Running After My Hat

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])

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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)).

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RAMH@5: Cherchez les Femmes (A Playlist)

April 20, 2013 by John 8 Comments

[Image: Fifty-Three Stations of Tokaido: 44 (Yokkaichi), color woodblock print (1841-34), by Utagawa Hiroshige. For more information, see the note at the foot of this post.]

Well, damn. I just couldn’t quite make it to a thousand posts by today: I’m still a couple dozen short. (On the other hand, if you count all the auxiliary not-actual-posts-as-such pages — the About stuff, and the Propagational Library series, story excerpts and so on — they put me easily over the top.)

If you challenged me on the point, I’m not sure I could answer coherently why I’m still blogging (however fitfully these days), in addition to Facebooking and posting to Twitter. On the face of it, the whole blogging transaction model is upside-down (especially relative to those other platforms): the blogger can spend an hour, several hours, sometimes days of work thinking about, possibly researching and writing-and-editing a given post — for close to zero reward. Post provocatively or hilariously (however briefly) on FB or Twitter, though, and you get a dozen acknowledgments of one kind or another, from simple “Like”s to full-blown dialogue on the subject. It’s… well, I don’t know. It’s weird. Unless you’ve got dozens of followers and regular commenters (a circumstance which I’ve frankly never aspired to), and hence something like conversation, blogging may just be one of those aimless pursuits which some humans follow. You go for Sunday drives in the country; I blog.

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Cut the Now, and Dance

April 19, 2013 by John 1 Comment

[Video from the PBS Blank on Blank series of animated “vintage [and previously unheard] interviews” with various celebrities. Others currently include, e.g., Jim Morrison on “Why Fat is Beautiful” (1969) and Dave Brubeck on “Fighting Communism with Jazz” (2008)]

From whiskey river:

Ours is a planet sown in beings. Our generations overlap like shingles. We don’t fall in rows like hay, but we fall. Once we get here, we spend forever on the globe, most of it tucked under. While we breathe, we open time like a path in the grass. We open time as a boat’s stem slits the crest of the present.

(Annie Dillard [source])

…and:

But it is never over; nothing ends until we want it to.
Look, in shattered midnights,
On black ice under silver trees, we are still dancing, dancing.

(Gwendolyn MacEwen [source])

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Midweek Music Break: Linda Ronstadt, “Trouble Again”

April 17, 2013 by John Leave a Comment

For reasons which may (if I’m lucky!) become obvious in a few days, I recently combed through RAMH to see when I’d featured this song here. I couldn’t believe what my eyes (via the Search feature here, or via our Google overlords) insisted to be true: never. I’d never even mentioned it in a comment. It appears in not a single draft post. The absence didn’t just defy expectations; it defied explanation — seemingly defied reality itself.*

I mean, seriously: I love this song.

When the album on which it appears came out, in 1989, I pretty much bought it automatically, knowing very little in advance: it was Linda Ronstadt, after all. And (look at that cover photo!) it clearly had nothing to do with her several previous albums — the Nelson Riddle collaborations on old standards, and so on — all of which I’d respected and listened to, even repeatedly, and even really, really liked… without ever falling in love with any of them.

So Cry Like a Rainstorm, Howl Like the Wind, unheard, seemed on the face of it a return to form.

Which turned out to be, well, not quite true. Don’t get me wrong: much of it sits very pleasantly in the ears, and Ronstadt is joined on several numbers by the silken-voiced Aaron Neville. (That collaboration seemed to draw the most commentary and praise from critics, and resulted in the album’s biggest hit singles… and not one but two Grammies for duet performances, in 1990 and ’91.) Brian Wilson (Ronstadt told one reviewer) added fifteen parts just to one song.

But wowie, when I heard this number — as far as I can tell, just Ronstadt and the musicians — I think I almost passed out. I’d bought the album on cassette tape back then, of course; and I was single at the time, so spent a lot of time in the car by myself, to and from work, on road trips and family visits, simply to the store and back. I listened to the whole thing — this number in particular — over, and over, and over. I listened to “Trouble Again” so many times that I knew exactly how many internally-clocked seconds it took to rewind to the beginning. Nothing else quite like it appears on that album. I don’t know why it was never released as a single.

