Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

A Mansion Like No Other

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Sea-Ty: an underwater city with a difference

[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

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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

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Happy Hooligan, in a characteristic moment: running from a policeman. Click for full postcard.[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

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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…]

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

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an old bar[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

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'Slow Learner: Early Stories,' by Thomas Pynchon[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

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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]

___________________________________

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

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[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

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Wenceslas Bible (late 14th c.): initial letter 'L'

[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

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Nathaniel Hawthorne[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]
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