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 , 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)

Story Starters: Shadows on a Wall

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'Mystery of the Street' by Otto Umbehr (1928), collection of the Metropolitan Museum of ArtA number of things I’ve come across in the last week have reminded me — at a time (yes) when I really should be concerned with ending a story — just how little it takes to start one. In particular, they’ve reminded me of the way in which implied story lines radiate forwards and backwards, starting from a single moment captured in a painting or photograph.

First, there was my post of the other day, about Brueghel’s Fall of Icarus painting and the W.H. Auden poem which sprang from it. What makes this a “story” as opposed to a conventional landscape is the precise instant crystallized in that tiny little area of the bottom right corner. We can imagine what must have led to that moment: the construction of the wings, the warnings from Daedalus, the over-confident youth rising and rising and rising toward the sun. We can see some other things happening during it, of course, and imagine other things which we can’t actually see (such as Daedalus, watching horrified from a shoreline). And we can guess about the moments to follow, from the immediate (the long, panic-stricken but then silent sinking of a feathered figure to the bottom of the sea) to the more remote (the wasteland of Daedalus’s life to come).

Then along came some posts over the last few days on the writing in the water blog. The innkeeper there, marta, recently acquired a scanner; she’s begun to post old family photos, taking off from each to ruminate about the stories it tells, fails to tell, or tells incompletely — and the stories it might have told instead (if the world and the people in it were different).

So while I was thinking about these things, it occurred to me that visual “moments” aren’t the only ones from which stories might branch, forward and back. Musical ones can work that way, too.

I don’t mean obvious story songs — shaggy-dog stories or Broadway show tunes, for instance (the latter of which can be associated with specific points within the show’s plot). No, what I’m getting at is songs, especially short ones, whose lyrics suggest with a quick few brushstrokes more — sometimes much more — than the words themselves say.

Like marta’s (or anyone’s) snapshots, like Fall of Icarus-style paintings, these songs fall into a category we might call “shadows on the wall.” A shadow is not the thing it represents, of course; but our eyes have been trained to see in certain shadowy shapes, or portions of shapes, the corresponding fully-fleshed 3D objects projected, darkly, on the wall. In the same way, shadow-on-the-wall story starters — images and songs — mark the edges of a plotline or a relationship, and let our minds fill in the gaps.

At the time these (not exactly earth-shaking) revelations came to me, I was in the car; in the CD player was Carly Simon’s Torch album of old standard, reworked, and brand-new songs of blues, heartbreak, and wish fulfillment. Just starting up then, in fact, was a perfect shadow-on-the-wall song: “What Shall We Do with the Child?”

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Writer’s Bane: Alan Nelson’s “Lafayette”

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Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs! birdA 1948 science-fiction story by Alan Nelson is called “Narapoia.” (And no, smarty — whoever you are — I did not read it when it originally came out.)

It’s an entertaining enough premise: a man visits a psychotherapist, showing signs of an unusual disorder:

“I don’t know exactly how to explain it to you, Doctor,” the young man began. He smoothed back his slick black hair that shone like a phonograph record and blinked his baby-blue eyes. “It seems to be the opposite of a persecution complex.”

Dr. Manly J. Departure was a short severe man who made a point of never exhibiting surprise. “The opposite of a persecution complex?” he said, permitting one eyebrow to elevate. “How do you mean — the opposite of a persecution complex, Mr. McFarlane?”

“Well, for one thing, I keep thinking that I’m following someone.” McFarlane sat placidly in the big easy chair, hands folded, pink cheeks glowing, the picture of health and tranquility. Dr. Departure stirred uneasily.

“You mean you think someone is following, you, don’t you?” the doctor corrected.

“No. No, I don’t! I mean that while I’m walking along the street, suddenly I have this feeling there is somebody just ahead of me. Somebody I’m after. Someone I’m following. Sometimes I even begin to run to catch up with him! Of course –there’s no one there. It’s inconvenient. Damned inconvenient. And I hate to run.”

After a couple of visits, the patient confesses to another symptom: non-hallucinations, you might call them — hallucinations which turn out not to be hallucinations at all:

“I’m afraid I’m beginning to be troubled with hallucinations, Doctor,” McFarlane finally volunteered.

Dr. Departure mentally rubbed his hands. He was back on old familiar territory now. He felt more comfortable.

“Ah, hallucinations!”

“Rather, they’re not really hallucinations, Doctor. You might say they were the opposite of hallucinations.”

Dr. Departure rested his eyes a moment. The smile disappeared from his face. McFarlane continued:

“Last night, for instance, Doctor, I had a nightmare. Dreamed there was a big ugly bird perched on my short-wave set waiting for me to wake up. It was a hideous thing — a fat bulbous body and a huge beak that turned upward like a sickle. Blood-shot eyes with pouches under them. And ears, Doctor. Ears! Did you ever hear of a bird with ears? Little tiny, floppy ears, something like a cocker spaniel’s. Well, I woke up, my heart pounding, and what do you think? There actually was an ugly fat bird with ears sitting on the short-wave set.”

Dr. Departure perked up again. A very simple case of confusing the real with the unreal. Traditional. Almost classical.

“A real bird on the short-wave set?” he asked gently. “With blood-shot eyes?”

“Yes,” McFarlane replied. “I know it sounds silly. I know it’s hard to believe.”

“Oh, not at all. Not at all. That type of visual aberration is a common enough phenomenon.” The doctor smiled soothingly. “Nothing to…”

McFarlane interrupted him by reaching down and hoisting the carton onto the desk. “You don’t understand, Doctor,” he said. “Go ahead. Open it.”

The doctor looked at McFarlane a moment, then at the brown box which was punctured with air holes and tied with heavy twine. Disconcertedly, the doctor cut the string and folded back the top flaps. He leaned over and peered in — then sucked in his breath. Pouchy, blood-shot eyes leered up at him. Floppy ears. The up-side-down beak. An obscene-looking bird.

“His name is Lafayette,” McFarlane said, tossing a few bread crumbs into the carton which were quickly devoured with a noisy, repulsive gulp. “He rather grows on you after awhile, don’t you think?”

(You can find more information — including the complete story — easily enough on the Web, if you’d like to follow up.)

By now you may wondering what this might have to do with writing, per this post’s title. Glad you asked…

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Review: Dean Koontz’s ODD HOURS

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No, no, no — not here. On The Book Book.

You will note, in the guidelines for reviewers over on the right side of that site’s various pages, the word-count specs: minimum one word; maximum 60,000 words. I believe these were meant humorously, meaning “Nobody’s gonna go through your review and count the freaking words, you dolt.”

Nevertheless, I suffered a bit of a guilty twinge when I saw how long my review looked relative to the other recent ones.

Dang. Gotta tell you, writing a book review is hard. Especially for an action-y book: you want to describe, kinda sorta, what happens. But you don’t want to give away anything really surprising, either. Tough balance to strike. I admire the other Book Book reviewers (also listed down the site’s right-hand menu) who manage to pull it off, review after review.

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