Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

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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Midweek Music Break: Henry Mancini, “Baby Elephant Walk”

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Sometimes on a stray cable-TV broadcast, still, you can catch a glimpse of the 1962 film Hatari! (Yeah: exclamation point and all. The word is Swahili for “danger,” so the emphasis is important, damn it.) John Wayne plays the leader of a group of hunters in Africa, who capture wild animals for sale to zoos. Their collective path intersects — as paths will do — with that of a wildlife photographer, played by Elsa Martinelli, who’s been hired by one of their clients to document the haul. Complications ensue: a rhinoceros escapes and must be recaptured, the photographer falls in love with Wayne’s character, and so on.

Hatari! doesn’t make many lists of the best films ever — even just those starring John Wayne, or directed by Howard Hawks. But it did make one memorable contribution to pop culture: the Mancini song which is the subject of today’s Midweek Music Break.

For obvious reasons, despite the title resemblance, the song has nothing at all to do with an Elizabeth Taylor film, Elephant Walk… which was made in 1954 and set on a plantation on Ceylon.

Apparently the film had a rather, um, casual script. Several key scenes were added on the spot, using footage shot around the production camp which had no reference in the screenplay. The rhino, for instance, really did escape and really did have to be recaptured; those scenes in the movie were unscripted — the honest-to-gods things happening.

And three of the baby elephants in the animal “cast” really did fixate on Elsa Martinelli. (You can see one of the little guys with her in the photo at the left, captured in a moment of delicately Freudian intimacy.) Hawks just happened to capture the incident, during a break in the film’s nominal real action. And Mancini took his cue from that lucky break. From Henry Mancini: Reinventing Film Music:

On the one hand, the sight of three pachyderms forming a conga line behind Martinelli and following her down the slope to the water’s edge put Mancini in mind of circus music; on the other hand, the syncopated shuffling gait of the animals suggested a boogie-woogie rhythm to him, eight beats to the bar… An electric circus calliope set the meter, then an E? clarinet played the droll, perky melody. Timed perfectly to the whole self-contained scene, this music shapes what was really a random incident into a film highlight.

According to a footnote in another source, “Mancini himself claims that the music for the ‘Baby Elephant Walk’ sequence kept the scene in the film.”

Be that as it may, “Baby Elephant Walk” sticks in the mind waaaaay more tenaciously than anything else about Hatari! (In a way, it deserves an exclamation point of its own.)

While working on this post, it suddenly occurred to me that an old TV game show from around the same time had a theme song also called “Baby Elephant Walk” — an entirely different song, but likewise memorable (in a piping, earwig-gy way). I was wrong about the title, though. The game show I remembered was “The Match Game,” and the theme song, “A Swingin’ Safari,” by Bert Kaempfert… coincidentally written the same year Hatari! came out. (An abbreviated cover by Billy Vaughan went to #13 on the Billboard chart.) Something peculiarly African-game-hunt must have permeated the air of 1962.

You Are (Barely) Here

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Sometimes when working on the Saturday Propagational Library serial I get a little overwhelmed thinking about the distances and time scales involved. While I try to keep things roughly “factual” — or factual-ish, anyhow — by referring as needed to one online source or another, it can really help to have a graphical tool available to bring it into perspective.

The Number Sleuth site has conveniently provided one such tool, with its “Magnifying the Universe” feature:

(For a more static but a little more easily digestible view, they also offer a plain old enormously long poster-style image.)

This perspective of relative sizes can change your perspective of everything: what’s important, what’s fair, what “change” means, what’s “old” and “young,” what’s worth remembering (and worth forgetting), what it means to age, what’s funny vs. deadly serious…

And I like the implied interrelationship between space and time, especially at the most gigantic scales. Let’s say you’ve got a way to measure the distances from yourself to greatly distant objects — some way which does not (obviously) require you yourself to travel that distance (using an odometer which clicks over every giga-parsec or so). Let’s say you take as a given the (still conventional) notion that nothing can move faster than light. One implication of this is that the universe is not just at least as far across (in radius) as the most distant object you can see; it’s that the universe is also at least that old. So if the most distant visible object in the heavens is a light-year away, the light from that object has taken a whole year to reach your eyes… and the universe is at least that old.

Therefore, if (as seems to be the case) the most distant visible object is around fourteen billion light-years away, then…

We can also infer the presence of objects even farther than we can actually see, from the effects of those yet-farther objects on what we can see. Imagine Aeolus, the God of Intergalactic Breezes, sitting on his throne way the hell out there beyond observable limits. We can’t see him but can guess he’s there, because of the way the most-distant-visible objects dance around every time Aeolus sighs (probably out of loneliness) in this direction.

If your head can stand even more interestingness, consider the theory that the universe is expanding, and indeed accelerating in its rate of expansion. According to this theory, although the speed of light still marks an upper limit, it does so locally, on a more or less “small” scale — implying that the space between objects may expand more rapidly than light speed. Thus, at that fourteen-billion-light-years horizon, things are constantly crossing over the line into invisibility and, ultimately, unknowability.

