Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

First Lines, Last Lines

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Ginevra de Benci, by Leonardo da Vinci

Short version: As an exercise, start a story with one “found” sentence, and end it with another:

First sentence:

I ask your forgiveness.

Last sentence:

I am a mountain tiger.

Note: The italics as presented above don’t have any significance; they aren’t meant to emphasize the text, nor do they indicate that these lines are spoken by someone.

Extra credit: Involve in the story, in some way, the image of the woman at the left. She may be a character in the story (either the “I” in the first and last lines or someone else), perhaps the story will be about the work of art itself.

Report back sometime before Labor Day.

Long version:

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The Extravagant Gesture

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From whiskey river:

The extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. After one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire since the word go. — Annie Dillard

Actions Speak Louder

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Robert Mitchum in 'Night of the Hunter'Writer’s dilemma: “Show, don’t tell.” “But how do I show somebody who’s uneasy? Isn’t that why we have the adjective ‘uneasy’ in the first place — sort of shorthand for all the… the stuff an uneasy person might do?”

Um, no.

Enter The Emotion Thesaurus, a (weekly?) Thursday feature at The Bookshelf Muse.

You start to type how your [Main Character] is cringing in terror and then stop. You glance back a page and shake your head. Somebody cringed in the last scene — can’t use that one. Hot, shuddering breaths? Nope, breathing’s already come up a million times in this book, so that beat won’t work. You need something different, something unique to show fear. His eyes widened? His face was a frozen mask? Pu-leeze. The POV police are screaming at the thought.

The joy and energy starts to leak out of you. The excitement that brought you here is fading. You can’t seem to find the right way to show the rawness of your character’s fear. Everything action you come up with seems trite or hollow or cliché.

Reality trickles in: the coffee’s even colder now, and the mailman has gone. Your flyers are probably out there on the step, about to blow away. And of course the eerie silence means your dog no longer needs to go outside. You sag in your chair, defeated by a descriptive beat.

As you leave to mop up Mr. Ruffy’s mess, you glance at the computer screen and think, if only I had a thesaurus of emotional beats.

…Now, if you draw a blank on how to show your character’s emotion through a physical action (a beat), we can help. Each Thursday we will introduce new cardinal emotions to our thesaurus, offering you an ‘idea bank’ for the times when you get stuck. You can scroll through our lists, and see if one of our ideas sparks one of your own.

For instance, here’s a selection from yesterday’s post, on “impatience”:

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The “Sing, Sing, Sing” Triptych

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A couple of months ago here, I posted a long short story I wrote some years back, called “Sing, Sing, Sing.” Whatever else that post might have accomplished, it’s managed to get a certain amount of attention from Googlers. Among other variations, hits have come to the post from searching on these phrases:

  • sing sing sing
  • sing sing sing arrangement
  • carnegie goodman sing sing sing

and my favorite:

  • words of sing sing sing by benny goodman

(Hint: The Goodman version of “Sing, Sing, Sing” — despite its title — has no words. Straight instrumental.)

In the interest of serving those who might really be searching for information about or analyses of the piece (surely one of the most famous recordings in jazz history), I thought I’d elaborate some about it, using excerpts from my story.

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Death of a Jacket

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There’s so much news every day. Who can keep up with it all…?

For example, I’m a couple-three months behind the curve on this:

One of the central works in the exhibition “Design and the Elastic Mind” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (until 12 May), Victimless Leather, a small jacket made up of embryonic stem cells taken from mice, has died. The artists, Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, say the work which was fed nutrients by tube, expanded too quickly and clogged its own incubation system just five weeks after the show opened…

Ms Antonelli says the jacket “started growing, growing, growing until it became too big. And [the artists] were back in Australia, so I had to make the decision to kill it. And you know what? I felt I could not make that decision. I’ve always been pro-choice and all of a sudden I’m here not sleeping at night about killing a coat…That thing was never alive before it was grown.”

Will wonders never cease? Apparently not. Just for starters, what are the odds that a work of art made from mice would have originated with an artist named Catts?

(More details on the Victimless Leather project from Wired, a few years ago.)

The Webster Stories

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dither (definition)Starting sometime in the mid-1980s, I wrote a series of short stories featuring the same protagonist, known only as Webster.

(It was never made explicit whether that was his first or last name, although I always thought of it, oddly, as his first. And the mid-’80s TV show of the same name? Forget it. Never saw it. My Webster was not that Webster, trust me.)

I’ve written about Webster before, in the first post which talked about David Gerrold’s 1990 writing workshop. (Webster was the character I “met” and subsequently talked with in the darkened-room exercise.) In my mind’s eye, he was tall, a little stoop-shouldered (as if to deny his height), wore his brown hair long enough to part (on the left) but not long, and had a strong, classic Roman nose. Invariably, at some point in each story, he appeared in a two-piece suit (even if the story never said so explicitly). It was gray, and it was undistinguished.

