Running After My Hat

Taking Off #7: Borders

November 2, 2019 by John 2 Comments

[Image: Belgium (Brussels) airport entry passport stamp, per Wikipedia]

Here’s how I’ve imagined getting around among the countries in the European Union: just like getting around among the states in the US. Y’know — walk across a narrow bridge and bam, there you are. Drive on an interstate highway, or the European equivalent, and keep your eyes peeled for the Welcome to the Next State! billboard. And so on.

Well, it is like that. Kinda.

The biggest difference lies in the fact that you’re crossing international borders — not mere political subdivisions of a single nation. The word “international” comes with teeth which the phrase “state-to-state” does not — specifically, the teeth bared to ward off excessive immigration.

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All Souls

November 1, 2019 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “Gratte Ciel’s ‘La Place des Anges,’ a French aerial spectacular,” by Peter Tea. (Found it on Flickr; using it here under a Creative Commons license — thank you!) Says one preview of the show (2018): “This weekend Botanic Park will be transformed nightly into a white wonderland as angels appear above the crowd for WOMADelaide. French company, Gratte Ciel (which means skyscraper in English) will perform its show ‘La Place des Anges’ between the trees of Botanic Park.” The park in question was this one.]

From whiskey river:

(a) Are the skies you sleep under likely to open up for weeks on end?
(b) Is the ground you walk on likely to tremble and split?
(c) Is there a chance (and please check the box, no matter how small that chance seems) that the ominous mountain casting a midday shadow over your home might one day erupt with no rhyme or reason?
Because if the answer is yes to one or all of these questions, then the life you lead is a midnight thing, always a hair’s breadth from the witching hour; it is volatile, it is threadbare; it is carefree in the true sense of that term; it is light, losable like a key or a hair clip. And it is lethargy: why not sit all morning, all day, all year, under the same cypress tree drawing the figure eight in the dust? More than that, it is disaster, it is chaos: why not overthrow a government on a whim, why not blind the man you hate, why not go mad, go gibbering through the town like a loon, waving your hands, tearing your hair? There’s nothing to stop you—or rather anything could stop you, any hour, any minute. That feeling. That’s the real difference in a life.

(Zadie Smith [source])

…and:

Then as regards the actual connection between spirit and body I consider that the body by reason of being a living body can “attract” and hold on to a “spirit” whilst the body is alive and awake and the two are firmly connected. When the body is asleep I cannot guess what happens but when the body dies the “mechanism” of the body, holding the spirit, is gone and the spirit finds a new body sooner or later perhaps immediately.
As regards the question of why we have bodies at all; why we do not or cannot live free as spirits and communicate as such, we probably could do so but there would be nothing whatever to do. The body provides something for the spirit to look after and use.

(Alan Turing [source])

…and:

Humans are indeed frightful beings.
A single moon
Bright and clear
In an unclouded sky:
Yet still we stumble
In the world’s darkness
Have a good look
stop the breath,
peel off the skin,
and everybody ends up looking the same.
No matter how long you live,
the result is not altered.
Who will not end up as a skeleton? Cast off the notion that “I exist.”
Entrust yourself to the windblown clouds,
and do not wish to live forever.

(Ikkyu (translated by John Stevens) [source])

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Dreaming Real: The Empty Shelves

October 26, 2019 by John 3 Comments

I woke up this morning at about ten minutes to five, needing to answer (as they say) the call of nature. But it took me several minutes to get out of bed, because I’d awoken from a dream of startling clarity — everyday clarity, at that, with nothing fanciful or otherwise “dreamlike” about it — and for whatever reason, I thought I needed to hang onto the details. The dream went like this…

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On Things Made

October 25, 2019 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “Patssi Nilsstrom,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) You can read Patssi’s #storypix saga here at SmugMug.]

From whiskey river…

Art is the means by which we communicate what it feels like to be alive — in the past that was mixed up with other illustrative duties but that was still its central function that has been liberated in the art called modern. Art is not necessarily good for you or about communicating “good things”…
Making beautiful things for everyday use is a wonderful thing to do — making life flow more easily — but art confronts life, allowing it to stop and perhaps change direction — they are completely different.

(Antony Gormley [source])

…and:

My theory is that the purpose of art is to transmit universal truths of a sort, but of a particular sort, that in art, whether it’s poetry, fiction or painting, you are telling the reader or listener or viewer something he already knows but which he doesn’t quite know that he knows, so that in the action of communication he experiences a recognition, a feeling that he has been there before, a shock of recognition. And so, what the artist does, or tries to do, is simply to validate the human experience and to tell people the deep human truths which they already unconsciously know.

