Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

Fiction and (Overly) Real Life

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[Photo by Alan Bauer]

I want to share with you a little anecdote about one of the wild joys of writing a novel. But let’s put real life aside for a moment; let’s start with a hypothetical. Let’s say you’re writing a novel, as follows:

A certain set of events must happen at night, say, because… um… In order for something else — something absolutely critical — to happen, two characters must exchange their first kiss (or bite) under the light of a full moon, within the first twenty-four hours of the April 21 opening of the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair, in the restaurant atop the Space Needle.

Now, of course, Seattle is often rainy, and when it’s not rainy it’s often foggy. But suppose you resolve the weather question satisfactorily, and hence resolve the question of visibility from the top of the Space Needle. Was the moon even full that night? If so, what time was moonrise? Could a character in a nearby skyscraper observe the kiss (bite) through binoculars — then lower the binoculars, noticing that the moon is full… without having to turn around?

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You Never Know

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[Image: “Untitled #153,” by Chris Marker. For more information, see the note at the foot of this page.]

From whiskey river:

Only Once

All which, because it was
flame and song and granted us
joy, we thought we’d do, be, revisit,
turns out to have been what it was
that once, only; every invitation
did not begin
a series, a build-up: the marvelous
did happen in our lives, our stories
are not drab with its absence: but don’t
expect to return for more. Whatever more
there will be will be
unique as those were unique. Try
to acknowledge the next
song in its body — halo of flames as utterly
present, as now or never.

(Denise Levertov [source])

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Midweek Music Break: Herb Alpert

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I didn’t really “get” rock until I was in college (which is weird, when you consider that I grew up right alongside the 1950s and ’60s). My appreciation of a certain Liverpool quartet’s songs was postponed for years thanks to the kids across the street, who stood on the sidewalk and annoyed passersby (and neighbors) by shrieking repeatedly, Yea, yeah, yeah! And in the house where I grew up, it seemed that the big hi-fi cabinet’s tuner had been spot-welded in place — allowing only the sounds of a nearby station’s 24-hour Big Band playlist to enter the living room.

I settled on neither rock nor Big Band music for my first playlist. For some reason, I settled on Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, and bought around a half-dozen of their LPs.

The band had a string of perky pop hits, often including weird special-effects instruments like cowbells and bicycle horns: “Spanish Flea,” “The Mexican [a/k/a Teaberry] Shuffle,” “Tijuana Taxi,” and so on. Of course, these songs made it onto their albums. But the LPs featured other music as well — also “Ameriachi”-sounding, vaguely, but slower and moodier. These were my favorites. What I didn’t know about loss back then could fill a stadium, but these tunes seemed to me drenched in it.

(An ongoing family joke centers around my teenage habit of whistling to myself while doing my laundry in the basement. The songs I whistled most often — at least as I imagined — were Alpert/TJB numbers: the slow ones.)

Here’s Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass’s interpretation of “Tangerine,” by Victor Schertzinger and Johnny Mercer:

When first written, the song perched at #1 on the Billboard list for six or seven weeks in 1942. The subject and lyrics? Unusual but not exactly melancholy. No, it’s something about the trumpet which affected me (and still does). Even the little upbeat curl at the very end feels rueful — as if backing the last line of that bitter poem by Dorothy Parker: You might as well live.

Lyrics:

Tangerine
(as performed by the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra,
with vocals by Bob Eberly and Helen O’Connell)

(Male singer)
Tangerine,
She is all they claim
With her eyes of night and lips as bright as flame
Tangerine,
When she dances by
Senoritas stare and caballeros sigh
And I’ve seen
Toasts to Tangerine
Raised in every bar across the Argentine
Yes, she has them all on the run
But her heart belongs to just one
Her heart belongs to Tangerine

(Female singer)
Tangerine,
She is all they say
With mascara’d eye and chapeaux by Daché.
Tangerine,
With her lips of flame
If the color keeps, Louis Philippe’s to blame.
And I’ve seen
Clothes on Tangerine
Where the label says “From Macy’s Mezzanine.”
Yes, she’s got the guys in a whirl
But she’s only fooling one girl
She’s only fooling Tangerine!

Book Review: Children of God, by Mary Doria Russell

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A few weeks ago I reviewed Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow at the Book Book review blog. I just posted a follow-up there, a review of The Sparrow‘s sequel, called Children of God. However, if you have not read The Sparrow, please don’t read my Children of God review: it assumes that you know what happened on the planet Rakhat.

