Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

Paying Attention to Titles

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One of my favorite Biblical stories seldom gets ranked among others’ top ten lists. Maybe only someone who aspires to use words professionally could so like Genesis 2, verses 19-20 (Revised Standard Version):

So out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name.

The man gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every beast of the field…

I’ve always been charmed by this moment in the creation story, which feels almost like the birth of language. (If you can’t name something, you can’t really talk about it.) And I’ve always been a little jealous of Adam for his having that opportunity, always liked to picture myself in his shoes, or in his feet I guess. It would go something like this, I imagine:

God: Okay, for starters let’s try these little things.

JES: Hmm… Wow. You know what they remind me of? You know how when You’re way up in an airplane—

God: I haven’t created airplanes yet.

JES: Okay, fine, just bear with me. Say You’re sitting up there on a cloud and You look down and You see all the people—

God: Nonono, you don’t understand, you’re the first—

JES: Jeez, give it a rest wouldja? And I don’t mean on the seventh day either. I know how this goes, all right? SO anyway You’re on a cloud and You look down and there are all these opposable-thumbed, tool-wielding bipeds swarming around down there. You know what they look like?

God: They look like a—

JES: Stop! I’m doing this, all right? But You’re absolutely correct. They look like ants. So that’s what I’m gonna call these little six-legged critters eating my damn cheese and crackers here on the picnic blanket with us.

God: I guess that makes sense. Why didn’t I think of that Myself?

Etc.

The point is, writers like to invent new ways of referring to things: persons, places, objects. Except, er, well, when it comes to their own works.

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Review: Michael Perry: COOP

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My review at The Book Book is up (as promised, weeks ago).

I think most of you are probably familiar with E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web and (with Will Strunk) The Elements of Style, maybe Stuart Little and so on. If you’ve read his book of essays, though — particularly the ones written once he left the city to live on a farm in rural Maine — you’ll be familiar with some of the themes which Coop explores, both the light-hearted and the profoundly moving.

Michael Perry is not E.B. White. And thank heavens for that (in both directions).

Writing and Silence

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From whiskey river:

Learn how to meditate on paper. Drawing and writing are forms of meditation. Learn how to contemplate works of art. Learn how to pray in the streets or in the country. Know how to meditate not only when you have a book in your hand but when you are waiting for a bus or riding in a train.

(Thomas Merton, Illusory Flowers in an Empty Sky)

Not from whiskey river:

Silence

I have known the silence of the stars and of the sea,
And the silence of the city when it pauses,
And the silence of a man and a maid,
And the silence of the sick
When their eyes roam about the room.
And I ask: For the depths,
Of what use is language?
A beast of the field moans a few times
When death takes its young.
And we are voiceless in the presence of realities —
We cannot speak.

A curious boy asks an old soldier
Sitting in front of the grocery store,
“How did you lose your leg?”
And the old soldier is struck with silence,
Or his mind flies away
Because he cannot concentrate it on Gettysburg.
It comes back jocosely
And he says, “A bear bit it off.”
And the boy wonders, while the old soldier
Dumbly, feebly lives over
The flashes of guns, the thunder of cannon,
The shrieks of the slain,
And himself lying on the ground,
And the hospital surgeons, the knives,
And the long days in bed.
But if he could describe it all
He would be an artist.
But if he were an artist there would be deeper wounds
Which he could not describe.

There is the silence of a great hatred,
And the silence of a great love,
And the silence of an embittered friendship.
There is the silence of a spiritual crisis,
Through which your soul, exquisitely tortured,
Comes with visions not to be uttered
Into a realm of higher life.
There is the silence of defeat.
There is the silence of those unjustly punished;
And the silence of the dying whose hand
Suddenly grips yours.
There is the silence between father and son,
When the father cannot explain his life,
Even though he be misunderstood for it.

There is the silence that comes between husband and wife.
There is the silence of those who have failed;
And the vast silence that covers
Broken nations and vanquished leaders.
There is the silence of Lincoln,
Thinking of the poverty of his youth.
And the silence of Napoleon
After Waterloo.
And the silence of Jeanne d’Arc
Saying amid the flames, “Blesséd Jesus” —
Revealing in two words all sorrows, all hope.
And there is the silence of age,
Too full of wisdom for the tongue to utter it
In words intelligible to those who have not lived
The great range of life.

