Running After My Hat

Story Up My Sleeve #7: “The Jockey,” by Carson McCullers

May 7, 2013 by John Leave a Comment

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

The jockey crossed the dining room and went into the bar. He ordered a Manhattan, and Sylvester watched him stand with his heels pressed tight together, his body hard as a lead soldier’s, holding his little finger out from the cocktail glass and sipping the drink slowly.

“He’s crazy,” said Simmons. “Like I said.”

Sylvester turned to the rich man. “If he eats a lamb chop, you can see the shape of it in his stomach a hour afterward. He can’t sweat things out of him any more. He’s a hundred and twelve and a half. He’s gained three pounds since we left Miami.”

“A jockey shouldn’t drink,” said the rich man.

“The food don’t satisfy him like it used to and he can’t sweat it out. If he eats a lamb chop, you can watch it tooching out in his stomach and it don’t go down.”

The jockey finished his Manhattan. He swallowed, crushed the cherry in the bottom of the glass with his thumb, then pushed the glass away from him. The two girls in blazers were standing at his left, their faces turned toward each other, and at the other end of the bar two touts had started an argument about which was the highest mountain in the world. Everyone was with somebody else; there was no other person drinking alone that night. The jockey paid with a brand-new fifty-dollar bill and didn’t count the change.

[source]

Story Up My Sleeve #6: “Entropy,” by Thomas Pynchon

May 6, 2013 by John Leave a Comment

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

DOWNSTAIRS, Meatball Mulligan’s lease-breaking party was moving into its 40th hour. On the kitchen floor, amid a litter of empty champagne fifths, were Sandor Rojas and three friends, playing spit in the ocean and staying awake on Heidseck and benzedrine pills. In the living room Duke, Vincent, Krinkles and Paco sat crouched over a 15-inch speaker which had been bolted into the top of a wastepaper basket, listening to 27 watts’ worth of The Heroes’ Gate at Kiev. They all wore hornrimmed sunglasses and rapt expressions, and smoked funny-looking cigarettes which contained not, as you might expect, tobacco, but an adulterated form of cannabis sativa. This group was the Duke di Angelis quartet. They recorded for a local label called Tambú and had to their credit one 10″ LP entitled Songs of Outer Space. From time to time one of them would flick the ashes from his cigarette into the speaker cone to watch them dance around. Meatball himself was sleeping over by the window, holding an empty magnum to his chest as if it were a teddy bear. Several government girls, who worked for people like the State Department and NSA, had passed out on couches, chairs and in one case the bathroom sink.

This was in early February of ’57 and back then there were a lot of American expatriates around Washington, D.C., who would talk, every time they met you, about how someday they were going to go over to Europe for real but right now it seemed they were working for the government. Everyone saw a fine irony in this. They would stage, for instance, polyglot parties where the newcomer was sort of ignored if he couldn’t carry on simultaneous conversations in three or four languages. They would haunt Armenian delicatessens for weeks at a stretch and invite you over for bulghour and lamb in tiny kitchens whose walls were covered with bullfight posters. They would have affairs with sultry girls from Andalucía or the Midi who studied economics at Georgetown. Their Dôme was a collegiate Rathskeller out on Wisconsin Avenue called the Old Heidelberg and they had to settle for cherry blossoms instead of lime trees when spring came, but in its lethargic way their life provided, as they said, kicks.

