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Sliding sideways

I notice and treasure oblique things—the angles of shadow and light in a photograph, the patterns of fallen branches that scratch the pavement, the way some people make strange connections in conversation.

I’ve written about oblique ideas. They are the ones that come crashing across your prose like meteors, blindsiding your cursor, demanding to be noticed. They are the ideas and the phrases that clash with what you have so carefully laid out. Thoughts logically placed are scattered as the sideways bomb blows them up.

This crow is unaware of the strong diagonal shadows that transform this photo.

Fran Gardner photo

After the explosion

When the pieces of your prose reassemble, there is something new. Richer. Maybe not what you intended. Almost certainly not what you intended. You were pursuing a goal, moving toward a horizon, and now the hills have changed shape and the cliched goalposts moved.

Accept that oblique gift! There is freedom in it! Accept the angle that makes a tangle out of your rectangular thinking.

In this photo, the oblique elements are overshadowed by other interesting things, like the two spots of red, the abandoned cinderblock and the dog that isn’t barking at the photographer.

Fran Gardner photo

Your thoughts, your words, your creative urges might be as simple as the lines of the wheelchair ramp in our backyard. Or as nested and oblique as the complex patterns of wood and grass and shadow.

Fran Gardner photo

Invite the oblique

When a piece of writing seems stale, and you will taste it when it is, you can invite the oblique in. Straighten your shoulders, do some breathing if that’s your practice. Close your eyes, take a moment—I think this might work but I honestly don’t know. My oblique thoughts are on autopilot. They zoom in whenever.

What comes next?

You’ve wrung all the juice from that lemon.
Now you must stop. And consider what’s next.
But why consider? Just do it, push the button,
Open the door, breathe the fresh air.

You are freshly born, with the feet of an infant.
Let the grass tickle you, run as fast as you can.
Conquer another hill, stretch to the horizon.
Stretch, yes, stretch. Your fingers touch the ring.

It’s not a competition

Who’s smarter, you or your spouse?

Best to remember, it’s not a competition. The proper answer is that you’re both really smart, in your own ways.

I thought about competitions when I listened to an podcast interview with James Patterson in which the interviewer breathlessly noted that this author has 400 million books in print. That seemed like a lot, till I looked up how many books other authors have sold.

The best-selling author of all time is undoubtedly William Shakespeare. Estimates are that 4 billion copies of his plays have been sold. How did that figure come to be? It’s hard to nail down. As the late Sen. Everett Dirksen is alleged to have said about the U.S. budget: “A billion here, a billion there and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.” Trouble is, I can’t nail down that quotation, either. It’s a good bet that Dirksen never said it. For one thing, in his Senate days—he died in 1969—a million dollars was real money.

Women authors sell

Total sales figures aside, various online sources agree that after the Bard, the biggest selling authors are a couple of women, Agatha Christie (whose books have been translated into more languages than any other writer, as well) and the romance writer Barbara Cartland. Cartland’s books, which pretty much single-handedly established the romance genre in the 1950s, have sold more than a billion copies, according to barbaracartland.com.

Part of that may have to do with her incredible output. She wrote 723 books.

Other contenders

Mental Floss notes that “Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong,” was one big seller. Some 740 million copies of “The Little Red Book” were published between 1966 and 1968. Every Chinese citizen owned a copy.

Newsweek’s fascinating roundup of the 30 best-selling books of all time leaves out Shakespeare, the Bible and the Quran. It includes some works you might not think of, like the Hite Report on female sexuality, Black Beauty, Watership Down and You Can Heal Your Life by Louise Hay. Others are no surprise: Dr. Spock, a clutch of Harry Potter Books, The Da Vinci Code, and And Then There Were None, the Agatha Christie mystery that had its title sanitized a couple of times. It started out as Ten Little Niggers, a line from a minstrel show song, then became Ten Little Indians before the final name change. It still sold in the tens of millions.

Sheet music

The best-selling sheet music of all time is a song I don’t know, “Sweet Leilani.” It’s from the 1937 film “Waikiki Wedding” and won an Oscar for best song. A recording by Bing Crosby was immensely popular. According to Billboard, the sheet music sold 54 million copies. That figure is startlingly high, considering that in 1930, the population of the U.S. was less than 125 million.

It’s hard to comprehend how popular sheet music was in the early 20th century. In those days before radios, pianos were being mass-produced for the first time. Families made music at home—and they bought sheet music. Other big sellers: “Old Folks at Home,” “Listen to the Mockingbird,” “After the Ball,” “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” and “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.”

Christmas songs are always popular: “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” was recorded by cowboy crooner Gene Autry in 1946, and Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas,” another Crosby chestnut, dates from 1942. On a hot summer’s day in 1945, Robert Wells and Mel Tormé came up with “The Christmas Song,” (“Chestnuts roasting on an open fire”), recorded by the warm-voiced Nat King Cole. Tormé also recorded this song.

The clock walk

Wikipedia says the first song to became popular because it was advertised nationally was “Grandfather's Clock,” first published in 1876. I remember singing it in Pioneer Girls:

Grandfather’s clock

My grandfather's clock was too large for the shelf,
So it stood ninety years on the floor.
It was taller by half than the old man himself,
Though it weighed not a pennyweight more.
It was bought on the morn of the day that he was born,
And was always his treasure and pride;
But it stopp’d short—never to run again—
When the old man died.

