more than it is—
something wonderful, exceptional,
stones awakening, depths opening to you.

In the dusky bookstalls
old books glimmer gold and brown.
You think of lands you journeyed through,
of paintings and a dress once worn
by a woman you never found again.

And suddenly you know: that was enough.
You rise and there appears before you
in all its longings and hesitations
the shape of what you lived.

(Rainer Maria Rilke [source])

…and:

You’re really just an ongoing set of events: boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, one after the other. The awareness is keeping up with those events, seeing your life unfolding as it is, not your ideas of it, not your pictures of it. See what I mean?

(Charlotte Joko Beck [source])

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Midweek Music Break: Pat Metheny, “Cherish”

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Jazz guitarist Pat Metheny has recently released a new album — What’s It All About. From the Nonesuch Records site:

After nearly 40 recordings under his own name, this is the first Pat Metheny album where there is not a single Metheny composition represented. This is a personal view of ten classic songs, some very well known, some less so, filtered through the harmonic and melodic ideology of a modern master with a most individual approach.

Of the three videos he’s released so far of performances from the album, this is probably my favorite. About it, Metheny himself says (at the same page linked above):

This was a huge hit in the late 60’s. One day i started playing around with it and while under the hood of the tune I found myself marveling at all the interesting moves that happen with the chords, especially on the bridge. And I used the same whole step modulation for the final A section of the song that was on the record, although I added a tag that is really not exactly derived from any obvious single point in the tune.

Gorgeous.

And, just for completeness’s sake, here’s the original, recorded in 1966 by The Association:

[Below, click Play button to begin Cherish. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 3:26 long.

[audio:cherish_theassociation.mp3|titles=’Cherish’|artists=The Association]

The Shock of What You Already Know

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For one reason or another, while sort of spiraling down the drain toward the end of this draft of Seems to Fit, I’ve been thinking some about Merry-Go-Round.

Don’t fret if you don’t recognize the title Merry-Go-Round. This was the novel I wrote back in 2007-08, and apparently last mentioned here at RAMH in a post about two-and-a-half years ago. In response to a hypothetical question as to its genre, I once offered:

Well, let’s see. It’s sort of a thriller. It’s sort of a near-future or parallel-world kind of story. There’s some funny stuff. And it’s also political. Does that help?

Now that it’s been at arm’s length, so to speak, for a few years, I doubt that it helps… but I still can’t think of a much better way to describe it, not without leaking a whole lot of plot details. You can read its prologue (here) and know a little more — at least maybe get a sense of the sort of world the action takes place: why it’s a “near-future or parallel-world kind of story.”

I don’t know what if anything I’ll ever do with Merry-Go-Round. At the time, it felt to me like a warming-up exercise. Maybe it will someday justify working on some more. In the meantime, I’ve been thinking particularly about a passage from about two-thirds of the way through.

All you really need to know to read the sample yourself is the following (repeated in a text box at the start of the excerpt):

This excerpt from Merry-Go-Round leads into a “big reveal”: what exactly has happened to one Walker Bryce, citizen of an unknown country — not quite the USA? (Of course it’s not the USA. It can’t be the USA, can it? Not with the dome of the Capitol building in the capital city, clad in stark gray steel armor?) All Walker knows is that he’ recently been… kidnapped, hasn’t he? or rescued? after being held… held… a prisoner, was it? Yes, rescued… yet kept in some sort of hospital… And now he’s being escorted out, finally, by a woman he knows only as “Tex.”

Not sure why I’ve been thinking of this passage in particular; it doesn’t have anything to do with Seems to Fit, nor with my work or personal life. I have to say that I do like the depiction of the scene — the details — especially given that they’re mundane, but being regarded by someone who at least believes he has never seen anything like them previously.

Maybe that sense of wonder — the shock of the familiar, the strangeness of the expected and hoped-for — is just a metaphor for what every writer hopes to induce in every reader. Maybe we can’t always (sorry, Herr Kafka) write books to stab our readers’ souls, to wake them up with a blow to the head — or to make them happy, for that matter. But at least we can write sentences and story lines that make them go: Whoa. I’ve never seen that before, have I?

The password for accessing this excerpt is the full name of the character first mentioned there (capitalized just that way, and yes, with the space between first and surname).

A Conspiracy of Pages

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[Etching: “The Hall of Planets,” by Erik Desmazières, #5 in a series of eleven illustrating  an edition of “The Library of Babel,” by Jorges Luis Borges; click to enlarge]

From whiskey river:

The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust in them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things — the beauty, the memory of our own past — are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have not visited.

(C. S. Lewis, The Weight Of Glory [source])

…and:

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy?… Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.

