Running After My Hat

Creation and Completion

January 16, 2009 by John 4 Comments

Making Poetry

“You have to inhabit poetry
if you want to make it.”

And what’s “to inhabit?”

To be in the habit of, to wear
words, sitting in the plainest light,
in the silk of morning, in the shoe of night;
a feeling bare and frondish in surprising air;
familiar . . . rare.

And what’s “to make?”

To be and to become words’ passing
weather; to serve a girl on terrible terms,
embark on voyages over voices,
evade the ego-hill, the misery-well,
the siren hiss of publish, success, publish,
success, success, success.

And why inhabit, make, inherit poetry?

Oh, it’s the shared comedy of the worst
blessed; the sound leading the hand;
a wordlife running from mind to mind
through the washed rooms of the simple senses;
one of those haunted, undefendable, unpoetic
crosses we have to find.

(Anne Stevenson, Collected Poems, p. 101)

…and:

I keep coming back to the statement because it gets at the truth. It’s another way of accounting for the fact that, if a poem is any good, you can repeat it to yourself as if it were written by somebody else. The completedness frees you from it and it from you. You can read and reread it without feeling self-indulgent: whatever it was in you that started the writing has got beyond you. The unwritten poem is always going to be entangled with your own business, part of your accident and incoherence — which is what drives you to write. But once the poem gets written, it is, in a manner of speaking, none of your business.

(Seamus Heaney)

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Placeholder Post: Update on Caboodle Ranch

January 15, 2009 by John Leave a Comment

Those of you who read the “Extreme Ailurophilia” post of last week and worried about the long-term fate of Caboodle Ranch’s hundreds of cats might find comfort in two items:

Nanette, of Pet Palaces in North Carolina, offered a couple of reassuring comments to help explain why some of the worry is misplaced. She comes down once a month, for 7-10 days at a time, to give Craig Grant a hand with the ranch. She and her husband build the “gingerbread houses” for the cats and, she says, are effectively in training to take over for Grant in the event he can’t continue to do the work himself.
At the time my post went up, the article I’d read about Caboodle Ranch had not yet been posted at the magazine’s site. It has now. (Also note the two sidebars, offering more information about feral cats in general.)

[A “real” post coming later today, the gods of the clock willing.]

Paying Attention to Meaning

January 14, 2009 by John Leave a Comment

I wanted to try something… something different for our writing workshop back then.

Not something funny (or was it?). Not something in the psychological horror line. Not a genre piece, not an obviously literary piece. For that matter, none of the things that would pop into workshoppers’ heads when they sat down to read it and started to answer the question, What sort of story has John written?

I wanted to overturn expectations. They knew what sort of story I wrote, after all, or so they thought: a story with some quirky protagonist at center stage, acting out some strange mental drama in a world which stubbornly resisted his or her preconceived ideas of the way the world should work. A story with a lot of… of… thwarting going on.

They’d expect a story, furthermore, that went on for thousands of words.

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The Culprit

January 13, 2009 by John 5 Comments

I couldn’t wait for the plumber to arrive.

Just for him, I’d cleaned out the cabinet under the kitchen sink, and put a bucket under the trap. I’d emptied the (dirty) dishwasher. I’d spread a towel on the floor, thinking that his knees — even more than mine — might appreciate the cushion. I’d left the cabinet door open, and I gestured at it and the sink when I led him into the kitchen. “There they are,” I said, as though he might might have expected more than one sink and drain in the kitchen.

He took in the scene, nodding vaguely at my tale of frustration and woe:

The tale extended back in time hours, days, weeks, to the dawn of time, and it involved gallons of Liquid Plum’r and first a 25-foot and then a 50-foot auger, or “plumber’s snake.” (Perhaps that was the creature which had defeated Adam in the Garden.) The tale involved a dishwasher frothy with gunk-dissolving chemicals, a dishwasher run through multiple (brief) rinses and drain-and-dry cycles. The tale involved mopping and sweeping and more mopping and it merited, by God, a little manly sympathy.