Briefly, I found the later book much harder to like than the earlier (although I continued to appreciate Russell’s skill):

  • We’re forced to spend much time in the company (and minds) of The Sparrow‘s less pleasant characters.
  • Much of the fun of The Sparrow came from the kidding, affectionate, and sometimes flirtatious interaction among the humans who made the trip to Rakhat. That original cast of characters is almost completely absent from this book; in their place we have a much more serious bunch. (There are reasons why they’re so serious. That doesn’t magically transform them into a larky gang of back-slappers, however.)

As I mention at the end of the Book Book review, I’d probably rate Children of God something like 85 out of 100, vs. The Sparrow‘s 95. Still worth a read, though — if for no other reason, than that it completes the circle of Emilio Sandoz’s story, while redeeming some of its predecessor’s horror.

Paying Attention to What You Want

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From Seems to Fit:

“For this one time,” [Bonnie] said aloud, “I want us each to think about the same question, one question, while we do this. We don’t have to say anything out loud, and we don’t have to spend more than ten minutes doing it, I don’t think—”

George: “Wait! Brandy first, question second.” He raised his glass, uttered a single syllable: “Al.”

“Al,” they all repeated, and downed their shots.

The three men downed their shots, that is. Not Bonnie. She didn’t want the shock of the liquor to bring on a second wave of laughter, and she wanted to ensure she could ask the question straightforwardly and without qualifying or explaining it. Bonnie sipped at hers, and put the glass back down on the table.

“Now,” she said. “Now we touch hands — that’s right, almost like a séance, good. And now we close our eyes, all the way Larry, no peeking. That’s right. This is just us, each of us, answering the question for ourselves.”

“So what’s the question?” said Larry.

“Just this: why?” Bonnie said. “Why am I — each of us — why would I do this thing… put so much at risk? Not what’s in it for Al, either. What’s in it for me. For each of us, inside our own heads, that’s the question for each of us: Why would I do this?” A pause to let it sink in. She closed her own eyes. “Okay? All clear? Go.”

—

Why would I do this? thought Pierce.

The question resisted focus. He could not think of a single argument, a single fact that would convince him to pursue such a strange, reckless course of action…

A recent post on one of Nathan Bransford’s forums asked the question directly, with the title “What Do You Write For?” INTERN asked it, customarily obliquely, in her post of a couple weeks ago (“chain of (publishing) fools”) and in one a couple weeks before that (“exhaustion hunting the great spotted WIP-alump”).

And it often percolates between the lines at Marta’s writing in the water blog, sometimes bubbling to the surface — as in an entry of last week (“This is a sign by the side of the road”). A couple days ago she offered this trailer of an award-winning documentary:

Marta asked:

Would you write if every word stayed in the room with you until you died and left them behind?

Which pretty much lays it out there in stark terms, eh?
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Anima

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[Image: Isle of the Dead (third version), by Arnold Böcklin]

From whiskey river:

Life is a garden,
not a road
we enter and exit
through the same gate
wandering,
where we go matters less
than what we notice

(Bokonon [source: see note below])

…and:

Walking to Oak-Head Pond, and Thinking of
the Ponds I Will Visit in the Next Days and Weeks

What is so utterly invisible
as tomorrow?
Not love,
not the wind,

not the inside of a stone.
Not anything.
And yet, how often I’m fooled —
I’m wading along

in the sunlight —
and I’m sure I can see the fields and the ponds shining
days ahead —
I can see the light spilling

like a shower of meteors
into next week’s trees,
and I plan to be there soon —
and, so far, I am

just that lucky,
my legs splashing
over the edge of darkness,
my heart on fire.

I don’t know where
such certainty comes from —
the brave flesh
or the theater of the mind —

but if I had to guess
I would say that only
what the soul is supposed to be
could send us forth

with such cheer
as even the leaf must wear
as it unfurls
its fragrant body, and shines

against the hard possibility of stoppage —
which, day after day,
before such brisk, corpuscular belief,
shudders, and gives way.

(Mary Oliver, from What Do We Know [source])

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RAMH@3: The Mix

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Today, Running After My Hat turns three years old. Over the last couple weeks, I had the opportunity (if that’s the word!) to go back and read a whole bunch of posts from that time. I thought, y’know, that I could maybe identify more clearly what the blog is (even vaguely, if not exactly). At the very least, it might give me some place to start revising the About RAMH page.

(I should be scuffing my feet in embarrassment to have a hard time answering that question. But I’m sure those of you who’ve been following along understand the problem. Ha.)