Aside from the music, from the start I very much liked the meaning — the story — in this song. “I’d be so pure if it hadn’t been for YOU” isn’t a unique theme, by any stretch. But every other example I can think of features a man singing of or to a woman who (he claims) led him astray: that “Trouble Again” stands the standard narrative on its head makes it worth hearing on its own, specific performance aside. Its protagonist even shares all those guys’ defensive self-delusion.

(Lest you think that Ronstadt’s simply covering a male-written song: nope. It’s a cover of a song by Karla Bonoff, who also penned a good number of other songs which have marked Ronstadt’s career.)

One note in particular really lingers in the mind — It. Is. Amazing — but I’ll let you discover it for yourselves:

[Lyrics]

The note in question was one of two which imprinted themselves on my brain around the same time. The other I already discussed a good while back, down towards the end of this post; there, Carly Simon rounded off “I Get Along Without You Very Well” with a lingering (and lingering, and lingering…) tug on the heart. But Ronstadt here powers through with a furious, sustained outburst of bitterness which — in the lyrics’ context — means above all not to let “you” get a word in edgewise.

For the record, here’s Karla Bonoff’s own version. Obvious differences between Ronstadt’s and Bonoff’s voices aside, all the essential elements are in place (including, not least, the storyline). The note here, however — at around the 1:30 mark — lasts for only couple of seconds (vs. Ronstadt’s ten-second blast). It’s missing the righteous fury:

_____________________________________

* Actually, I have shared it off the board with a couple of long-time RAMH readers. Yeah. That had to be what I was thinking of — because of course it couldn’t possibly be ascribed to a hiccup of memory…

Stories and Madness, Poem, Sentence, Silence

April 12, 2013 by John 4 Comments

[Image: an excerpt from Street of Crocodiles, by Bruno Schulz.
See note at the foot of this post for more info.]

From whiskey river:

My turn now. The story of one of my insanities.

What I liked were: absurd paintings, pictures over doorways, stage sets, carnival backdrops, billboards, bright-colored prints, old-fashioned literature, church Latin, erotic books full of misspellings, the kind of novels our grandmothers read, fairy tales, little children’s books, old operas, silly old songs, the naive rhythms of country rimes.

I dreamed of Crusades, voyages of discovery that nobody had heard of, republics without histories, religious wars stamped out, revolutions in morals, movements of races and continents; I used to believe in every kind of magic.

I invented colors for the vowels. A black, E white, I red, O blue, U green. I made rules for the form and movement of every consonant, and I boasted of inventing, with rhythms from within me, a kind of poetry that all the senses, sooner or later, would recognize. And I alone would be its translator.

I began it as an investigation. I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.

(Arthur Rimbaud)

…and (italicized portion, in a different translation):

For the poem does not stand outside time. True, it claims the infinite and tries to reach across time — but across, not above.

A poem, being an instance of language, hence essentially dialogue, may be a letter in a bottle thrown out to sea with the — surely not always strong — hope that it may somehow wash up somewhere, perhaps on a shoreline of the heart. In this way, too, poems are en route: they are headed toward.

Toward what? Toward something open, inhabitable, an approachable you, perhaps, an approachable reality.

(Paul Celan [source])

…and:

A Certain Swirl

The classroom was dark, all the desks were empty,
and the sentence on the board was frightened to
find itself alone. The sentence wanted someone to
read it, the sentence thought it was a fine sentence, a
noble, thorough sentence, perhaps a sentence of
some importance, made of chalk dust, yes, but a sen-
tence that contained within itself a certain swirl not
unlike the nebulous heart of the unknown universe,
but if no one read it, how could it be sure? Perhaps it
was a dull sentence and that was why everyone had
left the room and turned out the lights. Night came,
and the moon with it. The sentence sat on the board
and shone. It was beautiful to look at, but no one
read it.

(Mary Ruefle [source])

…and:

The brain is silent, the brain is dark, the brain tastes nothing, the brain hears nothing. All it receives are electrical impulses — not the sumptuous chocolate melting sweetly, not the oboe solo like the flight of a bird, not the tingling caress, not the pastels of peach and lavender at sunset over a coral reef — just impulses.