At the moment, Meatball’s party seemed to be gathering its second wind. Outside there was rain. Rain splatted against the tar paper on the roof and was fractured into a fine spray off the noses, eyebrows and lips of wooden gargoyles under the eaves, and ran like drool down the windowpanes. The day before, it had snowed and the day before that there had been winds of gale force and before that the sun had made the city glitter bright as April, though the calendar read early February. It is a curious season in Washington, this false spring. Somewhere in it are Lincoln’s Birthday and the Chinese New Year, and a forlornness in the streets because cherry blossoms are weeks away still and, as Sarah Vaughan has put it, spring will be a little late this year. Generally crowds like the one which would gather in the Old Heidelberg on weekday afternoons to drink Würtzburger and to sing Lili Marlene (not to mention The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi) are inevitably and incorrigibly Romantic. And as every good Romantic knows, the soul (spiritus, ruach, pneuma) is nothing, substantially, but air; it is only natural that warpings in the atmosphere should be recapitulated in those who breathe it. So that over and above the public components — holidays, tourist attractions — there are private meanderings, linked to the climate as if this spell were a stretto passage in the year’s fugue: haphazard weather, aimless loves, unpredicted commitments: months one can easily spend in fugue, because oddly enough, later on, winds, rains, passions of February and March are never remembered in that city, it is as if they had never been.

[source]

Story Up My Sleeve #5: “Big Blonde,” by Dorothy Parker

May 5, 2013 by John Leave a Comment

Jean-Jacques Henner: 'Weeping [a/k/a Penitent, Repentant, etc.] Magdalene' [Don’t know what this is? See the Story Up My Sleeve background page.]

Herbie earned enough, and they took a little apartment far up town. There was a Mission-furnished dining-room with a hanging central light globed in liver-colored glass; in the living-room were an “over-stuffed suite,” a Boston fern, and a reproduction of the Henner “Magdalene” with the red hair and the blue draperies; the bedroom was in gray enamel and old rose, with Herbie’s photograph on Hazel’s dressing-table and Hazel’s likeness on Herbie’s chest of drawers.

She cooked — and she was a good cook — and marketed and chatted with the delivery boys and the colored laundress. She loved the flat, she loved her life, she loved Herbie. In the first months of their marriage, she gave him all the passion she was ever to know.

She had not realized how tired she was. It was a delight, a new game, a holiday, to give up being a good sport. If her head ached or her arches throbbed, she complained piteously, babyishly. If her mood was quiet, she did not talk. If tears came to her eyes, she let them fall.

She fell readily into the habit of tears during the first year of her marriage. Even in her good sport days, she had been known to weep lavishly and disinterestedly on occasion. Her behavior at the theater was a standing joke. She could weep at anything in a play — tiny garments, love both unrequited and mutual, seduction, purity, faithful servitors, wedlock, the triangle.

“There goes Haze,” her friends would say, watching her. “She’s off again.”

Wedded and relaxed, she poured her tears freely. To her who had laughed so much, crying was delicious. All sorrows became her sorrows; she was Tenderness. She would cry long and softly over newspaper accounts of kidnapped babies, deserted wives, unemployed men, strayed cats, heroic dogs. Even when the paper was no longer before her, her mind revolved upon these things and the drops slipped rhythmically over her plump cheeks.

“Honestly,” she would say to Herbie, “all the sadness there is in the world when you stop to think about it!”

“Yeah,” Herbie would say.

She missed nobody. The old crowd, the people who had brought her and Herbie together, dropped from their lives, lingeringly at first. When she thought of this at all, it was only to consider it fitting. This was marriage. This was peace.

But the thing was that Herbie was not amused.

[source]

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Update — a note about sources: Some of the “[source]” links I provide in this series take you to the corresponding specific page(s) in an authoritative source (Google Books, often, or Amazon.com, if a preview is available there). And yet you get frustrated, because one or more of a story’s other pages can’t be previewed. No help for it, really — a little something called “copyright,” you know. That said, many of the stories are viewable in their entirety online. You just have to search for an extended bit of text. For instance, search on:

She would cry long and softly over newspaper accounts of kidnapped babies, deserted wives, unemployed men

and you’ll probably find lots of opportunities to read the whole thing. They might or might not be “authoritative,” but they’re the whole thing, all right.

