Running After My Hat

Invisible, Unknowable, Outside and In

June 28, 2013 by John 1 Comment

'Glass Ichthyosaur,' by Amanda Heath

[Image: “Glass Icthyosaur,” by Amanda Heath. I first
learned of this project at Scientific American‘s “Symbiartic” blog.]

From whiskey river:

A philosopher knows that in reality he knows very little. That is why he constantly strives to achieve true insight. Socrates was one of these rare people. He knew that he knew nothing about life and about the world. And now comes the important part: it troubled him that he knew so little.

(Jostein Gaarder [source])

…and:

It is life that does the thinking all around us, forming with playful ease the connections our reason can only laboriously patch together piecemeal, and never to such kaleidoscopic effect.

(Robert Musil [source])

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Irrevocability, Inevitability, and the Line Between Them

June 27, 2013 by John 2 Comments

[No, I don’t know what this represents in the real world. (I found it at a site somehow related to optical engineering, and am too distracted to make sense of it at the moment.) But it feels right: obviously a span of time, with three bright lines each clearly demarcating… something.]

Yesterday I passed a milestone of sorts: I signed the various forms which will, as of July 13, render me officially “retired.” Only… not so retired.

It used to be — although I’m sure it’s a fairly recent development, only in the last 75 years or so — that when someone retired, at least in the US, he parted company not only with his current employer, but with any employer. He stopped working, at least working for pay. Retired life, the retired life of fantasy anyhow, featured white-haired protagonists tending their gardens, writing memoirs, downsizing their homes with wandering RVs, becoming cranks, lovable curmudgeons, and (sometimes bound up in the same soul) chuckling old-timers. Given enough resources, especially retirement savings, they could do pretty much what they wanted with the rest of their days.

Different world now.

Far from staying home and puttering, or taking up new hobbies and so on, I will instead be coming to work five days a week, eight hours a day: to my same office, to perform the same work I’ve been performing for years. I can do this for up to five years, if I’d like. My accumulated pension savings will go into an interest-bearing account meanwhile; otherwise, I’ll continue to draw my salary, have the same benefits, build up and use personal and medical leave, and so on, just the same as always.

So no, as of July 13, I won’t really be retired. Not in the old sense. However, no matter what my official or semi-official status on the job, I will have entered a new life phase…

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A Glorious Mess

June 21, 2013 by John 5 Comments

[Lyrics here. More about the video below.]

From whiskey river:

Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn’t have to be a walk during which you’ll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don’t find meaning but “steal” some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn’t make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be.

(Albert Camus, Notebooks [source (unverified)])

…and:

I have no right to call myself one who knows. I was one who seeks, and I still am, but I no longer seek in the stars or in the books; I’m beginning to hear the teachings of my blood pulsing within me. My story isn’t pleasant. It’s not sweet and harmonious like invented stories. It tastes of folly and bewilderment, of madness and dream, like the life of all people who no longer want to lie to themselves.

(Hermann Hesse [source])

…and:

A Warning to My Readers

Do not think me gentle
because I speak in praise
of gentleness, or elegant
because I honor the grace
that keeps this world. I am
a man crude as any,
gross of speech, intolerant,
stubborn, angry, full
of fits and furies. That I
may have spoken well
at times, is not natural.
A wonder is what it is.

(Wendell Berry [source])

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Midweek Music Break: Aoife O’Donovan, “Red & White & Blue & Gold”

June 19, 2013 by John 2 Comments

Standup comedian Robert Klein used to do a short routine about US President James A. Garfield. Every reference to Garfield (1831-81), said Klein, said exactly the same thing about him. Apparently Garfield never actually did anything else; consequently, they all said: Shot by a disappointed office seeker. “George Washington: Father of our country. Abraham Lincoln: the Civil War. James A. Garfield: shot by a disappointed office seeker.”

The present artist is something like that, in one respect: pretty much every interview with or feature about her includes this information somewhere in the first paragraph.To wit: Aoife O’Donovan‘s first name is pronounced EE-fuh. (I’m not saying it’s required, but I’m damned if I’ll be the first to break the chain.)

