Running After My Hat

Story Up My Sleeve #16: “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” by Ernest Hemingway

May 16, 2013 by John Leave a Comment

[Don’t know what this is? See the Story Up My Sleeve background page.]

“I want to go home and into bed.”

“We are of two different kinds,” the older waiter said. He was now dressed to go home. “It is not only a question of youth and confidence although those things are very beautiful. Each night I am reluctant to close up because there may be some one who needs the cafe.”

“Hombre, there are bodegas open all night long.”

“You do not understand. This is a clean and pleasant cafe. It is well lighted. The light is very good and also, now, there are shadows of the leaves.”

“Good night,” said the younger waiter.

“Good night,” the other said. Turning off the electric light he continued the conversation with himself. It is the light of course but it is necessary that the place be clean and pleasant. You do not want music. Certainly you do not want music. Nor can you stand before a bar with dignity although that is all that is provided for these hours. What did he fear? It was not a fear or dread, It was a nothing that he knew too well. It was all a nothing and a man was a nothing too. It was only that and light was all it needed and a certain cleanness and order.

[source]

Story Up My Sleeve #15 / Midweek Music Break: “Cell Block Tango,” by John Kander and Fred Ebb

May 15, 2013 by John 2 Comments

[Continuing to combine the Story Up My Sleeve and Midweek Music Break series for Wednesdays in May…]

Doing this Story Up My Sleeve series has reminded me of a forgotten pleasure: the reading of short-story anthologies. I’ve never been able to read, cover-to-cover, an entire anthology of stories by a single writer (although I came close with John Cheever); but I’ve read the entirety of many anthologies of stories by multiple writers. I just haven’t done so in a long time.

So when casting about for a song to feature today, I was delighted to suddenly think of this number, from the Kander & Ebb musical Chicago. The lyrics present an anthology of six short-short stories, each with a different first-person narrator; while the stories are spoken rather than sung, each has a certain built-in crescendo-to-climax as the “murderesses” take turns describing their ~~crimes~~ murders, and as each story is told the other women sing the background refrain: He had it coming.

[Lyrics]

(Those lyrics are a little squirrely, so to speak. I began with lyrics commonly found around the Internet, but must’ve spent at least 45 minutes stopping the song, adjusting the lyrics, re-starting and backing up in the song to make sure I had it right so far, continuing, stopping again… (The lyrics I had obviously came from some production other than the film. Maybe they were the original lyrics as published, I don’t know. They sure didn’t fit flush with the lyrics as sung.) Finally I just said the hell with it and posted what I had to that point. :))

Story Up My Sleeve #14: “The Burning,” by Eudora Welty

May 14, 2013 by John Leave a Comment

[Don’t know what this is? See the Story Up My Sleeve background page.]

Delilah was dancing up to the front with a message; that was how she happened to be the one to see. A horse was coming in the house, by the front door. The door had been shoved wide open. And all behind the horse, a crowd with a long tail of dust was coming after, all the way up their road from the gate between the cedar trees.

She ran on into the parlor, where they were. They were standing up before the fireplace, their white sewing dropped over their feet, their backs turned, both ladies. Miss Theo had eyes in the back of her head.

“Back you go, Delilah,” she said.

“It ain’t me, it’s them,” cried Delilah, and now there were running feet to answer all over the downstairs; Ophelia and all had heard. Outside the dogs were thundering. Miss Theo and Miss Myra, keeping their backs turned to whatever shape or ghost Commotion would take when it came — as long as it was still in the yard, mounting the steps, crossing the porch, or even, with a smell of animal sudden as the smell of snake, planting itself in the front hall — they still had to see if it came in the parlor, the white horse. It drew up just over the ledge of the double doors Delilah had pushed open, and the ladies lifted their heads together and looked in the mirror over the fireplace, the one called the Venetian mirror, and there it was.

It was a white silhouette, like something cut out of the room’s dark. July was so bright outside, and the parlor so dark for coolness, that at first nobody but Delilah could see. Then Miss Myra’s racing speech interrupted everything.

“Will you take me on the horse? Please take me first.”

[source]

Story Up My Sleeve #13: “A Toy for Juliette,” by Robert Bloch

May 13, 2013 by John Leave a Comment

[Don’t know what this is? See the Story Up My Sleeve background page.]

Juliette wasn’t smiling at herself. She smiled because she knew that Grandfather was back, and he’d brought her another toy. In just a few moments it would be decontaminated and delivered, and she wanted to be ready.