The plumber walked around the kitchen counter and pointed with his thumb to the sliding glass door to the deck.

“All right I use this door?”

“Uhhh… yeah, sure, no problem.” Like, I didn’t know — maybe he and his partner would need to… um… trace the line or something. I pictured the two of them criss-crossing the yard, with GPS units in their hands and pipe-clog-detecting electronic sounding gear strapped to their backs and heads. Plumbing had obviously embraced the 21st-century World of Tomorrow. I opened the door, showed them out, and sat at the kitchen counter to watch.

No plumber(s) for a minute or two. Maybe I’ll just run down the hall to use the bathroom for a few secs, I thought. On my way through the living room, I glanced out the picture window at the driveway. Yes. The two of them were getting their gear. Probably emptying the little van.

As I returned to the kitchen, I heard a metallic clatter and crash out on the deck. What the—?

It was an extension ladder, propped up against the wall outside the kitchen window. The assistant plumber even now was climbing it, in his hands an industrial version of the apparently puny one which I’d spent so much loving, thrashing, cursing time wielding over the last few days.

A pause, the world in suspended animation. From the kitchen ceiling, suddenly, the sound of diamond miners drilling through our roof.

I went out onto the deck. And there I saw the culprit.

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“Defy the Languid Moment”

January 12, 2009 by John 10 Comments

There are lots of traditions of “how to grow old” in less than pleasant ways:

There’s the cantankerous strong-willed (and occasionally frolicsome) oldster. In my mind, the template for this tradition was Twin Peaks Mayor Dwayne Milford, as shown in this scene (“I don’t wanna talk. I wanna shoot!”):

(See what followed this scene by scrolling a little more than halfway down the page at the Twin Peaks Episode Guide: Episode 21. Search for the text string “Act 4” if you’re impatient.)

Then there’s the sort of soft-focus aging depicted in movies like Cocoon and On Golden Pond.
Of course, there are always plenty of news reports — no longer even remotely funny — of the aged wandering away from nursing homes, never to be seen again…
…or, alternatively, of their getting behind the wheel of a car and plowing through markets filled with mothers and children.

Thank God for the counter-examples.

The Telegraph (UK) recently reprinted an interview with someone with her head screwed on straight about getting older: “At 91, Diana Athill has moved from a distinguished career in publishing to success as a memoirist — and has now won the Costa prize for biography.” Excerpts:

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Flange: A Gargoyle Looks at Xmas (Part 2)

January 10, 2009 by John 2 Comments

(written by human John’s co-blogger gargoyle Flj,
but please to call me Flange, how pronounced anyway)
(edited by John for clarity and, um, readability)

You already read Part 1 of this series, yes? If not, it here.

There you learned things about gargoylish Xmas decorations and such.

(Ed. note: Asides in a couple of subsequent posts added some additional factoids.*)

But that post did not explain true heart of gargoylish Xmas, just like human variety: matters of spirit.

Surprised you may be, gargoyles, hideous beasts you probably think of us, even have souls (other than spirits, evil we consume). Let alone that think about and even celebrate spiritual matters. Humans only creatures with souls, no? with theology?

But yes, is true: gargoyles spiritual too.

About Xmas, the souls of gargoyles (much cleverer than human souls) know these things:

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Surprising the Audience

January 9, 2009 by John 4 Comments

[Above still from director Alex Cox’s Walker (1987), which sounds like one of the most
interesting films I’ve never seen. Click image for more info.]

My regular Friday post inspired by the mysteries of the past seven days’ entries at the whiskey river blog. This one’s a little more complex than most — one or two more selections, and a small cluster of strangely relevant associations from elsewhere around the Web.

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Fire and Paper

January 8, 2009 by John 5 Comments

A project pretty easy for a writer to empathize with: rebuilding another writer’s house, post-fire, brick by brick by brick.

