Dear Johnny Marks (repost)

Some holiday fun from last year, while I try to figure out how to write blog posts again...

Dear Mr. Marks,

Let's assume for a moment that I grant your initial premise, and that I admit that I know (or know of, as you seem to mean) Dasher and Dancer and Prancer and Vixen, as well as Comet and Cupid and Donner and Blitzen.

If I can then truthfully answer "no" to the question you pose, is it logical to assert as you have that this Rudolph is "the most famous" reindeer?

The others you present as a given. Of course you know them. Everybody knows them. You aren't denying this. It's the very first thing you say, in clear and unambiguous terms.

But do I recall this other one? The very question suggests the possibility that I might not. In fact, the entirety of your song after posing the question seems predicated on the listener having no recollection of this particular reindeer or the details of his life, else the singer would simply be rehashing a story familiar both to himself and his audience.

Are you simply trying to create buzz about this Rudolph character? Are you, perhaps, his publicist? Is it not possible that he is, at best, the ninth most famous reindeer, assuming that no others of his species have attained fame greater than or equal to either Rudolph or the eight reindeer mentioned previously? You provide no criteria for measuring reindeer fame other than name recognition, and it seems clear that he fails to achieve "most famous" status by this measure.

In an instance where the initial premise is not granted (i.e., the listener is unaware of the initial eight reindeer you name), does it not then fall to the person performing your song to provide some background data, perhaps biographical information or anecdotes which illustrate the characters and qualities of the reindeer? Where is this additional data? You included neither footnotes nor endnotes, and your bibliography is also missing.

I would recommend you delete this opening section entirely, if only because it is terribly unwise to begin a song about a single character with a recitation of eight other, possibly unrelated characters. Are they the bullies mentioned in your second verse? You never specify.

And who is this Santa person who mysteriously appears in what I can only assume (although the structure is never repeated) is the chorus? Is that his first name, his surname, or some sort of nickname? Is he some sort of communal task-master? All you divulge is that he is in possession of a sleigh, and has somewhere to be on the night in question.

From there you skip some crucial plot elements. One assumes that Rudolph indeed accepts the question posed by Santa. And then you leapfrog your story again, concluding that Rudolph will "go down in history" for some reason, even though you haven't told us why this might be true, or even where the sleigh was headed.

This is all without even addressing a central flaw in your tale. You tell us that Rudolph's nose is red, and then provide additional detail indicating that it "glows." Assuming that the night is perilously foggy (which you seem to be indicating) putting Rudolph at the front of the sleigh could only hope to provide enough luminescence for someone very close to the light source to be able to see at all through the fog. The nose, as you say, glows. You have given no indication that it shines or functions in a manner similar to the headlights on an automobile. Is Rudolph himself supposed to be guiding the sleigh through the darkness or is Santa? Santa would be too far from the light source, and Rudolph too close. If you put a light four inches in front of your eyes in the dark, all you can see is the light itself.

Since the Santa character never reappears, and there are no details of the sleigh ride itself, it is possible that Rudolph has purposefully led Santa to his demise in the dark, and the other reindeer reward him because they no longer have to work. But it seems your aim was to write a song for children, and this subject matter is a little dark, especially as you haven't established the Santa character as evil. He appears only once, and from all the information we are given, may never have even received a response to his request for Rudolph to guide the sleigh. The fact that he phrases his need as a question seems to deny the argument that he is the villain of the piece, and yet I have already established that the light from the nose could not possibly have been adequate to guide either Rudolph or Santa on a sleigh ride of any distance.

It is also worth noting that a sleigh is a hopelessly outdated mode of transportation. Modern children will likely not know what this is.

At present I can find no place for your song. The tune itself is acceptable, but only by a very slim margin. It is awfully short to have three distinct melody lines. And your narrative is quite obviously a shambles. Should you retool it to rectify some of the egregious errors discussed, I would be happy to take another look at your work.

Sincerely,

The Moon Topples

Repost: Some people I've seen in London

I have nothing to say tonight, so I thought I might repost this entry: some character sketches written in London during my trip there in October, when only four or five people were reading me. I was framing some pictures from my trip today, and one of these people came up in a conversation, so it seemed appropriate. I'm hoping it'll be new to most of you.

