Shakespeare

In a Certain Thrall

July 31, 2020 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: one of several in what I’ve been calling “The Odd Glove Project.” (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) Back in March or April, I started photographing a new category of roadside litter: single, unpaired surgical gloves. That I’d find any surgical gloves was, of course, not so surprising under the circumstances; the surprise came from their… well, their very unpairedness. I found enough such photographs, in just a few weeks, that I dumped them into a new Instagram account of their own. I don’t add new samples to the portfolio very often, but oh yes: they’re still accumulating.]

From whiskey river (italicized lines):

Mother Night
When you wake at three AM you don’t think
of your age or sex and rarely your name
or the plot of your life which has never
broken itself down into logical pieces.
At three AM you have the gift of incomprehension
wherein the galaxies make more sense
than your job or the government. Jesus at the well
with Mary Magdalene is much more vivid
than your car. You can clearly see the bear
climb to heaven on a golden rope in the children’s
story no one ever wrote. Your childhood horse
named June still stomps the ground for an apple.
What is morning and what if it doesn’t arrive?
One morning Mother dropped an egg and asked
me if God was the same species as we are?
Smear of light at five AM. Sound of Webber’s
sheep flock and sandhill cranes across the road,
burble of irrigation ditch beneath my window.
She said, “Only lunatics save newspapers
and magazines,” fried me two eggs, then said,
“If you want to understand mortality look at birds.”
Blue moon, two full moons this month,
which I conclude are two full moons. In what
direction do the dead fly off the earth?
Rising sun. A thousand blackbirds pronounce day.

(Jim Harrison [source])

…and:

The Poet Compares Human Nature to the Ocean from Which We Came
The sea can do craziness, it can do smooth,
it can lie down like silk breathing
or toss havoc shoreward; it can give
gifts or withhold all; it can rise, ebb, froth
like an incoming frenzy of fountains, or it can
sweet-talk entirely. As I can too,
and so, no doubt, can you, and you.

(Mary Oliver [source])

…and:

Cold Wind
I like those old movies where tires and wheels run backwards on horse-drawn carriages pursued by indians, or Model As driven by thugs leaning out windows with tommy guns ablaze. Of late I feel a cold blue wind through my life and need to go backwards myself to the outback I once knew so well where there were too many mosquitoes, blackflies, curious bears, flowering berry trees of sugar plum and chokeberry, and where sodden and hot with salty sweat I’d slide into a cold river and drift along until I floated against a warm sandbar, thinking of driving again the gravel backroads of America at thirty-five miles per hour in order to see the ditches and gulleys, the birds in the fields, the mountains and rivers, the skies that hold our 10,000 generations of mothers in the clouds waiting for us to fall back into their arms again.

(Jim Harrison [source])

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RAMH@8: To One Thing Constant Never… and a Playlist

June 4, 2016 by John 4 Comments

[Image: cartoon by French cartoonist/illustrator/humorist V. Spahn. Roughly translated, I believe the caption says something on the order of, “Oh, shoot — I meant to get to the office early this morning!”]

Like many people who fired up blogs in the Great Flowering Era — i.e., pre-2009, say (the year when Facebook first turned a profit, or at least become “cash-flow positive“) — I imagined Running After My Hat would become a journal.

A journal, of course, is different from a diary. A diary celebrates or simply notes the everyday, with lesser or greater force depending on its import to the author; a journal discusses, considers, weighs, argues, and/or blathers on about topics which may or may not be based upon something mundane, but which may also spring, unbidden, from the author’s mind and soul. The latter more closely resembles my RAMH ideal at the outset.

I suppose the place has attained that ideal, over time, although the topics have come to differ from those I’d first imagined. I apparently have much less to say about writing, for example, than I once thought I would. (On the other hand, some of this is reticence by design.)

It’s also become, well, stranger than I’d planned — stranger in ways that I could not have anticipated. I didn’t know, in 2008, that the blogging wave was already cresting. For a while, I actually tried to post something new every single day; by the time RAMH attained what I think of as its own peak, though — 2011-13, maybe — the posting rate had already declined, roughly in proportion to the dwindling audience.