Coming as this does on the heels of yesterday’s post about the cat man of Caboodle Ranch, I’ll just say: I know, I know. So many needs… I’m embarrassed to have overdrawn a check recently myself; I know what things are like right now.

But this just feels different — sharper and even more personal — to me. I’ll get back to the regular business of RAMH, whatever the hell that is, later today but in the meantime wanted to deal with this.

You may remember that Toni Morrison lost her house in a Christmas Day fire some 15 years ago. In an interview with Salon, she replied to a question about the fire:

It was just a routine, stupid Christmas fire, in the fireplace, with the coals and the pines smoldering. The wreaths, you know — the detritus, the dried needles were around on the floor and not swept up. And the fire leaped to one of those and leaped to the couch, where it smoldered, and no one knew. I wasn’t there. One of my kids was there. And by the time he got downstairs, it was shooting through the roof. So he called the fire department, but it was a terrible winter, and the water was frozen in the pipes. And I lost … I write by hand … I was able to save some books, but I had all my manuscripts, notes from old books, in my bedroom on the second floor, in a little trundle underneath the bed, where there was some storage space. It went up first. I said to somebody later, “Why did I think that having those things near me was safer than having them in the basement?”

My manuscripts, I didn’t care, I mean, I’m never going to look at that stuff again, so that wasn’t the hurtful part to me. They had a value, I think, to my children. As an inheritance. But I know I would never look at that stuff again. I would never look at “The Bluest Eye” — seven versions, in hand, of it — again. So I was not that upset about that. Other people might be interested in that. For me, it was the pictures of my children and of myself. Family. And I have nothing. Everything’s gone. So, I’m sorry about my children’s report cards, I’m sorry about my jade plants, certain clothes.

Travis Erwin, whom I don’t know, would probably happily insist he’s not a Toni Morrison. Nor am I. But philosophic though I might be about it (as Irwin is), my skin crawls now when I think of how much can be lost when someone who lives by paper experiences a fire.

[Heard about this from MoonRat’s blog yesterday;
Janet Reid followed up with her own thoughts.
Travis’s own account of the fire made it truly immediate.]

Extreme Ailurophilia

January 7, 2009 by John 15 Comments

Cats tend to push people to the outer limits of response; very few people I know can simply take ’em or leave ’em.

The Missus and I are squarely in the cat-loving circle. Except that she developed severe respiratory allergies to cat fur and dander in recent years, we’d probably still be hosting nine or ten of the little beasts instead of letting the supply, well, dwindle. (We’re down to two now.)

The current issue of a local magazine, though, has a story (not yet online) about someone who really cares about cats. His name is Craig Grant, and he’s the proprietor of something called Caboodle Ranch: a 30-acre chunk of the North Florida woods functioning as a sanctuary for feral or otherwise unwanted cats.

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Comes the Dawn

January 6, 2009 by John 2 Comments

[If you’re a regular reader here, you may recall this post from a couple weeks ago, co-written with my co-blogger. In which case, you may be wondering, What about Part 2? Patience, patience. Gargoyles celebrate Xmas for — guess what? — twelve of our days.* Part 2 of “A Gargoyle Looks at Xmas” will probably be up this Thursday.]

Yeah, “Comes the dawn. Also “A light bulb went on over my head”; “Eureka!”; “Now I get it…!” The slap-in-the-forehead moment that we literary types sometimes call… epiphany.

Writerly-advice gurus, agents, and editors will often tell you — rightly — that forms of the word “sudden” are overused, because most often things just happen at their normal rate. A “sudden” occurrence is more likely one which has been taking place all along; it just took someone a long time to notice.

But epiphanies and suddenness go hand-in-hand. There’s a slow but steady accretion of evidence which eventually reaches critical mass and explodes like a fireball in a character’s head: the flashpoint is the epiphany.

(The word’s roots are Greek, literally translating as “a showing forth.”)

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