And there is the silence of the dead.
If we who are in life cannot speak
Of profound experiences,
Why do you marvel that the dead
Do not tell you of death?
Their silence shall be interpreted
As we approach them.

(by Edgar Lee Masters, about whom I first wrote not quite a year ago)

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Public-Service Announcement: From Behind, Footsteps

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Strange days…

The Employer announced last week that they’d be blocking access to Facebook and MySpace, due to some unspecified virus activity. That took effect immediately. Can’t speak for MySpace, but Facebook access seems to have been restored yesterday (haven’t checked yet today).

This morning, a strange combination of “Personal and Social Networking Sites” are also blocked, with no warning.

Included are Flickr, any site hosted at wordpress.org (some sites merely powered by WordPress software), and blogger.com — but not blogspot.com. (Or maybe vice-versa, hard to tell.)

Still, during the workday — so far — I can see all your blog postings via Google Reader. (Even though I can’t see any images from the blocked sites.)

But I can’t actually get to (i.e., comment at) many of them.

(Aside: If your blog posts use those little “– more –” gizmos which restrict viewing to just the first portion of a post, Google Reader likewise will show me only the first portion: I can’t click through to read what follows.)

Anyhow, please don’t be alarmed (or insulted) if I seem to have gone all silent and unidirectional all of a sudden. If the blockade continues, I’ll try to figure out a way to visit more during off-hours

The Interwebs are our Precious. We hates the nasty hobbitses downstairs, we do — nasty hobbitses who steals from us the Precious.

Update: Nope, the doors are locked to Facebook, too. Also Twitter. I experimented a little last week with something called Posterous.com, which would allow me to update FB/Twitter status… but not to read/comment on anyone else’s status, which (for me) is 80% of the attraction. Sigh.

29° 57′ N, 90° 4′ W

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As you know if you’ve been here for a while — even if you haven’t read the explanation of the blog’s title; just from reading the content — the mission of Running After My Hat might be summed up, sorta, like this:

Despite the inherent ridiculousness of the act, to pursue in deadly earnest whatever weird little distraction catches my interest.

You could hardly pick a more appropriate city than New Orleans for pursuits like this. And I guess the obvious place to start doing so literally would be at Meyer the Hatter’s establishment. Says my little Frommer’s guide book:

Meyer’s opened more than 100 years ago and has been in the same family ever since. Today the haberdashery has one of the largest selections of fine hats and caps in the South… Go outfit yourself like a proper gentleman caller.

(No, sorry, I didn’t go into the store. I think that word “proper” discouraged me from entering.)

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Breaking It Down

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From whiskey river:

The states of mind or feelings that art can excite have been helpfully distinguished in Sanskrit aesthetics, where they are called rasas, from a word meaning “juice” or “essence”. A fully achieved work of art should flow with all nine of them: their names might be transposed into English as wonder, joy, sexual pleasure, pity, anguish, anger, terror, disgust and laughter.

(Marina Warner, Monsters of Our Own Making [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Naming of Parts

To-day we have naming of parts. Yesterday,
We had daily cleaning. And to-morrow morning,
We shall have what to do after firing. But to-day,
To-day we have naming of parts. Japonica
Glistens like coral in all of the neighboring gardens,
And to-day we have naming of parts.

This is the lower sling swivel. And this
Is the upper sling swivel, whose use you will see,
When you are given your slings. And this is the piling swivel,
Which in your case you have not got. The branches
Hold in the gardens their silent, eloquent gestures,
Which in our case we have not got.

This is the safety-catch, which is always released
With an easy flick of the thumb. And please do not let me
See anyone using his finger. You can do it quite easy
If you have any strength in your thumb. The blossoms
Are fragile and motionless, never letting anyone see
Any of them using their finger.

And this you can see is the bolt. The purpose of this
Is to open the breech, as you see. We can slide it
Rapidly backwards and forwards: we call this
Easing the spring. And rapidly backwards and forwards
The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers:
They call it easing the Spring.

They call it easing the Spring: it is perfectly easy
If you have any strength in your thumb: like the bolt,
And the breech, and the cocking-piece, and the point of balance,
Which in our case we have not got; and the almond-blossom
Silent in all of the gardens and the bees going backwards and
forwards,
For to-day we have naming of parts.

(Henry Reed, from Lessons of the War [source]; see an excellent film interpretation of the poem here.)