To be fair, the decline in my output was mirrored by the decline in my input — my reading of and participation in other blogs. It’s not as if RAMH were the only blog withering at the time. When Google dropped its “Google Reader” blog-aggregation product, in 2013, I believe the transformation of the Web from a writers-and-readers model to a social-chatter model was complete.

What’s left, then, has become more like a real journal: a place for talking to myself, as time and circumstance allow, about topics and in ways I don’t mind making public, but also about topics and in ways I can’t imagine sharing in Facebook’s short-attention-span theater. (RAMH posts do automatically trigger brief summary posts on Facebook, for anyone who might be interested, with links to the full RAMH entries.)

Although I haven’t done a statistical analysis, I bet ninety percent of the content here has come down to two things: posts in the “Ruminations” category — all of them whiskey river Fridays posts, I think — and posts related somehow to music. Translated, this means that my output here seldom exceeds two posts weekly: not a good mechanism for attracting and retaining loyal readers, but at the same time a good tool for “keeping my hand in.” I like ruminating, and I like learning (and talking at length) about some aspects of music, too: both pursuits which ultimately depend not on facts, but on the processing of facts. And I don’t mind processing them openly, for my own sake, even if for no one else’s.

All the other stuff I used to post about here has transitioned to That Other Place. That place has its uses, as I’ve learned. But there’s not much room there for running after one’s hat, any more than I’d find in a shopping mall at the holidays, or a crowded amphitheater.

—

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Ineffable

April 1, 2011 by John 10 Comments

[For information about this image, see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river:

There it is; the light across the water. Your story. Mine. His. It has to be seen to be believed. And it has to be heard. In the endless babble of narrative, in spite of the daily noise, the story waits to be heard.

Some people say that the best stories have no words. It is true that words drop away, and that the important things are often left unsaid. The important things are learned in faces, in gestures, not in our locked tongues. The true things are too big or too small, or in any case always the wrong size to fit in the template called language.

(Jeanette Winterson)

…and:

The Magic Mountain

A book opens. People come out, bend
this way and talk, ponder, love, wander around
while pages turn. Where did the plot go?
Why did someone sing just as the train
went by? Here come chapters with landscape all over
whatever happens when people meet. Now
a quiet part: a hospital glows in the dark.
I don’t think that woman with the sad gray eyes
will ever come back. And what does it mean when
the Italian has so many ideas? Maybe
a war is coming. The book is ending. Everyone
has a little tremolo in them; all
are going to die and it’s cold and the snow, and the
clear air. They took someone away. It’s ending,
the book is ending. But I thought — never mind. It
closes.

(William Stafford, The Way It Is)

…and:

The invisible and imponderable is the sole fact.

(Ralph Waldo Emerson)

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Mr. and Mrs. WS Go for a Walk

November 29, 2008 by John 4 Comments

Yesterday would have been William Shakespeare’s and Anne Hathaway’s 426th anniversary. Whew.

Per yesterday’s Today in Literature newsletter, which I’ve just got around to reading, we have this excerpt from Chapter 3 of Mrs. Shakespeare: The Complete Works, “Richard Nye’s fictional send-up of their marriage”:

When Mr William Shakespeare asked me that idle question as to whether I desired him to compare me to a summer’s day, and I said thank you no, we were standing together on the bank by London Bridge. I say together because together is worth remark in a marriage like ours was.

Himself had been picking his nose for at least five minutes, dreaming. As for me, I was counting the heads of the traitors up there on the poles. It was cold, I might tell you….

“Winter,” my husband said suddenly.

He swept off his hat with a flourish, as if he had just discovered some important new truth. I thought he’d read my mind about the day not knowing what season it belonged to. Then, from the green spark in his eyes, I knew there was worse to come.

“Winter what?” I demanded.

“Winter you,” Mr Shakespeare said. “Anne Hathawinterway with her,” he went on, grinning. “You’re more like a day in December,” my husband concluded.

I hit him.

Well, what would you have done?

What a great exercise: inventing dialogue — a whole life — for a famous person whose biography is documented poorly, or not at all.

