From UK retailer John Lewis:
Real-Life Dialogue (Household Hints Edition)
The scene: a suburban home in North Florida, USA. Family gathering for Kentucky Derby viewing: gambols and gambles. Much food and beverage being prepared and consumed. He has just returned to house after walking Pooch. Everyone but She is in the living room, talking, laughing, watching TV.
He: [entering kitchen, where He knows She must be] We had a productive walk— What?
She stands before open pantry, laughing madly, pulling things from shelves and dropping them on floor.
She: I can’t find my baking soda!
He: [mentally running through menu items, not remembering any which involve baking soda] Your, uh, baking so—
She: Yes! Baking soda! I can’t find it!
She shuts pantry door, which immediately springs back open because of heap of boxes, cans, and canisters on floor.
He: What do you need baking soda f—?
She: [reaching back into pantry, emerging with familiar dull-yellow box; running around to front of stove, and still bursting sporadically into demented giggles] I need it for the fire!
He: Er, the fire—?
She: Yes! [yanks open oven door] The fire! The potholder fire!
She points, needlessly now, to a flaming mass of thick furry dark-blue fabric on bottom of oven. The oven is filled with smoke, and also with a pan of oven-broiled sandwiches for the Derby Day crowd. She dumps half the box of baking soda on the erstwhile potholder, and shuts the oven door.
She: I dropped a potholder in the oven.
He: Yes, I noticed. But the—
She: I knew baking soda would put it out safely.
He: But the, uh, the pan—
She: [leaning back against counter, sipping at mint juleps] You should never use water on an oven fire.
The Self I Cannot See
From whiskey river:
Life continuously refuses to show us the plot. The desire to give it shape, and by shape, meaning, is so great anything will do. But Orwell would have us stand against all the “smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.” I am struck by how difficult it is to get back to something we knew to be true once we have been converted, forced by circumstances, or simply denied and turned away from it, to whatever lonely mess we have managed to make since. It is as though the experience of unhappiness is more valid than that of joy. We all know the experience of wanting something badly, only to have it disappear as we approach it. Rarely do we look at the wanting self. My shadowless shadow. We don’t cope with much grace, neither the grace of civility, nor the grace of physical being, nor the grace of the spirit. There is at bottom no real distinction between them anyway. Perhaps I am too often absent from my own being.
(Terrance Keenan [source, including the first three sentences])
…and:
Self-Portrait
Between the computer, a pencil, and a typewriter
half my day passes. One day it will be half a century.
I live in strange cities and sometimes talk
with strangers about matters strange to me.
I listen to music a lot: Bach, Mahler, Chopin, Shostakovich.
I see three elements in music: weakness, power, and pain.
The fourth has no name.
I read poets, living and dead, who teach me
tenacity, faith, and pride. I try to understand
the great philosophers – but usually catch just
scraps of their precious thoughts.
I like to take long walks on Paris streets
and watch my fellow creatures, quickened by envy,
anger, desire; to trace a silver coin
passing from hand to hand as it slowly
loses its round shape (the emperor’s profile is erased).
Beside me trees expressing nothing
but a green, indifferent perfection.
Black birds pace the fields,
waiting patiently like Spanish widows.
I’m no longer young, but someone else is always older.
I like deep sleep, when I cease to exist,
and fast bike rides on country roads when poplars and houses
dissolve like cumuli on sunny days.
Sometimes in museums the paintings speak to me
and irony suddenly vanishes.
I love gazing at my wife’s face.
Every Sunday I call my father.
Every other week I meet with friends,
thus proving my fidelity.
My country freed itself from one evil. I wish
another liberation would follow.
Could I help in this? I don’t know.
I’m truly not a child of the ocean,
as Antonio Machado wrote about himself,
but a child of air, mint and cello
and not all the ways of the high world
cross paths with the life that — so far —
belongs to me.
(Adam Zagajewski; translated by Clare Cavanagh [source])
Review: Enlightenment, by Maureen Freely
My review of this novel is now online, over at The Book Book blog.
