Running After My Hat

ADMIN: Temporary Site Funkiness

April 24, 2014 by John 5 Comments

The good folks who support the popular WordPress software — used by a bazillion sites, including Running After My Hat — recently introduced a new version. It’s not the first time they’ve done so, not by a long shot, and it’s not even a “major” upgrade.

But it has played holy hell with working on blog posts, for me and many others.

One reason for WP’s popularity is the huge variety of plugins and extensions which independent developers have built for it over the years, to add features to the way blogs run and are built. Another reason is the proliferation of easily installable (and then customizable) themes; think of these as design templates. Put these two reasons together and you’ve got a single big reason why WordPress support can’t identify, in the new version, anything in particular which might be causing problems for bloggers. It seems to work just fine for many… and for many others, it seems to work just catastrophically badly.

I’m somewhere in the middle.But what doesn’t work is driving me crazy.

WP support offers to bloggers the only solution possible under the circumstances: turn off all plugins and extensions, and set aside whatever theme you’re using — falling back on the default theme for the new version. Then add back into the mix each feature you want or need, one at a time, testing how things go before trying the next. When it breaks again, voilà! — you’ve found the source of the offending glitch(es).

IMPORTANT: Note that none of this applies to site visitors. You don’t have to do anything. These instructions apply just to the people who blog with WordPress (create and update posts, design sites, and so on) and are experiencing problems.

As I said, it may be — is — the only solution possible. But it also has the potential to become one tedious slog, during which one familiar feature or another of the site stops working. (Just for starters, as long as the custom theme is disabled, everything will look different — very, very different.) Please bear with me during this time. I will probably start tinkering with this sometime over the weekend. (And — who knows? — maybe the problem will turn out to be something easily fixable.)

—

I do have a couple of advantages in the fight:

First, RAMH certainly doesn’t carry a lot of user traffic. So it’s not like many, many people are going to be inconvenienced.

And second, I’ve been working with software a looooong time. (Just this past March was 35 years.) I’ve got some ideas about how to test and diagnose the problems a little bit at a time, based on the nature of the problems I’m having.

(For example, none of my problems seem to be with the site interface as viewed by visitors/readers — “only” with the admin/behind-the-scenes elements. So it’s unlikely that, say, the little audio-player thingum I use for playing music here needs to be disabled.)

Still, it’s going to be a pain in the rear. I’ll probably create tomorrow’s whiskey river post using some other software, then just copy-and-paste it into the editor here, all at one go. After that, even before, don’t be surprised if something you’re used to seeing at the top right here suddenly disappears, or moves to the bottom of the page, or whatever.

RAMH@6: Discoveries (A Playlist, and a Rumination)

April 20, 2014 by John 15 Comments

[Image: 19th-century drawing by A. Roeseler for “the German Punch,” Fliegende Blätter.
Posted on Flickr by user “digitalsextant.” For the whole three-panel thing, click the image.]

I wondered what I’d write about for Running After My Hat‘s sixth anniversary — because, damn it, I was determined to write about something rather than let it pass completely unremarked.

Before I get into the gist of my answer to that question, I thought I’d offer you up a playlist of a variety of music from posts here. Each link in the below table takes you to the post where it was featured; the links open in a new window or tab, and the corresponding posts almost always include (or link to) lyrics, if appropriate. (If you just want to see the post title and date, hover your mouse over the link without clicking on it.) The songs follow no particular sequence, except that (in my estimation) they sound pretty good in this order.

A little audio-player thingumabob appears below the track listing. Feel free to ignore this, or use it as a soundtrack for what follows.


#	Artist	Song	Time
1	Nicola Benedetti	Concerto for violin and strings in D/”Grosso Mogul” I. Allegro	5:28
2	The Staple Singers	Slippery People (Club Mix)	6:38
3	Lenka	The Show	3:56
4	Ariana Grande	Tattooed Heart	3:15
5	B.B. King	One Shoe Blues	3:15
6	Shook Twins	Rose	2:58
7	Old Crow Medicine Show	Down Home Girl	3:47
8	Rising Appalachia	Swoon	2:30
9	The Black Keys	Lonely Boy	3:13
10	Dominant Legs	Make Time for the Boy	5:12
11	Santana (w/Rob Thomas)	Smooth	2:33
12	Caitlin Rose	Pink Champagne	4:06
13	Emmylou Harris/Rodney Crowell	Spanish Dancer	3:45
14	Big Bad Voodoo Daddy	Mr. Pinstripe Suit	3:39
15	The Rankins	Movin’ On	3:27
16	Carrie Rodriguez	Lake Harriet	3:12
17	Lucky Soul	Upon Hilly Fields	3:55
18	Red Molly	Wayfaring Stranger	5:42
19	Tom Waits	Hold On	5:34

…and here’s the playlist-player doo-dad itself. (Total length of all songs together: ~78 minutes. So, yeah: settle in.)

