A Notebook – Since 2007
Mars plants flowers
against winter sewer
ruins
comes in colors
homeward
Mad dog out tramples
augh spring sprouts
runs quick and nimble
clouds and loamy
hugs a lush ball
Mush awake a March hare
argues mad lion movie stare
retreats lambs
clear Leo does not roar
he turns away the Hun
Many a time change
and the wind chimes
reels boisterous calls
another year belogged
befogged, begoggled.
“Why do you ask so many questions!”
“Why are you always yelling?”
We may have been taught in Grammar School to see the comma as a pause and the period as a stop, the comma a quarter note and the period a whole note. The semicolon a half note? The hyphen a rest. The dash a recess, the open parenthesis time to go home.
Adorno, in his essay titled “Punctuation Marks,” stops to consider a comparison to traffic signs:
“All of them are traffic signals; in the last analysis, traffic signals were modeled on them. Exclamation points are red, colons green, dashes call a halt.”
But Adorno quickly moves on to a consideration of punctuation as a kind of musical notation, but what then, he questions, becomes of that comparison when modern music begins to ignore tonality.
Of the exclamation point, Adorno gets historical, calling its use an example of expressionism:
“…a desperate written gesture that yearns in vain to transcend language.”
As for the dash – well, it no longer comes as a surprise:
“All the dash claims to do now is to prepare us in a foolish way for surprises that by that very token are no longer surprising.”
Why Adorno limits quotation marks to words being quoted suggests a fondness for rules that will always “call out” to be broken.
“The blind verdict of the ironic quotation marks is its graphic gesture.”
The loss of the semicolon Adorno attributes to market surveillance, not that anyone was looking anyway, but the use of the semicolon is perhaps the most difficult punctuation mark to establish conformity; the semicolon is the most personal of punctuation marks. It’s gone the way of the tie.
For Adorno, the test of a writer’s punctuation proficiency can be found or proven in how one handles parenthetical material; interruptions to the lineal flow of thought, which of course isn’t lineal at all, which is why we need punctuation. He uses Proust as an example of a writer’s need for parenthetical expression, where simple commas won’t do, because we are running on but actually stopping, without coming to a full stop, to check our shoelaces.
Interesting, even surprising, maybe, is that Adorno does not compare punctuation marks to editing in a film. Adorno disapproved of movies, jazz, and advertising, the sleep inducing drugs of what he called the cultural industry. Advertising makes enormous use of the exclamation mark, yelling and fist banging, even in ads without words – it’s the threat that numbs.
How does Adorno conclude in such a way that might be helpful to a writer either concerned over “correct” use of punctuation (incorrect, Adorno would say, that use of ironic quote marks; but it highlights – calls out – the irony of the rules as a kind of code, not code as in writing computer code, but as in work completed and awaiting inspection), or of wanting to use the tools available effectively, precisely, but at the same time creatively, interestingly?
It might come as some degree of solace to the punctuation befuddled writer (although some might feel worse) to know that Adorno considered all writing subject to an unsolvable “punctuation predicament”:
“For the requirements of the rules of punctuation and those of the subjective need for logic and expression are not compatible.”
35 mm slide taken with my Exakta 500 in 1969: An abstract, long-exposure photograph of lights vertically flowing in the foreground with squirrely lines of blue and orange streaks in the background created through intentional camera movement.
The Jimi Hendrix “Are You Experienced” album (1967) included a song, “May This be Love”:
“My worries seem so very small
With my waterfall
I can see my rainbow calling me…”
Turn the photo horizontal and we see an electric guitar effect.
why ask? ill said
naught he? nowhere
that said? what said
just this? this whose
unthrilled? feel so
said I’ll? be later
even so? what now
then again? nil wind
adversative? when to whom
conversative? with to which
adjourning? now here
heretofore? to where
in room? ill lit
elbow? move over
“Ill Seen Ill Said,” a novella piece by Samuel Beckett, appeared in the October 5, 1981 issue of The New Yorker magazine, first published by Les Éditions de Minuit in Paris, earlier in ’81. My poem above, “Q & A,” is a bit of a riff on Beckett’s themes.