I don’t normally write reviews of books which I don’t recommend. I don’t even like to. It’s possible to have fun with a writing a bad review, yes, a sort of malicious glee. But the fun is diminished — especially in reviewing a debut novel, like Enlightenment — by knowing what the author often had to go through for his or her book to see the light of day. So many good books await our attention, after all: why beat up on one that didn’t succeed for me?
Enlightenment was a special case. I began it with — and was for a while sustained by — high hopes. The exotic, almost completely unfamiliar setting (contemporary Turkey); the tangled web of international relationships both during the Cold War and post-9/11; the jacket copy description; even the cover — it all said that the book would appeal to me, a thought-provoking relief from my usual fare.
But wow, I didn’t like Enlightenment much at all.
And I was disturbed that I didn’t like it. When I finished it I checked up on the bona fides of the jacket blurbs — maybe they’d just been highly selective, y’know? Not only did it receive high critical praise, but reviewers often praised it for elements which I thought to be missing, or at best unconvincing.
So I don’t know. Maybe I was just in a weird psychological place for the first quarter of the year. Whatever the reason, frankly, I’m not even convinced by my own review — so do read it skeptically.
“Ye Gods — Not That Again…!”
I‘m going to start this post with some music which did not bore me at all.
On Saturday nights, our local public-radio station broadcasts a program originating in Chicago, called Midnight Special, whose slogan, per the program’s Web site, is “folk music with a sense of humor.” And the other night I just happened to catch a song called “Don’t Make Me Sing,” by an artist named Greg Greenway.
Now, Greenway — check his Web site — is a serious guy: not a “comic” performer, as a rule, although he obviously has a good sense of humor. But he’s been singing in small venues long enough to have seen a wide range of audience response… not all of it applause. “Don’t Make Me Sing” adopts the point of view of an audience member with things on his mind other than the person onstage.
I’ve transcribed the lyrics below the audio-player widget (please let me know of any mistakes); as you will see, this live performance comes with a certain amount of… well, let’s say it departs from what seem to be the “official” words. (In a performance captured via YouTube, Greenway manages to get through the song with somewhat less, er, distraction. Once he gets started, that is.)
Lyrics:
Don’t Make Me Sing
(by Greg Greenway)I ate at the bar
I surveyed the space
Two tables from the stage front
My favorite placeI was bursting with pride
I was flushed with success
I’d had to ask her out six times
Before she’d finally said…
…Okay.Then this guy started singing
It was a pretty good show
Then that telltale expression
Don’t even go there — oooh nooo…refrain 1:
Don’t make me sing
That’s why I paid to see you
It’s a show business trick,
Singer/Songwriter shtick
Why don’t you write something new?refrain 2:
Don’t make me sing
Don’t even act like I should
Give me a break, I’m on a first date
Why don’t you write something good?We gave it our best shot
We gave him a chance
Until he turned into Barney
In combat boots and black pants[refrain 1]
Everybody!
[refrain 2]
I gave into peer pressure
I sang with all that I’ve got
She used to be smiling
Now she’s checking her watch[refrain 1]
Don’t make me sing
They hit me up at the door
I did my job all day
Why should I have to pay
To help you do yours?Don’t make me sing
Why don’t you try something else?
If I had a good voice
I’d be up there myself[refrain 1]
[refrain 2]
I’ve been thinking about the song quite a bit since Saturday. Aside from enjoying the rhyme and melody (and of course laughing at the sense), I’ve also tried (and failed) to come up with analogy, for writers and readers, to the live singer/audience dynamic which Greenway depicts so wryly.
At first I tried to think of readings I’d attended — what do writers ask of their audiences on such occasions, which audiences might be unwilling to grant?
But the real analogy, I believe, isn’t in the live performance of a written work. It’s in the general unspoken contract between writer and reader. This is the contract which takes effect when you sit down in your favorite reading chair, open a new book, and begin to read.
What little gimmicks do writers rely on which drive you crazy, make you twitch, maybe make you wish you had picked up that other book instead? For example: cliffhanger chapter endings, maybe? gratuitous insertion of untranslated foreign words and phrases? picaresque plotlines? (Note: this is a question about writers in general, or writers in a particular genre, not about a specific writer’s tics and foibles.)
