Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

Ten Little Persons of Another Persuasion

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[Image: poster for 1945’s And Then There Were None, starring Barry Fitzgerald, Walter Huston, et al…. including someone named Queenie Leonard — who (one suspects) may have been among the first to go.]

Over at Soho Press, Senior Editor (and crime-fiction specialist) Juliet Grames has been hosting a series of blog posts she’s dubbed the “Crime Read-Along” series. Each month, she leads a discussion of a different classic crime story — private-detective story, police procedural, “cozy,” or what-have-you — selected from stories that she doesn’t know as well as ones she does. Each discussion begins with an introductory post on some more general topic related to the title under discussion, followed shortly by a post about the book itself. You can see all the books covered so far, with links to both parts, on the series’ Calendar page. On the shelf already: Poe’s “Murders in the Rue Morgue” (Part 1: “Why is early crime fiction so French?”); Arthur Conan Doyle’s “A Study in Scarlet” (Part 1: “What does Sherlock Holmes mean to you?”); Josephine Tey’s The Man in the Queue (Part 1: the “Grande Dames” of the Golden Age of British detective fiction, including Tey); and Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (Part 1: “the origins of American noir“).

Under consideration in July: one of Agatha Christie’s biggest-selling, most popular books, And Then There Were None.

What’s that you say? You don’t recognize the title? Hardly your fault: it’s just one of several versions. On publication in England in 1939, it went by Catch a Nigger by the Toe; roughly concurrently with its release there, the Saturday Evening Post serialized it as Ten Little Indians… and within a few months had been re-published in England under the And Then There Were None moniker. (Wikipedia tells the story. My first exposure to it was the 1965 film version, which used the Indians version.)

Just why it might have gone through all these re-christenings doesn’t surprise, of course. It doesn’t require knee-jerk political correctness to recognize that some words just whup us upside the head with an almost visceral shock value. In fact, although there may be some appeal to “getting people talking” (No such thing as bad publicity, goes the press agent mantra), any author — or editor, or publisher — really needs to think hard before committing such a title to print. Do you seriously believe you’ll attract more readers via controversy than you’ll turn off via distaste?

Which (as Grames mentions in her Part 1 post for July) raises the question of what Agatha Christie (and her various representatives) might have been thinking in the late 1930s.

To my mind, arguing that, well, the 1930s were a different time… and well, England didn’t have the United States’ history of slavery… — those are just excuses. The times weren’t that different. And it wasn’t as though the publisher — and Christie — never intended it for the US audience.

Part of me wants to say, like, who the hell cares? What a writer or any other artist chooses to call his or her work is his or her own business, and any “controversy” comes about only because someone else, after the fact, stirred it up.

And part of me knows well how powerfully — and literally — words set the tone for a culture. It’s one thing for Mark Twain to put the word nigger in the mouth of a poorly educated boy of the 19th-century American south; critics and do-gooders who tamper with such choices, however well-meaning, really haven’t thought very hard about the matter. But the responsibility for the effect of a work’s words does not lie entirely with the audience, either.

Especially in a title. I mean, sheesh. It’s like slapping a reader in the face and saying, Yeah, I know, and I don’t care, and this is MY book goddammit.

Heck of a thing, if you ask me.

Addendum: The plot of Christie’s book pretty much develops in the same manner as the nursery rhyme. So at first I thought, well, what was she to do? It was the perfect accompaniment, and if that’s the way the nursery rhyme goes then it’s not up to her to re-write it…

…except, well, no: the original rhyme was the ten-little-Indians version. (Wikipedia cites the Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes on this point.) While it’s true that nigger soon replaced Indian (or Injun), I’m not convinced by claims that Christie might have been just following a given. She had a choice.

Addendum 2: In a comment at Juliet Grames’s post, I mentioned a 1970s-something public-service announcement I remembered, which made use of the ten-little-Indians meme to warn young people away from drug abuse. Unsurprisingly, someone’s resurrected it on YouTube:

(My favorite part about this clip: the contrast with the second or so of the show it interrupted, The New Price Is Right, starring a madly grinning Bob Barker.)

As you can see in the comments on the video’s own page, even “Ten Little Indians” makes some people cringe. I don’t know what the dividing line is, but clearly different audiences have different thresholds. (Which doesn’t make an author’s job any easier.)