[source]

Story Up My Sleeve #12: “Tam O’Shanter,” by Donna Tartt

May 12, 2013 by John Leave a Comment

old Scot [Don’t know what this is? See the Story Up My Sleeve background page.]

… no matter how their parents tried to prepare them, warned them again and again that the films had been made fifty years before, children were always disappointed not to see another child. Sometimes the younger ones didn’t understand. They asked him where the real Geordie was, was he Geordie’s grandpa. But the older ones could scarcely conceal their dismay. He would never forget the afternoon several years before when a little girl — grandchild of a colleague at the production company — had been brought to meet him. Gamely, he had pulled out the old red tam-o’-shanter; gamely, he had answered the door, bending low to greet the little girl and booming: “Aye, then! And who’s this wee lassie?” He would never forget the look on the little girl’s face. It was a look of shocked recognition, then of dawning horror: as if it were her own death she saw, leaning down so close to greet her; as if she could see the ruin of the boy he had been — destroyed now, lost forever — buried deep beneath his sagging cheeks.

[source

__________________________________

(whispered) Note: the RAMH right-bracket secret decoder ring will come in real handy here for anyone who wants to read the whole brief thing…

Story Up My Sleeve #11: “The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg,” by Mark Twain

May 11, 2013 by John Leave a Comment

[Don’t know what this is? See the Story Up My Sleeve background page.]

Hadleyburg village woke up world-celebrated — astonished — happy — vain. Vain beyond imagination. Its nineteen principal citizens and their wives went about shaking hands with each other, and beaming, and smiling, and congratulating, and saying this thing adds a new word to the dictionary — Hadleyburg, synonym for incorruptible — destined to live in dictionaries for ever! And the minor and unimportant citizens and their wives went around acting in much the same way. Everybody ran to the bank to see the gold-sack; and before noon grieved and envious crowds began to flock in from Brixton and all neighbouring towns; and that afternoon and next day reporters began to arrive from everywhere to verify the sack and its history and write the whole thing up anew, and make dashing free-hand pictures of the sack, and of Richards’s house, and the bank, and the Presbyterian church, and the Baptist church, and the public square, and the town-hall where the test would be applied and the money delivered; and damnable portraits of the Richardses, and Pinkerton the banker, and Cox, and the foreman, and Reverend Burgess, and the postmaster — and even of Jack Halliday, who was the loafing, good-natured, no-account, irreverent fisherman, hunter, boys’ friend, stray-dogs’ friend, typical “Sam Lawson” of the town. The little mean, smirking, oily Pinkerton showed the sack to all comers, and rubbed his sleek palms together pleasantly, and enlarged upon the town’s fine old reputation for honesty and upon this wonderful endorsement of it, and hoped and believed that the example would now spread far and wide over the American world, and be epoch-making in the matter of moral regeneration. And so on, and so on.

By the end of a week things had quieted down again; the wild intoxication of pride and joy had sobered to a soft, sweet, silent delight — a sort of deep, nameless, unutterable content. All faces bore a look of peaceful, holy happiness.

Then a change came. It was a gradual change; so gradual that its beginnings were hardly noticed; maybe were not noticed at all, except by Jack Halliday, who always noticed everything; and always made fun of it, too, no matter what it was. He began to throw out chaffing remarks about people not looking quite so happy as they did a day or two ago; and next he claimed that the new aspect was deepening to positive sadness; next, that it was taking on a sick look; and finally he said that everybody was become so moody, thoughtful, and absent-minded that he could rob the meanest man in town of a cent out of the bottom of his breeches pocket and not disturb his reverie.

[source]

A Mansion Like No Other

May 10, 2013 by John 1 Comment

[Image: artist’s rendering of “Sea-Ty,” a bowl-shaped floating-but-underwater city, open to the sky. The page where I found this image says that it “resembles a traditional hillside town with a network of stairs connecting the various levels.” Each of those little box-type things, apparently, is a house or other building.]

From whiskey river (italicized portion):

Every human being is intended to have a character of his own; to be what no others are, and to do what no other can do. Our common nature is to be unfolded in unbounded diversities. It is rich enough for infinite manifestations. It is to wear innumerable forms of beauty and glory.

(William Ellery Channing [source])

…and:

Sometimes, When the Light

Sometimes, when the light strikes at odd angles
and pulls you back into childhood

and you are passing a crumbling mansion
completely hidden behind old willows

or an empty convent guarded by hemlocks
and giant firs standing hip to hip,

you know again that behind that wall,
under the uncut hair of the willows

something secret is going on,
so marvelous and dangerous

that if you crawled through and saw,
you would die, or be happy forever.