And if you’re a writer, have you — in horror, no doubt — ever found evidence in your own writing of something which drives you crazy in others’? If so, what (if anything!) did you do about it?
Just Wait
[Image above from The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks, which observes:
“I guess if you don’t just go grab a seat you may never get one.”]
From whiskey river:
The swarm of words
and little stories
are just to loosen you
from where you are stuck.
(Shitou Xiqian)
…and:
O, how incomprehensible everything was, and actually sad, although it was also beautiful. One knew nothing. One lived and ran about the earth and rode through forests, and certain things looked so challenging and promising and nostalgic: a star in the evening, a blue harebell, a reed-green pond, the eye of a person or cow. And sometimes it seemed that something never seen yet long desired was about to happen, that a veil would drop from it all; but then it passed, nothing happened, the riddle remained unsolved, the secret spell unbroken, and in the end one grew old and looked cunning… or wise… And still one knew nothing perhaps, was still waiting and listening.
(Hermann Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund [source])
Running After My Hat: The Two-Year, 30-Second Version
I’ve been trying to come up with something… different to do for this blog’s second anniversary. And then along comes Google, with its wacky “Search Stories Video Creator” for YouTube.
The Video Creator’s first page gives you up to six search boxes, into which you enter search terms — presumably forming some sort of “story arc.” (There’s also a seventh box on the form; this is used to create a “last slide,” as you will see.) For each search, you also choose whether you want to search the Web in general (the usual Google search), Google Images, Google Maps, blogs, news, Google Products, or Google Books. And then, when you’ve made those selections, you select a canned soundtrack from among numerous genres and styles.
And when you’ve done all the above, the system creates a YouTube video of your search(es) results.
It’s… it’s weird. Also kinda cool. And/Or disconcerting. Best of all, it gave me something… different to do for the blog’s second anniversary.
What I did was choose six posts from the last two years, published roughly every few months. From each of those six, I pulled key words or phrases for my search terms. I can’t say that the selection is entirely random: I wanted it to be sorta-kinda representative of the way RAMH has evolved (assuming “evolution” describes what’s happened here). And yet I also didn’t want to select “greatest hits,” “my favorite posts,” or any such thing. (You’ll find, for example, that none of the six was a What’s in a Song post, although a couple other series are represented.)
Here are the six posts I chose:
- April 2008: How It Was (the first post here, once I’d deleted my version of the obligatory “Hello world, this is my blog!” entry)
- July 2008: Good Will, Slumming (a previously untold story of Shakespeare’s writer’s workshop, from the horse’s mouth)
- October 2008: Salvaging the Honey at Heaven’s Edge (a whiskey river Fridays post)
- January 2009: A Cat’s Departure (death of a household pet)
- April 2009: Drafting a Beer (inventing the properties of a fictional beer ale, from scratch)
- October 2009: Perfect Moments: Birds of an Earnest Young Feather (my childhood friend, Ron)
Below is the “Running After My Hat” entry in the Search Stories pile o’ stories. I decided to call it “in pursuit of headgear”:
Thank you to RAMH readers, both the lurking and the commenting sorts (especially the latter!), and thank you beyond measure to the bloggers whose sites I visit regularly, and from whose words — every day — I draw inspiration.
_______________
Note: The image at the top of this post, “Breezy,” is a scratchboard illustration from the fairy tale commonly called “The Goose Girl.” (Caption: “Curdkin has been tormenting the main character, so she calls out ‘Wind, wind, blow today, carry Curdkin’s cap away!’, and it does.”) It is by Tanaudel, on Flickr. You can read “The Goose Girl” here, on Project Gutenberg. (That version of the story includes a striking print of the same scene; it is by one Jennie Harbour, an Art Deco-style illustrator about whom little seems to be known.)
[Hat tip to the pseudonymous Jordan Baker of Dealing in Subterfuges for alerting me to this Google/YouTube Video Creator thing.]
