Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

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.]

Starting Out Fresh

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From whiskey river (except for the last five lines; numerous other differences vs. the alternate source linked below):

Exercise

First, forget what time it is
for an hour
do it regularly every day

then forget what day of the week it is
and do this regularly for a week
then forget what country you are in
and practice doing it in company
for a week
and then do them together
for a week
with as few breaks as possible

follow these by forgetting to add
or to subtract
it makes no difference
you can change them
around after a week
both will help you later
to forget how to count

forget how to count
starting with your own age
starting with how to count backwards
starting with even numbers
with Roman numerals
starting with fractions of Roman numerals
with the old calendar
going on to the old alphabet
going on to the alphabet
forgetting it all until everything
is continuous again

go on to forgetting elements
starting with water
proceeding to earth
rising in fire

forget fire

(W. S. Merwin [source])

…and:

Imagine if for the next twenty-four hours you had to wear a cap that amplified your thoughts so that everyone within a hundred yards of you could hear every thought that passed through your head. Imagine if the mind were broadcast so that all about you could overhear your thoughts and fantasies, your dreams and fears. How embarrassed or fearful would you be to go outside? How long would you let your fear of the mind continue to isolate you from the hearts of others? And though this experiment sounds like one which few might care to participate in, imagine how freeing it would be at last to have nothing to hide. And how miraculous it would be to see that all others’ minds too were filled with the same confusion and fantasies, the same insecurity and doubt. How long would it take the judgmental mind to begin to release its grasp, to see through the illusion of separateness, to recognize with some humor the craziness of all beings’ minds, the craziness of mind itself?

(Stephen and Ondrea Levine, from Who Dies? [source])

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Touch and Enter

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In a comment on yesterday’s Towel Day post, Marta said:

The miracle of the towel! The man who realized this was a man to be reckoned with indeed.

That got me thinking: how cool it would be to come up with a… a something — an in-joke, an idea, a catchphrase, a little fictional detail, an entire story — which lodges in readers’ minds, gets passed around even among people who never read the original, and becomes part of the culture’s stock of unchanging raw materials.

Like towels in Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, say.

Or — to broaden the focus to the almost 100% universal (First World) level: The Wizard of Oz. Not the book, either (sorry, L. Frank Baum) — the movie.

  • “I’ll get you, my pretty.”
  • “…and your little dog, too!”
  • “I do believe in spooks. I do believe in spooks…”
  • “Professor Marvel never guesses; he knows!”
  • “Auntie Em! Uncle Henry!”
  • “Some, where—” (You almost don’t have to finish the phrase.)
  • “If I only had a brain”
  • “Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!”
  • “First they tore my legs off and threw them over there…”

(etc. etc. etc. — all of which I or other people have used in conversations in recent months.)

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Don’t Panic — But Happy Towel Day!

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May 25, as of course you already know, is celebrated worldwide as Towel Day*. Whatever you do, do not forget your towel today. If you cannot be properly entoweled, you might consider alternatives… carrying somewhere on your person folded-up paper towels purloined from the restroom, say.

The point is, do not go about unprepared. Because, well, you never know.

Per Wikipedia, here’s the passage in Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy encouraging towelage:

A towel, [The Hitchhiker’s Guide] says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-bogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

Note: The image at the top of this post is but one of thousands of Flickr images tagged “towelday.” (Edit to add: …to say nothing of YouTube videos.) The photographer, one per_p, helpfully reminds us that inanimate objects, too, deserve protection. Especially sentient inanimate objects.

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* Or, as it is known in Colombia, Dia de la Toalla.

Be Careful What You Wish For: Signing in the Waldenbooks

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[Hat tip to Miriam over at Dancing with Dragons Is Hard On Your Shoes.]

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P.S. And belated auto-congratulations to Running After My Hat for the missed anniversary: the most recent whiskey river Fridays post was #500 here. Is there a cake? How can there not be a cake?!?

In the Water

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[For information about this photo, called “Weeki Wachee Spring, Florida,”
see the Note at the bottom of this post.]

From whiskey river:

Adrift

Let my dreams while I’m wide-awake
loose. Let me be drowned, bap­tized,
in the light given me. Day comes around,
night, fall, win­ter, spring,
sum­mer. Leaves over­head, under­foot.
Waves arrive, buf­fets from friends
offended, ene­mies. Let it all come:
this is my way, this is the canoe I’m in.

(William Stafford [source])

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Take It Eeeeeeeeasy (Chorus of Strangers Edition)

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From Ze Frank (part of his “Songs You Already Know” series):

[Below, click Play button to begin. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 1:51 long.]

[audio:chillout_zefrank.mp3|titles=’Chill Out’|artists=Ze Frank]

…and the story behind it, which begins:

I received an email from a woman named Laura, who had recently moved to a new city for a new job.

She was overwhelmed with anxiety and asked me to write her a song to help her calm down.

Cool, eh?

[Hat tip to Mark Hurst of the Good Experience newsletter]

Pushing Your Writing, Pushing Your Mind

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Remember The Querulous Squirrel’s 100-stories-in-100-days challenge? Ambitious, wot? Supremely well executed, eh?

Okay, now start with a similar premise:

  • Write a story a day for an entire month.
  • Saturdays and Sundays included. Holidays, too.
  • No limit on word count. Just write a complete story each day.

Simple to say, hard to execute, right? Just as The Squirrel’s must have been.

So then add another huge level of complication: invent your own genre, in which you will write every one of your month’s worth of stories.

I’ll pause to let that sink in: your own genre…

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Official 2010 Write Your A** Off Day (Pt 2)

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I mentioned a “contest” of sorts in my post the other day about the New York Writers Coalition’s June 12 event: write 3,000 words on that one day, they said, and you could enter a drawing. Winner of the drawing would receive a free consultation with author Jennifer Belle. But I added:

…other than this email [from a NYWC publicist], I haven’t seen any official confirmation of this 3K-word challenge — like details about how the drawing will work — particularly for out-of-town writers. I’ll see if I can learn more.

Now I’ve got some of those details (thanks, Adaeze!):

  • First, sign up for the online “write-a-thon” here. You have to register, but it’s free.

Note: New registrations do not take effect automatically, but are human-moderated. This means you should expect a time lag before being able to do much of anything at the site. Do not wait until June 12 to register!

  • On June 12th, they’ll use the honor system. (My correspondent says, “We’re relying on them to be honest with themselves” — and I’ll wag my own index finger in your direction on this point. I mean, come on: it’s not like they’re requiring 3,000 tightly written words, right?)
  • When you’ve met the basic word-count requirement, you’ll post a comment on a write-a-thon thread they’ll open at the site.
  • At the end of the day, they’ll close the comment thread and draw a winner, announcing it at the site.
  • And then, finally, they’ll provide details to the winner about the logistics of claiming his/her consultation with Jennifer Belle.

If I learn anything else about the rules, or The Day itself, or Jennifer Belle, or… oh, hell: if I learn anything else about anything vaguely relevant, I’ll post the information here at RAMH. In the meantime, if you feel ready to take the challenge, hie thee to the NYWC discussion board and sign up.

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