Placeholder Post: Pre-Playlist

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At least one thing has surprised me about Running After My Hat so far: the extent to which I’m blogging about and incorporating music in my posts.

I mean, it’s not as though I actually know anything about the subject. I’m not a musician or musicologist or, well, much of anything regarding music — except maybe a dilettante fan, skipping from one genre to another…

Anyway, if you’ve visited (almost?) any of the posts in the Music category over there in the left sidebar, you’ve encountered a little gizmo which plays music. It’s got a couple of little VCR-style play/pause buttons, and you can adjust the volume up or down with a little slider (on the left) that looks like the reception-strength bars in a certain company’s cellular-service advertisements.

For instance, here’s the one from last Friday’s post, “A Gift of Frozen Words“:

[audio:somechildrenseehim_georgewinston.mp3|titles=’Some Children See Him’|artists=George Winston]

(For the information of those of you with WordPress-based blogs, for this purpose I use a plugin called, logically enough, the WordPress Audio Player. Find it here, if you’re interested, although here there’s a better set of usage examples and other notes.)

I’ve been meaning to explore using the audio-player thingum to play back an entire playlist, not just a single song. (I have long-term ulterior motives for knowing how to do this.) Christmas music seems an obvious choice for such a playlist, and that’s what I’m experimenting with at the moment.

Back soon. Hopefully with a playlist. :)

Flange: A Gargoyle Looks at Xmas (Part 1)

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Flanges (distant) cousin celebrate (click for original)After much debate, my co-blogger (Flange the gargoyle — “Flj” if you’re a purist of gargoylespeak) and I have finally resolved how to handle the mechanics of posting here.

In this entry, at least, I will simply tell you what he’s told me, translated to English; every now and then I’ll interject a comment from him, to help preserve the, er, voice of the original.

(By the way, that is not Flange himself in the photo, of course. It’s a distant cousin of his, one on a monastery somewhere in what we call, generically, Western Europe. (Flange called it what I believe could be translated as “home.”) I wouldn’t take the word “cousin” too literally; as I understand it, all gargoyle blood relations outside the direct like of descent are described as cousins.)

So, let’s begin with the obvious: Yes, Xmas. Gargoyles see nothing offensive in that X. They’ve always called the holiday Xmas — for far longer than the mere 2,000 years we humans have called it something else.

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A Gift of Frozen Words

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View Pier (click for original and info)

Soundtrack to today’s post: “Some Children See Him”
(piano solo by George Winston from his album December;
click Play button to start, and adjust volume with the little row of bars at the left):

[audio:somechildrenseehim_georgewinston.mp3|titles=’Some Children See Him’|artists=George Winston]

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Getting There, vs. There

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From an appreciation of novelist (and biographer, etc.) Penelope Fitzgerald, by novelist (etc.) Julian Barnes, appearing in The Guardian in July:

Novels are like cities: some are organised and laid out with the colour-coded clarity of public transport maps, with each chapter marking a progress from one station to the next, until all the characters have been successfully carried to their thematic terminus. Others, the subtler, wiser ones, offer no such immediately readable route-maps. Instead of a journey through the city, they throw you into the city itself, and life itself: you are expected to find your own way. And their structure and purpose may not be immediately apparent, being based on the tacit network of “loans, debts, repayments and foreclosures” that makes up human relationships. Nor do such novels move mechanically; they stray, they pause, they lollop, as life does; except with a greater purpose and hidden structure. A priest in [Fitzgerald’s] The Beginning of Spring, seeking to assert the legibility of God’s purpose in the world, says “There are no accidental meetings.” The same is true of the best fiction. Such novels are not difficult to read, since they are so filled with detail and incident and the movement of life, but they are sometimes difficult to work out. This is because the absentee author has the confidence to presume that the reader might be as subtle and intelligent as she is.

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“Stand by Me,” Worldwide

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From the previous post‘s ridiculous heart, to this one’s sublime:

Per the “more info” box at this video’s YouTube page:

From the award-winning documentary, “Playing For Change: Peace Through Music”, comes the first of many “songs around the world” being released independently. Featured is a cover of the Ben E. King classic by musicians around the world adding their part to the song as it travelled the globe. This and other songs such as “One Love” will be released as digital downloads soon; followed by the film soundtrack and DVD early next year.

Sign up at www.playingforchange.com for updates and exclusive content available only to those who…

Join the Movement to help build schools, connect students, and inspire communities in need through music.

Goosebumping stuff…

The Tiny Heart of Darkness

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[I’m working on a seasonal offering with my co-blogger. But, as you can perhaps imagine, complications abound in working on anything with a gargoyle. Communication problems, for one — we’re still getting used to each other’s language. And no computer “hard”ware known is meant for handling by someone with fingers of stone and eyes incapable of focusing on anything but the vague middle distance. So in the meantime, there will probably be a couple of brief posts here — like the one below — just to keep the site at a low simmer.]

Among the many dramatic narratives playing across the pop-culture landscape of recent years, one of the most dramatic — from a certain perspective — has been the South Park saga. Not that there’s really a continuing story line (each episode stands more or less on its own), no; the “dramatic arc” such as it is comes from the tension between what the show is and does, and what the broader culture implicitly says it may say and do.

(The popular saying “pushing the envelope” seems a little lame to describe South Park. The envelope in question isn’t just being “pushed” from inside; it’s actually bulging, rippling, threatening at every moment to tear itself from the addressee’s hands.)

The chief source of this tension, as in many works of, umm, art and literature, is the antagonist. The villain. The… resident evil.

Eric Theodore Cartman.

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Story Starters: The Writer’s Idea Bank

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When I first started programming, both I and a brother-in-law worked for AT&T. This was back in the days before all the local phone networks got spun off into their own companies — when the entire US phone network was called, collectively, “the Bell System.”

My brother-in-law, whom I will here call The BiL, was at the time an electrical engineer. As such, he too knew some things about programming. Like me, he also had (has) a flair for, umm, let’s say for an anarchic sort of jokes. And so we entertained ourselves for a brief time with a a thought experiment: an idea for a proposed software package, never built, which we called “BellPorn.” (In the post below, rather than use the actual P-word and attract all manner of unseemly traffic, I will indicate it thusly: p*graphy.)

It was a simple idea, or so it seemed:
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The “Greener” Other Side of the Fence

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Agent Jessica Faust of the BookEnds, LLC blog, on “Offering Representation to Published Authors,” seeks to reassure new authors that things could be worse for them: they might have a track record.

If a previously published author comes to me seeking representation, I need to, of course, look at the new work to see if it’s something I would even want to represent, and then if it passes that test I must consider the sales figures for the author’s previous work or works, and this is where things can get sticky. In case anyone has forgotten, this is a business, and when considering a new author a publisher’s, and therefore an agent’s, primary consideration needs to be how money can be made and how much. An author who only two years ago had incredibly poor sales numbers is going to have a hard time crawling out from under that. Bookstores are going to look at those numbers when placing orders and editors are going to look at those numbers when making an offer. So, unless the book is absolutely phenomenal, or a completely new direction for this author, it’s going to be a difficult sale for me.

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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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