Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

Destiny Has No Beeper

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[See Note at bottom of this post for information about this image.]

From whiskey river:

Almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of Pssst that you usually can’t even hear because you’re in such a rush to or from something important you’ve tried to engineer.

(David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest)

…and:

Have you watched your thinking? I watched that car go by, it was a blue car. Can I watch my thought in the same way, as it moves from one thing to another? And if it does, find out if it can end; instead of it being a long thread, break it, see what happens. Can you break a thought and say, “Well, that’s enough, enough is enough” and just end that thought and see what happens before the next thought is waiting. Before it springs on you, watch it. In that space, in that interval, what happens?

(Jiddu Krishnamurti, As the River Joins The Ocean)

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JES Has Come Unstuck in Time (by Choice and Training)

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[See note at bottom of the post for information about this image.]

One of these days, if I’m feeling very ambitious, I might expand this dream (from the other morning) into a whole story or book. Until then, feel free to use it for your own purposes. Should you take it to publication, I’m sure we can work out some sort of suitable deal. Just contact my attorney — and prepare to negotiate.

I’m with a team of adventurers — you know, one of those ragtag bunches of (probably) misfits who go around the world solving problems — digging up treasure, recovering stolen loot, righting wrongs, and so on.

Unlike other teams of adventurers, though, this one has a special talent: it travels in time.

Now, as you surely know from various pop-culture references, time travel is possible… but only if you have superpowers or other almost impossible resources. For instance:

  • If you’re Superman, you can zip around Earth in a direction opposite to the planet’s rotation, at a speed faster than light. All you have to do is, uh, be Superman.
  • Or, like the guy in H.G. Wells’s story, you can build a time machine to move backward and forward.
  • If you’re Claire Randall (née Beauchamp) in Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series of books, all you have to do is sort of walk through the right group of standing stones in Scotland at the right time (it helps if you swoon); just be in WW2-era Scotland, be a nurse, be brilliant, and be attractive. Also wry.
  • Dr. Who travels around time and space more or less at will — thanks to the TARDIS and its impossible geometry.

But this dream team doesn’t need any of that. It needs no machinery. Its members have no superpowers. All they have which you lack is one critical piece of information, and the training to use it: every human being is born with the ability to time-travel.

The leader of the team (think the Richard Attenborough character in Jurassic Park) made this discovery starting with a simple realization: that human memory and hope/expectation are simply diluted expressions of time travel. And the training? You just practice focusing the portion of your brain most responsible for memory (the hippocampus); you just rehearse sharpening the details of your hopes and expectations.

…and that was the sum of the dream. I didn’t remember any details of the group’s adventures or anything (ironic in light of what I did remember, eh?).

Would you time-travel if you could?

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Note: The photo at the top of this post shows a sand sculpture by the artistic team known collectively as Duthain Dealbh (“fleeting sculpture” in Gaelic). The subject of the sand sculpture is the Australian aboriginal legend of the dreamtime. From Wikipedia (quoting a line from Peter Weir’s film The Last Wave):

Aboriginals believe in two forms of time; two parallel streams of activity. One is the daily objective activity, the other is an infinite spiritual cycle called the “dreamtime,” more real than reality itself. Whatever happens in the dreamtime establishes the values, symbols, and laws of Aboriginal society. It was believed that some people of unusual spiritual powers had contact with the dreamtime.

Find more information about Duthain Dealbh at their site.

Paying Attention (or Not) to Word Count

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So, bottom line: yes, at around 12:30 this afternoon I bounded across the 3,000-word mark in the 2010 Write Your A** Off Write-a-Thon.

I’d gotten up around 6:30am, heated water in the teakettle, sat down at my desk and by 7:30 — after incidental stuff like selecting the day’s background music — begun to write. Took a break of about ten minutes at around 9:00 or so (cup of tea ), and another (#3) around 10:30. Did a word-count check at 12:30, and found that I’d indeed written just over the 3K target. Afterwards I tidied things up a bit, including bringing the current passage to a conclusion.

And then finally opened up the old blogging dashboard.

