Happy Holidays from the Inkstain Family.
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
There’s a story I heard once about John Coltrane: that he spent his whole musical career looking for the right saxophone mouthpiece. He was searching for the sound he heard in his head.
I was thinking of that Wednesday morning, curled up in the den reading as the snow fell outside. I’m in the midst of Peter Turchi’s Maps of the Imagination, a challenging book analogizing writer and mapmaker.
Turchi was talking about T.S. Eliot, who I had read at a very impressionable age, when I was imagining what it might be to be a writer. I went over to the bookshelf and grabbed my old college text, the wonderful battered Norton Anthology of American Literature. It’s a wonderful tome, printed on a thin sort of onionskin paper that allowed them to pack 2,590 pages of the American literary canon in a single volume.
Rereading The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, I was struck by the line I had marked with a ballpoint pen those many years ago:
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
I have no idea what that 18-year-old had in mind when that line struck him enough to point it out to his future self.
I love jazz, and I love art. I enjoy both in a similar way, piecing together the linkages and history and story that goes with them. Thursday morning, it was Bill Evans I was listening to as the snow fell. As I started thinking about the ideas I am now trying to explain to you, I looked up to this great painting on the wall above my head. It’s by my dad – the Grand Canyon or something like it, a piece I’ve stared at in one way or another since I was a small boy, assimilating without being conscious of it an aesthetic that carries me to this day. When I go to art museums, I piece together the history on the walls in a way that only makes sense as a piece of the art I grew up staring at.
I do not have to paint, or to make music, so I can listen and I look with great comfort. But I have never been a comfortable reader. It is because, after a lifetime of trying to write things down, I understand how hard it is to pick what it is that needs to be said out of all the noise around me. And once that is done, it is even harder to say just what I mean. I don’t mean to try to compare myself to Eliot or Coltrane here, but if it was hard for them – great artists in command of their tools – how could it be anything less than impossible for me?
A few lines later, Eliot’s Prufrock turns toward the window to say:
That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.
Albuquerque Transportation Center
I never got around to blogging Malcolm’s visit to Albuquerque and other bits of our great land. It was lovely to finally meet face to face after years of one of those bit-driven relationships. He’s posted his pictures from his trip, and his caption on this one caught my eye. We try, Malcolm. 🙂
Bee Clue Candy
Do you need some refreshment in your weariness? The only way of knowing the interest just by experiencing.
Storage method: avoid the sunlight
(Hat tip The Mother of The Boy, who has serious goofball cred.)
TV Haiku
They are ritualized art, the movie summaries in the daily TV listings – usually less than 10 words to summarize an entire film. Today’s favorite: Patton:
Gen. George S. Patton fights World War II.
Quacks in the Internet Age
The Internet has made it too easy to be a quack.
In my desk drawer at work, I have a wonderful collection of old UFO nuttiness from the early 1990s. It’s wonderful stuff – wildly imaginative zines full of poor writing, even poorer graphical presentation and absolutely wonderfully muddy thinking. Back in the day, you used to have to really take your nuttiness seriously to publish this stuff.
Today, it’s easy. Far too easy, which means there’s an absolute flood of poor quality nuttiness, and no real way to distinguish the dross from the gems. Which is why I embrace Arnd Bernaerts, the author of the thesis that naval warfare is behind climate change. Or something like that. I’m not entirely clear on the hypothesis. But in my mailbox the other day, I got a copy of Bernaerts’ book on the subject, which has all the hallmarks of the best UFO work I so enjoyed back in the day: poor graphics, (but lots of them!), a wonderfully self-consistent collection of strange anecdotes and an absolutely impenetrable thicket of argument that seems so obviously clear to the writer and absolutely incomprehensible to me.
Back in the day, I had a good deal of journalistic fun debunking nuttiness, but I’ve come to realize it’s rather like destructive hurricanes: bad in principle, but impervious to journalistic assault. So I largely ignore the field these days, leaving the battle against the forces of weirdness to others. Instead, I choose on occasion to simply embrace the nuttiness. And as a connoisseur, I suggest Arnd’s fine work is worthy of the embrace.
A Moment of Silence…
if you please, for the 32 journalists who died this year serving you in Iraq:
Violence in Iraq claimed the lives of 32 journalists in 2006, the deadliest year for the press in a single country that the Committee to Protect Journalists has ever recorded. In most cases, such as the killing of Atwar Bahjat, one of the best-known television reporters in the Arab world, insurgents specifically targeted journalists to be murdered, CPJ found in a new analysis.
Cartoon Semiotics
From today’s Zippy (link will point to a different comic after 12/19/2006):
Griffy: It isn’t what you say, Zippy. It’s how you say it.
Zippy: Noam Chomsky! Noam Chomsky! Noam Chomsky!
Inkstain Hearts Benny the Icepick
Benny and his posse showed up in force today on the Journal letters page, defending the humble bicycle:
Pete Vera feels as though cyclists should not be allowed on the roads because much of the money used to construct and maintain them come from car-related fees and taxes. He needs to be reminded that cars are costing taxpayers far more than bikes.
The manpower required to enforce traffic laws, clean up after accidents, officiate in traffic court, and maintain the roadways is enormous. But beyond that, the automobile-centric lifestyle leads to problems like air pollution, traffic congestion, and the heat island effect, not to mention obesity and a sedentary lifestyle. All of these factors contribute to an unhealthy citizenry.
Welcome to Inkstain
Nora told me what turns out to be a very old geekjoke yesterday, about how the only legitimate use of an HTML blink tag is as follows:
Schroedinger’s cat is not dead.
Unfortunately, (well, fortunately for you, dear readers, but unfortunately for the joke) WordPress won’t let me add a blink tag to the not, but at least it gives you some flavor of Nora’s goofballiness. So with that introduction, we welcome her to the Inkstain family.