Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

Why I Read Terry Pratchett

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Actually, there are a myriad reasons. (And I can’t think of a single legitimate reason not to read him. Uninformed reasons, yes, and/or reasons based on the faulty assumption that fantasy/SF has nothing to do with reality — or that funny has nothing to do with serious. But legitimate ones? Nope.)

This brief bit from Witches Abroad pretty much boils it down for me. The bare context you need at this point is that a conversation is taking place among three witches. Old Mother Dismass, the subject of this passage, has the ability to see into the future.

“You can’t tell me that’s worth tuppence,” said Old Mother Dismass, from whatever moment of time she was currently occupying.

No one was ever quite sure which it was.

It was an occupational hazard for those gifted with second sight. The human mind isn’t really designed to be sent rocketing backward and forward along the great freeway of time and can become, as it were, detached from its anchorage, seeing randomly into the past and the future and only occasionally into the present. Old Mother Dismass was temporally unfocused. This meant that if you spoke to her in August she was probably listening to you in March. It was best just to say something now and hope she’d pick it up next time her mind was passing through.

The writing is just right; even that “as it were,” which in a lesser writer’s hands might function as mere filler, adds an ironic distance between the author and the things and events which he’s describing.

I love the turnings of the mind behind this passage. Given a common convention of speculative fiction — second sight — just stop. Stop, and ask yourself what it would really mean to have this “gift.” Mightn’t life and thought actually be a little more unpleasantly complicated for the (ha ha) lucky seer than we normally take for granted? How would this power, if someone actually had it, affect those who had to deal every day with its bearer?

Finally, take that whole reductio ad absurdum of a notion and package it up into a supremely funny digression…

Damn. I’d love to be able to do that, and do it repeatedly, over the course of 25+ years (and counting).

Momentary Semantic Vertigo

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Please forgive an extended excerpt from a favorite scene in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass. Humpty Dumpty is here the initial speaker, and he is discussing birthdays vs. un-birthdays:

“…There”s glory for you!”

“I don”t know what you mean by ‘glory’,” Alice said.

Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t — till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!'”

“But ‘glory’ doesn”t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument’,” Alice objected.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that”s all.”

Alice was too much puzzled to say anything; so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. “They’ve a temper, some of them — particularly verbs: they’re the proudest — adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs — however, I can manage the whole lot of them! Impenetrability! That’s what I say!”

“Would you tell me please,” said Alice, “what that means?”

“Now you talk like a reasonable child,” said Humpty Dumpty, looking very much pleased. “I meant by ‘impenetrability’ that we’ve had enough of that subject, and it would be just as well if you’d mention what you mean to do next, as I suppose you don’t mean to stop here all the rest of your life.”

“That’s a great deal to make one word mean,” Alice said in a thoughtful tone.

“When I make a word do a lot of work like that,” said Humpty Dumpty, “I always pay it extra.”

“Oh!” said Alice. She was too much puzzled to make any other remark.

In the supermarket last night, I considered the flashlights displayed for sale. I’d been meaning to get a couple of little flashlights to distribute here and there in the house, for when we have power outages. (Not that we have a lot of them, but you never know.) I selected a couple of nice ones, each running on three triple-A batteries, and what I liked most about them was that their light came from this little cluster of bright LEDs instead of a conventional bulb. Five bucks each.

Took them home, and finally managed to cut through the insanely hard plastic bubble (invented, rumor has it, by the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s Division of Impermeable Wall Materials and then released to the private sector for its own use).

Inserted the batteries, tested them. Great. All was in working order.

Dropped one flashlight here, another in another room, then returned to extract the cardboard packaging inserts from the plastic bubbles in order to toss the inserts into the recycling stack. Before discarding them, though, I thought Okay, you already know what you just bought but what the heck, flipped one over, started to read the fine print on the back.

Here’s what I saw first:

Sounds great, right? Then I read further:

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“Can I Kindleize that Velveteen Rabbit For Ya?”

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Like most writing and reading households, The Missus and mine has books way in excess of the available bookshelf space. We’ve lived in this house for more than eight years now, yet still — still! — somewhere around six or eight cartons and big plastic tubs of books take up space in our (mercifully dry) garage.

On the one hand, as The Missus soberly points out, we’re never going to (re-)read all the books we’ve already got. Why not donate them to Goodwill, the Salvation Army, or just sell the damn things in a garage sale or on eBay?

And yet, and yet…

In just the six or or seven months I’ve been writing here on RAMH, on probably 15 or 20 occasions I have longed to put my hands on a book. Not just any book but a specific one for a specific occasion. A book containing a quote I know, sorta, but don’t know. Or a book containing some random fact which I don’t quite have the words for.

Every one of those books is in one box or another in the garage. I know exactly what their covers look like. Frustratingly, because some of them are in big translucent plastic containers, I can actually see some of them.

