Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

Working in the Small

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[Image: “#everydaybandw 699 (2019-08-26),” by John E. Simpson; original in my SmugMug gallery. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

I’ve never thought about my fiction in terms of its scale — its genre (if any), sure; its word count, of course (one must at least feign practicality, even if one seldom practices it)… But are my stories, y’know, sweeping? Am I a miniaturist, or do I paint with a big brush? And, for that matter, do any authors typically think of themselves in these terms? Or is it all just a critic’s shorthand for the endpoints of a continuum…?

A couple years ago, in my annual mid-June “Potpourri” post, I described a writing contest I’d been participating in that year. For that contest, whose three-round timeline sprawled across five or six months, entrants in each round had to compose a short story of N words or fewer, in a particular fictional genre (mystery, romance, etc.), on a given subject, and within a particular period of time. The maximum word counts and times-to-write were shared by everyone in a given round, and both went down as the contest went on: ranging from a maximum 2,500 words, written over eight days, for Round 1, to 1,500 words and 24 hours, for Round 3. Of the 4,000 entrants at the start, I placed sixth overall. This sufficiently swelled my self-regard that I entered the 2019 edition of the same contest… with a much more humbling outcome: I wiped out in the first round.

This year, I promised myself I wouldn’t get sucked in — a promise I kept… sort of.

Because, you see, I remain on the mailing list for the contest organizers, an outfit named NYC Midnight LLC. They’ve been running writing competitions since 2002 — short stories, screenplays, and so on, pretty much year round, contest after contest. And this year they added a variation which seems tailored to a quarantined-at-home-and-retired-to-boot writer’s context: a 100-hundred word microfiction contest.

I suspect the number of entrants for this one to be orders of magnitude larger; a hundred-word maximum, for aspiring writers who are confined at home all around the world, will most likely prove just too tempting a target to ignore.

Aside from the word-count ceiling, to meet the contest requirements each story must meet several other requirements, as I described the other day. Also as I explained then, I threw together a list of over 20,000 “prompts” to be used to practice with during the next week — I have vanishingly little experience “writing small” like this, and I want to be in something like (haha) shape for the first 24-hour round (which begins at 11:59 PM on May 8). (By contrast, my photography — as in this post’s cover image, above — very often drifts small-ward.)

Yesterday afternoon, I posted the first of those practice-session results. Today, and on subsequent days between now and then, I hope to post a new practice micro-story sometime in mid-afternoon. Maybe by Friday it will feel like a ho-hum challenge.

(And for the curious: today’s prompt is: romance genre (crap…!); required word “price”; required action “searching the files.”)

Microfiction Practice #1: Witmers and Sheila

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[Don’t know what this is? See yesterday’s post for some background.]

Prompt #211:

  • Genre: action/adventure
  • Word: quixotic
  • Action: balancing the books

Story (98 words, per Microsoft Word):

Sheila’s quixotic pet project – planting an Earth Day flag in the rain forest – had surely been doomed from the start. Her accountant Witmers had said so on Day 1, repeated it on Day 2 and all the other days. Sheila didn’t care. “Just get us the money,” she said. Witmers got them the money, yes. But did he really have to grasp the expenses with such a tight fist? Could he not have reconsidered the truly fatal decision: helicoptering them in, but trusting the guides to get them out – the damned bargain-basement Sherpa guides in their Everest off-season?

It’s True, You Can See It (But You May Have to Squint)

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[Video: In a scene deleted from Something’s Gotta Give, Jack Nicholson croons “La Vie en Rose” to Diane Keaton. (The audio was retained, though, as the soundtrack for the film’s closing credits.)]

From whiskey river:

Our task as [humans] is to find the few principles that will calm the infinite anguish of free souls. We must mend what has been torn apart, make justice imaginable again in a world so obviously unjust, give happiness a meaning once more to peoples poisoned by the misery of the century. Naturally, it is a superhuman task. But superhuman is the term for tasks we take a long time to accomplish, that’s all.