Which was the effect Webster wanted to achieve: invisibility, to the extent possible. He hated attention. He hated it so much, indeed, that he was constantly floundering around, forward and back, in an effort to avoid it — with the result, naturally, that he drew attention, further embarrassing himself. He could seldom decide on the best course of action to achieve maximum noticeability; when he did decide, it was reliably among the worst possible choices. (But I’ll hand it to him: his choices were never the obvious ones, either.)

Aside from Webster himself and the outlandish situations in which he constantly found himself (and without fail made worse), his stories had one other thing in common: their titles. Each title was a two-word phrase, the first word of which was “the.”

Here’s an overview of some of them:

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Caution *coughcough* New Construction

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Like a lot of bloggers, I use the Sitemeter service to keep tabs on how many people are visiting my site, how much time they spend here, and so on.

A couple weeks ago I decided to upgrade my Sitemeter account from free to paid status. I didn’t really care about some of the benefits of a paid account, but one benefit I cared about very much:

See, with the free (basic) plan, you can see what a site visitor’s entry page was — that is, the first page on your site that they came to during a given session; and you can see what his or her exit page was; and you can see how long his or session lasted, and how many total pages s/he viewed during that time. What you can’t see is which specific other pages (if any) s/he visited in between the entry and exit pages.

This is a little frustrating. If someone’s stopped to read ten pages on your site, wouldn’t you want to know what pages, exactly, were the eight pages between page 1 and page 10? Of course you would.

That’s the benefit I’m really paying for. And boy, it’s been instructive.

I mean, you expect a lot (er…) of people to come to the home page, sniff around a little, and then disappear. Others (like those who might be following your RSS feed), you expect, will see just the most recent post (and then disappear). What’s been really interesting to see is how many people sort of wander in the front door and then proceed to wander more or less aimlessly around the place, pulling open drawers, inspecting their contents, going upstairs and checking out the rooms there, and so on — before bailing 15 minutes or more later.

Thinking about this, I have concluded that maybe people just can’t figure out what sort of site this is. Unlike most blogs, it’s not single-purpose. I post often about books, writing, and so on, but somebody visiting just for that is likely to be put off by a post about (say) the Linux operating system. Somebody who sees this post show up in the Google hits for a search on “linux” is going to be completely confused on their arrival. And so on.

With all that in mind, I’ve added a new page to the site. It’s not a blog post per se, but it (like the About page) is linked at the top of every page in the blog, as “Navigating RAMH.”

If you need help figuring out where to start — or where to end, for that matter — that page is as good a starting point as any.

P.S. I’m also working on a style sheet which will enable you more easily to print out RAMH posts, if that’s how you prefer to read. (Killing trees is NOT a practice I recommend, though!) This style sheet will suppress the left- and right-side menus, and include other features more amenable to offline “reading” of the more verbose posts, especially. Assuming I actually write some.

Bloghopping: Haven Kimmel on “The Sopranos”

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Sometimes using the Web loses all its charm, because you’re too focused on problem-solving.

You need the answer to a question, say, about some damn thing or other that’s locking your computer up, and you don’t know if it’s Linux, or a video driver, or that cheese Danish which inadvertently fell from your mouth (of course it was inadvertent; you wouldn’t do something that stupid on purpose!) — where you’d parked it for a moment while swapping in the RAM upgrade, you just needed two hands for, like, three seconds — fell, as I was saying, into the guts of your computer, and when you went to scoop it up it just sort of schmeared across the surfaces and into the guts of what seems to be a satellite’s-eye view of two hundred silicon-and-plastic-and-steel skyscrapers waaaaay down at the end of a SimCity “game,” the boring part where you know you’re going to have to call down an earthquake or tornado or a major tax hike, inciting SimRevolution, just to keep from falling asleep with your hand on the mouse and dragging an entire suburb across the mountains.

At such moments, it’s easy to be overawed by the fact that Google actually returns close to 9,000 hits when you search on the words linux, video, driver, cheese, and danish (using The Missus’s computer, of course, since your own, at the moment, has as little to do with computing as it does with, say, dishwashing). It’s easy to be flat-out annoyed by that, in fact. Doesn’t Google know this is serious? You need an answer, damn it! An answer. An, as in one. You don’t need random attention-deficit Google-musings.

At such moments, congratulations, jerk: you’ve forgotten what the Web was like in, say, 1996. No Google. No MSN. No Yahoo. Very little, in fact, except the primo contribution of the Web to human communication: hyperlinks.

You’ve forgotten the unexpected pleasures you can get from simply hop-skip-jumping.

About a week ago, I stumbled across the blog known as “Seven Impossible Things to Do Before Breakfast.” (And I’d thought “Running After My Hat” was an ambitious blog name…) It didn’t take me long to add it to the Je Ne Sais Quoi… blogroll category, over there on the right. And one of these days I’ll do a post about it.

This post, though, is about a surprise I got from simply following a link — or rather, a couple of links: from the most recent 7-Imp entry, to a post on another blog by someone named Haven Kimmel. My curiosity was triggered simply by the phrase “The Sopranos.”

