Bibliobibuli

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Got a couple of words for you.

The first is the one in this post’s title. This is:

…a word coined by H. L. Mencken which means “people who read too much and so are generally oblivious to the world around them.”

Many of you probably know such people.

And then there’s dord. Yes: dee-oh-are-dee. Dord.

What an odd word, you’re thinking. It certainly doesn’t look like English. Well, it looks kinda like word. Especially if I tell you it’s a noun, meaning “density.”

There’s just one catch: it’s pretty much impossible to use it in a sentence — at least, if you’re not discussing dord AS a word. Why? Because it doesn’t exist.

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The Look of a Writer’s Blog: Putting Readers at Ease

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[This borders on “for geeks only” territory. But I think it’s worth at least some attention if you aspire to get — and keep — a reading audience for your words on the Web.]

A highly respected site for Web-site designers, typographers, and so on, is called A List Apart. It’s been around for years, freely dispensing advice and information from various experts on how to make pages look good and behave properly.

You may or may not know that a given page looks differently when viewed in one Web browser vs. another (Firefox vs. Internet Explorer vs. Safari vs. Opera vs. whatever); even if you know that, though, you may not know why you perhaps should care… let alone what to do about it. If that bothers you, and if you’re not too intimidated by tech subjects presented gracefully, A List Apart needs to be in your bookmarks list.

Regardless of your expertise, I want to draw your attention to a recent article by Mandy Brown, “In Defense of Readers.” It will be of interest to anyone placing his or or her words online, in an environment — like a blog — where one hopes or expects to attract readers as well as mere visitors.

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Of Time, Things Small, and Things Green

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Typestick Thank-You Card, from Green Chair Press (click for original)From whiskey river:

The Moment

Walking the three tiers in first light, out
here so my two-year-old son won’t wake the house,
I watch him pull and strip ragweed, chicory, yarrow,
so many other weeds and wildflowers
I don’t know the names for, him saying Big, and Mine,
and Joshua — words, words, words. Then
it is the moment, that split-second
when he takes my hand, gives it a tug,
and I feel his entire body-weight, his whole
heart-weight, pulling me toward
the gleaming flowers and weeds he loves.
That moment which is eternal and is gone in a second,
when he yanks me out of myself like some sleeper
from his dead-dream sleep into the blues and whites
and yellows I must bend down to see clearly, into
the faultless flesh of his soft hands, his new brown eyes,
the miracle of him, and of the earth itself,
where he lives among the glitterings, and takes me.

(Len Roberts)

Not from whiskey river:

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Department of Barely Restrained Comment
(Jane Austen Desk)

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From Variety (courtesy of The New Yorker‘s “The Book Bench” blog):

Rocket launches ‘Predator’
Clark to direct aliens vs. Jane Austen pic
By MICHAEL FLEMING

Elton John’s Rocket Pictures hopes to make the first Jane Austen adaptation to which men will drag their girlfriends.

Will Clark is set to direct “Pride and Predator,” which veers from the traditional period costume drama when an alien crash lands and begins to butcher the mannered protags, who suddenly have more than marriage and inheritance to worry about.

[…]

“It felt like a fresh and funny way to blow apart the done-to-death Jane Austen genre by literally dropping this alien into the middle of a costume drama, where he stalks and slashes to horrific effect,” [Rocket Pictures’ David] Furnish said.

What’s in a Song: I Get Along Without You Very Well
(Part 2)

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Excerpt from Hoagy Carmichael's 1st draft of 'I Get Along Without You Very Well'[This is another in an occasional series on popular songs with long histories. Part 1 — on the song itself as finally recorded by numerous artists — appeared on Tuesday.]

Hoagy Carmichael published “I Get Along Without You Very Well” in 1938. (The copyright date was November 18.) But the song’s history stretched back over 15 years earlier, and the sheet music as published bore two signs of this past:

  1. The full title of the song included, at the end, “(Except Sometimes)” — a phrase which appears nowhere in the lyrics.
  2. Following Carmichael’s name as the songwriter appeared the note, “Words inspired by a poem by J.B. (?)”

Why “Except Sometimes”? Who was J.B.? And why that trailing question mark?