(Albert Camus [source])

…and:

Tomorrow

there will be sun, scalloped by clouds,
ushered in by a waterfall of birdsong.
It will be a temperate seventy-five, low
humidity. For twenty-four hours,
all politicians will be silent. Reality
programs will vanish from TV, replaced
by the “snow” that used to decorate
our screens when reception wasn’t
working. Soldiers will toss their weapons
in the grass. The oceans will stop
their inexorable rise. No one
will have to sit on a committee.
When twilight falls, the aurora borealis
will cut off cell phones, scramble the internet.
We’ll play flashlight tag, hide and seek,
decorate our hair with fireflies, spin
until we’re dizzy, collapse
on the dew-decked lawn and look up,
perhaps for the first time, to read the long lines
of cold code written in the stars….

(Barbara Crooker [source])

…and:

Charity is the power of defending that which we know to be indefensible. Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances which we know to be desperate. It is true that there is a state of hope which belongs to bright prospects and the morning; but that is not the virtue of hope. The virtue of hope exists only in earthquake and eclipse. It is true that there is a thing crudely called charity, which means charity to the deserving poor; but charity to the deserving is not charity at all, but justice. It is the undeserving who require it, and the ideal either does not exist at all, or exists wholly for them. For practical purposes it is at the hopeless moment that we require the hopeful man, and the virtue either does not exist at all, or begins to exist at that moment. Exactly at the instant when hope ceases to be reasonable it begins to be useful.

(G. K. Chesterton [source])

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A New Writing Challenge

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Details forthcoming, probably in a real post on Saturday. For now, though: I’ve entered a fiction-writing contest, the first round of which will take place next week. Stories to be submitted to the contest in each round will have to follow these rules:

  • be of a fictional genre randomly assigned to each entrant by the contest organizers, from among this list: Action/Adventure; Comedy; Drama; Fairy Tale/Fantasy; Ghost Story; Historical Fiction; Horror; Romance; Romantic Comedy; Sci-Fi; and Suspense/Thriller.
  • include a word randomly assigned by the organizers;
  • include an action randomly assigned by the organizers (this apparently will be loosely of the [verb]ing a/an/the [noun] format, à la the old Mad Libs game); and
  • be no more than 100 words long.; and
  • take no longer than 24 hours to write.

It is, in short (ha!), a microfiction-writing contest.

With the assistance of several Facebook contacts, I’ve come up with a list of 37 “actions.” I also used a random-noun generator page I found on the Web to give me a list of 50 nouns. Putting this together with the 11 possible genres, this yielded a total of over 20,000 possible combinations. I then ran a little program to randomly select 1,000 from among all these possibilities, and you can find that list here (in the form of an Excel spreadsheet).

Of course the contest organizers will have their own lists of random words and actions — lists which they will not publish in advance — so this isn’t a real test. Nonetheless, I hope to practice for the first round, at least: every day, starting tomorrow, I’ll pull a randomly selected combination of those three main constraints from the list of 1,000 randomly selected possibilities. And I’ll write a 100-word “microfiction” based on it. And of course, I’ll post that little story here, together with the prompt which led to it.

(I will not post here the actual contest entries I may come up with, lest I run afoul of some little micro-rule or other designed to guarantee the contest rights to first “publication.”)

We’ll see how this goes. Things being what they are, here and everywhere else right now, I may well opt to continue the experiment through the rest of May.

In the meantime, expect my first practice story by tomorrow afternoon sometime. I anticipate no applause.

Sacred Necessaries

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[Image: “Four Rock Formation,” by Nicollazzi Xiong (discovered at the Pexels free stock-photography site — thank you!).]

From whiskey river (italicized lines):

Funny Strange 

We are tender and our lives are sweet

and they are already over and we are
visiting them in some kind of endless
reprieve from oblivion, we are walking
around in them and after we shatter
with love for everything we settle in.

Thou tiger on television chowing,
thou very fact of dreams, thou majestical
roof fretted with golden fire. Thou wisdom
of the inner parts. Thou tintinnabulation.

