Running After My Hat

What to Do (with, for, in) Just One World

July 12, 2013 by John 2 Comments

[Video from the Slashdot “News for nerds, stuff that matters” discussion forum: Sarah Campagna
discusses her CyberCraft robot-rescue project: building new robots from scraps of old ones. The finished
works are statues — immobile, fine-art sculpture — rather than machines, but they do arrest the
attention. The company slogan: “Robots, Rayguns, and Spaceships You Will Covet.”]

From whiskey river (italicized portion):

Long Point Light

Long Point’s apparitional
this warm spring morning,
the strand a blur of sandy light,

and the square white
of the lighthouse—separated from us
by the bay’s ultramarine

as if it were nowhere
we could ever go—gleams
like a tower’s ghost, hazing

into the rinsed blue of March,
our last outpost in the huge
indetermination of sea.

It seems cheerful enough,
in the strengthening sunlight,
fixed point accompanying our walk

along the shore. Sometimes I think
it’s the where-we-will-be,
only not yet, like some visible outcropping

of the afterlife. In the dark
its deeper invitations emerge:
green witness at night’s end,

flickering margin of horizon,
marker of safety and limit.
But limitless, the way it calls us,

and where it seems to want us
to come. And so I invite it
into the poem, to speak,

and the lighthouse says:
Here is the world you asked for,
gorgeous and opportune,

here is nine o’clock, harbor-wide,
and a glinting code: promise and warning.
The morning’s the size of heaven.

What will you do with it?

(Mark Doty [source])

…and (in slightly different words):

As a working hypothesis to explain the riddle of our existence, I propose that our universe is the most interesting of all possible universes, and our fate as human beings is to make it so.

(Freeman Dyson [source])

…and:

Today

Today I’m flying low and I’m
not saying a word.
I’m letting all the voodoos of ambition sleep.

The world goes on as it must,
the bees in the garden rumbling a little,
the fish leaping, the gnats getting eaten.
And so forth.

But I’m taking the day off.
Quiet as a feather.
I hardly move though really I’m traveling
a terrific distance.

Stillness. One of the doors
into the temple.

(Mary Oliver [source])

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You Don’t Have to Look for Everything to Find It

July 5, 2013 by John 9 Comments

[Image: Where the Baker was last seen. Plate 10 of Henry Holiday’s original illustrations for Lewis Carroll’s
The Hunting of the Snark. For an interesting report on some of the (possible) sources for Holiday’s
illustrations, see this paper (3.6MB PDF) by Goetz Kluge.]

From whiskey river:

There are poems
that are never written,
that simply move across
the mind
like skywriting
on a still day;
slowly the first word
drifts west,
the last letters dissolve
on the tongue,
and what is left
is the pure blue
of insight, without cloud
or comfort.

(Linda Pastan)

…and:

The journey is there and every single one of us has got to go through it, and you can’t dodge it, and the purpose of everything and the whole of existence is to equip you to take another step, and another step, and another step, and so on.

(Jesse Watkins)

…and:

Hope

It hovers in dark corners
before the lights are turned on,
it shakes sleep from its eyes
and drops from mushroom gills,
it explodes in the starry heads
of dandelions turned sages,
it sticks to the wings of green angels
that sail from the tops of maples.

It sprouts in each occluded eye
of the many-eyed potato,
it lives in each earthworm segment
surviving cruelty,
it is the motion that runs the tail of a dog,
it is the mouth that inflates the lungs
of the child that has just been born.

It is the singular gift
we cannot destroy in ourselves,
the argument that refutes death,
the genius that invents the future,
all we know of God.

It is the serum which makes us swear
not to betray one another;
it is in this poem, trying to speak.

(Lisel Mueller)

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(Belated, But Timely) Midweek Music Break: Fifes and Drums

July 4, 2013 by John 3 Comments

'Yankee Doodle,' a/k/a 'Spirit of '76'

It can be hard to take the music of fifes and drums seriously. Unlike Sousa marches, which I wrote of last year at this time, these marches have never had one single person’s name — a pop-culture champion, if you will — associated with them. They never even constituted a uniquely American genre: the form sprang from the battlefields of 17th- and 18th-century Continental Europe. Yet you almost never hear it played at other times of the year, only around July 4th*.

In the logbook of human civilization, the United States hasn’t even existed that long. Nevertheless, what we commonly refer to as the Revolutionary War feels like ancient history to us. Anyone who lived through it is long dead, and the manner in which it was conducted scarcely feels like warfare. In some engagements you could probably almost count the shots fired as they were fired. Total deaths on both sides together (considering battles only, not illness, starvation, and other war-related deaths) apparently numbered “only” in four figures. It almost feels like… well, like a toy war.

The sound of fife-and-drum music, to ears accustomed to the window-rattling brass of martial celebrations, itself feels like the perfect music for a toy war. Given enough schoolchildren who know how to whistle, and given enough empty picnic tables to slap their hands on, you could pretty convincingly recreate the sound (if not the discipline) of a fife-and-drum band. Wikipedia says that the flute “sounds an octave above the written music”; even someone musically unsophisticated can see a hint of, well, unseriousness in the instrument so described.

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Stanley Kubrick and One-Point Perspective

July 2, 2013 by John 3 Comments

After viewing this, it’s pretty hard to argue with the notion that one-point perspective was an obsession for Kubrick:

I found this via a commenter’s link in the Facebook Film Noir group, in a discussion of a still photo from Kubrick’s second feature, Killer’s Kiss. In most (all?) of the scenes captured in the above video, the one-point perspective takes place on a two-dimensional plane: the camera is aimed at the horizon, and the vanishing point is correspondingly horizontal from the viewer. Killer’s Kiss includes lots of other examples of that convention: alleys, warehouses, and so on. In this shot, though, he’s added a third dimension — you’re looking down, as well as across — making the moment even more vertiginously (and subconsciously) tense. Especially with the checkered tile, railings, and wall mouldings, it’s like looking into a shark’s mouth:

I love seeing this sort of thing.

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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