One really surprising finding: way more than I’d ever imagined, there’s a lot of music here. In fact, if you count multiple versions of the songs covered in the “What’s in a Song” series, and videos (in the posts themselves and, rarely, in the comments), apparently I include music in a third of the posts at the site . This suggested that I could offer you a “mix post” (like a mix CD) today.

So that’s what this is. [Read more…]

Savage Beasts

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A first for Running After My Hat: a guest blogger!

Kate Lord Brown is already familiar to some of you as the curator of the blog What Kate Did Next. (She also instigated the Burning Lines experiment in collaborative online fiction of a couple years ago.) More recently, though — and the reason she’s feeling celebratory — she’s published her first novel, The Beauty Chorus.

New Year’s Eve, 1940: Evie Chase, the beautiful debutante daughter of a rich and adoring RAF commander, listens wistfully to the swing music drifting out from the ballroom, unable to join in the fun… 5th January, 1941: Evie curses her fashionable heels as they skid on the frozen ground of her local airfield. She is here to join the ATA, the civilian pilots who ferry Tiger Moths and Spitfires to bases across war-torn Britain.

When Kate volunteered her services as a guest blogger, I thought at once of her own blog posts: light, downright lissome bundles of everyday slices of life, nostalgia, ruminations on and prompts for writing, and… music. All genres. All smoothly worked into the theme of the post du jour. So I asked her what role music had played in The Beauty Chorus itself, or in its author’s mind while writing it. Here’s how she responded.

Charms, eh? The woman hath charms.

[Videos below selected, by me with Kate’s blessing, from The Beauty Chorus‘s YouTube playlist.]

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Spark of Interest

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[Video: “Musical Tesla Coils: Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies.” For more information, see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river:

What is it that you contain? The dead. Time. Light patterns of millennia opening in your gut. Every minute, in each of you, a few million potassium atoms succumb to radioactive decay. The energy that powers these tiny atomic events has been locked inside potassium atoms ever since a star-sized bomb exploded nothing into being. Potassium, like uranium and radium, is a long-lived radioactive nuclear waste of the supernova bang that accounts for you.

Your first parent was a star.

(Jeanette Winterson)

…and:

I won’t get any poems written during these weeks either. It’s not the first time this has happened. And I won’t go on about it. There isn’t much to say. Victor Hugo once summed it up as follows (Karol Berger told me about this as we strolled through Paris, the sixteenth arrondissement). When someone asked him if writing poetry was easy, he said, “When I can write it, it’s easy; when I can’t, it’s impossible.”

(Adam Zagajewski)

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Midweek Music Break: Earworms of a 1950s Childhood

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When The Boy was a boy*, he did not know that nursery rhymes and fairy tales and folk songs had already lived lives stretching back centuries. When The Boy was a boy, he imagined that each story, verse, and tune had been crafted just for him and for people like him, all within the last few years. To honor such generous gifts of craftsmanship and art, he took them in, absorbed them, never forgot them. And he did the same with other stories and songs he learned then, because he did not know the difference between a profound message from the deep past and a superficial message from yesterday.

When The Boy was no longer a boy, he knew these things. But by then it was too late; he had memorized them all, equally, the new with the old and the silly with the deep. And long after The Boy was a boy, they would chew their way out of the recesses of his mind, laying claim to his awareness when he really needed to be thinking of other things…

When The Boy was a boy, true, he sometimes wondered about the songs they learned in music class. As printed in the music books, these songs featured black-and-white cross-hatched woodcut drawings taken from ancient sources, perhaps as far back as the eighteenth century. One drawing in particular entranced him: it depicted a raucous sort of restaurant — perhaps something like a diner, furnished in oak instead of chrome — were many people were eating and laughing; they poured huge mugs of something into their mouths, and one arm of each man encircled the waist of a wench…

Many, many songs and stories came to The Boy, when he was a boy, through the small, glowing gray screen in the living room. Many of these songs and stories were brief, lasting either thirty or sixty seconds — exactly — but some were a little longer. They showed up in venues like the beginning and end of each program. And they showed up within some of the programs themselves, like… Captain Kangaroo.

(When The Boy was no longer a boy, he came to believe that the first time he heard that song must have been the moment his politics became set for life. Good old Captain.)

_______________________

* Hat tip to Peter Handke’s poem “Song of Childhood,” featured in the marvelously hypnotic voiceover for Wings of Desire. Here’s Rutger Hauer’s voice reading the English translation, over a short film crafted especially to capture the poem’s essence:

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