Is it not sweet to hand over the ocean’s
harvest in a single wave of fish? To bounce
a vineyard of grapes from one’s apron
and into the mouth of the crowd? To scoop up
bread and offer up one’s armful to the throng?
Let us live as if we were still among

the living, let our days be patterned after
theirs. Is it not marvelous to be forgetful?

(Jennifer Michael Hecht [source])

…and:

Braided Creek : A Conversation in Poetry
(excerpts)

Under the storyteller’s hat
are many heads, all troubled.

Rowing across the lake
all the dragonflies are screwing.
Stop it. It’s Sunday.

Only today
I heard
the river
within the river.

I want to describe my life in hushed tones
like a TV nature program. Dawn in the north.
His nose stalks the air for newborn coffee.

Nothing to do.
Nowhere to go.
The moth just drowned
in the whiskey glass.
This is heaven.

Let go of the mind, the thousand blue
story fragments we tell ourselves
each day to keep the world underfoot.

If you can awaken
inside the familiar
and discover it strange
you need never leave home.

(Jim Harrison and Ted Kooser [source])

…and:

Oh my God, what if you wake up some day, and you’re 65, or 75, and you never got your memoir or novel written, or you didn’t go swimming in those warm pools and oceans all those years because your thighs were jiggly and you had a nice big comfortable tummy; or you were just so strung out on perfectionism and people-pleasing that you forgot to have a big juicy creative life, of imagination and radical silliness and staring off into space like when you were a kid? It’s going to break your heart. Don’t let this happen.

(Anne Lamott [source: nothing canonical; possibly a specific edition of this (but it’s not in the copy I own)])

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RAMH@12: Still Here, Just Differently (and a Playlist)

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[Painted wood carving, Wind Blows my Hat Off #1, by folk artist Mary Michael Shelley]

My practice in these anniversary posts has been to open with a playlist. Each such playlist has always included selections from music-related posts over the years… but this year, at least, seems to call for something different. (Not least, because I’ve so seldom done music-related posts in recent years: scant fresh music to draw on!)

So, then, the 2020 edition of the RAMH anniversary playlist includes 15 selections from a single album — at that, an album never discussed here: Silk Baroque, by a performer named (or at least going by the name!) Wu Wei. I discovered Wu quite by accident; if you’ve visited here recently, you probably already know which post‘s preparation led me to him. His instrument of choice is the modern version of an ancient Chinese wind instrument called the sheng; at his Web site, Wu describes this instrument as follows:

The Sheng, a mouth organ, formed out of a bundle of bamboo reeds and cased in a metal bowl, sounds as the singing phoenix from a Chinese legend: silvery and fleeting as the wind.

I won’t promise that the sheng’s sound will indeed say singing phoenix to you (whatever the hell a singing phoenix sounds like; I thought they pretty much just squawked). For me, I’ll say only that the Silk Baroque album has helped me a great deal to retain the frame of mind described in that post from two weeks ago.

Per usual for an anniversary post, I’ll add a few stray blogging-anniversary notes after the playlist — presumably setting the mood for your reading, ha.

I must have mentioned at least once — probably many years ago — that Running After My Hat is not my first blog (although it’s the longest-lived). As best I can recall, I previously posted with any regularity to a half-dozen others (all of them apparently still available in some form, via the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine if not actually still “live”):

  • Something called flixml.org: a blog set up in the late 1990s nominally to support my books and other writings about a technology called XML (for eXtensible Markup Language). It also included posts and other content on one thing or another unrelated to the core topic, such as an account of my and The Missus’s honeymoon in Alaska in 2000. A Wayback Machine snapshot is here, as of sometime in early 2002 (well after my last post there).
  • A group blog composed by members of my family only (hence no link available), where we did a brain dump of various details remembered from our childhood — family history, “big events,” and so on — in 1950s-’60s New Jersey.
  • Where Left Is Right: a politically-focused blog — its orientation probably obvious, from the title — composed during the first term of the Bush II Presidency, under the pseudonym “FLJerseyBoy.” A while after I stopped posting there, the blog name having been co-opted by some damned squatter or another; as a result, I reconstituted it — sans images, alas — as Where Left Is Right/The Old Site.
  • A Dog Starv’d: more politics, but less exclusively so, in 2007-11, again from “FLJerseyBoy.”
  • The Book Book: a book-review blog established by the erstwhile editorial-assistant blogger who then called herself “Moonrat.” Reviews there were by her and others she recruited over the years (including RAMH oldtimer Froog) — I myself was just satisfied with my own initials. (My last review there was in 2011… just about a week after RAMH‘s third anniversary.)