Running a Book through the Marketing Wringer

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[Image: found it here, at the “family tree” site of a gentleman in a
much better position than myself to identify everyone involved.]

I haven’t talked much of Seems to Fit here since announcing a few months ago, rather deliriously, that I imagined it to be “done.” Whatever else this meant, of course, it meant that the book was about to set forth on an awkward journey, drifting — mostly becalmed — between two ports: the author’s desk and an unknown reader’s hands. If you’re at all familiar with the process, you probably know some of the intermediate destinations I may be stopping at along the way. I promise to report on the trip once the guy up in the crow’s nest glimpses the mainland coast (and convinces the skipper he’s not imagining things).

In the meantime, I’ve had a couple of developments I thought I’d share. These aren’t “marketing” developments, strictly speaking, but they should help me when the moment arises.

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Shut Up Shut Up Shut UP

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[Image: Prototype of the SpeechJammer, a “gun” which makes it functionally impossible to talk.
Read about it at Wired.]

From whiskey river:

Silence is radical. When sustained, it has an effect on your perception comparable to that of any number of chemicals with which you might seek change. Your vision transforms, to start with; you suddenly find yourself absorbing what’s on the periphery, massive amounts of once-invisible data assailing your pupils. When you’re not preparing your next remark, your hearing capacity expands, too: the changing rhythms of the wind; the muted thud of a teardrop hitting the wooden floor; your neighbor’s beating heart. And taste, and smell, they’re amplified and shifted, as well — a cup of tea sipped without the surrounding dialogue (Earl Grey. You don’t? How about English Breakfast, then? No, no sugar, thanks. Watching my weight. Do you have one of those carrying trays? Wow, that sure is hot.) is a more intricate cup of tea. Silence gives you the opportunity to know any number of an object’s facets that typically disappear behind the verbal screens we erect constantly, unthinkingly, between our selves and our environments. And surely the power of wordless touch is one each of us knows; I need not expand on that.

(Anna Wood [source])

…and:

Silence

There is the sudden silence of the crowd
above a player not moving on the field,
and the silence of the orchid.

The silence of the falling vase
before it strikes the ?oor,
the silence of the belt when it is not striking the child.

The stillness of the cup and the water in it,
the silence of the moon
and the quiet of the day far from the roar of the sun.

The silence when I hold you to my chest,
the silence of the window above us,
and the silence when you rise and turn away.

And there is the silence of this morning
which I have broken with my pen,
a silence that had piled up all night

like snow falling in the darkness of the house—
the silence before I wrote a word
and the poorer silence now.

(Billy Collins)

…and:

At a certain point, you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening. After a time you hear it: there is nothing there. There is nothing but those things only, those created objects, discrete, growing or holding, or swaying, being rained on or raining, held, flooding or ebbing, standing, or spread. You feel the world’s word as a tension, a hum, a single chorused note everywhere the same. This is it: this hum is the silence. Nature does utter a peep – just this one. The birds and insects, the meadows and swamps and rivers and stones and mountains and clouds: they all do it; they all don’t do it. There is a vibrancy to the silence, a suppression, as if someone were gagging the world. But you wait, you give your life’s length to listening, and nothing happens. The ice rolls up, the ice rolls back, and still that single note obtains. The tension, or lack of it, is intolerable. The silence is not actually suppression: instead, it is all there is.

(Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters)

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Your Fiction-Always-Pales-Before-Reality Moment of the Day

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How many nuclear weapons have exploded on Earth?

Just the two, you say?

Oh, right. Duh: we’ve got to include all those notorious “test shots” back in the Cold War days. So maybe, umm… a hundred? A couple-three hundred, tops. Right?

Hahahaha.

This video comes courtesy of Dr. Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy blog, which yesterday marked — “celebrated” being absolutely the wrong word — the fiftieth anniversary of a spectacular/ghastly (take your pick) test: a 1.4-megaton explosion in space. (And not, like, way out past the moon or anything: a relatively mere 240 miles up.)

The video’s title, “1945-1998,” indicates its scope. For the first three explosions, the “clock” at the top right moves slowly. The global view zooms to the specific location, and there’s a little ping with each one. But then the pace picks up. A beep every second marks a month of calendar time, and the tone which accompanies a given explosion’s “marker” (as well as its size) seems to vary with the explosion’s yield*: those pings for the smaller, something more like oboe toots for the big shots. Running tallies in the top and bottom margins indicate how many explosions took place under the ægis of specific countries.