(Aside to The Missus: Don’t worry. I’m not about to start rummaging. We both know what will happen: I’ll find another book I wouldn’t mind having to hand, and then another, and then another… Within a half-hour I’ll have an empty box and even less space upstairs in the office for trivial activities like, oh, say, standing and sitting.)

Wouldn’t it be nice if I had all those books on… hmm… online, maybe? or digitized and placed on a little six-inch stack of Amazon Kindles?

A recent Op-Ed piece in the New York Times, by James Gleick*, tackles this problem. The piece begins by discussing the woes besetting the publishing industry (writers, agents, and editors as well as the faceless corporations themselves):

The gloom that has fallen over the book publishing industry is different from the mood in, say, home building. At least people know we’ll always need houses.

And now comes the news, as book sales plummet amid the onslaught of digital media, that authors, publishers and Google have reached a historic agreement to allow the scanning and digitizing of something very much like All the World’s Books. So here is the long dreamed-of universal library, its contents available (more or less) to every computer screen anywhere. Are you happy now? Maybe not, if your business has been the marketing, distributing or archiving of books.

If you’ve spent any time at all recently looking at the blogs of editors and agents, the angst will be familiar to you. It’s rampant not just among the bloggers and other opinion leaders, but among the commenters — often writers, nearly always passionate readers — upon their opinions.

Strangely, what is at stake — driving the panicky stampede over the cliff — isn’t the future of literacy, the real linchpin of civilization. It’s the future of books.

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Perfect Moments: The Boy, The Boy’s Father, The Sandwich

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Hoagie (click for full-size version, alas not for takeout)When The Boy grew up, he would tell people — with slight hesitation, thinking first of pizza — that his favorite food of all was sandwiches.

But there was a time when this was not true. There was a time when all that The Boy knew of sandwiches was what his mother made for him, and what he learned to make for himself:

Peanut butter and jelly, of course; tuna (with mayonnaise, lettuce optional); American cheese (in casual or formal versions, with jelly or mayonnaise respectively); ham and cheese (margarine and mustard); liverwurst (sometimes with cheese, always with mustard). Regardless of specific ingredients, these sandwiches all had one feature in common:

White bread.

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Mr. and Mrs. WS Go for a Walk

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Yesterday would have been William Shakespeare’s and Anne Hathaway’s 426th anniversary. Whew.

Per yesterday’s Today in Literature newsletter, which I’ve just got around to reading, we have this excerpt from Chapter 3 of Mrs. Shakespeare: The Complete Works, “Richard Nye’s fictional send-up of their marriage”:

When Mr William Shakespeare asked me that idle question as to whether I desired him to compare me to a summer’s day, and I said thank you no, we were standing together on the bank by London Bridge. I say together because together is worth remark in a marriage like ours was.

Himself had been picking his nose for at least five minutes, dreaming. As for me, I was counting the heads of the traitors up there on the poles. It was cold, I might tell you….

“Winter,” my husband said suddenly.

He swept off his hat with a flourish, as if he had just discovered some important new truth. I thought he’d read my mind about the day not knowing what season it belonged to. Then, from the green spark in his eyes, I knew there was worse to come.

“Winter what?” I demanded.

“Winter you,” Mr Shakespeare said. “Anne Hathawinterway with her,” he went on, grinning. “You’re more like a day in December,” my husband concluded.

I hit him.

Well, what would you have done?

What a great exercise: inventing dialogue — a whole life — for a famous person whose biography is documented poorly, or not at all.

Letting Go, with Thanks

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From whiskey river:

The wonder of a moment in which there is nothing but an upwelling of simple happiness is utterly awesome. Gratitude is so close to the bone of life, pure and true, that it instantly stops the rational mind, and all its planning and plotting. That kind of let go is fiercely threatening. I mean, where might such gratitude end?

(Regina Sara Ryan, Praying Dangerously)

Not from whiskey river:

Don’t pray when it rains if you don’t pray when the sun shines.

(Leroy “Satchel” Paige, New York Post, October 4, 1959)

…and:

My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it’s on your plate — that’s my philosophy.

(Thornton Wilder, “Sabiba,” The Skin of Our Teeth)

Finally, the song chosen to wrap up the Northern Exposure series. Not everyone is a fan of Iris Dement’s voice, but I think this is a great song. The performance was on Austin City Limits. (If you’d prefer to see the Northern Exposure version, it’s on YouTube as well — in a shorter and quite darkly lit video.)