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Comment Madness

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Attention readers: exciting news!

Sorry, folks, the commpetition (snort, cackle) is now closed. The winner is Tessa, of Nuts & Mutton.

And heck, I’m feeling so expansive right now that I’ll even toss the pen I use to sign it into the box.

As you can see from the partial screen capture at the left, Running After My Hat has to date received 999 approved comments (including pingbacks).

For the author of the 1,000th comment, I’m giving away a prize: a signed copy of my next book.

Fire away!

_________________________

TERMS AND CONDITIONS:

  • Void where prohibited by law.
  • John reserves the right to do things like post-date comments or otherwise shuffle them around if, like, say, a complete stranger on a random drive-through just happens to catch this post and sprays the comment box with text.
  • …which isn’t to say he WILL, only that he MAY.
  • Family of RAMH crew members not eligible.
  • …or, possibly, eligible.
  • As any regular reader here knows, my “next book” is at this time merely a possibility.
  • It’s the thought that counts.

What’s in a Song: I Get Along Without You Very Well
(Part 1)

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[Another in an occasional series on popular songs with appeal across the generations. This post will be broken into two parts; Part 2, about this song’s composition, appears tomorrow [edit to add:] or the next day Thursday.]

There’s a trick performed by some songwriters — I don’t know the term for it, if there is one — in which they “overstuff” their lyrics’ lines with extra syllables.

This is similar to what, in poetry, is called sprung rhythm: “verse” which mimics the rhythm of natural speech.

It also calls to mind a sly little bit of business by Alexander Pope. In demonstrating the awkwardness of so-called alexandrine meter — twelve syllables per line — Pope once, as Wikipedia says, “famously characterized the alexandrine’s potential to slow or speed the flow of a poem in two rhyming couplets consisting of an iambic pentameter followed by an alexandrine.” One of these two couplets goes:

A needless alexandrine ends the song
that like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along.

See the way that second line seems overloaded with syllables? That’s pretty much the idea I’m getting at here.

In a song, though, the effect can be either subtler or more ponderous, as the words follow the underlying instrumentation — and depending on the singer’s skill. It’s not like we’re just reading the words on a page, free to imagine, if we want, that the line breaks and meter don’t count at all: it has to “sound right.”

So let’s start out with the lyrics, then, to “I Get Along Without You Very Well” (Hoagy Carmichael*, 1939):

I get along without you very well,
Of course I do,
Except when soft rains fall
And drip from leaves, then I recall
The thrill of being sheltered in your arms.
Of course, I do.
But I get along without you very well.

I’ve forgotten you just like I should,
Of course I have,
Except to hear your name,
Or someone’s laugh that is the same,
But I’ve forgotten you just like I should.

What a guy, what a fool am I.
To think my breaking heart could kid the moon.
What’s in store? Should I phone once more?
No, it’s best that I stick to my tune.

I get along without you very well,
Of course I do.
Except perhaps in spring.
But I should never think of spring,
For that would surely break my heart in two.

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Humatons, Arise

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A disaster which befalls the Internet from time to time is the expiration of Web sites tied not to any particular domain name, but to the sites’ owners.

I’m thinking here of generically-formed URLs, like:

www.someisp.com/~username

Generally, when you get an email address from an ISP you also get some nominal amount of Web space, like 10MB or so, whose address is something like the above. Inevitably, some users make better use of this facility than others. And it’s those odd little back corners of the Web in jeopardy.

I recently came across such a site, called The Kooks Museum. This is a site built by one Donna Kossy, in support of her 1994 book Kooks: A Guide to the Outer Limits of Human Belief. What does she mean by “kooks”? As she happily quotes from the introduction to the book:

What distinguishes “kook” from other dismissive and stigmatizing terms? The various words denoting insanity — “crazy,” “psychotic,” “schizophrenic,” etc. — are not, for my purposes, interchangeable with “kook.” An obsessed murderer may be considered psychopathic or crazy, but more often than not these words categorize action, not belief. The obsessed serial killer is not necessarily a kook.