Ninety years without slumbering 
(tick, tick, tick, tick),
His life seconds numbering,
(tick, tick, tick, tick),
But it stopp’d short—never to run again—
When the old man died.

“Grandfather’s Clock” was written by Henry Clay Work, who also penned “Marching Through Georgia.”

I tried singing “Grandfather’s Clock” for a young woman named Becky at the Refuge Coffeehouse in Lents. Of course, she had never heard it. It’s a dinosaur.

Hardly anybody buys sheet music anymore. Publishers fight a losing battle to keep folks from photocopying songs. Perhaps the last big-selling pop song sheet music was “How Much is that Doggie in the Window?” back in the early ’50s.

Going in circles

In Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” the narrator, himself unnamed, admits—seemingly out of nowhere—to loving the sound of John Jacob Astor’s name.

I was not unemployed in my profession by the late John Jacob Astor; a name which, I admit, I love to repeat, for it hath a rounded and orbicular sound to it, and rings like unto bullion.

A children’s rhyme about John Jacob echoes the sentiment:

John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt
His name is my name too (yay, yay, yay)
Whenever we go out
The people always shout
There goes
John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt (na na na na na na na)

A similar song comes from Swedish vaudeville:
My name is Yon Yonson,
I live in Wisconsin.
I work in a lumber yard there.
The people I meet as
I walk down the street,
They say “Hello!”
I say “Hello!”
They say “What’s your name?”
I say: My name is Yon Yonson.

Here’s another circular rhyme:
That’s life.
What’s life?
A magazine.
How much does it cost?
Two bits.
Ah, shucks, I only have a nickel.
That’s life.
What’s life? 

Does anyone still refer to a quarter as two bits? As in the call-and-response jingle

Shave and a haircut. Two bits.
Or
 Two bits, four bits, six bits, a dollar.
All for (you name it!), stand up and holler!

Chop that tree

After seeing this Boston Globe story about a man who walked onto his neighbor’s property and cut down 16 big trees, I don’t feel so bad about a little trim job my neighbor’s landscaper did to our camellia.

This shrub, really a tree, is full of gorgeous deep pink blossoms in late winter. Passers-by often comment on its beauty, and I’ve seen people use it as a backdrop for photos. It’s hard to think of them doing that now that it’s been cut back.

At least a dozen limbs were cut off willy-nilly from the east side of our big camellia back in February. Fran Gardner photo

The neighboring property is an apartment house, and the camellia is next to a wide concrete driveway. The workers who turn up to leaf-blow the bricks that comprise the property’s landscaping had no response when I asked them about the butchery.

The branches of the tree that overhung the driveway were summarily chopped off without any notice to me or my husband. I can only assume the reason is that camellia blossoms fall on the driveway for a couple of weeks in February.

Well, bad news for them. Plenty of flowers will still fall on their property. I’ll leave it to the landscapers to clean them up. With their noisy leaf blowers.

‘Improving’ the view

In the Globe story out of Nantucket, the man who cut down the trees—cedar, cherry, and Leyland cypress, some 30 feet tall—has listed his property for sale for $10 million, touting its “sweeping view of the Atlantic Ocean” —a view he created by removing his neighbor’s trees.

The man admits that he cut the trees and asked his landscaper to clear away the debris. The homeowner whose trees were destroyed would like $486,000 in compensation. I hope she gets it.

Writing poems for others

Thanks to MS and summer heat, I haven’t had the energy to take in street fairs and farmers markets these last weeks, even though the season for both is in full swing. I’m hoping to find some venues this weekend, however, where I can offer to write poems for strangers for free.

I’m still stinging from my poor reception at the Hillsboro farmers market a few months ago. I whined about this in the posting “Spring Elms.” Sitting in my wheelchair with my “Let me write you a poem. It’s free” placard around my neck, I got no takers, and so I wrote a poem for myself.

Rejection

Dogs on leashes,
Sniffing at the bakery’s bread
Too well-behaved to snatch some.
Give them a tennis ball!
Or maybe a Frisbee.

I’m getting no takers,
Oh, the rejection!
Soon, someone will stop—
Or maybe not.

I tell myself, 
Not very interesting people
Here at the Hillsboro market.
Rhubarb’s a bigger draw,
That and asparagus,
Huge bunches of freesias
And tomato starts.
 
It’s like holding a garage sale:
I don’t want that stuff anymore
But it hurts to see other dismiss it.

It reminds me of all the times
I didn’t ask because 
I was afraid
The answer would be no.

Bump in the road

Somebody bumped this bump sign, knocking it to the ground.

Fran Gardner photo

That’s it, folks!

You may have noticed that Becoming appears in your mailbox at 7 p.m. or thereabouts every Saturday. I spend the week before gathering stories and photos and poetry to share with you.

I do this because I enjoy it. I like writing these things; I like sharing them with you. I love it when you “like” my postings or comment on them.

I’m considering some value-added offerings for the paid subscribers of Becoming, whom I’d like to acknowledge with more than just appreciation. I’ll keep you posted as I work out these plans.

Here’s the tip jar link at PayPal, where you can donate in increments of $5.

Take care and stay cool. I never thought I’d want air-conditioning in my home, but now I’m glad I have it.

—Fran