(In rare cases, too, your good old RAMH right-bracket secret decoder ring trick might work just fine to get you the complete story. Assuming, of course, you know that trick…)

Story Up My Sleeve #4: “The Killion,” by Ian Frazier

May 4, 2013 by John 1 Comment

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

At a little after noon on Friday, August 6th, Marcie Chang, anchorwoman on TV 8’s “Newsbusters” evening news show, picked up her envelope at the pay window on the studio’s fifth floor, bought a ham-salad sandwich and a cup of coffee from the lunch wagon in the hall, and took the elevator back to her office on the tenth floor. Sitting down at her desk, she tore open the envelope, which contained the first payment of the lucrative new contract that the station had offered her in the spring. She took one look at the check and collapsed. She was dead before her face hit the desk top. A few minutes later, TV reporter Kerri Corcoran, a colleague and friend, came into Marcie’s office, saw her, looked at the check she still held in her hand, and crumpled, lifeless, to the floor. The same fate met the receptionist who came to Marcie’s office to find out why she wasn’t answering her phone, and the building security guard, who was summoned by the cleaning woman after she had noticed the pile of bodies.

Nor was that the end. In quick succession, three police officers, a fireman, a newspaper reporter, and a pathologist from Mount Sinai were added to the death list. Alarmed public-health officials called on the Institute for Catastrophe Control in Princton. With grim predicatability, two of the institute’s top scientists soon showed the seriousness of the challenge when they, too, were felled. Within forty-eight hours, scientists from the institute who had taken over the case were fairly certain that the fatal agent was the check that Marcie had picked up that Wednesday afternoon. They examined it through heavily tinted safety glasses, in sections, with no one scientist viewing the entire check. Within another forty-eight hours, Dr. Leo Wiedenthal, director of the institute, knew what he had on his hands. In a statement released to the press, he said that there was no evidence of a supertoxin or highly contagious disease on the fatal paycheck. Rather, he said, “Marcie Chang and the eleven other victims almost certainly died as a result of what they saw on the check. Through a computer error, Marcie’s check was made out to an extremely high number. Apparently, the computer made Marcie’s check out to the sum of one killion dollars. The killion, as every mathematician knows, is a number so big that it kills you.”

[source]

Drawing (and Writing, Illuminating, Musing) Upon Infinity

May 3, 2013 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: the first page — the first letter, a capital L — of the so-called Wenceslas Bible. It’s not the Bible referenced in Jennifer O’Grady’s poem, below (for one thing, the text is in German, not Latin). But I have a feeling it’s in the same general neck of the illuminated-manuscript woods. It’s worth viewing full-size, and while you can do so by clicking the image above, a better way is by clicking this link. I couldn’t find one single authoritative page of information about this Bible edition, but numerous discussions of its “bathhouse babes” entertained me greatly.]

From whiskey river:

When I Met My Muse

I glanced at her and took my glasses
off — they were still singing. They buzzed
like a locust on the coffee table and then
ceased. Her voice belled forth, and the
sunlight bent. I felt the ceiling arch, and
knew that nails up there took a new grip
on whatever they touched. “I am your own
way of looking at things,” she said. “When
you allow me to live with you, every
glance at the world around you will be
a sort of salvation.” And I took her hand.

(William Stafford [source: quoted all over the place, including here])

…and:

This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on seas and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.

(John Muir [source])

…and (same post as above):

The door to infinity is somewhere in the room with you, right now.

(Gina Rocca)

[Read more…]

Story Up My Sleeve #3: “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” by Nathaniel Hawthorne

May 3, 2013 by John Leave a Comment

[Don’t know what this is? See the Story Up My Sleeve background. Expecting, perhaps, a whiskey river Fridays post? Patience, patience: the Friday is still young!]

“Halt, honest man, and answer me a question,” said [Robin], very resolutely. “Tell me, this instant, whereabouts is the dwelling of my kinsman, Major Molineux?”

“Keep your tongue between your teeth, fool, and let me pass!” said a deep, gruff voice, which Robin partly remembered. “Let me pass, I say, or I’ll strike you to the earth!”

