Trees slowly green then to brown grow and winds whip clash crash blow fall heavy branched ice and frozen snow break thru hour glass windows just to call a leaf drop hello here come our birds and squirrels we can carry no more this last fruit full of drunken hornets fat old olives hidden walnuts bowl of table plums plucked your fub greedy yet lovely opposable thumbs. Call now the biggest arborist garden organist whose long band saw lets us come back come spring your teeth again green and trees cannot talk.
Books. Shelved books. Backs to the world. Musty, dusty, pages that crackle when opened. Do I want to live in a library, surrounded by a labyrinth of shelves of my own making, impossible to find my way out, the books aging and shrinking as things alive, spine colors fading, hairlines receding, skins foxing, books sleeping in their den?
On-line, books do not sleep. And why not clear the house of the fossilizing, dusty creatures? In 1996, the San Francisco Library started a grand plan to replace its paper books with the new fandangled electronic stuff:
“In an apparent attempt at secrecy, Dowlin arranged for 200,000 more books to be completely discarded: Over nine months and despite protests and even outright sabotage by the library staff, San Francisco Department of Public Works dump trucks carted away these books to landfills.”
From Baker, Nicholson. ‘The Author vs. The Librarian,’ The New Yorker 72 (Oct. 14, 1996): 50-62 and Basbanes, Nicholas, Patience and Fortitude. New York: Random House, 2001.
Organizing, shelving, cataloging books, building cradles, bookcases, shelves to hold them, often an enjoyable if obsessive evening’s occupation. Borges, from “The Library of Babel”:
“The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings….Twenty shelves, five long shelves per side, cover all the sides except two; their height, which is the distance from floor to ceiling, scarcely exceeds that of a normal bookcase. One of the free sides leads to a narrow hallway which opens onto another gallery, identical to the first and to all the rest.
“The Library of Babel,” from Labyrinths, Selected Stories & Other Writings, by Jorge Louis Borges, A New Directions Paperbook – NDP186, 1964, p. 51.
I recently joined Goodreads. No, that isn’t stop the press headline news. I wanted to catalog my library. I tried Libib, but always wondering what I was missing without the “Upgrade,” left for Library Thing, maybe too frantic for a library, but I’m still working with Thing. Finding books on Goodreads is both easy and difficult. Easy to find any book, or any version of the book you might be looking for, difficult, at times, to find an exact match (of the many versions often shown) to the book you have in hand. Still, not a big deal, unless you obsessively want or need to ensure every brick in the wall of your collection is designed in color coded Flemish brickwork, in which case you want your books on course.
Perusing the various versions though can be a pleasure. Discovering, for example, the bright yellow banana on the cover of an e-book version of Beckett’s “Krapp’s Last Tape.” And pulling books I’ve not looked at for some time from the home shelves, I’ve a chance to reconsider what a particular book has meant to my reading life. Not that I’m a constant reader, one who is going to post hundreds of reviews weekly to Goodreads. Egads! I’m still gobsmacked to see readers doing that. And I think I’m a slow reader, though I’ve never ran a reading marathon – would probably finish somewhere in the middle of the pack.
Not too long ago, at around 4,000 books in my library, I decided to winnow the bunch down to those books I feel a special affinity for, usually gained from my predicament when first acquired and read. I now have about 1,500 books, and I thought I might use Goodreads to catalog some of those with brief notes and comments, beginning with collections of my favorite authors. Not that any book is not important. To have read even a single book in one’s life is noteworthy. To have discovered a writer and read all their books is to become a fan of literature – without which a writer’s books fade away. And when you pull an old book away from its crusty place, you might find it crystallized like an old bottle of honey lost high on a pantry shelf. But you can warm it up and it’ll come back to flowing.
Under the weather, literally, in rain country, but I would have been unable to get too excited for the great eclipse of Spring 2024 under any kind of sky. Drive five hours and climb a mountain and smoke a joint for four minutes of totality? I don’t think so. I experienced the eclipse of February 26, 1979, living in what used to be called a mother-in-law house (MLH), what now would be called an Additional Dwelling Unit (ADU), on a bluff over a lake, under ship hull grey skies. I remember a shadow blowing quickly and soundlessly by the windows, its darkness thickening, and then it moved on, and so did I.