(Diane Ackerman [source])

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The Only One of Us with the Coordinates for This Destination and Its Hardware Is You

April 11, 2013 by John Leave a Comment

Surely I’ve said so before, here and elsewhere, but just in case it’s fallen through the cracks: I really, really like being friends with — just knowing — smart people. I could cite any number of reasons for this (better reading and music suggestions, better jokes, and so on). One perhaps not so obvious (and if they knew, they might prefer otherwise): better quirks.

Consider the case of a woman I’ve known for, oh, ten years or more, but have never met-met. (Our first encounter took place via email while she was doing some tech work for my computer-books agent’s site.) She seems quite level-headed and nice, and also (importantly) smart as heck. She’s published books on a couple of topics — including an excellent reference on using Google, back in the days when almost no one knew all the ins and out. And she also publishes a several-times-weekly e-newsletter of Web-research and -data tips. In all of these venues she’s exhibited an excellent, modestly skewed sense of humor.

Anyhow, on Facebook yesterday she posted the following non-technical status, which I frankly believe too good to keep to myself. (I checked with her before including this verbatim here on RAMH, by the way.)

I dreamed that a job applicant mentioned he had won $2000 solving King Friday’s Rubric. I was curious so I ordered a copy to see what it was.

It showed up as a large printed list, 1,000 large file cards and a hanging cloth, printed with a grid, the size of a shower curtain (in the dream we used shower curtain rings to hang it up.)

The list was a list of saints. The file cards were clues about the saints that you had to match to the list. The clues were in logic format. (“This saint was kind to birds and lived to be exactly 20 years older than the saint who is celebrated in March.”)

Once you matched up the saints to the clues, you had to use the letters on the back of the cards and arrange them on a grid in something that was kind of like Sudoku, only for letters of the alphabet.

I have no idea.

King Friday’s Rubric. I got that far and practically swooned. (Who dreams in words like rubric?!) And it testifies, indirectly, to her Web-research influence that I immediately had to look that up. King Friday, as it happens, is the name of one of the puppet characters in Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood — specifically Friday XIII, don’t you know — but rubric? Maybe it didn’t mean what I thought it meant… [Calm down, self: yes, it does.] It certainly doesn’t seem to be something in need of a solution, let alone a solution someone would pay for… a solution involving shower curtain rings? A Sudoku grid using letters instead of digits?

I have no idea, either. But is that a great dream or what?

_______________________

About the post title: This is a quotation from Twin Peaks. The speaker, FBI forensic examiner Albert Rosenfield (played by Miguel Ferrer), is responding to some characteristically off-center pronouncement by Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan). In full:

Cooper. In observation, I don’t know where this is headed. But the only one of us with the coordinates for this destination and its hardware is you. Go on whatever vision quest you require. Stand on the rim of a volcano, stand alone and do your dance. Just find this beast before he takes another bite.

It’s a Matter of Leaning the Right Way

April 5, 2013 by John 7 Comments

[I have no idea where this sculpture is located, or who created it. Anyone know???]

From whiskey river:

Thirst

Another morning and I wake with thirst for the goodness I do not have. I walk out to the pond and all the way God has given us such beautiful lessons. Oh Lord, I was never a quick scholar but sulked and hunched over my books past the hour and the bell; grant me, in your mercy, a little more time. Love for the earth and love for you are having such a long conversation in my heart. Who knows what will finally happen or where I will be sent, yet already I have given a great many things away, expecting to be told to pack nothing, except the prayers which, with this thirst, I am slowly learning.

(Mary Oliver [source])

…and:

On Living: I
(excerpt)

Living is no laughing matter:
you must live with great seriousness
like a squirrel, for example–
I mean without looking for something beyond and above living,
I mean living must be your whole occupation.
Living is no laughing matter:
you must take it seriously,
so much so and to such a degree
that, for example, your hands tied behind your back,
your back to the wall,
or else in a laboratory
in your white coat and safety glasses,
you can die for people–
even for people whose faces you’ve never seen,
even though you know living
is the most real, the most beautiful thing.
I mean, you must take living so seriously
that even at seventy, for example, you’ll plant olive trees–
and not for your children, either,
but because although you fear death you don’t believe it,
because living, I mean, weighs heavier.

(Nâzim Hikmet [source])

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