Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

How It Was: The Boy, The Water…

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[Not The Boy’s dangerous swimming area]

Many people, I know, actually look forward to mid-summer. It reminds them of easy childhood days (it has that effect on me, too), and suggests the prospect of recapturing some of those moments. You laze around a house or porch or beach, maybe with a book. Maybe board games are involved. Certainly, food cooked (or at least consumed) out-0f-doors will figure into it somehow. You swat at mosquitoes and siblings, while the ones stab at your skin and the others, at your psyche. Cicadas buzz at twilight, and fireflies ignite a little while later. (Maybe the cicadas were just the power generators kick-starting themselves.) The smell of newly mown grass perfumes the air. The moon rises in a star-speckled night sky; from a couple of back yards away, you can hear the laughter of adults discussing who knows what…

Memories of mid-summer also fire off in your head, almost inescapably, when the day is hot, the humidity high, and you hear from somewhere nearby a good, solid splash. I’m not talking the plain old splash of a spoon into dishwater, either, or even of an ice cube into a glass of tea. I mean the splash of a good-sized living creature into a substantial body of water: a pool, a lake, a river, even (between waves) the sea.

For some of you, no doubt, this splash makes you all wistful and nostalgic. Even the grown-up version of The Boy appreciates this sensation, vicariously. But the grown-up version of The Boy can’t help associating this splash with another, decades ago…

—

The Boy lived a mere two blocks from a great and beautiful body of water known to insiders as, simply, “the river.”

You could go down to the river on a hot summer afternoon, clamber down to the bank from the concrete wall erected (legend had it) by laborers during the period known as The Great Depression in order to hold back the mighty flood tides that they had had back then, when the Ice Age was ending and there was suddenly more water than the world could cope with. You could find flat stones, slimy mollusk shells, and (if you were willing to dare having your fingers slashed) shards of green Rolling Rock bottles to skip across the surface in the direction of the mansion on the far side, whose white pillars and especially whose windows gleamed invitingly a mere half-mile distant.

Yet perhaps it was the river itself that was the source of the discomfort The Boy had always had with the notion of buoyancy.

The Boy had many years ago been warned away from the river by his parents. His father had threatened him, as was his wont, with a sentence beginning, “If I ever, ever catch you down there…” and ending with a phrase the exact contents of which did not matter, since all such phrases always promised total annihilation. “A dragon lives there,” said his mother, more fancifully.

This dragon, The Boy imagined, was long and undulant, its silver skin scaly and iridescent; its head looked like an automobile hood ornament, steely and unforgiving. There would be a splash as it surfaced when adults (but never their children) were present, and it would glare at them with its red, hungry eyes, projecting telepathic thoughts at them like Bring me your children. It would look at The Boy’s own parents and add, Yours first.

 

In the Large Dark and the Long Light

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From whiskey river:

It’s true that someone will always say that good and evil don’t exist: that is a person who has never had any dealings with real evil. Good is far less convincing than evil, but it’s because their chemical structures are different.

Like gold, good is never found in a pure state in nature: it therefore doesn’t seem impressive. It has the unfortunate tendency not to act; it prefers, passively, to be seen.

(Amélie Nothomb, Les Catilinaires)

…and:

In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. But if you ride these monsters deeper down, if you drop with them farther over the world’s rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest, which gives goodness its power for good, and evil its power for evil, the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together here. This is given. It is not learned.

(Annie Dillard [source])

…and:

People are frightened of themselves. It’s like Freud saying that the best thing is to have no sensation at all, as if we’re supposed to live painlessly and unconsciously in the world. I have a much different view. The ancients are right: the dear old human experience is a singular, difficult, shadowed, brilliant experience that does not resolve into being comfortable in the world. The valley of the shadow is part of that, and you are depriving yourself if you do not experience what humankind has experienced, including doubt and sorrow. We experience pain and difficulty as failure instead of saying, I will pass through this, everyone I have ever admired has passed through this, music has come out of this, literature has come out of it. We should think of our humanity as a privilege.

(Marilynne Robinson [source])

…and:

Let Me Make This Perfectly Clear

Let me make this perfectly clear.
I have never written anything because it is a Poem.
This is a mistake you always make about me,
A dangerous mistake. I promise you
I am not writing this because it is a Poem.

You suspect this is a posture or an act
I am sorry to tell you it is not an act.

You actually think I care if this
Poem gets off the ground or not. Well
I don’t care if this poem gets off the ground or not
And neither should you.
All I have ever cared about
And all you should ever care about
Is what happens when you lift your eyes from this page.

Do not think for one minute it is the Poem that matters.
It is not the Poem that matters.
You can shove the Poem.
What matters is what is out there in the large dark
and in the long light,
Breathing.

(Gwendolyn MacEwen [source])

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Not Exactly What You Had in Mind

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[Image: promotional photo for Later the Same Evening, a one-act opera about five paintings by Edward Hopper. In this photograph, Hotel Room (also shown below) is the third painting from the left.]

From whiskey river:

Dark Pines Under Water

This land like a mirror turns you inward
And you become a forest in a furtive lake;
The dark pines of your mind reach downward,
You dream in the green of your time,
Your memory is a row of sinking pines.

Explorer, you tell yourself this is not what you came for
Although it is good here, and green;
You had meant to move with a kind of largeness,
You had planned a heavy grace, an anguished dream.

But the dark pines of your mind dip deeper
And you are sinking, sinking, sleeper
In an elementary world;
There is something down there and you want it told.

(Gwendolyn MacEwen [source])

…and:

Thomas Merton wrote, “there is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues.” There is always an enormous temptation in all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end. It is so self-conscious, so apparently moral, simply to step aside from the gaps where the creeks and winds pour down, saying, I never merited this grace, quite rightly, and then to sulk along the rest of your days on the edge of rage. I won’t have it. The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus…

Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock — more than a maple — a universe. This is how you spend this afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.

(Annie Dillard [source])

…and:

I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn’t resolve. But I was outside the Baghdad Theatre one night when I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for fifteen minutes and he never opened his eyes.

After that I liked jazz music.

Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself. It is as if they are showing you the way.

I used to not like God because God didn’t resolve. But that was before any of this happened.

(Donald Miller [source])

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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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