Nick Paumgarten put up an interesting take of his recent eclipse experience in a Dispatch at The New Yorker site (9 April):
“Watching the Eclipse from the Highest Mountain in Vermont: People cracked cans of beer and smoked cannabis and popped mushroom gummies and ate smoked-meat sandwiches as totality approached at fifteen hundred miles per hour.“
We seem doomed to a craving for the spectacle, the big events: Superbowl, Burning Man, EGOT awards, Election Night. When what we want, or need, is to sit back and relax, but even to relax has become big business, and nothing will do without we get super relaxed, hyper-relaxed.
Inevitably, the great hyper-experience is followed by a come-down. Paumgarten concludes, having made the trek from New York to Vermont to experience the eclipse:
“That night, the highway south, back to the cities, was jammed. People reported that it took more than six hours to get out of Vermont. Others posted screenshots of the flight paths of private jets leaving local airports. Everyone had time to reconsider what was worth it, and what was not, and perhaps to weigh keeping those considerations to themselves.“
I remember another eclipse, this one experienced vicariously via Mark Twain, which might help explain our fascinations and superstitions. This eclipse is from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Hank, Twain’s time traveler, finding himself at odds with Merlin, is about to be burned at the stake when he leverages his knowing, having been there, in the future, of the coming eclipse to control the King and his minions:
“I have reflected, Sir King. For a lesson, I will let this darkness proceed, and spread night in the world; but whether I blot out the sun for good, or restore it, shall rest with you. These are the terms, to wit: You shall remain king over all your dominions, and receive all the glories and honors that belong to the kingship; but you shall appoint me your perpetual minister and executive, and give me for my services one per cent of such actual increase of revenue over and above its present amount as I may succeed in creating for the state. If I can’t live on that, I sha’n’t ask anybody to give me a lift. Is it satisfactory?”
‘There was a prodigious roar of applause, and out of the midst of it the king’s voice rose, saying:’
“Away with his bonds, and set him free! and do him homage, high and low, rich and poor, for he is become the king’s right hand, is clothed with power and authority, and his seat is upon the highest step of the throne! Now sweep away this creeping night, and bring the light and cheer again, that all the world may bless thee.”
If the next big event doesn’t eclipse its predecessor, it’s a bust.
In Percival Everett’s “James,” we read Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” overdubbed with newly invented first person narration by Twain’s character Jim, who becomes the protagonist, changing his name to James – “Just James,” he introduces himself at the end, when asked what his last name is. Or maybe, in Everett’s telling, James is his last name, and his first name is Just.
Huck becomes a secondary main character, a deuteragonist. “James” is not the first book to take a foil character from another book and reverse foils. Mark Twain did it himself when Huck, who first appears in “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” becomes the narrator of his own story. The full title of Huck’s work is “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer’s Comrade).”
The antagonist remains the same as in the Mark Twain book James comes from: slavery in the US mid 19th Century – or more specifically, slave traders or sellers, owners, and others benefiting or attempting to leverage for some advantage from the arrangement. In one of many ironic ideas in “James,” James and his friend Norman come up with a plan: sell James, James escapes, sell James again, repeat again and again as they move north – the idea first suggested to James by the Duke of Duke and Dauphin infame, here presented as far more evil than in Twain. They are brought nearby, and the slapstick is not funny. The early chapters of Everett’s book more closely follow Twain’s narrative than the later chapters, where we find new adventures of James and his reflections on what’s happening to him, why, and what can he possibly do about it as the book spirals into fantastical end chase scenes.
But Everett might have left James without a surname to underscore the existential adventure James embarks upon when he decides to leave his wife and child when he hears of his owner’s intent to sell him downriver; if sold he fears he’ll be separated from his family never to see his wife or child again. But to be without a surname is to be free from predispositions, assumptions, or any kind of argument about who you are or might be, where you come from or where you might be going. Language is a primary theme of “James,” as is writing and reading, and to give names to people, places, things, is to establish their reality, particularly if named via writing:
“My name is James. I wish I could tell my story with a sense of history as much as industry. I was sold when I was born and then sold again. My mother’s mother was from someplace on the continent of Africa, I had been told or perhaps simply assumed. I cannot claim to any knowledge of that world or those people, whether my people were kings or beggars. I admire those who, at five years of age, like Venture Smith, can remember the clans of their ancestors, their names and the movements of their families through the wrinkles, trenches and chasms of the slave trade. I can tell you that I am a man who is cognizant of his world, a man who has a family, who loves a family, who has been torn from his family, a man who can read and write, a man who will not let his story be self-related, but self-written.