Because my morning writing time is pretty much the same length every weekday (90 minutes to two hours), there’s usually — usually — a fairly consistent word count each day, depending on how much revision I do. So I don’t really like to rely on word count as a measure of “success.” For one thing, good or ill, I tend to write very fast — not “write” meaning “…in a publishable sense,” obviously. But the words do pour forth. And although I’ve never had a single typing lesson, just from years and years of working with keyboards (both as a computer guy and a writer) I do type very fast, too.

(Against this latter speed you have to weigh, however, my neurotic hyper-awareness of typos and awkwardness as I commit them, causing me to back up and overtype quite a bit. (Just then, I typed wuite, braked, threw it into reverse, and replaced the w with a q before moving on.))

Still, in light of my creative frozen-ness of recent weeks, I really welcomed the WYAO Write-a-Thon’s 3K Challenge. So when I took my first break and did a quick word-count check, and saw that the odometer had rolled over to four digits, I exulted.

You take what you can get, hmm?

Anyway, if you’d like to see what I accomplished today — the start of (presumably) a short story, or possibly something longer — the first third of it is posted here. And if you want to see all the 3,100-some words, you can find them in this (74KB) PDF.

(Thanks, everyone, for your good wishes as I embarked on this mini-project!)

A** Over Teakettle

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As a reminder — not that you doubted! — I’ll be intensely preoccupied tomorrow, for the 2010 edition of the New York Writers Coalition’s Write Your A** Off Day.

I’ve mentioned before that this year, they’re sponsoring an online “write-a-thon.” Participants are urged to take the 3K Challenge: to shoot for a goal of 3,000 words’ output on the day. With a certain number and/or volume of qualms, I’m in.

I say “qualms” there because, as I’ve also mentioned, I’ve been in a cavernous creative slump for weeks.

Nonetheless, I’ll play along. I don’t expect to work on Seems to Fit, though. (I feel especially tender and protective about my putative work-in-progress; if my slough of despond drowns it, I’ll really be ready to hang up my keyboard and LaserJet.) Instead, over the course of the last few days I laid the groundwork for a new story; it’s got a fairly interesting plot hook, which I’d like to believe will propel me across the 3K mark at some point tomorrow.

We’ll see. In the meantime, if you catch me frolicking in your neighborhood or elsewhere around the Internet tomorrow, feel free to shy something* at me, and/or yell (à la many a childhood neighbor) something like, “Hey you — get the hell off the playground and get back to work!”

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* Shy me a brickbat, please. I’d love to know what a brickbat looks like. Especially one that’s been shied.

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Update, 2010-06-12, 2:55(ish) p.m.: So I crossed the 3K word mark at around 12:30. The current word count, after some tidying up, is 3,123 words. I’ll post what I got done today in a subsequent entry. This is just my placeholder announcement for anyone who stumbles in and wonders what the heck happened.

A Matter of Form

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[See the note about this video at the bottom of the post.]

From whiskey river:

Any Morning

Just lying on the couch and being happy.
Only humming a little, the quiet sound in the head.
Trouble is busy elsewhere at the moment, it has
so much to do in the world.

People who might judge are mostly asleep; they can’t
monitor you all the time, and sometimes they forget.
When dawn flows over the hedge you can
get up and act busy.

Little corners like this, pieces of Heaven
left lying around, can be picked up and saved.
People won’t even see that you have them,
they are so light and easy to hide.

Later in the day you can act like the others.
You can shake your head. You can frown.

(William Stafford)

…and (italicized portion only):

There’s a great deal to say about how we tend to see, and hear, only what has been pointed out to us… We are given words for those things that are pointed out to us. What about everything else? What are we missing? That’s one reason I like poetry, because it allows me to surmise, to question what may be beyond what we presently see and hear simply because it’s never been noticed.

(Pattiann Rogers [source])

…and:

For all my skepticism, some trace of irrational superstition did survive in me, the strange conviction, for example, that everything in life that happens to me also has a sense, that it means something, that life speaks to us about itself through its story, that it gradually reveals a secret, that it takes the form of a rebus whose message must be deciphered, that the stories we live compromise the mythology of our lives and in that mythology lies the key to truth and mystery. Is it an illusion? Possibly, even probably, but I can’t rid myself of the need continually to decipher my own life.