RAMH@6: Discoveries

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Little Figures, Big Contexts, and the Distance Between Them

April 18, 2014 by John 2 Comments

[Video: Ariana Grande, “Tattooed Heart.” I’m probably making people sick of this performance.]

From whiskey river:

When we remember our former selves, there is always that little figure with its long shadow stopping like an uncertain belated visitor on a lighted threshold at the far end of an impeccably narrowing corridor.

(Vladimir Nabokov [source])

…and:

Why We Tell Stories
(excerpt)
for Linda Nemec Foster

I

Because we used to have leaves
and on damp days
our muscles feel a tug,
painful now, from when roots
pulled us into the ground

and because our children believe
they can fly, an instinct retained
from when the bones in our arms
were shaped like zithers and broke
neatly under their feathers

and because before we had lungs
we knew how far it was to the bottom
as we floated open-eyed
like painted scarves through the scenery
of dreams, and because we awakened

and learned to speak

(Lisel Mueller [source])

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At Root

April 11, 2014 by John 2 Comments

[Video: launch trailer for the puzzle game Antichamber. I haven’t played it (yet), but the object
seems to be to keep moving forward — when the answer to the question, “Move forward
from where?” changes constantly. The game’s designer says that it has an end… despite the appearance
(to me) of an edgeless, centerless geometry of edges and centers.*]

From whiskey river (italicized portion):

Isle of Mull, Scotland

Because by now we know everything is not so green elsewhere.

The cities tied their nooses around our necks,
we let them without even seeing.

Not even feeling our breath soften
as clumps of shed wool scattered across days.

Not even. This even-ing, balance beam of light on green,
the widely lifted land, resonance of moor
winding down to water, the full of it. Days of cows
and sheep bending their heads.

We walked where the ancient pier juts into the sea.
Stood on the rim of the pool, by the circle
of black boulders. No one saw we were there
and everyone who had ever been there
stood silently in air.

Where else do we ever have to go, and why?

(Naomi Shihab Nye [source])

…and:

The secret of the mountain is that the mountains simply exist, as I do myself: the mountains exist simply, which I do not. The mountains have no “meaning,” they are meaning; the mountains are. The sun is round. I ring with life, and the mountains ring, and when I can hear it, there is a ringing that we share. I understand all this, not in my mind but in my heart, knowing how meaningless it is to try to capture what cannot be expressed, knowing that mere words will remain when I read it all again, another day.

(Peter Matthiessen [source])

…and:

Someday, sometime, you will be sitting somewhere. A berm overlooking a pond in Vermont. The lip of the Grand Canyon at sunset. A seat on the subway. And something bad will have happened: You will have lost someone you loved, or failed at something at which you badly wanted to succeed.

And sitting there, you will fall into the center of yourself. You will look for some core to sustain you. And if you have been perfect all your life and have managed to meet all the expectations of your family, your friends, your community, your society, chances are excellent that there will be a black hole where that core ought to be.

I don’t want anyone I know to take that terrible chance. And the only way to avoid it is to listen to that small voice inside you that tells you to make mischief, to have fun, to be contrarian, to go another way. George Eliot wrote, “It is never too late to be what you might have been.” It is never too early, either.

(Anna Quindlen [source])

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The Space That Contains the Stalk I Call Me

April 4, 2014 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “Homeward Bound,” by Luc De Leeuw on Flickr. Used under a Creative Commons license.]

