Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

Bookwormed

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Ron Arad's Bookworm bookshelf (click for more info)Seems I have been “bookworm tagged” by Julie Weathers.

“Bookworm Award” rules:

  1. Open the closest book — not a favorite or most intellectual book — but the book closest at the moment, to page 56
  2. Write out the fifth sentence, as well as two to five sentences following
  3. Tag five innocents [or more]

With the assumption that “book” means “published book, not your own manuscript, Mr. or Ms. Writer,” followed immediately by the thought that it would be interesting, in fact, to apply to writing friends’ manuscripts, Julie has added another step:

4.  Repeat steps 2 and 3 for your own manuscript.

So, umm… okay.

I’m going to disregard tech-reference books, which are stacked over and around my computer. The closest other book I can put my hands on without getting up and looking around is a well-thumbed 1967 paperback edition of Catch-22, which is still on my desk from when I reviewed it for MoonRat’s “celebrate reading” series back in June.

In this passage, the protagonist, Yossarian, is talking with his friend Hungry Joe about nightmares. Hungry Joe is speaking sentence #5 on page 56, and the conversation continues:

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Near-Misses: The Legend of 1900

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The Missus roamed the aisles of the video store a few nights ago, not looking for anything in particular. (Which is to say, she’d ceased looking for anything in particular: it was one of those in-between times when all the “new releases” on our must-see list had already been claimed by renters with more disciplined calendars  and schedules.)

Knowing me to be a fan of director Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso, she brought home his 1998 English-language debut, The Legend of 1900. Which we (well, I) watched last night.

What an interesting premise, with all sorts of opportunities for metaphor and sentiment:

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Sweet Mystery

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Kitty Kitsch: Jeanette McDonald and Nelson Eddy

[Image above is a “Kitty Kitsch” sculpture by C. David & Ferbie Claudon,
depicting feline versions of Jeanette McDonald and Nelson Eddy
serenading each other in the Canadian wilderness. Click image for more info.]

From whiskey river:

Strange Life

It’s as if you are alone in a room
in an empty house and there’s music
playing somewhere, the kind of
music that you always knew would
accompany a moment like this
The air is heavy. The water in
the pool outside looks like glass
The color of everything can be
described as in the blue hour,
which eventually fades to gray
Yes, it’s a strange life
But wait. It’s getting stranger still

(by Eleanor Lerman)

Not from whiskey river:

The Mystery of Meteors

I am out before dawn, marching a small dog through a
meager park
Boulevards angle away, newspapers fly around like blind
white birds
Two days in a row I have not seen the meteors
though the radio news says they are overhead
Leonid’s brimstones are barred by clouds; I cannot read
the signs in heaven, I cannot see night rendered into fire
And yet I do believe a net of glitter is above me
You would not think I still knew these things:
I get on the train, I buy the food, I sweep, discuss,
consider gloves or boots, and in the summer,
open windows, find beads to string with pearls
You would not think that I had survived
anything but the life you see me living now
In the darkness, the dog stops and sniffs the air
She has been alone, she has known danger,
and so now she watches for it always
and I agree, with the conviction of my mistakes.
But in the second part of my life, slowly, slowly,
I begin to counsel bravery. Slowly, slowly,
I begin to feel the planets turning, and I am turning
toward the crackling shower of their sparks
These are the mysteries I could not approach when I was younger:
the boulevards, the meteors, the deep desires that split the sky
Walking down the paths of the cold park
I remember myself, the one who can wait out anything
So I caution the dog to go silently, to bear with me
the burden of knowing what spins on and on above our heads
For this is our reward:Come Armageddon, come fire or flood,
come love, not love, millennia of portents —
there is a future in which the dog and I are laughing
Born into it, the mystery, I know we will be saved

(also by Eleanor Lerman*)

Finally, this: If you’re familiar with Mel Brooks’s 1974 film Young Frankenstein, you know the scene in which Madeline Kahn’s character — Elizabeth, Dr. F’s fiancee — first meets up with The Monster (played by Peter Boyle). Or rather let’s say, the scene in which The Monster first makes himself known to her. The scene which, uh, climaxes with Kahn’s operatically ecstatic warbling of the first few lines of the song “Sweet Mystery of Life.”

The YouTube clip below takes a different approach with the song. Here, the singer is Mario Lanza; over that glorious voice are interleaved a host of scenes fom Young Frankenstein (except, interestingly, any scenes featuring Madeline Kahn or Peter Boyle).

