Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

Off Balance

by 11 Comments

[Image by Jan Piller at redbubble.com. Click the image for the original/to purchase.]

From whiskey river (italicized portion):

Taking a walk with you

lacking the wit and depth
that inform our dreams’
bright landscapes,
this countryside
through which we walk
is no less beautiful for being only what it seems.
rising from the dyed
pool of its shade,
the tree we lean against
was never made to stand
for something else,
let alone ourselves.
nor were these fields
and gullies planned
with us in mind.
we live unsettled lives
and stay in a place
only long enough to find
we don’t belong.
even the clouds, forming
noiselessly overhead,
are cloudy without
resembling us, and, storming
the vacant air,
don’t take into account
our present loneliness.
and yet, why should we care?
already we are walking off
as if to say,
we are not here,
we’ve always been away.

(Mark Strand [source])

…and:

Anyone whose goal is “something higher” must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.

(Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being [source])

[Read more…]

Ultra-Short Story Competition

by 9 Comments

Can you write a ghost story in no more than 124 characters?

Stuart Neville, author of The Twelve (which I reviewed on The Book Book the other day), is running a little contest. The occasion? That book’s publication tomorrow in the US, called here The Ghosts of Belfast. Following is a brief description of the rules/guidelines (for more information see Neville’s Web site):

  • Compose a ghost story no more than 124 characters in length.
  • By midnight, October 31, Post it in a Twitter tweet, with the hashtag #GhostsOfBelfast.
  • Sit back and wait for the adulation and/or prizes to roll in.

All right, it’s not that simple.

For starters, obviously, if you have no Twitter account you are (as the rude abbreviation says) S.O.L. If you’re in that position, you have one, maybe two options:

  1. Enter it as a comment to this post here on RAMH. I’ll tweet it for you. Since I’ve reviewed his book, I hereby disqualify myself from winning. Should your entry be a winner, I’ll put you and Neville in touch with each other. The drawback to this option: anyone on Twitter who’s following the hashtag will think I wrote your ultra-short, although they’ll know better by the time the contest is over.
  2. Neville says in his guidelines (emphasis added): “Each of those [winning] tweets will be re-tweeted by me and the good folks at Soho Press (or linked to a special page on my website if they’re too long).” This implies to me that he’s willing to consider stories which exceed Twitter’s maximum tweet length. The drawback to this option: you’ll have to figure it out on your own and/or wait for Neville to clarify. Or not. :)
    Update: On reflection… no, he’s not saying the entries can be longer than a tweet’s allowed to be. He’s saying that when he and Soho Press re-tweet the winning entries, they’ll probably be longer than a tweet may be because of extra text which Twitter adds to a re-tweet. (And no, I can’t believe adults actually talk like this.) So you’re stuck: either use Twitter to get credit for the story, or use me to front for you. It’s gotta be Twitter.

As I said above, I myself am not actually entering the contest. But here’s an example of what an entry might look like:

Old guy at the bar glares at you, at anyone who dares to sit nearby. Don’t take it personally; he’s been there since 1843. #GhostsOfBelfast

[Hat tip to Moonrat.]

Review: Stuart Neville’s The Twelve

by 15 Comments

My review of this new thriller is up, over at The Book Book.

(Technically, it’s only newish; it came out in the UK several months ago. However, it’s slated for publication here in the US on October 1, under the title The Ghosts of Belfast.)

Capsule review: an excellent story, told in what is — for another aspiring new author — an embarrassingly expert manner. I have no idea how much this book resembles the form in which he submitted it, but on its evidence Stuart Neville has a long successful career ahead of him.

The book’s setting: contemporary Northern Ireland. On the surface, the IRA is going through all the motions of becoming a respectable, merely political force. But this innocent exterior is threatened by certain old-line forces which long for the days when an opponent could simply be threatened or dispatched outright.

Into this mix comes one Gerry Fegan, a long-time IRA “hard man” — what we might think of here as a goodfella, of the particularly brutal sort — recently released from prison. He’s not really interested in returning to his old ways, and in fact has twelve very good reasons to put them behind: the ghosts of those he has killed, now demanding payment from Fegan. Blood payment — the blood of those who condemned the twelve to death…

I really liked The Twelve. The supernatural angle isn’t heavy-handed; these ghosts appear to no one but Fegan, and intervene in no way directly. No floating candlesticks, no banging doors. But Neville has made them real to Fegan — oh boy are they real to him.