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My first morning here I kept walking past a policeman who looked exactly like Johnny Lee Miller (Sick Boy from Trainspotting, pretty much nothing else). I didn't think much of it, filed it in my head as what would likely be the closest I came to a celebrity encounter. He was on my street, just a couple of blocks north, so I've walked past the place several times since. I started to notice that there was always a policeman standing there, a different one each day. Curious, I looked at the buildings by where the cop was always posted. And that's how I found out where the Iraqi embassy in London is located.

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On Abbey Road on Saturday, I saw an elderly woman walking up the street while I waited for my bus. I asked her if she'd lived in the area long.

"All my life." She puffed up a little. This may have been some sort of accomplishment I didn't understand.

"So were you living here when the Beatles recorded here?"

"Maaaahhh," she said, making a sign to ward off evil, and then moving away from me.

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A woman in the coffehouse I frequent asked a man (an American, as it happens) for a sheet of paper. He said he didn't have any.

Thirty seconds later he reached into his bag and pulled out a sheet of paper without any rooting around. He knew exactly where it was. He gave it to the woman.

She thanked him twice immediately. The second time contained all sorts of extra words meant to convey the depth of her gratitude and her humility for having bothered such an obviously august personage with such a trifling request.

I got the impression that this was exactly the response he wanted. That perhaps he always said no before saying yes in order to produce a disproportionate amount of thanks for even the smallest of basic, common-courtesy gestures.

Which would be a weird, although perhaps gratifying, way to go through life.

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Grabbing lunch in the same coffeehouse, I took a comfortable seat in the same little chair cluster as a woman whose unhappiness was so palpable as to fill the two seats between us and brush uncomfortably against me.

Her mouth turned down at the ends in two vertical lines which seemed permanent. Even just looking out the window her expression was of utter disappointment or perhaps disgust. She threw a couple of baleful stares at me when I sat, even though she had no drink or food in front her and arguably, therefore, far less claim on the table. It wasn't clear if she was even a customer or just someone who came in out of the rain.

She dropped her umbrella and, before picking it up, she grabbed what might have been a small sliver of nut, a shell from a seed, or perhaps a fingernail from where it lay on the floor in a footprint next to a cigarette butt. She put it in her mouth.

I started to think maybe she was homeless. Her hair was clean, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything. Her clothes were plain but not dirty. Homeless remained my best guess until she pulled out a cell phone and sent a text message. Then I didn't know what to think.

She grew tired from all her angry staring, curled up in her chair and went to sleep.

Later she awoke in time to dart like a squirrel across the room and snatch some sunflower seeds off an empty table which hadn't yet been bussed. Eating them, she placed a phone call. When she spoke, it was in a surprising high-pitched baby-doll voice with a heavy French accent.

I don't know what was said by either party, but the call appeared to have changed her life for the better. Before I left (during a bizarre jazz arrangement of Grandmaster Flash's "White Lines") I actually saw her smile.

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A guy outside the National Gallery took off his shirt to eat his lunch. Somebody must have said something or just been staring because, as I walked by him, he screamed "Well, if you don't like it you can bugger off!" at a seven-year-old girl.

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A woman with a ridiculously deep fake tan and vertigo-inducing cleavage runs the coffeehouse on my way to the Baker St. Tube stop.

My first time there was on my dawn walk my first morning in London. I stopped there largely because they were the first open coffeehouse I had seen. I had some trouble figuring out the coins I was paying with, and she patiently waited while I checked the backs and counted it out for her.

The last time I was there, a middle-aged woman with Elvis Costello glasses revealed herself to also be an American. She was having the same difficulty with the money as I had had.

After about a second, the woman who worked there barked, "They're labelled, yeah? Right on the back. Work it out!" And then walked away without taking her money. The other counter girl had to fill in until she returned.

From some similar observations I have concluded that she is nice only to male customers and people she knows. Which seems like another weird way to go through life.