When I started here, I meant the blog to become the centerpiece of a “platform” whence to launch a book, specifically an e-book. I imagined myself at the vanguard of a New Age, you see: an age in which authors would simply post their work online, and readers would pay to read it there.

(Yeah, I know. Hahahaha. LOL. *eyeroll* All that.)

Things didn’t work out as planned, of course. I never had and never will have the stamina and focus of a successful self-published author.

But I found, over time, that RAMH fed some needs in me otherwise. Partially, it was the company of other people going through much the same aspiration/crashing-and-burning cycle of the unsatisfactorily published writer. Partially — as with the whiskey river Fridays series — it presented a periodic challenge and opportunity to break away from mundane everyday stuff: programming, Web development, household life. Some of the other series of posts (particularly the music-related series — e.g., here, here, here, and here) came out of nowhere to give me reasons to learn about and share stuff I’d never imagined becoming obsessed with. It forced me to write openly, without too much embarrassment, at a time in Internet history when readership has wandered away to entertainments not quite so driven (as blogging is) by a performer-audience model. (It even enabled me, for a short but wild few months, to research, compose, and upload something like a novella in something like real time.)

Gone, now, the daily preoccupation with work. And for a good part of the next N months, of course, like everyone else I’ll be stuck more or less at home, my travel more or less restricted to whatever I can do on foot. I do look forward to whatever the next phase in the blog’s development turns out to be. Whatever it is, whatever it becomes, I remain confident the blog will continue to warrant its name: I’m still chasing the damned hats.

Thanks as always — whoever you may be — for joining me here!

Still, a Kind of Realism

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[Image: “Still as Rain,” by Tim Sackton. (Discovered on Flickr, and used here under a Creative Commons license: thank you!)]

From whiskey river (italicized portion):

And the Moon on Its Stem Will Steal You Away

That’s a good one, the idea of the moon having a stem and somehow
stealing you, whoever you are, kind of like Persephone or Orpheus,
portrayed or alluded to in countless forms of art and popular culture
including poetry, film, opera, music, and painting. And it kind of fits
my mood this morning, something vaguely cartoonish and devoid
of real gravitas, but still, a kind of realism, even so. And the area
around is the void, outer space, nothing, because explaining things
is never as interesting as wanting them, the desire to know, set against
a backdrop of black velvet and rhinestones. Let’s say that you wake up
one day and realize you don’t remember anything that happened
yesterday. Maybe for five minutes or so. And for those five minutes
you’re thinking, as I was thinking this morning, that this is it. Car keys.
The word for when you really want something and work for it.
Your dog’s name. There are not enough blank pages for all this
forgetting, like debris falling back to earth, you and yours hiding in
the underbrush with hopes of your own, of rescue or escape.
When you don’t remember why you’re hiding in the underbrush,
you’ve been hiding in the underbrush forever. This whole other
existence leaps forward in possibility. And then the five minutes
are up, and it’s oh yeah, eggs, Saturday. Some day that was.
A chemist once told me luminol was her favorite color. It glows
a beautiful greenish-blue when it comes into contact with blood
by reacting to the iron in hemoglobin, looking a bit like the sky
this morning. It’s a kind of truth of blue, that uncovers, that
remembers. It’s used by investigators to detect blood at crime scenes
where no blood is visible. There are so many things to forget,
to lose, and in so many different ways. But even so, one can be wrong
about the past, and deduce from error, but still be right about
the future or the present. And when you don’t remember what day
it is, happy birthday. Despite all our best efforts, there’s a wolf
on the horizon making a movie of your approach, and it’s
a shipwreck playing across me as I’m pouring sugar into my cup.