And as a thriller it’s got everything I’d look for: not mere action (though there’s plenty of that) and not mere suspense (ditto), but plenty of heart as well.

__________________

P.S. Stuart Neville is a blogger and sometime commenter on other popular writerly blogs, like Moonrat’s and Nathan Branford‘s places. Other long-time denizens of those places have known him for years, some even having read and/or critiqued early drafts of his book. I myself don’t “know” him in any way, although I have posted maybe two or three comments to his blog in the year since I encountered him as his online persona named “Conduit.”

On the Page vs. Around the Table

by 16 Comments

From yesterday’s New York Times Book Review, we have an essay on “When Writers Speak“:

Like most writers, I seem to be smarter in print than in person. In fact, I am smarter when I’m writing. I don’t claim this merely because there is usually no one around to observe the false starts and groan-inducing sentences that make a mockery of my presumed intelligence, but because when the work is going well, I’m expressing opinions that I’ve never uttered in conversation and that otherwise might never occur to me…

I’m willing to bet that more gray matter starts quivering when I sit down to write than when I stand up to speak. In fact, if you were to do an M.R.I. of my brain right now, you would see regions of it lighting up that barely flicker when I talk. How do I know this? Because I’m writing! In fact, I’m so smart right now that I know my cerebral cortex is employing a host of neurons that are cleverly and charmingly transforming my thoughts and feelings into words. But if I were talking to you about all this, a different set of neurons would be triggered, different connections and associations would be made, and different words and phrases would be generated. In short, I’d be boring the pants off you.

All of which raises a whole lot of questions in my head (while putting a smile on my face).

[Read more…]

So Deep a Sound in Autumn

by 11 Comments

[Image: “Autumn Grasses,” a two-panel folding screen by 19th-century
Japanese artist Shibata Zeshin. Click image for more information.]

From whiskey river (which has been on a William Stafford binge for a few weeks, not that you’ll find me complaining):

Assurance

You will never be alone, you hear so deep
a sound when autumn comes. Yellow
pulls across the hills and thrums,
or in the silence after lightning before it says
its names — and then the clouds’ wide-mouthed
apologies. You were aimed from birth:
you will never be alone. Rain
will come, a gutter filled, an Amazon,
long aisles — you never heard so deep a sound,
moss on rock, and years. You turn your head —
that’s what the silence meant: you’re not alone.
The whole wide world pours down.

(William Stafford [source])

[Read more…]

The Ick Factor

by 12 Comments

The Missus and I saw District 9 on Saturday. I’m tempted to review it in full, but fear I’d reveal too much of its plot. So I’ll just say that District 9 is one of the, I don’t know… two or three best movies I’ve seen for the last 10 or 15 years — in any genre. It raises important questions about what it means to be human, and it leaves them dangling in the air, just daring the audience to answer them. And it does so in the context of a science-fiction, summer-blockbuster, mock-documentary-cum-action film which should be a natural draw for audiences across the board.

Which may sound like a recommendation. You need to see it if you haven’t already, right? But, uh, well… No.

Why not? Because of the ick factor: surgical close-ups; exploding bodies; individual and societal violence (and threat of same)… Some people might even be put off just by the, well, icky appearance of the aliens, who look like viscous love children of THE alien from the Aliens films and H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu.

[Read more…]

Travels

by 9 Comments

From whiskey river:

The Way It Is

There’s a thread you follow. It goes
among
things that change. But it doesn’t
change.
People wonder about what you are
pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s
unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.

(William Stafford [source])

…and:

May your trails be crooked, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds, may your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you — beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.

(Edward Abbey, “A Prayer for the Traveler” [apparently not a title Abbey himself used: source])

[Read more…]

Confuse-a-Dog

by 8 Comments

An old Monty Python skit posits a service called “Confuse-a-Cat.” (Veterinarian to anxious elderly couple: “I think I can definitely say that your cat badly needs to be confused.”) I started to explain the whole thing but was laughing too hard to type properly; I’ll include the seven-minute routine in its entirety at the foot of this post, for those of you who don’t know of it — or just want to see it again.

I remembered this skit this morning, after an episode of complicated human-canine choreography. (A cat was involved as well, peripherally — and perhaps in confusion.)