(Lisel Mueller [source])

…and:

The Night, the Porch

To stare at nothing is to learn by heart
What all of us will be swept into, and baring oneself
To the wind is feeling the ungraspable somewhere close by.
Trees can sway or be still. Day or night can be what they wish.
What we desire, more than a season or weather, is the comfort
Of being strangers, at least to ourselves. This is the crux
Of the matter, which is why even now we seem to be waiting
For something whose appearance would be its vanishing—
The sound, say, of a few leaves falling, or just one leaf,
Or less. There is no end to what we can learn. The book out there
Tells us as much, and was never written with us in mind.

(Mark Strand [source])

[Read more…]

Story Up My Sleeve #10: “Blue Moon,” by Jayne Anne Phillips

May 10, 2013 by John 4 Comments

Trampoline silhouette [Not sure what this is? See the Story Up My Sleeve background page. A regular whiskey river Fridays post will show up here sometime later today.]

My brother was a gymnast, the best in the Tri-County area; he refused to perform on any equipment but the trampoline. The trampoline was a new acquisition for Bellington High School in 1968, and Billy wanted to do things no one in Bellington had ever seen anyone do.

I didn’t know I loved him deeply, not then, not yet; for days on end I had no conscious thoughts of him. After all, I was the elder sister; I was a senior, I would graduate with Honors (as honors went, in Bellington), I was pretty enough. I did right in superficial ways. I kept structures intact by attending to surfaces, trying to conceal the fact that I belonged nowhere. Uneasy, I watched Billy practice in the gym, twisting and turning as though borne up by some liquid medium.

In the weeks preceding the gym show, Billy was granted special practice time during homeroom hour. Mornings in the crowded high school, I had homeroom in the gymnasium. Thirty of us sat in one section of the portable bleachers, waiting for the scream of first-period bell. Roll was taken, announcements made. Girls gossiped. In front of us lay the basketball court, vast and blond; on the other side of it, my brother hurled himself into the air repeatedly, warming up. He was obvlivious to spectators, and most only glanced at him once or twice and went back to copying homework assignments. I kept my hands open in my lap and stared at my palms, at the lines, the whorls and stars and crosses. If I looked at Billy, I wouldn’t be able to look away.

[source]

Story Up My Sleeve #9: “Babel II,” by Damon Knight

May 9, 2013 by John Leave a Comment

[Don’t know what this is? See the Story Up My Sleeve background page.]

From the front he looked a little like Happy Hooligan, if you remember that far back. From the side, where you got a better view of that silver white crest, he looked like a cross between George Arliss and a cockatoo.

He stood just under four feet tall, big head, crest and all. He had a wrinkled violet-gray skin, curious S-whorled ears, and a Tweedledum tummy; he was dressed in an electric-blue jacket and small clothes of some crinkly material that glittered when he moved, with jackboots on his stubby legs and a white-metal disk, a quarter as big as he was, slung by a baldrick from one narrow shoulder.

…Suddenly illuminated, the Hooligan-thing blazed at him like a Christmas tree ornament. Its eyes blinked rapidly; then the long upper lip curled up in an astonishing crescent-shaped bucktoothed smile. It made a sound like “Khakh-ptui!” and nodded its head several times.

Cavanaugh’s first thought was for the Hasselblad. He picked it up, tripod and all, carried it crabwise backward to safety behind the armchair, then crossed the room and took a poker out of the fireplace rack. Gripping this weapon, he advanced on the Hooligan.

The thing came to meet him, grinning and nodding. When they were two strides apart it stopped, bowed jerkily, and lifted the white disk at the end of the baldrick, holding it at the top, with one of the flat sides toward Cavanaugh.

A picture formed in the disk.

[source]

Story Up My Sleeve #8 / Midweek Music Break: “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” by Gordon Lightfoot

May 8, 2013 by John Leave a Comment

Trackline (estimated) of the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald on November 10, 1975

I thought I’d take liberties with both of these ongoing series’ themes in order to combine them. This may continue for the next few Wednesdays, as well — creating, in effect, a weekly post on story songs.

Gordon Lightfoot’s rambling, rolling ballad doesn’t recount the real-life facts 100% exactly as they happened — at least as far as we know of those facts. Indeed, Lightfoot himself recast a portion of the lyrics (in live performances, anyhow) to reflect more recent research. Yet considering that he wrote the song within months after the event in question, and that we still — almost 40 years later — don’t know-know what happened, he didn’t do a bad job at all.

In general outline, here’s what we do (more or less) know:

[Read more…]