(Walker Percy [source])

…and:

I Am Learning to Abandon the World: for M
I am learning to abandon the world
before it can abandon me.
Already I have given up the moon
and snow, closing my shades
against the claims of white.
And the world has taken
my father, my friends.
I have given up melodic lines of hills,
moving to a flat, tuneless landscape.
And every night I give my body up
limb by limb, working upwards
across bone, towards the heart.
But morning comes with small
reprieves of coffee and birdsong.
A tree outside the window
which was simply shadow moments ago
takes back its branches twig
by leafy twig.
And as I take my body back
the sun lays its warm muzzle on my lap
as if to make amends.

(Linda Pastan [source])

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Wait on the Wind, Catch a Whiff of Salt

October 18, 2019 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “Ready 4,” by Kevin Dooley. (Found at Flickr, of course, and used here under a Creative Commons license. Thank you!) The Wonderland Cinema at 402 Front Street in Niles, Michigan, seems to be still in operation — but doesn’t have the same gritty exterior. When I checked the address via Google Street View, I found a building with one blank brick wall facing a side street — and some kind of what appeared to be corrugated-metal cladding on the other three sides. The funky sign has been replaced by a neon and/or LED thing mounted on a pole on the corner.]

From whiskey river (stanzas 2-3):

Our Valley
We don’t see the ocean, not ever, but in July and August
when the worst heat seems to rise from the hard clay
of this valley, you could be walking through a fig orchard
when suddenly the wind cools and for a moment
you get a whiff of salt, and in that moment you can almost
believe something is waiting beyond the Pacheco Pass,
something massive, irrational, and so powerful even
the mountains that rise east of here have no word for it.
You probably think I’m nuts saying the mountains
have no word for ocean, but if you live here
you begin to believe they know everything.
They maintain that huge silence we think of as divine,
a silence that grows in autumn when snow falls
slowly between the pines and the wind dies
to less than a whisper and you can barely catch
your breath because you’re thrilled and terrified.
You have to remember this isn’t your land.
It belongs to no one, like the sea you once lived beside
and thought was yours. Remember the small boats
that bobbed out as the waves rode in, and the men
who carved a living from it only to find themselves
carved down to nothing. Now you say this is home,
so go ahead, worship the mountains as they dissolve in dust,
wait on the wind, catch a scent of salt, call it our life.

(Philip Levine [source])

…and:

And then a man of forty or so, with a French accent, asked, “How do you achieve the presence of mind to initiate the writing of a poem?” And something cracked open in me, and I finally stopped hoarding and told them my most useful secret. The only secret that has helped me consistently over all the years that I’ve written. I said, “Well, I’ll tell you how. I ask a simple question. I ask myself: What was the very best moment of your day?” The wonder of it was, I told them, that this one question could lift out from my life exactly what I will want to write a poem about. Something I hadn’t known was important will leap out and hover there in front of me, saying I am—I am the best moment of the day. “Often,” I went on, “it’s a moment when you’re waiting for someone, or you’re driving somewhere, or maybe you’re just walking across a parking lot and admiring the oil stains and the dribbled tar patterns. One time it was when I was driving past a certain house that was screaming with sunlitness on its white clapboards, and then I plunged through tree shadows that splashed and splayed across the windshield. I thought, Ah, of course—I’d forgotten. You, windshield shadows, you are the best moment of the day.

(Nicholson Baker [source])

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Weekend Music Break: Eric Bibb and Jean-Jacques Milteau: “Good Night Irene”

October 12, 2019 by John Leave a Comment

My quest continues to clean up older music-related posts here whose little audio-player plugins are outdated (and hence won’t play in some browsers). This led me to a favorite series, called “What’s in a Song” — in particular, to a four-year-old, three-part post (published over a two-week period… you’re keeping all these numbers straight, right?) on Huddie Ledbetter’s classic, “Goodnight, Irene”:

	Description
Part 1	The Huddie Ledbetter (“Lead Belly”) story
Part 2	Precursors to Lead Belly’s “original” version
Part 3	Covers of the song by some later artists

In that last installment, I referred to the Secondhand Songs site — a database, essentially, listing cover versions of a given song. At the time of the original post, a little over 70 covers of “Goodnight Irene” were included; as of today, it lists over 150. (No grass growing under the song’s feet, for sure — nor under Secondhand Songs‘s feet. for that matter.)

This led me, of course, to wonder about the remakes I might’ve missed, for one reason, on my earlier visit. That’s when I stumbled on this, from 2015; I recommend it to you not only for the song itself, and for the lead performer, but for his sideman: blues harmonicist Jean-Jacques Milteau. I have a feeling M. Milteau has found his way into my rotation of most listened-to instrumentalists.

