Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

How (Not) to (Dis)Connect

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[Image: “Superman” (strip #220 January 16, 1944), by Jerry Siegel and Joel Shuster.
Click to enlarge; see the whole page here.]

From whiskey river:

I go to a pub and talk to another man. He is experienced deeply part of the time, and shallowly another part of the time, depending on the quality of my consciousness. If I am very conscious, meeting him can be an experience comparable to great music or even an earthquake; if I am in the usual shallow state, he barely “makes an impression.” If I am practicing alertness and neurological self-criticism, I may observe that I am only experiencing him part of the time, and that part of the time I am not-tuning-in but drifting off to my favorite “Real” Universe and editing out at the ear-drum much of what he is saying. Often, the “Real” Universe hypnotizes me sufficiently that, while I “hear” what he says, I have no idea of the way he says it or what he means to convey.

(Robert Anton Wilson [source])

…and:

Adage

When it’s late at night and branches
are banging against the windows,
you might think that love is just a matter

of leaping out of the frying pan of yourself
into the fire of someone else,
but it’s a little more complicated than that.

It’s more like trading the two birds
who might be hiding in that bush
for the one you are not holding in your hand.

A wise man once said that love
was like forcing a horse to drink
but then everyone stopped thinking of him as wise.

Let us be clear about something.
Love is not as simple as getting up
on the wrong side of the bed wearing the emperor’s clothes.

No, it’s more like the way the pen
feels after it has defeated the sword.
It’s a little like the penny saved or the nine dropped stitches.

You look at me through the halo of the last candle
and tell me love is an ill wind
that has no turning, a road that blows no good,

but I am here to remind you,
as our shadows tremble on the walls,
that love is the early bird who is better late than never.

(Billy Collins [source])

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Potpourri, June 18 (2012 ed.)

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[What I saw on Google’s home page today. (Almost certainly, YOU did NOT.) You rock, Google.]

On this day in history: The US declared war on Great Britain in 1812, initiating the War of 1812. So glad we got that out of our system, finally. (Well, declaring war on them, anyway. We’re still working on being satisfied with everybody else — although by now it feels absurd to add, “Give us time.”)

Speaking of the (more-or-less) British: Also, Canadian actress Linda Thorson was born on this day, in 1947. Thorson’s biggest career splash (well, so far) was her role as Tara King on the British light-action TV series The Avengers. (That’s her over there at the right, hamming it up with series co-star Patrick Macnee (who played John Steed).) Tara King replaced the outgoing Emma Peel (Diana Rigg). Mentioning (or remembering) Emma Peel still induces heart flutters among men of a certain age, but, alas for Ms. Thorson, mentioning (or remembering) Tara King has relatively no effect among that audience. Not her fault, I think. Those were very tough leather boots to fill.

The problem, honestly, was rooted in the character, not the actress. Audiences had been teased for years by the playfully flirtatious yet respectful on-screen relationship between her predecessor and Steed. In Tara King, the series producers opted for a sexy-cute character, nothing at all like Mrs. Peel’s sexy-dangerous. (And Patrick Macnee had obviously been given the message, too: Don’t just waggle your charming eyebrows and smirk your charming smirk. Hit on her, man!) Mrs. Peel had seemed like a step forward for women as action heroes; Tara King seemed to have wandered onto the set from the typing pool on a 1950s-era sitcom. [Read more…]

I Have Found It (or Maybe I Haven’t)

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[For more about the video, see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river:

Discovering the selfless nature doesn’t have a monumental “Eureka!” quality. It is more like being continually perplexed, the way we feel when we’re looking for the car keys we’re so sure are in our pocket, or when the supermarket’s being renovated and what we need has moved to a different aisle each time we go shopping. That experience of being somewhat dumbfounded is the beginning of wisdom. We’re beginning to see through our ignorance — the everyday vigil we sustain to confirm that we exist in some permanent way. We look at our mind and see that it is a fluid situation, and we look at the world and see that it is a fluid situation. Our expectation of permanence is confounded.

(Sakyong Mipham [source])

…and:

The Poet with His Face in His Hands

You want to cry aloud for your
mistakes. But to tell the truth the world
doesn’t need anymore of that sound.