(Milan Kundera, from The Joke [source])

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A Moment, a Moment Long…

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[Image: The Meteor of 1860, by Frederic Edwin Church]

This summer marks the 150th anniversary of a remarkable celestial event: an Earth-grazing meteor procession of interest not just to the scientific world, but to the literary one as well. It wasn’t just notable: it was flat-out forgotten until recently.

First, some definitions:

  • An Earth-grazing meteor is one which enters the Earth’s atmosphere at a shallow angle, and exits the atmosphere a few moments later without actually striking the ground. Of course, during those brief few seconds or minutes, it flares up just like any other fast-moving object from the heavens.
  • The term meteor procession refers to a phenomenon in which an Earth-grazing meteor hits the atmosphere and bursts into fragments, which then become multiple smaller meteors traveling in parallel with one another.

These events are exceedingly rare, countable on the fingers of one hand if you go back several centuries. In fact, the 1860 occurrence had been utterly forgotten until about ten years ago — even though (from all contemporary reports) it was one of the more spectacular. Its very, um, forgottenness created a problem for literary scholars with an OCD bent. To wit: what was Walt Whitman nattering on about in poem #100 of Leaves of Grass, entitled “Year of Meteors, 1859-’60“?

Here’s the relevant passage:

…the comet that came unannounced out of the north,
flaring in heaven;
Nor the strange huge meteor procession, dazzling and clear,
shooting over our heads,
(A moment, a moment long, it sail’d its balls of unearthly light
over our heads,
Then departed, dropt in the night, and was gone;)

In the upcoming July issue of Sky & Telescope magazine, a physicist (a “forensic astronomer”) explains how he made the connection (thanks to the painting featured at the top of this post) — and “discovered” the 1860 procession. If you don’t want to wait for that issue, you can read about the whole matter here (in an interview at the New Scientist site) and here (Texas State University news service).

I just love stuff like this.

Woodchips and Sawdust

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Before getting into anything else: yes, as previously reported (or implied!) I will be trying my damnedest to Write My A** Off this Saturday, June 12.

And wow, I’ve gotta say — it’s way overdue for me. This has been one of the longest dry spells of writing I’ve gone through in almost three years. Blog posts aside (so yes, technically I have been writing…), over the last two months or so I think I’ve written no more than a couple-three hundred words on any single day. And that’s been very scattered, un- or utterly misdirected, fitful. I’m determined to turn that around, though. This morning I did a little over 500 words, simply by forcing myself to start typing, and maybe I’ll be able to get something crankin’ by Saturday. I sure hope so. This has made me miserable — literally, beyond words.

In the meantime, a couple of minor things:

  • We got back from New Orleans fairly late Sunday night. Although I was able to at least visit my favorite blogs over the weekend, via Blackberry, I’m lamentably behind on reading for real, let alone commenting. I’ll get back into that rhythm soon too, I hope.
  • In a weekend comment on a post here, Froog reported that Running After My Hat had been loading painfully slowly for him. I’d noticed it too, frankly, although I thought it might have something to do with other network problems. Froog’s comment led me to poke around in a couple of suspiciously soft spots in the infrastructure. I’m not a hundred percent sure, but I think I’ve traced the problem to that Google Buzz thingumabob I mentioned in an aside a couple of posts ago. So I disabled that thing — I don’t care how cool or interesting a feature is, if it cripples a site’s basic functionality it’s not worth including. Do let me know if any of you are experiencing other (or the same!) problems.

If You Can Believe It (or Even If You Can’t)

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[Image: backglass from a new(ish) pinball game by Stern,
currently available from Premier Amusements]

From whiskey river‘s archive (a/k/a the commonplace book):

A physicist visits a colleague and notices a horseshoe hanging on the wall above the entrance.

“Do you really believe that a horseshoe brings luck?” he asks.

“No,” replies the colleague, “but I’ve been told that it works even if you don’t believe in it.”

(Niels Bohr)

…and:

Strangers

A man and a woman happened to sit next to one another on a train. The woman took out a book and began reading. The train stopped at a half dozen stations, but she never looked up once.

The man watched her for awhile, then asked, “What are you reading?”

“It’s a ghost story,” she said. “It’s very good, very spooky.”

“Do you believe in ghosts?” he asked.

“Yes, I do,” she replied. “There are ghosts everywhere.”