Update, 2010-04-26: The Teacher Tracks blog recently posted an entry on five ways which teachers can use the Google Search Stories thingum as an educational tool. It included a link to a (Google-produced) “love story” using a beefed-up version of the publicly available tool:
(Apparently this was used in a Super Bowl ad this year. Darn. I missed that, didn’t I?)
The Face of the Writer
Just found this at Jesse Kornbluth’s Head Butler site.
The subject of the post was James Frey, author of the Million Little Pieces bogus memoir of a few years ago; I liked what it said about writers and writing, and liked the Orwell quote very much:
Contrary to what Frey, his publisher, Larry King and Oprah believe, writing is not a career. For some writers — for the writers who, I like to think, will endure — it’s a calling. Those who write especially well are like priests. It follows that books are sacred texts, and that the best ones — even the best novels — faithfully deliver what the writer believes is the truth.
That is why we have favorite writers, just as we have favorite musicians; their works “speak” to us. And it is why we have very definite ideas who they are. George Orwell ends his essay on Charles Dickens by addressing this:
When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page. It is not necessarily the actual face of the writer. I feel this very strongly with Swift, with Defoe, with Fielding, Stendhal, Thackeray, Flaubert, though in several cases I do not know what these people looked like and do not want to know. What one sees is the face that the writer ought to have. Well, in the case of Dickens I see a face that is not quite the face of Dickens’s photographs, though it resembles it. It is the face of a man of about forty, with a small beard and a high colour. He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry — in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.
Look Up! Look Up! (Or Is It Down?)
[Image: “Looking Up the Yosemite Valley,” by Alfred Bierstadt.
For more information, see the Haggin Museum site.]
Note: Here for Poetry Friday (hosted today at the impossibly appealing Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast)? Never before been here on a Friday? Just plain confused by what’s going on in this post? You might want to read about my “whiskey river Fridays” series, at its own “About” page.
From whiskey river:
Thursday
I have had my dream — like others —
and it has come to nothing, so that
I remain now carelessly
with feet planted on the ground
and look up at the sky —
feeling my clothes about me,
the weight of my body in my shoes,
the rim of my hat, air passing in and out
at my nose — and decide to dream no more.
(William Carlos Williams [source])
…and, likewise (although whiskey river omits the first stanza):
A Blessing of Angels
May the Angels in their beauty bless you.
May they turn toward you streams of blessing.May the Angel of Awakening stir your heart
to come alive to the eternal within you,
to all the invitations that quietly surround you.May the Angel of Healing turn your wounds
into sources of refreshment.May the Angel of Imagination enable you
to stand on the true thresholds,
at ease with your ambivalence
and drawn in new directions
through the glow of your contradictions.May the Angel of Compassion open your eyes
to the unseen suffering around you.May the Angel of Wildness disturb the places
where your life is domesticated and safe,
take you to the territories of true otherness
where all that is awkward in you
can fall into its own rhythm.May the Angel of Eros introduce you
to the beauty of your senses
to celebrate your inheritance
as a temple of the holy spirit.May the Angel of Justice disturb you
to take the side of the poor and the wronged.May the Angel of Encouragement confirm you
in worth and self-respect,
that you may live with the dignity
that presides in your soul.May the Angel of Death arrive only
when your life is complete
and you have brought every given gift
to the threshold where its infinity can shine.May all the Angels be your sheltering
and joyful guardians.
(John O’Donohue [source])
Stretching to Make a Point
One of my favorite RAMH regulars kindly forwarded this video to me. It’s a clip from a 1944 film called Broadway Rhythm, and the performers here were called the Ross Sisters.
More information on the girls can be found (naturally) on Wikipedia. The video’s been around long enough that I should be embarrassed not to recognize it (especially since I’ve got a copy of That’s Entertainment III, which Wikipedia says includes the bit). But I’m enjoying it too much to be embarrassed.
Innocent times…
For those of you who are writers or artists, do you have any “tricks” which you knowingly perform — because you know you’re good at them (even if you don’t usually admit it, for the sake of modesty or other reasons), and because they’re identifiably yours? Take your last name, or your commenting handle, and add an -ism suffix to it (e.g., Simpsonism): what are your characteristic isms, that is, your bits? what’s your shtick?
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