Consider the similarities between all this and (say) the way in which things, people, and experiences pass from our individual (or collective) memory.

Consider the grand themes of art, literature, and music, from the small and personal to the most sweepingly “universal.”

Consider sharing those themes with Aeolus and, if Aeolus creates art of his own, his sharing his themes with us…

 

The Propagational Library (10): Striking a Match

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

…in which The Librarian, and a certain author, have their minds turned inside-out.

If you’ve never read any of the series, please consider visiting the Overview/Table of Contents page before diving headlong into this chapter.

Caught by Surprise

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[Image: a key (and classic) moment in Fritz Lang’s 1931 thriller, M: the murderer, played by Peter Lorre, learns he’s a (literally) marked man.]

From whiskey river:

We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.

(Milan Kundera [source])

…and:

When It Comes

Any time. Now. The next minute.
Years from today. You lean forward
and wait. You relax, but you don’t forget.

Someone plans an elaborate party
with a banquet, dancing, even fireworks
when feasting is over. You look at them:

All those years when you searched the world
like a ferret, these never happened — your marriage,
your family, prayers, curses. Only dreams.

A vacuum has opened everywhere. Cities,
armies, those chairs ranked in the great
hall for the audience — there isn’t anyone.

Like a shutter the sky opens and closes
and the show is over. The next act
will deny that anything ever happened.

Your hand falls open. It is empty. It never
held a knife, a flower, gold,
or love, or now. Lean closer—

Listen to me: there isn’t any hand.

(William Stafford [source])

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Midweek Music Break: Deana Carter, “Did I Shave My Legs for This?”

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[Image: Deana Carter, circa 1995]

A bit of urban folklore which I sort of remember (and sort of don’t) from years ago, regarding a difference between the sexes: Boys roll; girls fold. The rolling-and-folding in question was (supposedly) of paper programs for events like football games, concerts, and church services. (I may have mixed up the verbs and subjects — I can see it either way — but I think I’ve got it right.) Whether or not the folklore is true is almost beside the point: it’s so simply expressed, and it’s such a… such an interesting — outright weird — idea, that we instinctively feel it should be true.

Another such formulation I’ve heard has probably a bit more common experience behind it, and it’s certainly got the popular-songwriter vote sewn up: Guys use love to get sex; women use sex to get love. Because, y’know, guys are lying heels and women are shameless vamps; as soon as either side gets what they want, they show their true colors.

Accounts (often weepy) of evidence for that general truism — and the sense of betrayal which follows — may litter the pop-music landscape. But I can’t think of another song* with a premise quite like today’s Midweek Music Break selection, the title track from Deana Carter‘s debut album; it sings not of heartbreak, but of annoyance at a partner far too boneheaded to know the rules of the game, let alone to play along:

[Lyrics]

I’m definitely not a fan of the video for the song; if I’d seen it before hearing the song, you’d probably never be reading this post. From all evidence, Deana Carter is a very good-looking woman, with something of Naomi Watts about her. But in that video, she shines not at all as an actress. She’s dressed and made up — and acts — way too cutesy (almost winking), as though we need her help to get the joke. (And if we still don’t get it, at least we’ll think she’s adorable.) At any rate, she treats the role that way right up until the closing shot. Finally, in that moment, she seems to become the narrator, at last capturing a genuine sense of disbelief in her own naivete (and yes, the guy’s ignorance).

The song does make me wonder about the counterpart from a male point of view… Maybe just, “I said that I loved you, for this?”

___________________

* Nominees gratefully received, though!

 

Caught Up

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I can scarcely believe it: my Google Reader feed now has only THREE unread items in it now (and one of them is my own Propagational Library installment from yesterday, so even that unread is provisionally not in quotation marks). It’s taken me a month to clear the backlog.

Granted, in order to get to this quasi-virginal state I had to completely drop subscriptions to a bunch of fascinating-but-way-too-frequent-to-read-religiously feeds (I’m looking at you, Brain Pickings), and also do blanket “mark all as read” clearings of certain other stacks that I just couldn’t bear to cancel (hello, My Old Kentucky Blog and Bad Astronomer!).

And granted, I still owe comments on some recent posts by, like, actual friends (hang on, Suburban Soliloquy!).

And granted even furthermore, dry desert winds blow through some of my favorite bloggish haunts, which I hope are not actually ghost towns despite the piles of tumbleweeds blocking entry to the saloon (hellooooo, Mature Landscaping???).

Still, it feels good.

(But damn — what if I missed something important?!? Better go switch the Reader view to All (rather than merely Unread) Items so I can check…)

 

The Propagational Library (9): “But What About Me?”

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

…in which The Librarian asks the most important question we ever ask —
and puts a pretty big dent in the answer (or it puts a big dent in him).

If you’ve never read any of the series, I encourage you to head over to the Overview/Table of Contents page before diving in.

 

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