On page 41 of The New Yorker, where the story begins, is a cartoon by Charles Barsotti. The cartoon shows a duck sitting at a desk. The duck wears glasses, is writing with a short pen or pencil on a piece of paper, a phone on a front corner of the desk, a stack of three pieces of paper on the other corner, the duck looking up, as if thinking of what to write next. Above the duck, still in the cartoon frame, the words: “Quack! Quack! Quack! Quack!” And above the cartoon box, a handwritten caption reads: “THE CALL OF THE WILD.”
There are 77 question marks in Beckett’s novella, including: “What the wrong word?” Just before, “Imagination at wit’s end spreads its sad wings.”
Why sad? Why wit? Rye whit. Why wry. Wary. Worry. Weak wreck.
Near 8,000 words to the novella. I counted only 3 commas in the entire piece. Short, staccato sentences.
We hardly see anything of reality’s totality (“Ill seen”), but that is our syllabus, and even that may seem overwhelming, and suppose we could see it all, could we describe it (“Ill said”), let alone explain it, and with only 0.000375% commas! All that said, we sometimes seem to come close, or someone does, and shares, and that’s a pleasure. Not an argument, not a theory, not a grammar, just a pleasure, like at a circus.
Beckett’s piece ends with, “Know happiness.” No end of playing with words.
“Which say? Ill say. Both. All three. Question answered,” says Beckett, in “Ill Seen Ill Said.”
Sunday mornings, I fill our little blue watering can at the kitchen sink and walk around like a waiter at a cocktail party, offering drinks to the houseplants. In our first place together, we sprouted plants from avocado seeds. One spread from a ceramic pot on the ledge above the sink, the window never closed, where the cat Freely came and went. Oak Street.
One day, each of us carrying a bag of groceries, walking home down Main Street, we paused at the Realtor’s window at the end of the commercial strip to look at the photos of houses for sale in town. We lived in one of four small white stucco houses, one in each corner of a courtyard, a wooden barn-like garage out back with four open stalls. Our rent was $95 a month, the beach a mile away.
Standing at the window of the Realtor’s, I was surprised to see a photo of our place. The four house lot was for sale. We didn’t have a telephone, so I went over to my folks-iz home and called our landlord, who confirmed our house was for sale, sold, actually, and he just had not had the heart to tell us, but the eviction notice would soon be in the mail.
That summer, the four small houses were torn down and a large apartment complex with no yard space erected, but this little story is not about inflation. It’s about night and day, dancing the night away, surfing in the morning.
Click anywhere in the gallery for scroll and captions.
“they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness”1
“And that’s life, then: things as they are,
This buzzing of the blue guitar.”2
“What slight essential things she had to say
Before they started, he and she, to play.”3
“Useless
to silence it.
Impossible
to silence it.”4
“I opened its lid and saw Joe
written twice in its dust, in a child’s hand,
then a squiggled seagull or two.”5
I’ve been working on the coderoad
Just to pass the time away
Someone’s in the kitchen with AI
Bowing on the old cello
Soprano alto tenor bass
The four each know their place
One has a deja vu
Looking back at you
Oats peas beans and barley grow
Timeline full of doodly squat
Do you or I or anyone know
How code from AI grows
Rounding off we come to end
Our four part harmony
She prompts you and you bump him
Tomorrow we’ll meet again
What is writing? I’ve been pulling maintenance on the blog. Too many categories clutter the recipe. Is blogging writing? Not if the blog is photographs only. Then again, notice “graph” in the word photograph. In a photo, we are doodling with light. Is turning wrenches blogging?
What is coding? I was also working on trying to code. Options may work differently depending on blog template, but clicking on the three vertical ellipsis dots next to the Publish button in the upper right corner of my post draft reveals a drop-down menu that includes, under EDITOR, both Visual and Code editor options. Coding is editing that results in how what you say looks.
I experimented enough to resolve not to mess with coding. For one thing, results are seldom what you saw is what you got. Format often changes depending on user device but also depending on WordPress built-in preferences – in the Reader alone there are several view options, and they often seem to apply the code differently. Sometimes the magic works; sometimes it doesn’t.