Good Will, Slumming

July 15, 2008 by John 2 Comments

[Entry from William Shakespeare’s recently discovered blog, “Honour’d in the Breach”]

Well now I’m not so sure workshopping Shrew was such a great idea.

Like I said the other day, I was really looking forward to the new group. I’d been working with the others for like SO LONG that we were all starting to get on each other’s last nerve, you know? (“Do be or don’t be”? Puh-LEEZE.)

So I’m sitting in the tavern at that table in the back. And every time the door swings open I’m like totally checking out the newcomer, wondering if it would be Bacon, deVere, or Greville (so-called Lord Brooke). Marlowe I knew from the old group of course and wasn’t crazy about bringing him along to this one. (Drunken sod, if I had to lay a shilling I’d say he’ll die in a tavern.) But he was already there. Not with me, of course, at the bar. Chatting up the strumpet of the day, and a right loony Ophelia she was too.

Bacon strode in first. ‘Struth,I knew him by reputation right enough. He had every bit the swagger I expected, and lacked every bit of wordsense you need in a good workshopper. By evening’s end he had us all pretty pissed, except for Marlowe who’s always pissed anyway. On the other hand the boastful cock did come up with “Gremio,” the “Gresio” I’d been using always bugged me. Too much the slur on the Eye Tees, you know? So “Gremio” it is.

I had high hopes for deVere. I’d heard so much good about the man. He certainly knows his words, and he certainly knows (ha ha) his Queen. I did like much of what he had to offer but eventually concluded he had, like, too much to offer. When he told us about the bloke he borrowed the 500 Cs from I seized ‘pon it at once and made him Kate’s da. Then we all had a good beery laugh like old chums about Bertie and deV’s sister and I managed to put some of that in, too, and the stuff about Italy, well, a little local spice never hurts and Christ knows I cannot supply any of that meself. But then deV got greedy. Started on that piggish swill about “A Shakespeare/deVere Production” and he wasn’t jokin’ neither. Who’s the think he is? Pox him, I say. Pox him soundly.

Greville, what can I say. Seems like a right enough chap. But as the saying goes, all the world’s a stage and if you can’t make an appearance till the curtain drops, you sir are no player. Or however it goes. By the time he showed up I’d already tidied me pages. I might show him some o’me other stuff sometime, if he’s lucky hehe.

Which left Marlowe. Lucky for me he had already had one or two or perhaps three too many, or he would have recognized himself in, ha ha, Christopher Sly. That seemed to sail over everybody else’s noggin too, perhaps I should be making the point more sharply. Christopher Toolow, perhaps? Nay. Sly it is.

Anyway, Marlowe was Marlowe. When he slid me his copy of the draft, o’er which he had spewed his draught, I stopped attending to him.

Surprisingly to me, worst of all was my own dear dear Anne.

She had been at me for weeks, she had, and perhaps ’twas the last time I’ll let her peek at my stuff ahead of time: You’ve gotta make Kate do this. Make her do that. Kate would nary say any such thing. All that muck and I went along with it just to shut her up. But when she plunked herself down at the tavern, elbowing deV aside (granted, he’s an arse-licker and I was well rid of him) and trying to keep Marlowe from tossin’ peanuts ‘twixt her bazooms, and THEN in front o’me workshopmates starts saying this and that about men and womenfolk and how the one needs a little more of this and the other less of that… well I have to say I do love the woman dearly dearly after all but am starting to wonder if she really deserves to get my best bed when I am dead and in the ground, you know what I’m saying? Blest be the woman that spares these stories and that woman clearly is not Anne.

But I showed her, indeed I did. This morning before I mailed to the printer the final quarto or folio or whatever the Hades they call it these days, I crossed out that “rights of woman” oration at the end which dear dear Anne had insisted on. Hehe, came up with some good stuff. “My hand is readie, may it do him ease” indeed. Dear dear Anne will crap a pretty brick when she hears that tomorrow night. ‘Course it doesn’t make much sense considering all the rot that came before but at this point I just want to be shut of it. Let the critics sort it all out, I say.

More later!

[Hat tip to Moonrat, of Editorial Ass]