“I don’t believe in them,” he said. “It’s just a lot of superstition. In all my years I’ve never seen a ghost, not one.”

“Haven’t you?” the woman said, and disappeared.

(Alvin Schwartz)

…and (plus the last sentence):

“I see nobody on the road,” said Alice.

“I only wish I had such eyes,” the King remarked in a fretful tone. “To see Nobody! And at that distance too! Why, it’s as much as I can do to see real people, by this light!”

(Lewis Carroll [source])

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Review: Shades of Grey, by Jasper Fforde

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My review of Jasper Fforde’s newest novel, Shades of Grey, is online over at The Book Book blog.

Maybe I’m just lucky to have read and savored everything else which Fforde has written. His work is without peer, I think — not necessarily in the sense of “none better,” more in the vein of “nothing else like it.” He’s endlessly inventive, does not take himself too seriously, always takes the story seriously, and somehow — despite his literally fantastic plots and alternate-universe settings and characters — escapes categorization as a writer of fantasy and/or science fiction. He probably belongs the “Pantheon” list in the right sidebar here. I desperately want his job.

In any event: Shades of Grey is highly recommended for readers who don’t mind being challenged by strange, even slightly loopy ideas, and who can recognize tongue-in-cheekery when they see it.

For more on the plot and so on, check the Book Book review. And of course, feel free to ask questions here (or over there) if you’d like.

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On another note…

You may notice signs of some construction here for a little while. From time to time I think about messing with the overall “look” of the blog, but that’s not likely to happen; I’ve invested too much time in customizing what I’ve already got.

So far, two changes:

  • I replaced the ever-expanding list of month-by-month archives, in the left sidebar, with a little calendar doo-dad which lets you move around among the stacks here. Once you’ve got a particular month displayed, you can see the titles of posts from that month by clicking on the little «-» link below the calendar proper.
  • At the bottom of the left sidebar, there’s now a list of my five most recent Google Buzz entries. I keep finding these little Webly tidbits which are hard for me to justify turning over to a whole blog post, but which I think might be interesting to what passes as my “readership” at Running After My Hat. At the same time, this obviates the need for you to “follow my Buzz!” or whatever the hell cheerful thing Google is calling it in Gmail.

Not sure what else I might fool with. The list of categories bugs me a little, but I haven’t really given much thought what (if anything) to do with it. In the meantime, as someone or other has been saying around the Web since the early 1990s, I’ll try to keep the sawdust to a minimum.

He Would’ve Been 86 (+ Two Days)

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[Twenty-year-old Dad-to-be applies an arc-welding torch to a tank, somewhere in Europe, 1944-45. Handwritten caption on back: It’s me again. Actually working. I told you so!]

For years, this has been a psychologically complicated few days — at least for those of us in my family given to psychological complication.

In no particular order:

  • Dad’s birthday was May 29th.
  • The Missus and I were married on May 29th. (About which, more later this week.)
  • Memorial Day — because of my parents’ fondness for and involvement in drum-and-bugle corps — was pretty much the biggest national secular holiday for us, throughout the 1950s and into the ’60s. (And of course, in that much different time, it was always held on May 31 rather than the vague albeit convenient “last Monday in May.”)
  • It was at a Memorial Day family cookout in the late 1980s that Dad took me aside and told me of the pain in his shoulder, which I was not to tell Mom about because she’d likely recognize it for what it was: a return of his supposedly gone cancer.
  • Dad died on June 4, 1988.

Although I’m sentimental about Dad (and many other things), I know — intellectually — that picturing him 20 or 30 years older, but otherwise unchanged, qualifies as just a comfortable fantasy. If he hadn’t died in 1988, he might have died later, in an even worse way. And even if still alive and healthy at this moment, he might (who knows?) be 22 years’ unhappier. So yes, I know.

But damn, I sure wouldn’t mind talking with him every now and then…

I recently saw a TV show in which a character continued, obsessively, to call his girlfriend’s cellphone number — long after she’d died — because her voicemail was still active and at least he could listen to her voice reciting something like, I’m out living my life and can’t talk right now. Leave it at the beep!

Yeah: that.

[Comments disabled for this post, obviously, and the title shamelessly ripped off
and altered from the title of a post at my kid sister’s blog on Saturday.]

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