The Missus and I share one car, which works well for us (with some periodic adjustments) maybe 97% of the time. But boy, that remaining 3% is a killer, and today definitely fell into the 3% basket. Without getting into the details, here’s what had to happen:

  • The Missus needed to use the car for an hour or two, starting at 8 a.m.
  • Our Yorkshire terrier Sophie — who normally goes to work with The Missus — had to stay home. She’s done this before, so it wasn’t exactly a crisis in itself. But there was a catch, or maybe two:
  • We have a housecleaning service come in every couple of weeks…
  • …and while Sophie is much much better at dealing with strangers than she was a year ago, she still completely loses it when a stranger first enters the house. (Translation: high anxiety for both dog and housecleaning personnel.)

The solution I came up with: I’d stay home with Sophie until The Missus got back with the car; this would help keep Sophie calm, or at least distracted. And because that part of the plan required separating dog and housecleaner as much as possible, we’d stay isolated in the upstairs offices (which we clean ourselves). And that part of the plan required that I get not just Sophie, but all her… her appurtenances upstairs with us. (This would be the same upstairs area where our dog-phobic cat lives, by the way. And where Sophie never visits, therefore, except accidentally.)

Some of the appurtenances involved:

  • a collapsible gate which I could set up at the top of the stairway, to keep Sophie upstairs
  • food dish and water bowl (and food and water, of course)
  • bouncy ball
  • dog bed (in the unlikely event that she’d want to sleep)
  • treats A, B, and C
  • the hard-rubber doggy gizmos into which we insert treat A, B, or C and thus make Sophie work for them, by God
  • various materials to enable prompt, sanitary handling of what we might call “dog spillage”

I also needed to take my shower and get dressed for work, pack up the various bags we bring with us each day, get a few things out of the housecleaner’s way, leave a note for her on the front door so she wouldn’t be freaked out by the footsteps and (probable) barking and yelping and reprimanding and pleading overhead, write a check for her, be sure I had a bottle of water for myself — and ditto my Blackberry, to keep me entertained (on the Web) while, as I hoped, Sophie would be entertaining herself.

I had one hour to do all the above. And I wanna tell you, I was sweating when done.

And you know what? If you want to completely reverse the behavior of a hyperactive little dog, this appears to be a great approach: disappear into the bathroom for a half hour and emerge clean and completely dressed; run around furiously, snatching up all of said dog’s everyday sacred objects and carrying them off to forbidden territory; setting up the hated collapsible gate at the top of the stairs; grabbing said dog herself and depositing her on the far side of said collapsible gate, in said forbidden territory; clamber over the gate yourself; flop (soaked and interestingly perfumed) onto the floor, alongside said dog; and there pluck from your shirt pocket a small black rectangular object which you immediately start poking at, madly, with your thumbs.

Worked great, I tell you. Instant and total physical inertia of the canine sort — the opposite of confusing a cat, in fact. And even though it didn’t last, it was thoroughly satisfying for those few minutes.

__________________

Here are the Pythons and their Confuse-a-Cat skit (and here’s the transcript, if you’d like to follow along):

Enough Is Enough! (Er, Isn’t It?)

by 14 Comments

From Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance, by Robert M. Pirsig:

You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It’s easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally.

From “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” a story by Jorge Luis Borges (translation by James E. Irby):

[Menard] did not want to compose another Quixote — which is easy — but the Quixote itself. Needless to say, he never contemplated a mechanical transcription of the original; he did not propose to copy it. His admirable intention was to produce a few pages which would coincide — word for word and line for line — with those of Miguel de Cervantes…

The first method he conceived was relatively simple. Know Spanish well, recover the Catholic faith, fight against the Moors or the Turk, forget the history of Europe between the years 1602 and 1918, be Miguel de Cervantes.

—-

Edit to add (2009-09-17): If you’ve already read this post and the postscripts which follow it, you already know about the book Mrs. West’s Hats. The author/photographer has kindly given permission for me to use an image from the book, which I’ve added to the P.S.

[Read more…]

On the Inside, Looking In

by 13 Comments

From whiskey river (italicized portion):

Messenger

My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird —
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect? Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be
astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all ingredients are here,

which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy
to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,
telling them all, over and over, how it is
that we live forever.

(Mary Oliver [source])

[Read more…]

Verified by MonsterInsights