So if you’re going to do it and can’t
stop yourself, if your pretty mouth can’t
hold it in, at least go by yourself across

the forty fields and the forty dark inclines
of rocks and water to the place where
the falls are flinging out their white sheets

like crazy, and there is a cave behind all that
jubilation and water fun and you can
stand there, under it, and roar all you

want and nothing will be disturbed; you can
drip with despair all afternoon and still,
on a green branch, its wings just lightly touched

by the passing foil of the water, the thrush,
puffing out its spotted breast, will sing
of the perfect, stone-hard beauty of everything.

(Mary Oliver [source])

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Always Surprised

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The Missus has told me on numerous occasions that my astrological character — Gemini, born in the Year of the Rabbit — has doomed me to an intense, lifelong hatred of being bored… and a desperation to be otherwise, even unwisely so.*

Assuming that she’s right (generally a safe assumption), then a corollary to that proposition, of course, must be that I like nothing more than not being bored. Indeed, that’s one of my favorite things — maybe my single most-favorite thing — about writing fiction: how reliably the result catches me by surprise. (I’m no longer surprised to be surprised, which isn’t quite the same thing as saying the surprise has become boring.) It almost never ends up quite as I’d imagined when I first set out on the project, and the surprising element(s) almost always seem improvements.

(To qualify: I don’t make everything up as I go along. I do plan, some. I just try to… how you say…? to stay alert to the possibility of sudden changes in direction.)

When I started working on The Propagational Library, here’s what I had in mind:

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The Propagational Library (12): Beyond

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The final installment in the weekly serial story called The Propagational Library appears here:

…in which The Librarian (with some help) punches through
the curtain rippling at the borders of the universe.

Haven’t read any of the series? Please consider visiting the Overview/Table of Contents page before barging into this chapter — or, for that matter, into any of the preceding ones. :)

Choose Your Armor Carefully

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[Note: an abbreviated whiskey river Fridays post today, since I’m out of town. Normal blogcasting (whatever “normal” means) will resume tomorrow. This includes tracking down primary sources for the quotations, per my usual practice on Fridays.]

[Image: Urban Security Suit, designed by Tim Smit of Nieuwe Heren. For more information,
see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river:

No one lives his life.

Disguised since childhood,
haphazardly assembled
from voices and fears and little pleasures,

We come of age as masks.
Our true face never speaks.

Somewhere there must be storehouses
where all these lives are laid away
like suits of armor or old carriages
or clothes hanging limply on the walls.

Maybe all paths lead there,
to the repository of unlived things.

(Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God)

…and:

It is fabled that we slowly lose the gift of speech with animals, that birds no longer visit our windowsills to converse. As our eyes grow accustomed to sight they armor themselves against wonder.

(Leonard Cohen)

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Midweek Music Break: Dr. John, “Iko Iko”

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At the time this post goes up, The Missus and I will be in or awfully darned close to New Orleans. For an occasion like this, who could be better to Midweek-Music-Break with than Dr. John — practically the latter-day musical voice of the Crescent City?

As quoted on Wikipedia, here’s Dr. John’s description of today’s selection:

The song was written and recorded back in the early 1950s by a New Orleans singer named James Crawford [JES: photo at right] who worked under the name of Sugar Boy & the Cane Cutters… Also in the group were Professor Longhair on piano, Jake Myles, Big Boy Myles, Irv Bannister on guitar, and Eugene ‘Bones’ Jones on drums. The group was also known as the Chipaka Shaweez. The song was originally called “Jockamo,” and it has a lot of Creole patois in it. Jockamo means “jester” in the old myth. It is Mardi Gras music, and the Shaweez was one of many Mardi Gras groups who dressed up in far out Indian costumes and came on as Indian tribes. The tribes used to hang out on Claiborne Avenue and used to get juiced up there getting ready to perform and “second line” in their own special style during Mardi Gras. That’s dead and gone because there’s a freeway where those grounds used to be. The tribes were like social clubs who lived all year for Mardi Gras, getting their costumes together. Many of them were musicians, gamblers, hustlers and pimps.