(John Gallaher [source])

…and (italicized stanzas):

The Face

Is there a single thing in nature
that can approach in mystery
the absolute uniqueness of any human face, first, then   
its transformation from childhood to old age—

We are surrounded at every instant   
by sights that ought to strike the sane   
unbenumbed person tongue-tied, mute   
with gratitude and terror. However,

there may be three sane people on earth   
at any given time: and if
you got the chance to ask them how they do it,   
they would not understand.

I think they might just stare at you
with the embarrassment of pity. Maybe smile
the way you do when children suddenly reveal a secret   
preoccupation with their origins, careful not to cause them shame,

on the contrary, to evince the great congratulating pleasure   
one feels in the presence of a superior talent and intelligence;   
or simply as one smiles to greet a friend who’s waking up,
to prove no harm awaits him, you’ve dealt with and banished all harm.

(Franz Wright [source])

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All You Knew Must Be Learned Again

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[Video: high-definition trailer for the wordless 1992 film Baraka, a sequel of sorts to the better-known Koyaanisqatsi (and directed by that film’s photographer). According to Roger Ebert’s review of the restored DVD edition (2008), “‘Baraka’ is a Sufi word meaning ‘a blessing, or the breath, or the essence of life, from which the evolutionary process unfolds.’ In Islam generally, it is ‘a quality or force emanating originally from Allah but capable of transmission to objects or to human beings.’ In Judaism, it is a ceremonial blessing. In Swahili, it means ‘blessing.’ In French slang, it means ‘good luck.'”]

From whiskey river:

How is it that one day life is orderly and you are content, a little cynical perhaps, but on the whole just so, and then without warning you find the solid floor is a trapdoor and you are now in another place whose geography is uncertain and whose customs are strange?

Travellers at least have a choice. Those who set sail know that things will not be the same as at home. Explorers are prepared. But for us, who travel along the blood vessels, who come to the cities of the interior by chance, there is no preparation. We who were fluent find life is a foreign language. Somewhere between the swamp and the mountains. Somewhere between fear and sex. Somewhere between God and the Devil passion is and the way there is sudden and the way back is worse.

(Jeanette Winterson [source])

…and:

The Ninth Elegy
(excerpt)

Why, if it’s possible to spend this span
of existence as laurel, a little darker than all
other greens, with little waves on every
leaf-edge (like the smile of a breeze), why, then,
must we be human and, shunning destiny,
long for it?…

Oh, not because happiness,

that over-hasty profit of loss impending, exists.
Not from curiosity, or to practice the heart,
that would also be in the laurel…
but because to be here is much, and the transient Here
seems to need and concern us strangely. Us, the most transient.
Everyone once, once only. Just once and no more.
And we also once, Never again. But this having been
once, although only once, to have been of the earth,
seems irrevocable.

(Rainer Maria Rilke [source])

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Sitting Quietly, Doing Nothing: Freeing the Elephant

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[Image: “Wu Wei,” copyright © 2013 by George Clark, a/k/a user Buddhadog on Flickr — which, of course, is where I found it. (I use it here with Mr. Clark’s generous permission. Thank you again!) Finding images of these Chinese characters on the Web was no great challenge — but they’re generally straightforward representations. This one, unlike those others, exhibited character, not mere characters.]

Midweek — yesterday, as I write this — I joined the ranks of the idle aging. (Some confusion persists, at least in my head, over whether my “retirement” began on Tuesday or Wednesday. But it doesn’t really matter. All that matters to me, now and forever going forward, is that I no longer must follow a daily schedule and to-do list prescribed by someone other than me and, of course, The Missus.)