O’Donovan has had a successful career already, as a member of “neo-bluegrass” band Crooked Still and the “folk noir” trio Sometymes Why. Her first solo album, Fossils, debuted last week. I’d previewed several of the songs already, at one site or another, and I gotta say: love at first hearing — even without being able to parse out all the lyrics. (And the album’s so new that the lyrics haven’t started to be posted anywhere online, it seems.)

Fossils has gotten so many rave reviews one might be inclined to conspiracy-and-collusion theories… but yes, I think it’s really that good, and I’m just a tiny caboose at the tail end of a loooong train of praise.

Here she is in a live performance of one of the songs on the album, “Red & White & Blue & Gold.”

[Lyrics to come]

…and here is “Beekeeper,” from the album:

[Lyrics to come]

O’Donovan will join Garrison Keillor and company this summer on his “Radio Romance” national tour. Live performance tickets are not something The Missus and I normally spring for, and Keillor almost never ventures this far south anyhow. But I’d have to fight temptation not to see her in concert.

Potpourri, June 18 (2013 ed.)

June 18, 2013 by John 6 Comments

[Continuing in what seems to have become an annual June 18 tradition, of commenting about whatever the heck I want to…]

[Video: Neil Gaiman signs 1200 copies of his newest novel, The Ocean at the End of the Lane.]

—

Medium-lukewarm: I’m still posting occasionally over at Medium. (Most recently, a brief appreciation of Carl Sagan.) But I still don’t get it, quite. The first time I posted there — the “Scribbling in Books” piece — was right after receiving the invitation to contribute to Medium. Within an hour or two of its posting, I got an email reporting that the thing had made a list of Editor’s Picks.

Exciting news, right? It certainly boosted the page’s view count (see image at right; click to enlarge.) And yet (as you can also glean from the image) there was little if any spillover to subsequent posts. I have no way to figure out why the drop-off, alas. All the possible reasons I can think of are sobering, if not depressing. If a post makes either the Editor’s Picks list, or a similar list of those most recommended by other Medium readers, you apparently can count on some good exposure. Otherwise…

Because of the way Medium is organized — very little information about those posting there — aside from their thumbnail photos (and, of course, the topics they choose to address) there is no way to know with any certainty the context in which they write. How old/young are they? What other sites, even what other Medium writers, do they read most often? (No blogrolls.) On what posts have they commented?

I can sorta tell that most of them are young, probably under 40 years of age. They tend to have professions rather than jobs. They’re politically astute. It’s almost charming how willingly they offer life advice: I’ve read numerous posts which begin, not in so many words, something like: Now that I’m 30 years old, I can say with assurance that X is true (whatever the X of the moment). I wonder if I ever had such confidence. (Probably not.)

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The Waking Moment

June 14, 2013 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: Because of childhood associations, all I can think of when I see this is something like, “Come ON. It’s Saturday morning! Can I watch cartoons yet? Can I can I can I?!?”]

From whiskey river:

The Gate

I had no idea that the gate I would step through
to finally enter this world

would be the space my brother’s body made. He was
a little taller than me: a young man

but grown, himself by then,
done at twenty-eight, having folded every sheet,

rinsed every glass he would ever rinse under the cold
and running water.

This is what you have been waiting for, he used to say to me.
And I’d say, What?

And he’d say, This — holding up my cheese and mustard sandwich.
And I’d say, What?

And he’d say, This, sort of looking around.

(Marie Howe [source])

…and:

Annunciation

Even if I don’t see it again — nor ever feel it
I know it is — and that if once it hailed me
it ever does —
And so it is myself I want to turn in that direction
not as towards a place, but it was a tilting
within myself,
as one turns a mirror to flash the light to where
it isn’t — I was blinded like that — and swam
in what shone at me
only able to endure it by being no one and so
specifically myself I thought I’d die
from being loved like that.

(Marie Howe [source])

…and:

A lifetime may not be long enough to attune ourselves fully to the harmony of the universe. But just to become aware that we can resonate with it — that alone can be like waking up from a dream.