The video is the work of artist Isao Hashimoto; a few more details available here.

_____________________

* The Wired (UK) article which seems to have first publicized the video says that the pings/toots are synced with the country which fired the explosion, but I didn’t get this. To me, the countries seemed to be indicated just by the colors of the circular blurs for the various explosions. But, y’know, this is probably the sort of argument over detail that civilized people often throw up to distract themselves from uncomfortably room-sized elephants.

All Too Knowing

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[Image: “Roller Coaster Tycoon Conspiracy” (click to see punchline; original here)]

From whiskey river:

Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it. Because cynics don’t learn anything. Because cynicism is a self-imposed blindness, a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt us or disappoint us. Cynics always say no. But saying yes begins things. Saying yes is how things grow. Saying yes leads to knowledge.

(Stephen Colbert, playing it straight for once [source])

…and:

We may ask, “What is wisdom?” It is our life itself. We not only have that wisdom, we are constantly using it. When we are cold, we put on more clothing. When hungry, we eat. When sad, we cry. Being happy, we laugh. That’s wisdom. The seasons change, the stars shine in the sky, it’s all wisdom. Regardless of whether we realize it or not, we are always in the middle of the Way. We are nothing but the Way itself.

(Taizan Maezumi [source])

…and:

What Is There Beyond Knowing?

What is there beyond knowing that keeps
calling to me? I can’t

turn in any direction
but it’s there. I don’t mean

the leaves’ grip and shine or even the thrush’s
silk song, but the far-off

fires, for example,
of the stars, heaven’s slowly turning

theater of light, or the wind
playful with its breath;

or time that’s always rushing forward,
or standing still

in the same — what shall I say —
moment.

What I know
I could put into a pack

as if it were bread and cheese, and carry it
on one shoulder,

important and honorable, but so small!
While everything else continues, unexplained

and unexplainable. How wonderful it is
to follow a thought quietly

to its logical end.
I have done this a few times.

But mostly I just stand in the dark field,
in the middle of the world, breathing

in and out. Life so far doesn’t have any other name
but breath and light, wind and rain.

If there’s a temple, I haven’t found it yet.
I simply go on drifting, in the heaven of the grass
and the weeds.

(Mary Oliver [source])

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Midweek Music Break: The Eyes of War, the Marches of John Philip Sousa

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[Image: the Jersey Joes, on parade (somewhere) in the 1940s-50s. Twenty years ago, I’d have said this was too blurry or grainy. Now, I think it’s just about perfect.]

You could hear them for a full minute before they came into sight. A couple of blocks away, still, the horns sounded a little tinny; the drums were a muted, basso sort of approaching rumble. As they got nearer, each breath of the brass grew both fuller and more pointed, and you could hear not just the rattle of the snare drums’ skins but the slight ticky-ticky-tick of the sticks against the chrome or stainless-steel rims…

…and then they were there, suddenly.

You’d read (so you thought) all about The War, and you’d seen the movies and TV shows about it. You knew what they looked like in their service garb back then — ten, fifteen, twenty years before: rumpled khaki or olive uniforms, the helmets dirty dinged and battered and maybe camouflage-netted or even bullet-holed, the boots like something you’d see on a dirt farmer’s feet, their hands grimy, their chins unshaven, maybe a smear of grease or mud or something worse (the photos were all black-and-white) across a cheek or forehead, their eyes the eyes of men who’d never stop wincing at the sound of a backfire. You could trace a direct line to their old uniforms from the uniforms of the Revolutionary War marchers in that Spirit of ’76 painting.

And you’d seen them as they looked since then, too, still in uniforms perhaps (but with the logos of gasoline retailers, grocery-store chains, public utilities and bus companies swapped in for the medals and insigniae of rank), still with the smear of grease across a corner of their faces, weekend Budweisers clenched in the hands which once gripped rifles, wrenches, binoculars, and maps.

All of which made their transformation on  this muggy South Jersey July morning remarkable: crisp black cotton uniforms; brilliant black boots with white laces; white helmet liners; white gloves; clean and clean-shaven faces; and a distant look in their eyes… These uniforms had nothing to do with the Spirit of ’76 guys’ clothes, but these eyes came straight from those faces.

And always, always with the music, pounding, rattling the windows of the stores as they passed, vibrating through the soles of your feet, and making it impossible to remain seated on the curb.