(By the way, if you’d like to see the Kahn-Boyle moment itself, of course it’s on YouTube as well.)

Update, a little later on 2008-12-12: Over at the inestimable Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast site, coincidentally, Jules is also thinking about great movie-music moments.

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* Eleanor Lerman’s work has now made three appearances in two consecutive Friday posts here. (Here‘s last week’s, which includes Lerman’s lovely “Starfish.”) This pretty much makes her the only candidate for the title of RAMH Poet Laureate. I didn’t even know there was such a title.

I Can Has Claus. Teef Too.

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From the Associated Press, December 10, 2008:

Santa Claus posed with a very large kitty on his lap — and now, unfortunately, he might need rabies shots. Jonathan Bebbington was playing the jolly old elf during a Santa Paws photo event at a PetsMart store when he was bitten Sunday on the wrist and hand. The event was to raise money for Penny Angel’s Beagle Rescue group.

The cat and owner disappeared after the incident. At least one person thought it was a bobcat, said Joan Kerr, president of Penny Angel’s.

“It had absolutely huge paws, like 3 inches around,” Kerr said.

One person reported that the cat’s name was Benny.

Of course, anyone with even a nodding familiarity with common urban slang knows that benny is a nickname for the drug benzedrine. According to one description of their effects, bennies “hit users with a fast high, making them feel powerful, alert, and energized… pump up heart rate, breathing, and blood pressure, and they can also cause sweating, shaking, headaches, sleeplessness, and blurred vision… Prolonged use may cause hallucinations and intense paranoia.”

The AP story notes, drily:

The woman who brought it to the store told people there she bought the cat from a breeder in Wyoming for $1,500.

“Her last words were, ‘I have a permit and the cat has all his vaccines,'” Bebbington said.

Her last words. Right. Wanna bet that “have” wasn’t her only four-letter last word?

Some posts just write themselves…

Update, 2008-12-12: There’s been a flurry of conflicting later reports about this. One AP followup story, posted at the MSNBC site — including a video of Jonathan Bebbington, his (rather minor) wounds, and the cat itself — claimed that the cat, hallelujah, was not a bobcat after all.

Reporters for the Philadelphia Inquirer determined, specifically, that it was a special breed called a “pixie-bob” — domesticated, merely resembling a real bobcat.

Not so fast, says the Big Cat News blog:

…that is a bobcat. I have worked with bobcats for more than 20 years and have 47 of them at Big Cat Rescue. The cat is not a hybrid, not a Pixie Bob. The owner is lying. See dozens of bobcat photos for yourself at BigCatRescue.org Carole Baskin CEO of Big Cat Rescue

Pixie Bob breeders also commented at the site [where the blogger read the Inquirer story] that the cat in Santa’s lap is not a Pixie Bob.

We on the outside are left to wonder. We wonder about the cat, of course. We wonder about the cat’s owner. And we wonder what must have been running through Jonathan Bebbington’s mind when someone handed him 30 pounds of muscle, fur, fangs, and claws, and the first dog barked.

How It Was: Deck the Halls

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The time: late fall, 1990.

The place: Ashland, Virginia.

A young(ish) man sits at a card table by his bedroom window. He is temporarily jobless, by choice, and living on accumulated savings while he writes what will become his first book.

And he is panicking, inwardly, because nowhere in his budget is there sufficient flexibility for anything like Christmas presents for his family…

I think back on it now and know, know with certainty, that the panic was silly (if not foolish). Nevertheless, panicky I was.

And then I suddenly thought to myself: Well, self, you are after all presuming to be a writer. Surely you can put that to use. Give them something unique, something written, something true (if fuzzily factual)…

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Happy Birthday, Mr. Milton

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Wow — four hundred years, and (many) people still don’t even furrow their brows when you say the name “John Milton.” Most of us aspire to be remembered for one-fourth of that span, if that much.

Today, Milton’s memory is honored (if not read, exactly) principally for his epic works, Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained — and, to a lesser extent, for his other poetry.

But in his time he was also something of a political gadfly. Wikipedia speaks of his “radical, republican politics and heretical religious views,” which — coming, as they did, before, during, and after the English Civil War — ensured either his popularity (during Cromwell’s Commonwealth) or his ostracism (during the monarchy).

Among the forward-thinking issues which Milton made a point of espousing was freedom of written expression (what we’d call freedom of the press, today).