With my pencil, I wrote myself into being. I wrote myself to here.”
Percival Everett, “James,” Doubleday, 2024, p. 93 (italics in original).
What does James mean by “self-related,” and what does it mean to be “self-written“? And how do the two terms differ? He doesn’t mention self-published, or any kind of publishing, and how he might have to rewrite, edit, embellish his story to get it published. But he seems to feel it is published as soon as he writes it down. Self-written. “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” begins differently. We’re six paragraphs in before we learn Huck’s name, which we get indirectly, from the Widow Douglas. Huck begins by telling us we don’t know about him unless we’ve read “Tom Sawyer,” which contains some lies, Huck says, which doesn’t matter, everyone lies, he says. James presumably will not lie, not to his reader.
To be a writer is to make choices, to string together those choices. The above quote, from page 93 of “James,” is a rewrite of an earlier draft:
Then I wrote my first words. I wanted to be certain that they were mine and not some I had read from a book in the judge’s library. I wrote:
“I am called Jim. I have yet to choose a name. In the religious preachings of my white captors I am a victim of the Curse of Ham. The white so-called masters cannot embrace their cruelty and greed, but must look to that lying Dominican friar for religious justification. But I will not let this condition define me. I will not let myself, my mind, drown in fear and outrage. I will be outraged as a matter of course. But my interest is in how these marks that I am scratching on this page can mean anything at all. If they have meaning, then life can have meaning, then I can have meaning.”
p. 55.
Huck is not much given to such reflections in his book. That’s not why he writes. Maybe he’s too young yet. Why does he write? He simply jumps in and rambles on, telling of things as they happen, his eye for detail and ear for dialog both as acute as an owl’s. He doesn’t recognize or reveal his indebtedness to his creator, but he does mention him:
“That book [Tom Sawyer] was made by Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly.”
Huck has no need to lie to his reader. He’s enough to relate without lying.
James’s use of the term self-related could be a reference to the autobiography of Venture Smith, mentioned above in the quote from “James” page 93. Smith’s self-account begins as follows:
“The following account of the life of VENTURE, is a relation of simple facts, in which nothing is in substance to what he relates himself. Many other interesting and curious passages of his life might have been inserted, but on account of the bulk to which they must necessarily have swelled this narrative, they were omitted. If any should suspect the truth of what is here related, they are referred to people now living who are acquainted with most of the facts mentioned in this narrative.
The reader is here presented with an account, not of a renowned politician or warrior, but of an untutored African slave, brought into this Christian country at eight years of age, wholly destitute of all education but what he received in common with other domesticated animals, enjoying no advantages that could lead him to suppose himself superior to the beasts, his fellow servants. And if he shall enjoy no other advantage from perusing this narrative, he may experience those sensations of shame and indignation, that will prove him to be not wholly destitute of every noble and generous feeling.
The subject of the following pages, had he received only a common education, might have been a man of high respectability and usefulness; and had his education been suited to his genius, he might have been an ornament and an honor to human nature. It may perhaps, not be unpleasing to see the efforts of a great mind wholly uncultivated, enfeebled and depressed by slavery, and struggling under every disadvantage. The reader may here see a Franklin and a Washington, in a state of nature, or rather, in a state of slavery. Destitute as he is of all education, he still exhibits striking traces of native ingenuity and good sense.
This narrative exhibits a pattern of honesty, prudence, and industry, to people of his own colour; and perhaps some white people would not find themselves degraded by imitating such an example.
The following account is published in compliance with the earnest desire of the subject of it, and likewise a number of respectable persons who are acquainted with him.”
The Project Gutenberg eBook, A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, a Native of Africa, But Resident above Sixty Years in the United States of America, Related by Himself, by Venture Smith.
That is not like the book Percival Everett is helping James to write. In any case, self-related might also refer to concepts or ideas of the self discussed by Kierkegaard. Percival Everett gives his reader homework assignments. James in dream reveries has discussions with Voltaire and Locke. Does the common reader simply gloss over these references? Google them? Do they provide argument for James’s own conclusions and rebuttals regarding economics, ethics, slavery? Are they meant to explain the behavior of Judge Thatcher, who presumably has read these same writers (James gets the books from the judge’s library)?