—

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Remembering What You’ve Forgotten to Be

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[Image: Jim Henson and Bert, circa 1971]

From whiskey river:

Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep-drawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and the whole world glows outside your eyes. A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, even the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then — the glory — so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished. And I guess a man’s importance in the world can be measured by the quality and number of his glories.

(John Steinbeck [source])

…and:

Should we finally and willingly cease to understand? I have often said I would rather wonder than know. Is that a youthful stance, a Keatsian stance? Is that — could it be — negative capability? Should one mature beyond it? I don’t know. Rilke advises the young to “live the questions now,” because the answers can only be revealed in time, the extension of which they do not possess. Much like Keats himself says, in a letter, that certain lessons can only be learned on the touchstone of the heart, that is, through direct experience.

What has life taught me? I am much less afraid than I ever was in my youth — of everything. That is a fact. At the same time, I feel more afraid than ever. And the two, I can assure you, are not opposed but inextricably linked. I am more or less the same age Emily Dickinson was when she died. Here is what she thought: “Had we the first intimation of the Definition of Life, the calmest of us would be Lunatics!” The calm lunatic — now that is something to aspire to.

(Mary Ruefle [source])

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Midweek Music Break: The Staple Singers, “Slippery People (Club Mix)”

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Wake-you-up music, even — or especially — if you (unlike me, alas) have just gotten out of bed and stumbled to your computer:

[Lyrics]

This isn’t the first appearance by the Staples here at RAMH. (I mentioned Pops in a comment a long while ago (although — note to self — I have still not posted that clip!), and Mavis got a solo here, singing Randy Newman’s “Losing You.”) As for “Slippery People,” it first appeared on the Talking Heads’ great 1983 album, Speaking in Tongues. (It was also released as a single, and a music video, taken from their 1984 concert film, Stop Making Sense. The lyrics linked above match these versions more closely than the Staple Singers cover.) The comment about Pops Staples even took place in the context of a Talking Heads film.

But clearly, none of these people required my help: the Staples and the Heads were destined for each other. Witness today’s song, mid-’80s techno-R&B-disco funk welded seamlessly to New Wave rock.

(The clip, by the way, comes thanks to the good graces of the indispensable Aquarium Drunkard.)

Update (1:10pm-ish): While we’re talking about icons of the 1980s… You probably know that Norah Ephron died yesterday at age 71. Ephron crafted some of the best romantic-comedy scripts of that decade and the one following, maybe ever (When Harry Met Sally, anyone? Sleepless in Seattle?) The New Yorker has opened up their vaults and made the following freely available:

This Year, Hallmark — Hands Down

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Saying something like “This was my favorite birthday card this year” is a little like announcing you have a favorite son or daughter from among all your children. It seems like something one doesn’t do in polite company — certainly not in a public forum where family injuries may ensue.

Still… The message printed inside this card caught me completely by surprise; my younger sister, who sent it to me, wrote that she “laughed [her]self silly” when she read it. I had that reaction, too.

(One reason: this is a Hallmark card — not even from one of the off-the-mainstream product lines, like Shoebox. The punchline is completely unconventional.)

In the spirit of The New Yorker‘s weekly cartoon contest, anyone want to guess what this card says inside? (Note especially that it’s not specifically a birthday card. It’s not specifically a card for any occasion, in fact.)

I’ll eventually post the answer in a comment. In the meantime…?

 

ADMIN: Simplifying (or Not) RAMH‘s Feed

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The other day, former agent Nathan Bransford (of the enormously popular self-titled blog) wondered about modifying his blog’s “feed” from full to partial posts. Responses from his readers — or at least, those who commented — completely surprised me in their lopsided preference.