“No, no, neighbour!” cried Robin, flourishing his cudgel, and then thrusting its larger end close to the man’s muffled face. “No, no, I’m not the fool you take me for, nor do you pass till I have an answer to my question. Whereabouts is the dwelling of my kinsman, Major Molineux?”

The stranger, instead of attempting to force his passage, stepped back into the moonlight, unmuffled his face, and stared full into that of Robin.

“Watch here an hour, and Major Molineux will pass by,” said he.

Robin gazed with dismay and astonishment on the unprecedented physiognomy of the speaker. The forehead with its double prominence, the broad hooked nose, the shaggy eyebrows, and fiery eyes, were those which he had noticed at the inn, but the man’s complexion had undergone a singular, or, more properly, a twofold change. One side of the face blazed an intense red, while the other was black as midnight, the division line being in the broad bridge of the nose; and a mouth which seemed to extend from ear to ear was black or red, in contrast to the colour of the cheek. The effect was as if two individual devils, a fiend of fire and a fiend of darkness, had united themselves to form this infernal visage. The stranger grinned in Robin’s face, muffled his parti-coloured features, and was out of sight in a moment.

[source]

Story Up My Sleeve #2: “Drunk With Love,” by Ellen Gilchrist

May 2, 2013 by John 2 Comments

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

The first shock passed up the desk and through his hands and into his jaw. Books fell from their shelves, a chair slid into a window, there were crashes downstairs. She’s in the car, he thought. She’s in that goddamn convertible. He got up and pulled the door open and moved out into the hall. The stairway was still there. He ran down the stairs and found Francis in the History section holding onto a man in a raincoat. Several customers were huddled around the cash register. Willis and Eileen were on the floor with their arms over their heads. “Get out into the street,” Freddy yelled. “For Christ’s sake, get out of here. There’s too much to fall. Let’s go. Let’s get outside.” He pushed a group of customers through the turnstile. The second shock came. A section of art books fell across Children’s Fantasy.

“Out the door,” he was screaming. “For Christ’s sake get out the door. Francis, get over here. Get out that door before it shatters.” He dragged the customers along with him. They were barely out the door when the third shock came. The front window collapsed around the sign Clara Books, Clara For Light. His baby. The whole front window caved in upon a display of photography books. It moved in great triangular plates right down on top of Irving Penn and Ansel Adams and Disfarmer and David Hockney and Eugene Smith. A five thousand-dollar print of “Country Doctor” fell across the books.

[source]

Story Up My Sleeve #1: “Farewell, My Lovely Appetizer,” by S.J. Perelman

May 1, 2013 by John 1 Comment

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

“Any customers?”

“A woman by the name of Sigrid Bjornsterne said she’d be back. A looker.”

“Swede?”

“She’d like you to think so.”

I nodded toward the inner office to indicate that I was going in there, and went in there. I lay down on the davenport, took off my shoes, and bought myself a shot from the bottle I kept underneath. Four minutes later, an ash blonde with eyes the color of unset opals, in a Nettie Rosenstein basic black dress and a baum-marten stole, burst in. Her bosom was heaving and it looked even better that way. With a gasp she circled the desk, hunting for some place to hide, and then, spotting the wardrobe where I keep a change of bourbon, ran into it. I got up and wandered out into the anteroom. Birdie was deep in a crossword puzzle.

“See anyone come in here?”

“Nope.” There was a thoughtful line between her brows. “Say, what’s a five-letter word meaning ‘trouble’?”

“Swede,” I told her, and went back inside. I waited the length of time it would take a small, not very bright boy to recite “Ozymandias,” and, inching carefully along the wall, took a quick gander out the window. A thin galoot with stooping shoulders was being very busy reading a paper outside the Gristede store two blocks away. He hadn’t been there an hour ago, but then, of course, neither had I. He wore a size-seven dove-colored hat from Browning King, a tan Wilson Brothers shirt with pale-blue stripes, a J. Press foulard with a mixed-red-and-white figure, dark blue Interwoven socks, and an unshined pair of ox-blood London Character shoes. I let a cigarette burn down between my fingers until it made a small red mark, and then I opened the wardrobe.