We must also distinguish kooks from quacks, frauds and hoaxers, for kooks are invariably sincere. Their main intent is not to deceive or defraud; to the contrary, they are trying to impart an essential truth. A kook’s thoughts rarely turn to profit; some squander personal fortunes to investigate or spread The Word. A New Age personality who channels a wise entity from the Pleiades is not a kook if his channeled voice is designed to attract funds.

Finally, it is important to differentiate a kook from an eccentric. An eccentric is defined as someone with an unorthodox lifestyle, which may or may not include unorthodox beliefs. Is a hermit a kook? Can we call a scatological fetishist a kook? Not necessarily, especially if they haven’t codified their own preferences as an eternal truth.

Is this not a useful set of definitions? Is The Kooks Museum not a site worthy of a more permanent home?

I say yes to both questions. (God forbid someone clicking on that hyperlink above should someday be greeted with a dread “404 – Not Found” page.)

In the meantime, here are some samples of the, um, authors and their works commemorated there.

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Dream Talk

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Somewhere around here we’ve got one of those little reference books to help you interpret your dreams. You know the ones — structured sort of like a thesaurus, so when you look up a word or phrase (“coffee,” say, or “horror movie” or “lava lamp”) you get an instant read on what that object or experience represents. Especially if you look up more than one dream-thing at a time, and combine the interpretations. (“You are concerned about sleeping too much” + “You need more Citizen Kane and less hockey-mask Jason in your life” + “You vaguely remember your life of 30-40 years ago” = “Dude…”)

I need to find it to look up my two most recent (remembered) dreams. At least they were on different days, so there’s no chance (is there?) that they’re related. Both had a curious visual quality to them — not quite animated, and not quite like viewed as an old scratchy film, but not not quite not animated or scratchy, either.

Sunday morning, minutes before waking

I dream that I am lying in bed, and that I am in that pleasant half-conscious state where one has the option of getting out of bed right that moment or drowsing a little longer. In the dream, I opt to get out of bed finally when I hear dream-voices.

In the dream’s master bathroom, our next-door neighbor (whom I will call Mrs. L) is discussing something with The Missus. Mrs. L has a clipboard in one hand, which she consults or annotates from time to time, and I get the distinct impression that Mrs. L is our landlady (although we don’t rent this house).

My dream-self gets out of bed. Uncharacteristically — so uncharacteristically that I know this must be a dream — I’m not self-conscious about standing there in my underwear. I kind of give the women a little finger-wave and then, because I obviously can’t use the master bathroom at the moment, I walk briskly down the short hall to the guest bathroom.

But you know, there’s something odd about this guest bathroom. Or rather, some things.

The tub is gone. There is no sign a tub ever occupied that part of the bathroom: the wall is blank, the tile floor extends right up to the wall. There is nothing at all in that roughly 3’x6′ area. Nothing hangs on the wall. It’s just… empty.

There is no toilet.

The vanity is lower, only about thigh-high or so, and not as broad as the real thing. It’s like a two-thirds-scale model vanity, in fact. No mirror is on the wall above it.

Everywhere — around the edges where the vanity meets the wall and floors, between the tiles — the grout is fresh.

“Uh, honey?” my dream-self calls. “What happened to the guest bathroom?”

The Missus materializes at my side. “Oh,” she explains, “the pipes were clogged.”

And that’s when I woke up.
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Haunted by What’s Inside

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Inside Looking Out, by Trish Bilch (click for original)From whiskey river:

People talk about the discontent in the world and about existential anxiety as if it were something new! Everyone at every period in history felt it. You have only to read the Greek and Latin authors! It is not true that the individual with his emotional life no longer feels himself the center of the world! What do you think really interests people from morning to night if it isn’t their feelings, their work and love — especially love.

(Alberto Giacometti)

Not cited at whiskey river, but the above quotation continues:

…They read the newspaper maybe ten minutes a day, they see that a satellite is orbiting around the moon, and then they immediately start talking again about work, and love. And not only that: often somebody will commit suicide because of love problems. And that means that if an individual would rather die than live without a person he loves, then the power of emotion does still dominate the world.

(cited by Reinhold Hohl in Giacometti: A Biography in Pictures)

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