I was interested in making letters joggle and words dance, slip and slide up and down the page, dressed in wild and varied colors, and of varying size and shapes. Not gonna happen. There are wheels within wheels, codes within codes, and editors, supervisors, and principals insisting on consistent behavior.
I abandoned my brief foray into coding and set to work on the maintenance of categories and tags. Did you know WordPress limits attention per post the total of Tags plus Categories to 15? If you go over 15, the post won’t appear in tag searches. That I did not know. And major service maintenance required if you want to find those posts over 15 and whittle them down under the limbo bar. Not absolutely necessary to know or act on, but the mechanic in me wants to know how things work and how to handle the tools.
Or is it all a distraction from writing? What category to assign this? How to tag it? I’m often not sure. Meantime, under the heading of pulling maintenance on the blog, I added a Tag Cloud and a Category drop down menu to the bottom footer. And I added back the subtitle to the blog: A Literary Notebook – Since 2007. How had it come unattached? Probably my mettlesome mechanic meandering.
Writing is distraction. From what?
“Must we wring the neck of a certain system in order to stuff it into a contemporary pigeon-hole, or modify the dimensions of that pigeon-hole for the satisfaction of the analogymongers? Literary criticism is not book-keeping.”1
As for jiggling letters and dancing words, we shouldn’t rely on code:
“When the sense is sleep, the words go to sleep. (See the end of ‘Anna Livia‘) When the sense is dancing, the words dance.”2
Sketches from the edges of notebooks, nine images under a thematic title.
This week’s theme, cafes, is taken from Hemingway’s short story titled “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” in which two waiters, one younger and complaining, the other older and empathetic, wait to go home while a lone customer, an old man, lingers on, drinking.
Click anywhere in the gallery for scroll and captions.
A Clean, Well-Lighted Place
I carried a three ring canvas binder between classes first year of high school that rubbed against my shirt and pants, stained indelibly a light purple from my doodle drawings on the binder covers front and back in red and blue ink pen. I wasn’t “The Illustrated Man,” but I sure had a tattooed notebook. Alas, there was no time-travelling girl helping me draw. Four years later when I started spending time in Venice, Ray Bradbury was long gone, but I was still doodling.
I wrote in books, marginalia and notes, and doodled in notebooks. I couldn’t sit through a class without doodling. I was never that into comic books, which are more artistic than the common doodle. The beauty of the doodle is that it is not art, and it’s useless criticizing something for not being what it was not intended to be. And I took copious, effective notes in lecture classes; when neighboring students missed a class, they wanted my notes. Bonus the cartoons. There seems to be a relationship connecting the doodling brain to notetaking.
A doodle isn’t automatically a cartoon. Doodling might be likened to automatic writing, where the subconscious develops surreal on a cafe napkin. The doodle may or may not have a model or subject, though often one emerges. The doodle is disposable, like the napkin it’s drawn on.
Job changes, and then involved in business meetings, I continued to doodle, unable to pay attention otherwise. I suppose I doodled like others smoked cigarettes. On the five minute phone call, I could fill a ream. Sometimes, in a meeting, over my arm, someone would notice a doodle and comment. My notes and doodles were mosaic, non-linear.
At some point I started looking at my doodles a bit differently. They went from a means to get through a class or meeting or phone call to a hobby of drawing and sketching, which meant trying to doodle outside the captive occasion and saving them, and turning them into cartoons. But it’s not so easy to draw when it isn’t improvised or made from a distraction, the mind mostly still focused on something else, and captions complicate the process, an attempt to explain a dream.
Maybe doodling is a way of handling experience outside the rules of what children see as the adult world. The doodle is usually not an attempt at representational art, and so the doodler is free from linear perspective requirements. That’s one difference between the doodle and the sketch. At the same time, a true artist like Picasso might have drawn like a child because he had the skill to do so. It’s hard for an adult to doodle like a kid.
Below are some doodled fragments. Click anywhere in the gallery to scroll and view single pics with captions.
The Coming of the Toads 