From whiskey river gone by:

The irony and tension fade away, and I am home once more. I don’t want to ruminate on happiness. It is much simpler and much easier than that. For what has remained untouched in these hours I retrieve from the depths of forgetfulness is the memory of a pure emotion, a moment suspended in eternity. Only this memory is true in me, and I always discover it too late. We love the gentleness of certain gestures, the way a tree fits into a landscape. And we have only one detail with which to recreate all this love, but it will do: the smell of a room too long shut up, the special sound of a footstep on the road. This is the way it is for me. And if I loved then in giving myself, I finally became myself, since only love restores us.

(Albert Camus [source])

…and (from whiskey river’s commonplace book):

The Resemblance Between Your Life And A Dog

I never intended to have this life, believe me —
It just happened. You know how dogs turn up
At a farm, and they wag but can’t explain.

It’s good if you can accept your life — you’ll notice
Your face has become deranged trying to adjust
To it. Your face thought your life would look

Like your bedroom mirror when you were ten.
That was a clear river touched by mountain wind.
Even your parents can’t believe how much you’ve changed.

Sparrows in winter, if you’ve ever held one, all feathers,
Burst out of your hand with a fiery glee.
You see them later in hedges. Teachers praise you,

But you can’t quite get back to the winter sparrow.
Your life is a dog. He’s been hungry for miles,
Doesn’t particularly like you, but gives up, and comes in.

(Robert Bly [source])

…and:

In his book On Having No Head, Douglas Harding pointed out that our actual experience of life is of being a stalk, the body, which ends at the chest and shoulders, upon which sits the entire universe. We can’t directly experience ourselves as having a head; we simply assume we are looking out through the eyes in our head because we see others doing that, and when we look in the mirror, that’s what we see. But our experience is of an undifferentiated world of colors, shapes, textures, sounds, feelings and sensations, all existing in one reality, roughly in the spot where we think of our head as being. All that exists, exists on top of the stalk that I call me.

The truly amazing next step in this realization is that the stalk I call me is included in the total existence that extends outward from the top of the stalk. My actual experience is that nothing is separate. I cannot say that any one thing is separate from any other one thing because they all occupy the same space — the space that exists, and contains, the stalk that I call me.

(Cheri Huber)

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Feeling Your Way

March 28, 2014 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: cartoon by David Sipress, from The New Yorker (July 31, 2000). Original here.]

From whiskey river:

Goods

It’s the immemorial feelings
I like the best: hunger, thirst,
their satisfaction; work-weariness,
earned rest; the falling again
from loneliness to love;
the green growth the mind takes
from the pastures in March;
The gayety in the stride
of a good team of Belgian mares
that seems to shudder from me
through all my ancestry.

(Wendell Berry [source])

…and:

Even now, all possible feelings do not yet exist, there are still those that lie beyond our capacity and our imagination. From time to time, when a piece of music no one has ever written or a painting no one has ever painted, or something else impossible to predict, fathom or yet describe takes place, a new feeling enters the world. And then, for the millionth time in the history of feeling, the heart surges and absorbs the impact.

(Nicole Krauss [source])

…and:

298

A monk said, “In the day there is sunlight, at night there is firelight. What is ‘divine light’?”

The master said, “Sunlight, firelight.”

(uncredited [source])

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This Just In: Fox, ESPN Bracing for Niffleist Protests

March 23, 2014 by John Leave a Comment

NEW YORK (March 23) Supporters of the National Football League — dubbed “niffleists” — have pledged to “bring baseball to its knees” unless television networks make certain changes in broadcasts of professional baseball games.

The Major League Baseball (MLB) season opens at the end of March. Games are carried by the Fox and ESPN broadcast and cable networks.

“To be fair, I personally haven’t watched a baseball game since 1957,” said unofficial niffleist spokesperson Alfredo de Darque. “We just think it’s past time for the networks to acknowledge that baseball doesn’t have a lock on the word ‘rulebook.'”

When reporters asked what sort of changes in MLB broadcasts niffleists would like to see, de Darque suggested three:

Umpires must wear uniforms featuring vertical black-and-white stripes.
Winning coaches must be doused with Gatorade. (De Darques said, “But we’d accept tins or pouches of chewing tobacco, as long as they’re national brands.”)

And, most controversially:

“Whoever’s holding the ball may be tackled by one or more members of the opposing team.”

Still under consideration by the niffleists: rubberized baseballs. Said one source, “We believe in our hearts that balls designed this way will ‘spike’ much better than the current models.”