“Hi,” the blonde said lazily. “You Mike Noonan?” I made a noise that could have been “Yes,” and waited. She yawned. I thought things over, decided to play it safe. I yawned. She yawned back, then, settling into a corner of the wardrobe, went to sleep. I let another cigarette burn down until it made a second red mark beside the first one, and then I woke her up. She sank into a chair, crossing a pair of gams that tightened my throat as I peered under the desk at them.

“Mr. Noonan,” she said, “you — you’ve got to help me.”

“My few friends call me Mike,” I said pleasantly.

“Mike.” She rolled the syllable on her tongue. “I don’t believe I’ve ever heard that name before. Irish?”

“Enough to know the difference between a gossoon and a bassoon.”

“What is the difference?” she asked. I dummied up; I figured I wasn’t giving anything away for free. Her eyes narrowed. I shifted my two hundred pounds slightly, lazily set fire to a finger, and watched it burn down. I could see she was admiring the interplay of muscles in my shoulders. There wasn’t any extra fat on Mike Noonan, but I wasn’t telling her that. I was playing it safe until I knew where we stood.

[source]

Getting the Syrup to Pour

April 26, 2013 by John 2 Comments

[Image: visual.ly’s infographic-style interpretation of Kurt Vonnegut’s “Shape of Stories” theory. Click to enlarge; go here (starting at the bottom of the page) to see Vonnegut’s own expression of the idea: a lecture whose text (with drawings) appeared in his A Man Without a Country. See also the Brain Pickings post on it — including a video.]

From whiskey river (two italicized stanzas):

Why We Tell Stories
For Linda Foster

1

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

2

We sat by the fire in our caves,
and because we were poor, we made up a tale
about a treasure mountain
that would open only for us

and because we were always defeated,
we invented impossible riddles
only we could solve,
monsters only we could kill,
women who could love no one else

and because we had survived
sisters and brothers, daughters and sons,
we discovered bones that rose
from the dark earth and sang
as white birds in the trees

3

Because the story of our life
becomes our life

Because each of us tells
the same story
but tells it differently

and none of us tells it
the same way twice

because grandmothers looking like spiders
want to enchant the children
and grandfathers need to convince us
what happened happened because of them

and though we listen only
haphazardly, with one ear,
we will begin our story
with the word and

(Lisel Mueller [source])

…and:

Let us think of the still nameless poets, still nameless writers, who should be brought together and kept together. I am sure it is our duty to help these future benefactors to attain that final discovery of themselves which makes for great literature. Literature is not a mere juggling of words; what matters is what is left unsaid, or what may be read between the lines. Were it not for this deep inner feeling, literature would be no more than a game, and we all know that it can be much more than that.

(Jorge Luis Borges [source])

…and:

In the Garden of Eden

No one tells much about it,
but there were vultures in the Garden of Eden,
Turkey vultures, to be exact.
Dark eagles, they would soar like gods
voiceless, their wings held out in blessing,
their unfeathered heads the red jewels
of the sky of the garden.

They were vegetarian then.
There were no roadside kills,
no bones to pick, no dead flesh to bloom, ripen.

And they were happy.
They could not imagine
what they would become.

(Sheryl St. Germain [source])

[Read more…]

Understanding the Terms of the Bargain You’ve Struck

April 24, 2013 by John 4 Comments

[Image: two panels from the Changeling’s Child webcomic, by Bartholomew Schmidt. See the full installment from which this is excerpted here; the complete series begins here.]

Well before a writer signs with an agent or outside editor, and certainly well before anyone will consider publishing his book, he must agree to one very important contract — arguably the most important contract of all, and one which needs to be at least drawn up even before the first word goes into the manuscript*.

I speak, of course, of the writer’s contract with himself (which will later be countersigned by his work, but that’s another matter (and a more rickety metaphor)).

[Read more…]