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Wild

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[Image above, “Where the Wild Things Are,” a tribute to Maurice Sendak
by elmicro of the deviantArt site. Click the image to see the original.]

Today marks Maurice Sendak’s 81st birthday.

This year also marks the 45th anniversary of the publication of Where the Wild Things Are.  From 100 Best Books for Children:

After creating art for almost fifty books by other authors, Sendak took up a project of his own begun in November 1955, a saga called “Where the Wild Horses Are.” But since he couldn’t draw horses very well, he tried to think of another character he might use — eventually focusing on “Wild Things.” That idea brought back childhood memories of his Brooklyn relatives — aunts, uncles, cousins — who would come visiting and eat his family food. They pinched his cheeks and cooed over him, saying, “You’re so cute, I could eat you up.” Sendak brought these relatives and the movie King Kong together in his story caldron. As Sendak drew and redrew the Wild Things — at first quite skinny and under-nourished — they gained weight and density.

…

The writer’s favorite fan letter reads: “How much does it cost to get to where the Wild Things are? If it is not expensive, my sister and I would like to spend the summer there.”

The book’s grip on the popular imagination — at least in the US, among the generations which have grown up since 1964 — boggles the mind. And among artists and illustrators? Pfft: words don’t suffice.

(For example, just check out, the deviantArt site where thousands of indie/professional artists display their work online. Do a search on “wild things” and you get over 12,000  hits, among them the illustration which tops this post: Max giving a Wild Thing as good as he gets.  Not all of those hits refer to the book, but a lot — I mean, a lot — of them do.)

Here’s a video of Sendak talking about “his work, childhood, [and] inspirations”:

Finally, if you follow such things you probably already know about the forthcoming film version of Where the Wild Things Are, from director Spike Jonze and screenwriter Dave Eggers. Here’s the trailer for it:

WIP Excerpt: Al Castle Meets… Someone Important

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Background: This passage’s action takes place in 1959. The “Al” here is Al Castle, who owns a metalworking company in southeast Pennsylvania, in a small town named Caerleon. His company has been acquired by a big multi-national corporation named Sarras, which also owns a Welsh firm which brews a particularly elegant, powerful, and pricey ale. Sarras has asked Al to arrange the manufacture of a one-of-a-kind corporate emblem for the brewer: a mug, or a tankard — something like that — which they plan to feature in a series of TV commercials and print ads, at ceremonial corporate functions and the like.

One problem: Al’s company is a manufacturing firm, geared to mass production. He’s terrified that he’s taken on a job that he can’t perform, has promised more than he can deliver. He needs to impress his new board of directors. What can he do?

He’s pondering all this while he finishes up a cup of coffee in a local luncheonette, called Mr. Bill’s. And he’s pretty much decided he’s going to have to admit failure to the people at Sarras. He gets up from his table and leaves Mr. Bill’s.

—-

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Aqua Vitae

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[A modified version of the image above appears as the cover of Pascale Petit’s 2008
collection, The Treekeeper’s Tale. It also pretty much perfectly accompanies
Petit’s poem appearing below, as the first whiskey river entry in today’s post.]

From whiskey river:

What She Wanted

What she wanted was to return
to the original rainforest

hear water pushing
through the sapwood

and leaves eating light
as she wanted to eat light.

She knew her nature
was to be water, not wood.

She knew there was a grove
of vertical rivers

of roaring waterfall-trees,
and a grove of whirlpool-trees

with vortices she could dive through,
past the hollow years of her life

right back to the roots.

(Pascale Petit)

…and:

On those occasions when one’s serenity seems about to collapse, I recommend that one step out into the backyard and vigorously spit.

(David Huddle)

Not from whiskey river… a poet catalogues the waters and other landmarks on the map of her life:

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Crossing the Line

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For me, the last few days of May and the first few of June, in most years, are veined with ambivalence.

First, there’s May 29. As you may have put together by your own clever self, that’s The Missus’s and my anniversary. This has always been an easy date for me to remember, because it was also my Dad’s birthday. Somewhere around here was also my maternal grandmother’s birthday. And finally, because I have many happy childhood memories of Memorial Day — which used to fall every year on May 31 — the very end of the month always seems to carry with it an assertive whiff of celebration and commemoration.

But then we come to the small matter of June 4, 1988…

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