![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/images\/naturesymbolized_arthurdove_sm.jpg?resize=500%2C395&ssl=1\" "\\"'Nature")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
From whiskey river<\/em><\/a>:<\/p>\n A Way to Look at Things<\/strong><\/p>\n We have not yet made shoes that fit like sand (Arthur Dove<\/a> [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Not from whiskey river<\/em>:<\/p>\n “We’re going through!” The Commander’s voice was like thin ice breaking. He wore his full-dress uniform, with the heavily braided white cap pulled down rakishly over one cold gray eye. “We can’t make it, sir. It’s spoiling for a hurricane, if you ask me.” “I’m not asking you, Lieutenant Berg,” said the Commander. “Throw on the power lights! Rev her up to 8,500! We’re going through!” The pounding of the cylinders increased: ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa<\/em>. The Commander stared at the ice forming on the pilot window. He walked over and twisted a row of complicated dials. “Switch on No. 8 auxiliary!” he shouted. “Switch on No. 8 auxiliary!” repeated Lieutenant Berg. “Full strength in No. 3 turret!” shouted the Commander. “Full strength in No. 3 turret!” The crew, bending to their various tasks in the huge, hurtling eight-engined Navy hydroplane, looked at each other and grinned. “The old man will get us through” they said to one another. “The Old Man ain’t afraid of Hell!” . . .<\/p>\n “Not so fast! You’re driving too fast!” said Mrs. Mitty. “What are you driving so fast for?”<\/p>\n “Hmm?” said Walter Mitty. He looked at his wife, in the seat beside him, with shocked astonishment. She seemed grossly unfamiliar, like a strange woman who had yelled at him in a crowd. “You were up to fifty-five,” she said. “You know I don’t like to go more than forty. You were up to fifty-five.” Walter Mitty drove on toward Waterbury in silence, the roaring of the SN202 through the worst storm in twenty years of Navy flying fading in the remote, intimate airways of his mind.<\/p>\n “You’re tensed up again,” said Mrs. Mitty. “It’s one of your days. I wish you’d let Dr. Renshaw look you over.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n (James Thurber, from “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n …and:<\/p>\n The Dead<\/strong><\/p>\n Their reward is and when they reappear in memory and move through their new world with clean, from her histories, from the trappings a good woman. But the dead don\u2019t care anymore for that. have bodies. Once,<\/p>\n at the end of August, after swimming I\u2019d gone into the living room, cool I remember her rings, bigger onto the floor becoming slippery leaned into my ear and whispered to forgive her? My mother tells me<\/p>\n no one ever loved her, I see her moving among the strange and most of all, she is beyond reach, beautiful.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n (Kate Northrop, from Back Through Interruption<\/em> [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n Finally, no video or music clip this week. It just seemed right<\/em> to use this bit, from Douglas Adams’s unfinished novel The Salmon of Doubt. <\/em>Adams would have been 58 years old today<\/span> yesterday, but died — the very model of a writer with sadly unfinished business — in 2001. Which I guess makes this excerpt trebly appropriate: content, source, creator.<\/p>\n One particularly niggling piece of Unfinished Business, it occurred to me the other day in the middle of a singing session with my five-year-old daughter, is the lyrics to “Do-Re-Mi,” from The Sound of Music<\/em>.\u00a0 It doesn’t exactly rank as a global crisis, but nevertheless it brings me up short anytime I hear it, and it shouldn’t be that difficult to sort it out<\/em>.<\/p>\n But it is.<\/p>\n Consider.<\/p>\n Each line of the lyric takes the names of a note from the solfa<\/em><\/a> scale, and gives it meaning: “Do (doe), a deer, a female deer; Re (ray), a drop of golden sun,” etc.\u00a0 All well and good so far.\u00a0 “Mi (me), a name I call myself; Fa (far), a long, long way to run.”\u00a0 Fine.\u00a0 I’m not saying this is Keats, exactly, but it’s a perfectly good conceit and it’s working consistently.\u00a0 And here we go into the home stretch.\u00a0 “So (sew), a needle pulling thread.”\u00a0 Yes, good.\u00a0 “La, a note to follow so…”\u00a0 What?\u00a0 Excuse me? “La, a note to follow so…”\u00a0 What kind of lame excuse for a line is that?<\/p>\n Well, it’s obvious what kind of line it is.\u00a0 It’s a placeholder.\u00a0 A placeholder is what a writer puts in when he can’t think of the right line or idea just at the moment, but he’d better put in something and come back and fix it later.\u00a0 So, I imagine that Oscar Hammerstein just bunged in a “a note to follow so” and thought he’d have another look at it in the morning.<\/p>\n Only when he came to have another look at it in the morning, he couldn’t come up with anything better.\u00a0 Or the next morning.\u00a0 Come on, he must have thought, this is simple.\u00a0 Isn’t it?\u00a0 “La… a something, something… what?”<\/p>\n One can imagine rehearsals looming.\u00a0 Recording dates.\u00a0 Maybe he’d be able to fix it on the day.\u00a0 Maybe one of the cast would come up with the answer.\u00a0 But no.\u00a0 No one manages to fix it.\u00a0 And gradually a lame placeholder of a line became locked in place and is now formally part of the song, part of the movie, and so on.<\/p>\n How difficult can it be?\u00a0 How about this for a suggestion?\u00a0 “La, a…, a…” — well, I\u00a0 can’t think of one at the moment, but I think that if the whole world pulls together on this, we can crack it.\u00a0 And I think we shouldn’t let the century end with such a major popular song in such an embarrassing state of disarray.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Update:<\/strong> Oh, the heck with it. It’ll make this post awfully long, but here’s an excerpt — Episode 1 — from the original BBC radio production of Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy<\/em>.<\/p>\n [Below, click Play button to begin. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 28:36 long.]<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n
\nNor clothes that fit like water
\nNor thoughts that fit like air.
\nThere is much to be done —
\nWorks of nature are abstract.
\nThey do not lean on other things for meanings.
\nThe sea-gull is not like the sea
\nNor the sun like the moon.
\nThe sun draws water from the sea.
\nThe clouds are not like either one —
\nThey do not keep one form forever.
\nThat the mountainside looks like a face is accidental.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nthey become innocent again,<\/p>\n
\ndeath has completely erased
\nthe blurs, given them boundaries. They rise<\/p>\n
\nclear edges. My grandmother, in particular
\nhas become buoyant, unattached finally<\/p>\n
\nof family. By no means was she<\/p>\n
\nWeightless, they no longer assume
\nresponsibility, they no longer<\/p>\n
\nin the muddy pond<\/p>\n
\nas vodka, where my grandmother
\nsat. Greed thins a woman,<\/p>\n
\nthan her fingers.
\nWater ran down my legs<\/span><\/p>\n
\nand my grandmother, her breath
\nscratchy from cigarettes and blended whiskey,<\/p>\n
\nyou\u2019re an ugly girl<\/em>. Do I have<\/p>\n
\nso when I see her, I see her again in the park
\nin her pink tailored suit, suede pumps,<\/p>\n
\ngentlemen that have gathered, the dark
\npowerful men. She is still young, blonde<\/p>\n