(Regarding that “second line” reference: you might want to refer back to a post from about a year ago, on Old Crow Medicine Show’s “Down Home Girl”; it uses the phrase, in a context which I completely misunderstood… until Froog set me straight in a comment.)

The spelling of the word “Iko” seems consistent across various interpretations of the lyrics. More troublesome is “Jockamo,” which sometimes appears that way, sometimes as “Jockomo,” sometimes with and sometimes without hyphens… I don’t know what’s right.

We are, however, considering eating at Wednesday night at a restaurant in the Uptown district of New Orleans, called… Jacques Imo’s. Clever, wot?

[Lyrics (in a transcription which doesn’t quite correspond with Dr. John’s rendition above)]

“Iko Iko” also provided the ’60s girl group The Dixie Cups (“Chapel of Love”) with a minor hit, in 1965:

[Below, click Play button to begin Iko Iko. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 2:04 long.

[audio:ikoiko_dixiecups.mp3|titles=’Iko Iko’|artists=The Dixie Cups]

Wikipedia, again, on the way this recording came together:

[Group member] Barbara Hawkins had heard her grandmother sing the song… “We were just clowning around with it during a session using drumsticks on ashtrays. We didn’t realize that Jerry and Mike had the tapes running”. Leiber and Stoller overdubbed a bassline and percussion, and released it. It was The Dixie Cups’ fifth and last hit.

One kind soul has posted a rare (?) clip of The Dixie Cups performing “Iko Iko” on a TV show… yes, complete with clicky-clicky drumsticks.

Looking Forward to Shelving the Library

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I’ve been tickled by the way the storyline in The Propagational Library series has developed; it’s caught me by surprise several times, and I like how it’s grown in scope (as I see the whole thing, even what’s not actually written) beyond my original intentions. But if all goes well, the upcoming installment of the series — that is, the one I post this Saturday — will be the last. (Because each installment/chapter is a first draft, my progress in a given writing session can affect how well my predictions for it bear out, hence the uncertainty.)

And then, eventually, I shall have some decisions to make about the story.

As posted at RAMH, the whole tale will consist of thirteen chapters, comprising no more — probably — than 30,000 words. (This doesn’t count related material outside the story itself, primarily blog posts about it.) I can just leave it as it stands, of course, just as if it were any other series of blog posts. (At that length, it’s too short for publication in most media, and in any case I’d never submit it in its present rough form.) I can bundle up Part 2 for offline reading, just as I did Part 1, two months ago. I see no reason to remove any of the series for good.

But I can think of several reasons to put at least some of it behind a password-protected “wall,” after a decent interval of open availability. That’s probably what I’ll end up doing, in the hope that some day I’ll revisit The Librarian’s adventures, and fashion them into something longer, better written, altogether more complete.

I’ve started a couple other stories in the meantime, and I’d like to get on with them (and/or something else), but I need my Saturdays back for that to happen. So after this week, I’ll just let The Propagational Library sit for a little while. And let my subconscious stew about the story’s future…

…whatever that turns out to be.

 

The Propagational Library (11): The Sponge

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The latest installment in the weekly serial story called The Propagational Library appears here:

…in which The Librarian remembers the other thing he was supposed to do,
and hears voices — a voice, anyhow.

If you’ve never read any of the series, please consider visiting the Overview/Table of Contents page before barging into this chapter. It may — will probably — help if you read the preceding installments, too. :)

Natural Wonder

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[Obviously, this displays the global distribution of…
something. But what? See the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river:

The world of the living contains enough marvels and mysteries acting upon our emotions and intelligence in ways so inexplicable that it would almost justify the conception of life as an enchanted state. No, I am too firm in my consciousness of the marvelous to be ever fascinated by the mere supernatural.

(Joseph Conrad)

…and:

The Kingdom

At times
the heart
stands back
and looks at the body,
looks at the mind,
as a lion
quietly looks
at the not-quite-itself,
not-quite-another,
moving of shadows and grass.

Wary, but with interest,
considers its kingdom.

Then seeing
all that will be,
heart once again enters —
enters hunger, enters sorrow,
enters finally losing it all.
To know, if nothing else,
what it once owned.

(Jane Hirshfield)

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