(David Steindl-Rast [source])

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Thought-Struck

June 7, 2013 by John 2 Comments

[Image: “Twinned meerkats,” by user amndw2 (Amanda L. Watson, whom I do not know) on Flickr. She received these small toys (only about an inch high) as gifts, independently, within months of each other. She does not know what, if anything, the coincidence might mean. I believe they’ve just twigged to the same idea, at the same time.]

From whiskey river:

Dangerous Considerations
(excerpt)

In our day, we confine ourselves at the best of times to discussing the imagination. The word “imagination” is beautiful and vast, but it doesn’t hold everything.

But what is the spirit, the spiritual life? If only I were up to defining such things! Robert Musil says that the spirit synthesizes intellect and emotion. It’s a good working definition, for all its concision.

In the case of poetry, literature, it’s simpler to say — theologians know a thing or two about this — what the spirit isn’t. It’s not psychoanalytic any more than it is behavioral, sociological, or political. It is holistic, and in it are reflected, as in an astronaut’s helmet, the earth, the stars, and a human face.

These are difficult and dangerous considerations.

(Adam Zagajewski [source])

…and:

The thought is not something that observes an inner event, but, rather it is this inner event itself. We do not reflect on something, but, rather, something thinks itself in us.

(Robert Musil [source])

[Read more…]

Midweek Music Break: The Coup (and Patton Oswalt), “The Magic Clap”

June 5, 2013 by John 3 Comments

I have a “real” Midweek Music Break in the pipeline, but it’ll have to wait another week; it’s taking (to my surprise) way too much time in the research for me to finish today. In the meanwhile, here’s a hilarious video in which comedian Patton Oswalt acts out the lyrics to The Coup’s new single “The Magic Clap.” Paste, where I saw it, describes this as “an awesomely spastic video” — which says pretty much all there is to say about it. (No lyrics provided, for what will be obvious reasons.)

I don’t think I’ve ever listened to anything by The Coup before, and probably will find excuses not to do so again. But this was too entertaining to keep to myself. I’ve always thought of Patton Oswalt as one of the most interesting and consistently watchable comedians in the business — the video sort of cements that impression in my mind.

June 4th: Twenty-Five Years On

June 4, 2013 by John 8 Comments

Inadequate words, scraps of memories, images…

After a pause, a bigger boy — a teenager — appears. On his head is a ridiculous bolero hat, on his upper body a flashy silk shirt, on his upper lip a patently false pencil-thin mustache; tucked into the hat is what seems to be a bushel of thick black hair. He’s leaning over, striking a would-be “artistic” pose, something he picked up from dancing school, and he’s grinning — grinning, crookedly, for all he’s worth.

The older boy executes a sweeping bow, almost a curtsy, and sashays back into the trees…

I don’t have real pictures of my Dad to correspond to all these memories. But if I could keep only one of the real ones, I know which it would be: any of three or four taken at about the mid-point of his life. He’s got a Budweiser in one hand and a cigarette (a Tareyton: he hadn’t switched yet) in the other… He’s grinning, of course, and why not? His life is in place: he’s happily married, all four of us kids are on the scene, we’re living in the first and only house he and Mom would ever own or ever need.

Dad could be a lively conversationalist. When he talked, I loved his facial expressions, especially: the goggle eyes and slackened jaw of bogus shock; the steep, steep, steeply-angled furrows of his brow (we joked he could hold pencils there) that seemed to say, “What in the hell are you talking about?!?”; the fake teeth-gnashing as he pretended to bite his tongue at someone else’s idiotic remark that he’d only get in trouble for responding to… Dad was, in short, a great mugger.

…when Dad wanted you to pass him something, he’d just sort of look in its direction until someone finally asked, “Is this what you want?” (Our first guess was invariably wrong, and then he would say, all exasperation, “No, the salt!” or whatever. Few things annoyed him more profoundly than our failure to know when he wanted the salt.) …I hope we passed him whatever it was he wanted this time, although now (of course) we’ll never know for sure.

One of these years, I may get through an entire June 4th without thinking there’s anything special about the day — even without feeling foolish or sentimental otherwise. I will say, though, that over the years the fact or manner of his death seems ever less significant: we all die, after all, and the varieties of death are countless. But the fact that he lived, and how he dealt with it all (or didn’t) — yes, that. That.