(If by some chance you’re really an oldtimer here at RAMH, you may recall Eric Bibb’s name from an even earlier post — back when the site toddled around the Internet as a mere two-year-old. His “Don’t Ever Let Nobody Drag Your Spirit Down,” featured there and in several playlists since, continues to be for me a solid Keep your chin up, damn it anthem for life in the early 21st century — certainly in the USA, anyhow!)

On the Road from Impossible to Done

October 11, 2019 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “Afloat and awaiting,” by Emilie Cotterill. (Found on Flickr, and used here under a Creative Commons license — thank you!) You can find many photos of this sculpture (“Afloat,” by Hamish Black) on the Web, but this may be my favorite (probably because of the ghostly effects applied to the so-called “donut” itself and to the man on the left). You can read more about the work — how it was created, details of its appearance — again, at many places, including the art.uk site.]

From whiskey river:

Do Not Expect

Do not expect that if your book falls open
to a certain page, that any phrase
you read will make a difference today,
or that the voices you might overhear
when the wind moves through the yellow-green
and golden tent of autumn, speak to you.

Things ripen or go dry. Light plays on the
dark surface of the lake. Each afternoon
your shadow walks beside you on the wall,
and the days stay long and heavy underneath
the distant rumor of the harvest. One
more summer gone,
and one way or another you survive,
dull or regretful, never learning that
nothing is hidden in the obvious
changes of the world, that even the dim
reflection of the sun on tall, dry grass
is more than you will ever understand.

And only briefly then
you touch, you see, you press against
the surface of impenetrable things.

(Dana Gioia [source])

…and:

Sometimes it was hard to say things. Things were so complicated. People might resent what you said. They might use your remarks against you. They might take you seriously and act upon your words, actually do something. They might not even hear you, which perhaps was the only thing worth hoping for. But it was more complicated than that. The sheer effort of speaking. Easier to stay apart, leave things as they are, avoid responsibility for reflecting the world and all its grave weight. Things that should be simple are always hard. But hard things are never easy.

(Don DeLillo [source])

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Seeing It All, Unblinking

October 4, 2019 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “Shattered: Corbière’s Affair,” by user “slrjester” on Flickr.com. (Used here under a Creative Commons license; thank you!) Other than the explicit, er, shatteredness of the glass shown here, it’s not obvious (to me!) how the image, or its title, relates to the extensive caption which accompanies it. That caption is, or purports to be, a portion of a play called An Excerpt From The Teenage Opera — in particular, a monologue by a character known as “The Lecturer.”]

From whiskey river:

We are fast moving into something, we are fast flung into something like asteroids cast into space by the death of a planet, we the people of earth are cast into space like burning asteroids and if we wish not to disintegrate into nothingness we must begin to now hold onto only the things that matter while letting go of all that doesn’t. For when all of our dust and ice deteriorates into the cosmos we will be left only with ourselves and nothing else. So if you want to be there in the end, today is the day to start holding onto your children, holding onto your loved ones; onto those who share your soul. Harbor and anchor into your heart justice, truth, courage, bravery, belief, a firm vision, a steadfast and sound mind. Be the person of meaningful and valuable thoughts. Don’t look to the left, don’t look to the right; we simply don’t have the time. Never be afraid of fear.

(C. JoyBell C. [source])

…and:

Long Afternoons

Those were the long afternoons when poetry left me.
The river flowed patiently, nudging lazy boats to sea.
Long afternoons, the coast of ivory.
Shadows lounged in the streets, haughty manikins in shopfronts
stared at me with bold and hostile eyes.

Professors left their schools with vacant faces,
as if the Iliad had finally done them in.
Evening papers brought disturbing news,
but nothing happened, no one hurried.
There was no one in the windows, you weren’t there;
even nuns seemed ashamed of their lives.

Those were the long afternoons when poetry vanished
and I was left with the city’s opaque demon,
like a poor traveler stranded outside the Gare du Nord
with his bulging suitcase wrapped in twine
and September’s black rain falling.

Oh, tell me how to cure myself of irony, the gaze
that sees but doesn’t penetrate; tell me how to cure myself
of silence.

(Adam Zagajewski [source])

…and:

When you feel connected to everything, you also feel responsible for everything. And you cannot turn away. Your destiny is bound with the destinies of others. You must either learn to carry the Universe or be crushed by it. You must grow strong enough to love the world, yet empty enough to sit down at the same table with its worst horrors.