If you already know what a blog’s “feed” is, feel free to skip past this entire bulleted list and go down to the bottom of the post. If you don’t know what a blog’s “feed” is, here’s a rough summary:

  • Blogging sites and technologies — Blogger, WordPress, Live Journal, etc. — all provide automated subscription services for people who might want to learn when a given blog has posted a new entry. Subscribers receive a feed: a stream of links to a given blog’s most recent posts. (Subscribing to a blog’s feed is sometimes called syndicating it. The technology used to manage blog subscriptions is called RSS — originally an abbreviation for RDF Site Summary, but generally regarded nowadays to stand for really simple syndication. Thus, you may also come across verbiage like “RSS feed” or (like “pizza pie”) “RSS syndication.”)
  • If you’re a blogger and have never explicitly told your blogging platform (Blogger, etc.), “Do NOT allow subscriptions,” then guess what? Right. Anybody who wants to (unless you’ve somehow otherwise managed to exclude them) may receive your blog’s feed.
  • A feed might consist of (a) just the links to each post (always, I think, consisting of the post’s title), or (b) the link, plus the entire contents of the post; or (c) the link, plus a truncated version of the post’s contents — that is, a partial post, with the text cut off after some arbitrary number of characters.
  • You view a list of all your subscribed blogs’ posts using software most often referred to as feed readers. A feed reader might be a standalone software package, a browser or blogging plug-in or widget or extension, a Web site… You can also subscribe to the content of many blogs (including Running After My Hat) via email.
  • The most popular feed reader, maybe unsurprisingly, is a Google product — Google Reader.
  • Here’s a partial screen shot of how my own Google Reader screen looks at the moment (click for a wider view, including stuff to the right of what’s shown here):

  • The right side of the window is the important part, for now. It shows you a list of all posts in any of the blogs to which you subscribe which you have not yet read. (At least, as far as Google Reader knows. There are various ways to read blog posts without telling Google Reader, of course, in which case they will still show up here as “unread.” In the above list, as of right now I’ve actually read four of the displayed nine “unread” posts.)
  • As you can see, the right side displays the title of the blog itself, the (boldfaced) title of the specific blog post, and a rendering — in gray — of the first few words of the blog post: as many words as will fit without bumping the item to more than one line long.
  • Here’s a partial screen shot of what happens when you click on a given blog post (in this case, my own most recent one, Friday’s whiskey river post):

  • The most important things about the expanded view of the post you just clicked on:
    • It’s almost completely unformatted: in particular, it doesn’t show you the fonts, colors, and general appearance of the blog as you might be accustomed to seeing it at its home site. It’s just the content.
    • Images from the blog post may or may not show up in the expanded view, depending on the settings of the given blog.
    • Running After My Hat‘s feed as shown above is a partial feed. It includes the first N words of the post’s full content; to read the entire post, a subscriber can click on the blue post title (the phrase “How (Not) to (Dis)Connect,” in this case) — the post opens in a new browser window or tab.
    • Blogs may, as I mentioned, provide full content instead of partial content. In these cases, to read the whole post you almost never have to leave Google Reader to visit the actual site.
  • If you’re a blogger, offering full vs. partial feeds can offer different advantages. The main one is that — if you care about your blog’s statistics — people who read your blog via a feed reader do not count as site visitors unless they actually “click through” to your site itself. Thus, if you’re feeding full posts, you may actually have many more readers than you’ll ever know. (This seems to have, in part, inspired Bransford’s considering a switch to partial feeds.)
  • If you’re a blog reader, though, you’ve got other things to consider.
    • Full feeds can be annoying, especially if the blogger tends to run off at the mouth. You may or may not be able to see images, videos, music-player widgets, and so on, even after scrolling down through a couple of screens of nothing but text. If the blogger uses various little visual stylistic devices like drop-caps to break up his long entries, you won’t see those. You may or may not even see italics, boldface, and so on.
    • Partial feeds can also be annoying — particularly because they require the extra step of visiting the blog’s own site (and loading into your browser all that other junk, including blog header images, menu sidebars, and so on).

What surprised me about Nathan Bransford’s little straw poll was how many of his regular readers hate-hate-flat-out-absolutely-hate partial feeds. I didn’t count them up, but I’d say the tide was running 80-20 (or more) in favor of keeping the full feeds. Many people said, flat-out, that if Bransford switched from a full to a partial feed, they’d stop reading him altogether: they’d simply delete his blog from their feed readers.

Bottom line: I’ve always fed RAMH on a partial-post basis. But now I’m wondering how many people took one look at the partial feed and said, y’know, the hell with that and moved on to the next distraction. So, for a while at least, I’m going to switch it over to a full feed. My blog traffic (never astronomical to begin with) will probably drop as a result… but, oddly, I may acquire more readers.

If you already subscribe to this blog, btw: when I (starting with this post) switch to the “full” setting, you’ll see ALL posts in full — not just all future ones on a going-forward basis.

 

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