Lyrics:

Our Town
(words and music by Iris Dement)

And you know the sun’s settin’ fast
and just like they say nothing good ever lasts
Well, go on now and kiss it goodbye but hold on to your lover
’cause your heart’s bound to die
Go on now and say goodbye to our town, to our town
Can’t you see the sun’s settin’ down on our town, on our town
goodnight

Up the street beside that red neon light
that’s where I met my baby on one hot summer night
He was the tender and I ordered a beer
It’s been forty years and I’m still sitting here

But you know the sun’s settin’ fast
and just like they say nothing good ever lasts
Well, go on now and kiss it goodbye but hold on to your lover
’cause your heart’s bound to die
Go on now and say goodbye to our town, to our town
Can’t you see the sun’s settin’ down on our town, on our town
goodnight

It’s here I had my baby’s and I had my first kiss
I’ve walked down Main Street in the cold morning mist
Over there is where I bought my first car
it turned over once but then it never went far

And I can see the sun settin’ fast
and just like they say nothing good ever lasts
Well, go on now and kiss it goodbye but hold on to your lover
’cause your heart’s bound to die
Go on now and say goodbye to our town, to our town
Can’t you see the sun’s settin’ down on our town, on our town
goodnight

I buried my Mama and I buried my Pa
They sleep up the street beside that pretty brick wall
I bring them flowers about every day
but I just gotta cry when I think what they’d say

If they could see how the sun’s settin’ fast
and just like they say nothing good ever lasts
Well, go on now and kiss it goodbye but hold on to your lover
’cause your heart’s bound to die
Go on now and say goodbye to our town, to our town
Can’t you see the sun’s settin’ down on our town, on our town
goodnight

Now I sit on the porch and watch the lightning-bugs fly
but I can’t see too good, I got tears in my eyes
I’m leaving tomorrow but I don’t wanna go
I love you my town, you’ll always live in my soul

But I can see the sun’s settin’ fast
and just like they say nothing good ever lasts
Well, go on I gotta kiss you goodbye but I’ll hold to my lover
’cause my heart’s ’bout to die
Go on now and say goodbye to my town, to my town
Can’t you see the sun’s settin’ down on my town, on my town
Goodnight, goodnight

Thankful for the War Chant

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Despite having spent 40 years of my life in one area of New Jersey or another, and despite having gone into New York City many times, I’ve never seen the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade live.

Oh, it’s been tempting, all right. I do like going to parades — something about them, their not-quite-cheesy sentimentality, their infectious mass giddiness, the tinniness of the music and the general professionalism but occasional ineptitude of the performers, something about them always manages to stir my blood. (This would be blood shared with my late drum-and-bugle-corps Dad and erstwhile drum-majorette Mom, so perhaps it’s not just coincidence.)

But the Macy’s Parade — like Times Square on New Year’s Eve — just seems one of those crowd experiences enjoyed better from the comfort of one’s living room. The views are better. The sound is better. In recent years, with the advent of closed captioning, even more esoteric rewards can be found in the commentary and lyrics previously only guessed at.

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Thought Music

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Idea Clef, c. 2008 by clix of sxc.hu (click for original)What’s the deal with music, anyway?

Why does listening to music feel so much different from listening to anything else? Why does certain music make it easier to work — and certain music make it so much harder?

I’m not talking about coarse basics like volume, or instrumental-versus-vocal music. Apply enough volume, after all, and ANY music becomes mere (or not so mere) noise. No, I’m wondering about subtleties: rhythm, pace, melody, “feel.”

For the rest of this post, if you’d like, feel free to select one of the following three audio streams as your soundtrack. (Or leave them playing in this browser window or tab while you use another to go on doing something else.) They’re all instrumental. And there’s one for each of three genres: classical, jazz, and “post-rock,” a genre I myself wouldn’t have named (which probably just proves that I know nothing consequential about music).

Note: I also tacked on a bonus track; in the course of building this post, I couldn’t stop thinking of this number. It’s much longer than the others, though — 20+ minutes instead of only around six.

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The Sum of All Fears

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From an article entitled “Up and Then Down,” by Nick Paumgarten, in The New Yorker‘s issue of April 21, 2008:

The longest smoke break of Nicholas White’s life began at around eleven o’clock on a Friday night in October, 1999. White, a thirty-four-year-old production manager at Business Week, working late on a special supplement, had just watched the Braves beat the Mets on a television in the office pantry. Now he wanted a cigarette. He told a colleague he’d be right back and, leaving behind his jacket, headed downstairs.

The magazine’s offices were on the forty-third floor of the McGraw-Hill Building, an unadorned tower added to Rockefeller Center in 1972. When White finished his cigarette, he returned to the lobby and, waved along by a janitor buffing the terrazzo floors, got into Car No. 30 and pressed the button marked 43. The car accelerated. It was an express elevator, with no stops below the thirty-ninth floor, and the building was deserted. But after a moment White felt a jolt. The lights went out and immediately flashed on again. And then the elevator stopped.

White would be stuck in the elevator for 41 — forty-one! — hours. A “security” camera captured his entire stay in the Hotel Car 30. Afterwards, he managed to obtain a copy of the tape:

He has watched it twice — it was recorded at forty times regular speed, which makes him look like a bug in a box. The most striking thing to him about the tape is that it includes split-screen footage from three other elevators, on which you can see men intermittently performing maintenance work. Apparently, they never wondered about the one he was in. (Eight McGraw-Hill security guards came and went while he was stranded there; nobody seems to have noticed him on the monitor.)

Here’s the video, the whole 41 hours viewable in about three minutes:
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