Spring 2020, almost anywhere in the world by now, is an “interesting” moment in history to find yourself with an empty calendar. I’ve had the luxury to imagine in advance how my days might pass; I haven’t been abruptly launched into a thumb-twiddling vacuum of inactivity — hanging in space, dazed, wondering what the hell just happened. I’ve appreciated the flood of newspaper and magazine articles presenting ideas about things to watch on TV, about the rediscovered pleasures of neighborhood walking, about books in which to linger. But honestly? Those pleasures have been on my radar for months. Nor have all the social-distancing rules of engagement freaked me out nearly as much as they have others. The Missus and my families live hundreds and thousands of miles away; we haven’t had much of an active in-real-life “circle” for years, not since our old writing workshops disbanded and the other participants — friends — moved away. The bulk of our daily human contact with loved ones hasn’t moved online: it’s been there for a long time.

And it all fits in quite neatly with a state of mind I’ve cultivated — knowingly and otherwise — all through adulthood…

One pre-retirement plan we had, back in the days before the hammer of COVID-19 flattened all plans everywhere, would have had us on a five-day “weekend” trip to Tampa, primarily to attend a large-scale classical music concert in an arena there. Secondarily, The Missus was toying with the idea of getting a tattoo; she has none, but a friend she knows professionally had recently opened his own tattoo shop in Tampa. She’d promised to stop by to boost his new career a little. She asked me, “Do you think you might get a tattoo while we’re there?”

Now, I’d never considered such a thing before. I’m not a joiner, for one thing: no need, real or imagined, to brand myself as a member of one herd versus another. And on an aesthetic level, well, I accept that body art — like other kinds — can work well as a form of self-expression… but have never been interested in it, as such, for myself.

But I promised to think about it. And as she worked up various possibilities for her own — possibilities which coalesced into probabilities when she first thought: An elephant! — I just sort of let the notion percolate in my own head.

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The Physiology of the Soul

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[Image: “ThreeWay,” by Daniel Friedman. (Found on Flickr, naturally, and used here under a Creative Commons License: thank you!) Among the quotations which appear as the image’s description: “A metaphysical conclusion is either a false conclusion or a concealed experimental conclusion.” (Hermann von Helmholtz, from On Thought in Medicine (1877))]

From whiskey river:

The Bodies
(excerpt)

We move, we love, we cry out,
we hold or cannot hold to what we are
and finally wake to find ourselves
changed beyond all imagining.
Was it enough to have lived?
In that moment of still approach,
will it be given to us to know?

(Elizabeth Spires [source])

…and:

Time seems to pass. The world happens, unrolling into moments, and you stop to glance at a spider pressed to its web. There is a quickness of light and a sense of things outlined precisely and streaks of running luster on the bay. You know more surely who you are on a strong bright day after a storm when the smallest falling leaf is stabbed with self-awareness. The wind makes a sound in the pines and the world comes into being, irreversibly, and the spider rides the wind-swayed web.

(Don DeLillo [source])

…and:

No matter what the universe has in store, it cannot take away from the fact that you were born. You’ll have some joy and some pain, and all the other experiences that make up what it’s like to be a tiny part of a grand cosmos. No matter what happens next, you were here. And even when any record of our individual lives is lost to the ages, that won’t detract from the fact that we were. We lived. We were part of the enormity. All the great and terrible parts of being alive, the shocking sublime beauty and heartbreak, the monotony, the interior thoughts, the shared pain and pleasure. It really happened. All of it. On this little world that orbits a yellow star out in the great vastness. And that alone is cause for celebration.

(Sasha Sagan [source])

…and:

One Heart

It is late afternoon and I have just returned from
the longer version of my walk nobody knows
about. For the first time in nearly a month, and
everything changed. It is the end of March, once
more I have lived. This morning a young woman
described what it’s like shooting coke with a baby
in your arms. The astonishing windy and altering light
and clouds and water were, at certain moment,
You.

There is only one heart in my body, have mercy
on me.

The brown leaves buried all winter creatureless feet
running over dead grass beginning to green, the first scent-
less violet here and there, returned, the first star noticed all
at once as one stands staring into the black water.

Thank You for letting me live for a little as one of the
sane; thank You for letting me know what this is
like. Thank You for letting me look at your frightening
blue sky without fear, and your terrible world without
terror, and your loveless psychotic and hopelessly
lost
with this love.

(Franz Wright [source])

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