Now, I’ve almost lost my sense of surprise that wonderful New York Times bestselling writers have been doing their work for years, quite successfully, with no help at all from my wallet or even my admiration, let alone fanboyishness. Almost, but not quite. And so I can’t help asking the question: Where has Haven Kimmel been, where did she come from, and why haven’t I heard of her before?!?

Okay. I sorta understand. But now I’ve got some catching up to do (and you may, too).

In the meantime, I’ll refer you to an early post on her blog — or rather to its title, “Haven’s First Law: Never Quote A Better Writer Than Yourself.” Because I’m about to quote, very briefly, from her children’s book Orville: A Dog Story (2003):

Orville barked and barked against his chain. And right in the middle of a long summer day, when he had barked about how he was really a good dog in a bad mood, and how he missed that one-eyed doll, and how there was something so terrible about the feeling of a chain against a neck, everything changed, because a girl with cotton-candy hair moved into the little house across the road and Orville fell in love.

And then, just because I don’t trust you to follow the above link to her “Sopranos” post, there’s this:

…perhaps things were slightly askew in my psyche, because in an e-mail exchange between three friends I was asked to name off the top of my head (seriously! think fast!) how I would choose to die if I only had twenty-four hours. What would I do, spend my last day hysterical over my motherless children? Try to see the Seven or Ten or Eight Wonders of the World? God, no. I answered as honestly as humanly possible. I said, “I would want to spend 24 hours with Tony Soprano and then I would want him to shoot me in the heart.”

Ha!

Watchmen: The Movie?

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Watchmen - issue 1, September 1986I don’t read many graphic novels, but I do read some. There’s no pattern, apparently, to the ones I’ve chosen to read, except that I tend to favor ones heavy on story (and not necessarily on action).

Watchmen (written by Alan Moore, illustrated by Dave Gibbons) is in a class by itself.

Published as a regular “comic”-book series in 1986-87, from the very first issue it announced its difference. (See the cover of issue #1, over there on the left, for the opening evidence — surely among the most subversive uses of a smile symbol.) If you have no classic-comix-style used bookstores handy, fear not: its twelve issues were repackaged in 1995 in a single paperback volume, which you can obtain at many places (it’s still in print), including Amazon and all the usual brick-and-mortar sources.

The premise of the story, while neither unique nor original in the comic-book universe, will strike newcomers (in these days of superhero movies and other forms of media worship) as a little strange: Imagine a world in which superheroes are real, really real. They include superheroes you’ve never heard of, among them the seven who figure as Watchmen‘s protagonists: Doctor Manhattan, the Comedian, Ozymandias, Nite-Owl, Rorschach, Captain Metropolis, and Silk Spectre. (That’s them in the image below and to the right, running clockwise and starting with the freaky blue guy at the top.)

Watchmen - cast of charactersThey’re “people,” yes, of a particularly intense (and talented or perhaps even mutant) sort. But people nonetheless, with ugly or sympathetic pasts, who live in flophouses or penthouses, perhaps eat meals cooked in the equivalent of microwave ovens, have relationships with one another, get disappointed and p!ssed off.

Furthermore, as a class, they’re regulated, or rather registered with the mid-1980s government. Why? Because in the Watchmen world, there was a time when it seemed like any idiot with a stretchy-fabric uniform was running around, fighting crime (or imagining he was fighting it). They kept getting in the way of the real forces of law and order — the police et al…

I won’t spoil your pleasure in getting to know more about Watchmen on your own. (But I will note that it not only won a Hugo Award for science fiction in 1987 — the only graphic novel to have done so. In 2005, Time magazine also named it to its list of the best 100 novels in the English language published since 1923. Get that? Not graphic novels. Not comic books. Not fantasies or works of science fiction. Novels, period.)

But I will say I was delighted to learn recently that a Watchmen movie is scheduled for release sometime in 2009. (Here‘s the IMDB page on it.) Like many fans of the book — of superhero comics in general — I’m apprehensive about Hollywood’s take on it. They can never include everything, after all, and what’s left must necessarily be altered somehow to account for the subtractions.

Still, hope springs eternal and all that. Based on the trailer (below), they seem to have certainly captured the look of the comic — to the extent which any live-action film could:

It Was Like This

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My weekly favorite selection from the incomparable whiskey river (which daily seems as unlike a blog as it’s possible for a blog to be):

It Was Like This: You Were Happy

It was like this:
you were happy, then you were sad,
then happy again, then not.

It went on.
You were innocent or you were guilty.
Actions were taken, or not.

At times you spoke, at other times you were silent.
Mostly, it seems you were silent – what could you say?

Now it is almost over.

Like a lover, your life bends down and kisses your life.

It does this not in forgiveness –
between you, there is nothing to forgive –
but with the simple nod of a baker at the moment
he sees the bread is finished with transformation.

Eating, too, is now a thing only for others.

It doesn’t matter what they will make of you
or your days: they will be wrong,
they will miss the wrong woman, miss the wrong man,
all the stories they tell will be tales of their own invention.

Your story was this: you were happy, then you were sad,
you slept, you awakened.
Sometimes you ate roasted chestnuts, sometimes persimmons.

(by Jane Hirshfield)

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