(Andrew Boyd [source[)

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In the End the Mystery Is All There Is

September 27, 2019 by John 1 Comment

[Image: “the SMILES MYSTERIOUSLY in DA VINCI GALLERY,” by user “RANT 73” on Flickr.com. (Used here under a Creative Commons license; thank you!) The caption, in Dutch, alludes to a computer-based analysis of the painting — described here and elsewhere — which determined that “she is 83 per cent happy, 9 per cent disgusted, 6 per cent fearful and 2 per cent angry.” I leave it to your judgment whether such an analysis is useful as an exercise in art appreciation.]

From whiskey river:

Wait for an Autumn Day
(from Ekelöf)

Wait for an autumn day, for a slightly
weary sun, for dusty air,
a pale day’s weather.

Wait for the maple’s rough, brown leaves,
etched like an old man’s hands,
for chestnuts and acorns,

for an evening when you sit in the garden
with a notebook and the bonfire’s smoke contains
the heady taste of ungettable wisdom.

Wait for afternoons shorter than an athlete’s breath,
for a truce among the clouds,
for the silence of trees,

for the moment when you reach absolute peace
and accept the thought that what you’ve lost
is gone for good.

Wait for the moment when you might not
even miss those you loved
who are no more.

Wait for a bright, high day,
for an hour without doubt or pain.
Wait for an autumn day.

(Adam Zagajewski [source])

…and:

If it happens that the human race doesn’t make it, then the fact that we were here once will not be altered, that once upon a time we peopled this astonishing blue planet, and wondered intelligently at everything about it and the other things who lived here with us on it, and that we celebrated the beauty of it in music and art, architecture, literature, and dance, and that there were times when we approached something godlike in our abilities and aspirations. We emerged out of depthless mystery, and back into mystery we returned, and in the end the mystery is all there is.

(James Howard Kunstler [source])

…and:

Catchpenny Road

Summer ends tonight.
Air cuts into our lungs
as frost cuts the field
into flowers. Stars catch
in the pond’s dark water
drawing us farther
from the lighted houses.
We catch our arms
in circles round our chests
as if this were protection
against darkness.

Spiked firs border the road.
Behind each one are ghosts
whose names we don’t know,
who watch us, who
withhold themselves,
who’d never hurt us.
They come to you in your sleep,
sit in a circle round your bed,
saying the things the living
want to say and can’t.
You try to move your head, try
to move into their world of light
where the lace on the child’s
white dress burns your skin
like a kiss. But no,
touching their lips to yours,
they go, wordlessly and without cause,
as only the dead might.

Mist spills from the trees
as you talk and we walk
from valley to hill, hill to valley,
till we come to the place
where we left off, unmarked road
crossing itself in the dark.
Blackened by frost, leaves
blow over the pond,
absorbing the water’s stain,
sinking towards the stars’ reflections.
You kneel, smooth the water
with your hands, and say nothing.
Perfect in their pain,
the dead surround us, holding
stones in their hands like coins.
Money they would lend us.

(Elizabeth Spires [source])

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Taking Off #6: International Tech

September 21, 2019 by John Leave a Comment

[Stock image by Gerd Altman on Pixabay: thanks!]

Although I’ve been what one could call, generically, a “technology professional” for over forty years, I have intentionally limited the scope of technology I pay much attention to. (My thinking: if I control what I know about, I’ll limit what I’ll be expected to know about.) Consequently, I’m always behind the curve — I might (indeed, do) know about Tech X, Y, or Z, just not enough to be confident enough in making recommendations or providing support.

Here’s the current general configuration of our electronic stuff:

Two computers — a six-year-old desktop PC which alternately boots into Windows 10 or Linux Mint, and a… well, a maybe nine-year-old laptop (also dual booting, but most often into Windows). The desktop is “mine”; the laptop (nominally The Missus’s) I have used myself on a few trips here and there. (Update, 2019-10-19: The Missus mentioned this week that she’s thinking of getting a new laptop.)
Two not-really-conventional “computers”: The Missus’s iPad Pro (now a few years old), and my Pixelbook (just got it over the summer). The iPad can be used in either WiFi mode, or in cellular mode if no WiFi signal is present; the Pixelbook does WiFi only.
Phones: an iPhone 8 and an LG G6. Our cellular provider for years has been Spr*nt, but we’re still with them now more or less just out of inertia.
A variety of media-related tech — several Roku boxes and a Chromecast.

So given all the above, what would we have to give up for a six-month trip to Europe? And of what’s left, what should we leave behind anyhow?

The need to answer those questions has bumped me out of my comfort zone. But this is what I’ve got a handle on so far…

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