(Franz Kafka [source])

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Midweek Music Break: The Jolly Boys and “The Passenger”

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Remember The Jolly Boys, the Jamaican mento combo last mentioned at RAMH at the foot of this post for their cover of Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab”? Here’s the “official” video for “The Passenger” (an Iggy Pop composition!), about which their YouTube channel says:

The video for “The Passenger” by The Jolly Boys, takes the form of a filmic documentaryesque journey with lead singer Albert Minott captured on The Jolly Boys tours earlier this year. It is particularly interesting that the 72 year old Jamaican had never been over the Atlantic in his life; his observations on life in a Europe that he had only ever seen in movies and on TV was an insight. We will be seeing the full documentary of this later in the year.

Amy Winehouse… Iggy Pop… You can’t say these guys exactly reach for the obvious, hmm?

Lyrics:

The Passenger
(by Iggy Pop; performance by The Jolly Boys)

I am the passenger
I ride and I ride
I ride through the city’s backsides
I see the stars come out of the sky
Yeah they’re bright in a hollow sky
You know it looks so good tonight

I am the passenger
I stay under glass
I look through my window so bright
I see the stars come out tonight
I see the bright and hollow sky
Over the city’s a rip in the sky
And everything looks good tonight

La la la la lalalala…

Get into the car
We’ll be the passenger
We’ll ride through the city tonight
We’ll See the city’s ripped backsides
We’ll see the bright and hollow sky
We’ll see the stars that shine so bright
And everything was made for you and me
All of it was made for you and me

La la la la lalalala…

He rides and he rides
He sees things from under glass
He looks through his window’s eye
He sees the things he knows are his
He sees the bright and hollow sky
He sees the city asleep at night
He sees the stars are out tonight
And all of it is yours and mine
And all of it is yours and mine
So let’s take a ride and ride and ride

La la la la lalalala…
La la la la lalalala..

ADMIN: Connection Problems?

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[breaking usual Saturday-morning silence]

Please let me know via comment or email if you are having difficulty accessing Running After My Hat.

Note: By “difficulty” I don’t mean flat-out impossibility — it might be just extreme sluggishness, unresponsiveness, and so on. All but impossibility counts — especially if there’s been a notable change in that direction! (If you, and only you, have ALWAYS had this problem, well…)

I’ve received one comment to this effect already, but it came from China-based Froog. He’s accustomed to late May/early June slowdowns: [irony alert on] for some reason [irony alert off] the authorities there become exceptionally nervous around this time every year, screwing down the lid on Internet access even more than usual. But this year some pages have proved unloadable for him.

No idea if this is something anyone else has experienced. Haven’t made any recent changes to the blog’s theme or plug-ins and so on. Still… Just wanted to check.

[returning to customary Muzak soundtrack]


Slow Enough (To See the Large in the Small)

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[Image: Still from Institute Benjaminta (1995), by the Brothers Quay. For an interesting interview with them about it, see this page at the Electric Sheep site.]

From whiskey river:

In reality there has never been a day in our lives (and maybe not one hour or even one minute) when something happened that did not eventually lead to significant results. However, in the onward rush of events it is usually hard to see these patterns.

(Manjusvara (David Keefe), Writing Your Way [source])

…and:

There are things that cannot ever occur with any precision. They are too big and too magnificent to be contained in mere facts. They are merely trying to occur, they are checking whether the ground of reality can carry them. And they quickly withdraw, fearing to lose their integrity in the frailty of realization. And if they break into their capital, lose a thing or two in these attempts at incarnation, then soon, jealously, they retrieve their possessions, call them in, reintegrate: as a result, white spots appear in our biography — scented stigmata, the faded silvery imprints of the bare feet of angels, scattered footmarks on our nights and days — while the fullness of life waxes, incessantly supplements itself, and towers over us in wonder after wonder.

And yet, in a certain sense, the fullness is contained wholly and integrally in each of its crippled and fragmentary incarnations. This is the phenomenon of imagination and vicarious being. An event may be small and insignificant in its origins and yet, when drawn close to one’s eye, it may open in its center an infinite and radiant perspective because a higher order of being is trying to express itself in it and irradiates it violently.

(Bruno Schultz, Sanatorium Under The Sign Of The Hourglass)

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Midweek Music Break: Josephine Baker and “J’Ai Deux Amours”

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Froog posted the other day on great movie songs, taking inspiration from the American Film Institute’s (AFI’s) “100 Years – 100 Songs” list of 2004. He pointed out some strange omissions (even considering the raw list of four hundred nominees from which the hundred were selected).