“Kierkegaard does not think of the human self predominantly as a kind of metaphysical substance, but rather more like an achievement, a goal to strive for. To be sure, humans are substances of a sort; they exist in the world, as do physical objects. However, what is distinctive about human selves is that the self must become what it is to become, human selves playing an active role in the process by which they come to define themselves.”
Language is the great theme of Percival Everett’s book. It’s about writing, what to write about and how. It’s about how people talk, often adopting or adapting a style they might think is suitable to their audience – or what they think their audience might want to hear. Language is marketing. Even when talking to ourselves, we might often feel like we’re selling something, or being sold something. The rhetorical flourishes in “James” both stir the emotions and logically persuade; and who can argue with James’s first hand ethos reliable and credible experience? James is a statement, a claim, to which there can be no rebuttal. His backing is impervious. Percival seems to want to write (as James does) something of both human affairs (history) and economic activity (industry). When James kidnaps Judge Thatcher, the judge asks James three times over the course of several pages, “Why are you talking like that?” – referencing James speaking out of the expected slave-speak language and instead using the judge’s own language. The judge can’t get over it, can’t understand, is utterly confused by James’s ability to speak out of (what the judge believes to be) character. James’s rhetorical skills mean, for one thing, the judge’s view of James has been and remains wrong. The foundation of his excuse for slavery is undermined, and he caves in on himself, though he keeps acting like a judge. In terms of the dual language scenario Everett has created, the judge might just as well be suddenly talking to an alien. He is talking to an alien.
While language is the great theme of “James,” the pencil is the great symbol. James at one point thinks he’ll adopt the last name of FABER, it being stamped on the stub he’s using:
“I studied the small stick that had cost so much. I had no way of knowing whether Young George’s beating had stopped short of his death. I knew I owed it to him to write something important. The pencil lead was soft and made a dark mark. I resolved to use it with a light touch to have it last as long as possible. Stamped on it was the name FABER. Perhaps that would be my last name. James Faber. That didn’t sound too bad.”
p. 102.
Did Percival Everett consider putting the name THOREAU on the pencil, after Henry David Thoreau’s father’s pencil making company, where Henry worked a good part of his life? The pencil appears again and again during James’s journey, almost always at a cost incommensurate with its size and weight and feel. If symbol, what does the pencil stand for? If you’re going to write, as James wants to, you need an implement, and paper, which James also acquires though not quite at the same cost as the pencil. The pencil is a tool. We would probably discard without thinking twice a pencil already whittled down to the stub size of the one James holds on to almost to the end. The feel of the pencil in his pocket gives him comfort, he says. Later, he notes the pencil has “survived.” Others have not.
But note how quickly James seems to move from the sacrifice of Young George for the pencil to thinking some more about choosing his name. James has the ego of a writer. Huck had a story to tell, but he had no aspirations of becoming a writer. Ironically, Huck has no use for books, in Twain or in Everett. Can books make you good? Is reading sublime? Is James a good man or a good character or both or neither, or does that matter? He wants out of his birth predicament. What he wants is not arcane: he wants to live in peace and independence and freedom with his family. Notably not included in Everett’s version is the scene in “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” where Jim scolds his daughter for leaving a door open, asks her to close it, and when she ignores him, he hits her, only to discover she can’t hear. She didn’t hear him telling her to close the door. Twain’s Jim feels the remorse of pathos, and we feel it too as he recalls the event to Huck. Would a similar scene, if included in “James,” come before or after the “Papa, Papa, Papa,” that comes at the end of Everett’s chase? Writers make choices because they have choices. That’s the reason James wants to become a writer. Slavery can’t prevent James from writing.
“James” is full of sarcasm, wit, irony, satire – but it’s not humor as Twain wrote humor. For example, at the end of “James,” Graham, the evil owner of a slave breeding plantation, upon being rousted out of his house to find his cornfield ablaze and his slaves in revolt and escaping, his overseer dead on the ground, James’s gun in his face, says, “What in tarnation?” Really? Tarnation? Isn’t that a clown’s word, an alteration, euphemism, for damnation? Is tarnation what Graham would have said? But it was a word used circa 1850’s, as indicated by Google’s Ngram analysis:
Use over time for: tarnation
And, note, tarnation is making a resurgence.