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Line Burners

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You’ve probably encountered references to NaNoWriMo here, at least in the comments — the so-called “(Inter)National Novel Writing Month” of November. This project encourages people who want to write fiction to, well, do it; everyone who signs up agrees to try writing a complete 50,000-word novel over the course of the thirty days.

(There’s no penalty for not succeeding, and “winners” — anyone who meets the 50K target — don’t win much more than the approbation of peers and a cool badge to display on their Web sites. A few NaNoWriMo participants, however, have gone on to publish what they started and finished there.)

If you do the NaNoWriMo math, dividing 50,000 words by 30 days, you get the average number of words to be written each day: a little over 1,666. It’s a pretty ambitious schedule for people with otherwise busy lives (day jobs, families and other relationships, keeping up with current events, hobbies, and so on). And yet, as I’m finding, there’s a writing challenge even harder — for me — to keep up with. It’s called Burning Lines.

Here’s how it started, with an exchange of comments on Kate Lord Brown’s What Kate Did Next blog. (Kate’s next post actually announced the start of the project.)

Years ago, I’d participated online in what we then called a “round-robin” story. The idea was to enlist, oh, a dozen people or so in a community writing project. We worked up a schedule of rotation: Writer 1, then Writer 2, and so on; each writer, in turn, would add a new installment to the end of a story begun by Writer 1. No deadline for each installment, as I recall, but it was understood that we’d have day to consider and post each one. So it unfolded in a stately pace (as it now seems), over the course of however long it took.

The Burning Lines project adds a whole ‘nother layer to the experience — a layer of… excitement? mania? fear? chaos? disorientation? all the above?

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Leaving a Light On the Reality of Writing

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Short-lived triumph, by Shannon Wheeler (click for critical last two frames)

[Don’t assume the above is the whole story. Click the image to see the
complete strip from Shannon Wheeler’s “How to Be Happy” series.]

Like me, you have probably heard more than once the assertion — pronounced in a gentle voice, at the end of a radio commercial (for the Motel 6 chain) consisting entirely of nothing but that gentle voice — “We’ll leave the light on for you.” Like me, you may have assumed that the speaker, self-identified as a “Tom Bodett,” either founded or at least owns or otherwise presides over Motel 6.

Not so. Here’s how Wikipedia summarizes his work: “…an American author, voice actor and radio host.” Far from having any official capacity for Motel 6, he’s just its “current spokesman.” (Many more details can be found at Bodett’s own site.)

In a commentary broadcast a couple years ago on Bob Edwards’s XM Radio program, Bodett talked about a side of “the writing life” which will be painfully familiar to just about anyone who’s attempted to take it seriously. Bodett himself is kidding. Sort of:

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Everyday Matters

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Giant screw

[Photo of a giant Archimedes screw. Funny, isn’t it — how
a giant screw can be both a problem and a solution?]

From whiskey river:

Starfish

This is what life does. It lets you walk up to
the store to buy breakfast and the paper, on a
stiff knee. It lets you choose the way you have
your eggs, your coffee. Then it sits a fisherman
down beside you at the counter who says, Last night,
the channel was full of starfish. And you wonder,
is this a message, finally, or just another day?

Life lets you take the dog for a walk down to the
pond, where whole generations of biological
processes are boiling beneath the mud. Reeds
speak to you of the natural world: they whisper,
they sing. And herons pass by. Are you old
enough to appreciate the moment? Too old?
There is movement beneath the water, but it
may be nothing. There may be nothing going on.

And then life suggests that you remember the
years you ran around, the years you developed
a shocking lifestyle, advocated careless abandon,
owned a chilly heart. Upon reflection, you are
genuinely surprised to find how quiet you have
become. And then life lets you go home to think
about all this. Which you do, for quite a long time.

Later, you wake up beside your old love, the one
who never had any conditions, the one who waited
you out. This is life’s way of letting you know that
you are lucky. (It won’t give you smart or brave,
so you’ll have to settle for lucky.) Because you
were born at a good time. Because you were able
to listen when people spoke to you. Because you
stopped when you should have and started again.

So life lets you have a sandwich, and pie for your
late night dessert. (Pie for the dog, as well.) And
then life sends you back to bed, to dreamland,
while outside, the starfish drift through the channel,
with smiles on their starry faces as they head
out to deep water, to the far and boundless sea.

(by Eleanor Lerman)

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