I’m not much surprised that no songs from the soundtrack of 1991’s Henry & June made either list. (It was probably considered a non-American and maybe even “non-fictional” film, violating some of the criteria listed at the foot of this page.) A pity. No matter what you thought of the film’s NC-17 rating — the first ever! — or of its caliber as a film, the music which accompanied everything onscreen was (I thought) a model of how to match musical sensibility to a particular film’s time, place, and “feel.”

Nowhere does this match seem truer than in the recording of Josephine Baker’s “J’Ai Deux Amours” (“I Have Two Loves”) which closed the film.

It made a canny signature song for Baker in general, and (sixty years later) for Henry & June in particular. The title — in English, “I Have Two Loves” — cuts in several directions at once. The “two loves” (per the song’s lyrics) are not human loves but geographic and cultural ones: “my country and Paris.” Baker herself was a black American who utterly bloomed in pre-World War II France, especially Paris. Still, says Ethan Mordden’s The Guest List:

Baker’s two loves were not, as one might think, America and Paris. The number was introduced at the Casino de Paris, in 1930, in a scene laid on the African shore, where Adrien Lamy played a French colonist who wants to take native girl Baker back to France. Composer Vincent Scotto and lyricists Géo Koger and the Casino’s producer, Henry Varna, wrote this number for Baker as a woman torn between Paris and Africa. Further, to the French, “mon pays” means “my province” as much as “my country.” Thus, Baker’s two loves never included America.

But even without the full lyrics, “things” are happening with the title alone:

  • The film (based on Anaïs Nin’s book of the same name) is about Nin’s relationships with American author Henry Miller and his wife, June: Anaïs to Henry, Henry to June, and Anaïs to June (all vice-versa, of course).
  • Baker was (fairly famously) bisexual; for her to declare in song I have two loves was virtually an open wink at this reputation.

Yet I fell in love with this song — this performance of it — way before I knew any of that. I’m not especially one way or the other about it until about two minutes into its three-plus-minute length. But suddenly, Baker’s trilling voice is joined by a man’s (Adrien Lamy, mentioned above, and pictured at left), and for most of the rest of the song he assumes responsibility for the lyrics. Baker “merely” accompanies him, in a wordlessly vocalized run of counterpoint and harmony which twines sinuously — like some exotic Beaux-Arts species of vine — around and within the pauses of Lamy’s voice. It’s really, for me, among the most memorable ninety seconds of music I know — especially given that I understand no French myself!

Here are Josephine Baker and Adrien Lamy, singing of their two loves:

Lyrics:

J’Ai Deux Amours
(by Vincent Scotto and Geo Koger; performance by Josephine Baker and Adrien Lamy)

On dit qu’au delà des mers
Là-bas sous le ciel clair
Il existe une cité
Au séjour enchanté
Et sous les grands arbres noirs
Chaque soir
Vers elle s’en va tout mon espoir

J’ai deux amours
Mon pays et Paris
Par eux toujours
Mon cœur est ravi
Ma savane est belle
Mais à quoi bon le nier
Ce qui m’ensorcelle
C’est Paris, Paris tout entier
Le voir un jour
C’est mon rêve joli
J’ai deux amours
Mon pays et Paris

Quand sur la rive parfois
Au lointain j’aperçois
Un paquebot qui s’en va
Vers lui je tends les bras
Et le cœur battant d’émoi
A mi-voix
Doucement je dis “emporte-moi!”

J’ai deux amours…

Translation (approximate, of course :) — corrections more than welcome!):

I Have Two Loves

It is said that above the seas,
Over there under the clear sky,
Exists a city, where the stay is enchanted,
And under the big black trees,
Every evening,
Towards it tend all my hopes.

I have two loves
My country and Paris.
By them always
Is my heart ravished.
My savannah* is beautiful,
But why deny that
what puts a spell on me is Paris,
Paris in its entirety.

Seeing it one day
Is my pretty dream.
I have two loves,
My country and Paris.

(Repeat)

My savannah is beautiful,
But why deny that
what puts a spell on me is Paris,
Paris in its entirety.
Seeing it one day
Is my pretty dream.
I have two loves,
My country and Paris.

When at the distant shore
I sometimes see a ship depart
To him I extend my arms
And heart beating with excitement,
Whisper softly, I say, “Take me!”

I have two loves…

_____________________________
* “My savannah“? Yeah. I think this probably refers to the home of the African “native girl” described by Mordden’s interpretation. Generalized, if so, you can probably just read this phrase as something like “my home” or “the place I came from.” (In Madeleine Peyroux’s cover of the song, My savannah becomes Manhattan.)

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