Or does Percival have Graham say tarnation to mock him before James shoots and kills him? Is its use in “James” intended as humor? Graham has no idea, as Judge Thatcher did not, not clue one, of what’s happening. Tarnation, indeed.
I stepped in front of him. “Who the hell are you?” I pointed my pistol at him. “I am the angel of death, come to offer sweet justice in the night,” I said. “I am a sign. I am your future. I am James.” I pulled back the hammer on my pistol. “What in tarnation?” He cocked his weapon.
p. 302.
Maybe it’s farce? A pun? It’s a mixture. Depends on how you hear it, not necessarily on how it’s said – not necessarily the same as how it’s said. But James (the word, Biblical) means supplanter. While James professes no interest in the God of his oppressors, he clearly knows the Bible.
“Those things that have the name poetry, do you understand me?”
Some there are can’t stomach poetry – unpalatable the pretentious sugar and fat out of which poetry is whipped. But when we use the word poetry, what are we talking about? If we say we like music, what kind of music – polka, hip hop, electronica, diva pop? We might like some forms of music, dislike others, but rarely do we hear someone spout, “I disrelish music!” Why such animosity when it comes to poetry? Maybe the various forms of poetry are not as obvious to the common reader as the forms of music. Some music we enjoy, if not most, but do we get any kind of amusement, let alone rapture, from poetry? Hearing poetry, the curling monotones, the false mouthed sounds, is like eating raw oysters or anchovies, moldy cheese, mushrooms. But we might say we dislike opera, though we’ve never attended a live opera, while we’ve been unwittingly moved dozens of times by operatic scores in films; and our overstated displeasure with opera does not inhibit us from saying we love music. Opera, it might be argued, by the way, might be the most pretentious form of music, and financially, like poetry, has great difficulty digesting its own costs. But anyone can scribble a poem on the ubiquitous napkin; it takes a pro to echo “Mi Chiamano Mimi” without disturbing a neighbor’s evening meal. We might even try our hand at a few poems, but only to poke mullock, feeling pretentious otherwise, but to accuse one of pretension is a kind of conservatism, a keeping to class boundaries. All should feel free to whip up their own cupcake.
“Alone in a little white room, I see rooftops and sky.”
Others love poetry, but not all poetry, and in deference to the pros write very few poems. Poems must be full of light and air, like angel food cake. Here the word poetry refers to a small corner cafe with only four tables within and outside one table under an umbrella hung over the sidewalk. The sidewalk ends in a barrier curb of cement chipped from the days when horse drawn milk and ice carts with steel rim wheels rounded too close, and a rusted ball topped bollard sits on the corner – the skaters use it as a roundabout. Above the cafe, seven floors of once cold water walk-up bedsits, now each floor converted to a single luxury apartment. From the penthouse views of the river over rooftops, the sun through the morning bedroom balcony, the sun through the evening dining room floor to ceiling windows, the sun over the private patio roof. The penthouse throughout the day fills with enough light to power a casino, but there are no neighbors, the appendage sloping up and away into the awe-inspiring sky. But poems are born on the sidewalk, the margins of the city, and hardly any wind up in the sumptuous collection on the penthouse coffee table, but maybe that is simply a reflection of so much that has of course been lost and continues to disappear, like the neighbor who came unexpectedly to bother you for a cup of flour and stayed for a small glass of creme de menthe.
“That gentle perfume of a flower!”