De Darque insisted, “Every single one of our rules is just as valid as any of theirs.” When asked if the NFL would accept counter-proposals to introduce baseball rules to football games, he said, “Well, no. Certainly not on Sundays, anyway. They’re sort of sacred to us.”

I Used to Think… But Now…

March 21, 2014 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “On second thoughts…,” by Tim Norris on Flickr. (Click to enlarge.) Used under a Creative Commons license.]

From whiskey river:

Insight roams the sea of the unconscious like the Loch Ness monster, a rumor whose wake occasionally becomes visible, but even then it’s mystifying and scarcely believed.

(Diane Ackerman [source])

…and:

Words are substance strange. Speak one and the air ripples into another’s ears. Write one and the eye laps it up. But the sense transmutes, and the spoken word winds through the ear’s labyrinth into a sense that is no longer the nerve’s realm. The written word unfolds behind the eye into the world, world’s image, and the imagination sees as the eye cannot see — thoughtfully.

(Dan Beachy-Quick [source unknown])

…and:

Inspiration is not the exclusive privilege of poets or artists generally. There is, has been, and will always be a certain group of people whom inspiration visits. It’s made up of all those who’ve consciously chosen their calling and do their job with love and imagination. It may include doctors, teachers, gardeners — and I could list a hundred more professions. Their work becomes one continuous adventure as long as they manage to keep discovering new challenges in it. Difficulties and setbacks never quell their curiosity. A swarm of new questions emerges from every problem they solve. Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous “I don’t know.”

(Wislawa Szymborska [source])

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The Uncertain Sum of Definite Parts

March 14, 2014 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “I dreamed about a human being,” by Fran Simó (original on Flickr; used under Creative Commons license. For more information, see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river:

The Life of a Day

Like people or dogs, each day is unique and has its own personality quirks which can easily be seen if you look closely. But there are so few days as compared to people, not to mention dogs, that it would be surprising if a day were not a hundred times more interesting than most people. But usually they just pass, mostly unnoticed, unless they are wildly nice, like autumn ones full of red maple trees and hazy sunlight, or if they are grimly awful ones in a winter blizzard that kills the lost traveler and bunches of cattle. For some reason we like to see days pass, even though most of us claim we don’t want to reach our last one for a long time. We examine each day before us with barely a glance and say, no, this isn’t one I’ve been looking for, and wait in a bored sort of way for the next, when, we are convinced, our lives will start for real. Meanwhile, this day is going by perfectly well-adjusted, as some days are, with the right amounts of sunlight and shade, and a light breeze scented with a perfume made from the mixture of fallen apples, corn stubble, dry oak leaves, and the faint odor of last night’s meandering skunk.

(Tom Hennen [source])

…and (italicized portion):

The brain’s dynamo runs millions of jobs, by mixing chemicals, oscillations, synchronized rhythms, and who knows what else. It is like looking at a mosaic or a pointillist painting in motion. Study the whole and the parts disappear; study the parts and the whole disappears. Maybe stronger brains will solve that problem in future days. I believe consciousness is brazenly physical, a raucous mirage the brain creates to help us survive. But I also sense the universe is magical, greater than the sum of its parts, which I don’t attribute to a governing god, but simply to the surprising, ecstatic, frightening everyday reality we all know. Ultimately, I find consciousness a fascinating predicament for matter to get into.

(Diane Ackerman [source])

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Too Many Answers to Stop

March 8, 2014 by John Leave a Comment

I’ve long held that a story I’ve started writing must reach a certain “critical mass” in order for me to carry it through to completion. This critical mass might be defined as the written length — the word/page count — beyond which I will not, can not stop writing. A story which might become a novella (or longer), for instance, seems to hit critical mass at about 10,000 words. At this point, the narrative has so much momentum in my head that it’s a force in its own right: I know enough about the characters and the story to know how little I really know about them, and how much I want to find out.

(I’m pretty sure many/most other writers feel the same way, incidentally, although we’ve probably all got different critical masses.)

Mostly, this is just a descriptive figure, not a prescriptive one. It’s an observation which seems to have held true in the past and (as I expect) will likely hold true in the future, not a make-or-break target.

For the piece I’m working on now, though, I seem to be approaching — perhaps have already crossed — a different and perhaps unquantifiable threshold: a critical mass of research.
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