__________________________________

Quotations in this post come from an unpublished essay,
“Crossing the Line,” first written in 1989 or 1990.

Story Up My Sleeve, May 2013: Wrapping Up

June 3, 2013 by John 1 Comment

I had no specific objectives at the outset: just wanted to post an excerpt from a different story — any story — on each day in May. My only real guideline was: don’t feature any author’s work more than once. Over time, though, some observations emerged:

Gender

I can’t remember the exact timing, but back around the beginning of the month I first heard about the online kerfuffle — the male Wikipedia editor, who was systematically working his way through the alphabetic list of “American authors” and moving any who happened to be women out of that general category and into the more specific “American female authors” category. (Not simply ensuring they were in both, mind you.)* I’m not generally quota-driven in such matters, but this whole thing appalled me. While brainstorming the Story Up My Sleeve selections, within a couple of days I decided I would alternate male-female authors throughout the month. I more or less stuck to this. (Final tally, not counting the Midweek Music Breaks: fourteen stories by men, thirteen by women.) But then I ran up against…

Medium

Most of the stories this month, obviously, were in prose form. But it occurred to me early on that I might easily interweave the Midweek Music Break series with the short-story one. So on May 8 through May 29, the Wednesday posts featured story songs. But this tripped me up gender-wise; my story list at that point had just featured Carson McCullers and was about to do Damon Knight, and my first song selection was Gordon Lightfoot… Totally confused at trying to work out the permutations, I decided to more or less relax when it came to the music. (For the record, it featured two songs by men; an “anthology” of songs sung by a musical-film cast of women; and a duet sung by a woman and a man.)

Genre

Something that surprised me: I probably could have done nothing but science-fiction stories all month. I kept thinking of other favorite SF (and fantasy) tales I wanted to include; what’s funny about this is that I haven’t read SF/F stories regularly for years. Finally, I just had to force myself to be disciplined. (For what it’s worth, stories from the American South presented me with the same dilemma — and solution. Hence, no Faulkner.) I also decided to mix things up some on this score, too, although literary/classic stories generally predominated.

Bottom line

In a tweet she posted after Friday’s entry, Jessica Francis Kane hinted that this Story Up My Sleeve project might become an annual one, undertaken by more than one individual (albeit on just one day in May, not throughout the entire month). I can’t offer an opinion about that. But I will say that doing it this way once certainly felt right to me. Coming up with roughly 30 stories felt difficult at first; obviously, or so I told myself, I’d bitten off too ambitious a chunk to chew, let alone swallow. By mid-month, though, I cringed every time I realized I’d run out of May before I ran out of stories.

Poetry and novels get all the glamour and red-carpet walks; if we’re not paying attention, short stories can feel almost like afterthoughts — like conjunctions, prepositions, and other function words to the rest of literature’s complete sentences. A claim like “I’m about halfway through my next novel” fairly roars in people’s imaginations; saying you’re far through your next short story just squeaks.

But y’know, short stories are a wonderful form. (Even the conventional novel implicitly acknowledges as much: what’s a chapter, really, if not a short story?) If you seek breadth of reading — diversity of voice, style, and theme — you could do far worse than starting with an anthology… whether lifted from a bookshelf, or pulled from your sleeve.

__________________________

*I did read this guy’s account of his reasoning, and even sympathized and agreed with it on some levels; when doing research, it generally does help me to start with a more specific category (“beetles,” say, vs. “insects”), and drill down from there. But I can’t imagine requiring others to do so. Just for starters, non-native speakers of a given language may not know whether a given name says to start in the women’s list, or the men’s. (I myself can never remember without hesitation that Chinua Achebe was a man, or that Michiko Kakutani is a woman.) You might as well categorize authors by hair color or shoe size. And why not drill down even further? If you know that Faulkner was left-handed (no, I have no idea) and had brown hair, why label him simply as a male author? Why not move him into the list of southpaw brown-haired male authors from Mississippi, and leave the generalists to stumble around in the dark?