Still others are indifferent to poetry. It remains a mystery, yet it’s used in so many places: the names of cars, greeting cards, commercials and advertisements, songs of all kinds. But naming cars is a silly practice, greeting cards are cloying, and many listeners prefer instrumentals. And you might think twice about what flowers you grow if you happen to be allergic to bee stings. And people don’t like to be fooled or to be made fools of, the province of much poetry, since the poet often has something to say that can only be said indirectly. Still, artificial flowers are nice, and can even be made to waft odor with a spray of floral scent. Flowers appear in spring, often in the most unlikely places – gutters, vacant lots, desert blooms; poems appear in spring too, in similar places – napkins, ice box notes, Easter egg wraps. According to a 2023 report by the National Endowment for the Arts, “Nearly 12 percent of U.S. adults read poetry or listened to it via media.” Doesn’t sound like many, but that’s roughly 30 million people reading poetry. I don’t know many of them. And it sounds like participation is on the decline:
“For starters, 18-to-24-year-olds, who, in 2017, exhibited the highest rate of poetry-reading of all age groups, lost half their share of the readership in 2022. That year, 9.0 percent read poetry, compared with 17.5 percent five years earlier….The other age group that experienced a major decline in poetry-reading, from 2017 to 2022, consisted of the nation’s oldest adults. The reading rate of those 75 years of age and older was 11.0 percent in 2017, and 7.1 percent in 2022.”
“Alone, I eat. I miss mass, but I pray. Alone in my little white bedroom.”
Poetry offers community but also forms into cliques, coteries, cultish fads, but also for the lonely may remedy the lack of company. Secular poetry has offered some a substitute for missed religious passion, while the Bible is full of poetry, the Psalms, for example. Yet poetry can lead us astray. It is part of the tree, but it is not the tree. A nest built in the tree. We fall from the nest, and in our experience or reflection or just old age come to reject poetry, and the nest is empty, but we are free.
They might be called Smart TVs for their clever capability to befuddle the old fashioned viewer. Long ago and far away are the days you walked up to the television set, turned a knob to On, turned the other knob to Channel 2, 4, 6, or 10, TV Guide in hand, reached over the set to fidget a bit with the rabbit ears antennae, and slid back to the couch to watch a recorded picture version of what your parents when young had listened to on live radio.
Television has grown, if not matured; still, we haven’t quite reached the television walls Ray Bradbury predicted in “Fahrenheit 451,” where the entire wall is a television, and keeping up with the Joneses means adding additional TV walls until your room is entirely enclosed in TV, the effect being that you are part of the television show you are watching. But the new virtual reality headsets are probably skipping over Bradbury’s wall sets.
One advantage of old television was that at the end of the broadcast day, TV rested – it went off, off the air. A sign off screen appeared. The station transmitters shut down, the Star-Spangled Banner played (absurdly, no game following), then a test pattern with a shrill hum signal, a high E organ note. Nothing more to watch. Midnight. You either went to bed or read a book. Or went out walking, nothing on television.
Not that it matters what’s on television. Whether you’re watching “Masterpiece Theatre” or “All in the Family,” the “Red Skelton Show” or the “Andy Griffith Show,” “The Colgate Comedy Hour” or “Arthur Godfrey and His Friends,” you have to fill in the dots. Television is a DIY proposition.
“The structural qualities of the print and woodcut obtain, also, in the cartoon, all of which share a participational and do-it-yourself character that pervades a wide variety of media experiences today. The print is clue to the comic cartoon, just as the cartoon is clue to understanding the TV image.”
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964, p. 151, Signet Mentor
A British literary lad I know sent me a poem purportedly written by an artificial intelligence machine. He (the lad) asked the AI to “write a short poem in the style of Joe Linker.” The AI response contains a significant change to that writing prompt: “Certainly! Here’s a short poem inspired by the style of Joe Linker.” Stop the presses: “in the style” and “inspired by the style” are not the same prompt.
In any case, as these things go, I say purportedly to have been written by AI because for all I know the Brit lit lad wrote it himself. But whoever wrote it, the poem is a masterful piece of literary criticism in action. It appears to have been composed by MS Copilot, which, according to Wiki, “is a chatbot developed by Microsoft and launched on February 7, 2023. Based on a large language model, it is able to cite sources, create poems, and write songs.” Whoopee!
Before I reveal the poem, I’ll share a few responsive or reactive notes, which I sent to my Brit copilot this morning (before coffee): I find the poem encouraging for its critical honesty, because if true, what it says is that I should give up writing poetry – it’s the best criticism ever. But is it true? The dawn is not quiet. Those cars don’t hum, they snort and scream, honk and squeal. Pigs to market. No, wait – that’s my tinnitus acting up again. And the veins are pockmarked with potholes (but veins as metaphor for streets? I would never). There are however three w’s in the first stanza. The World Wide Web. No escape. The sun doesn’t peek in Portland. It either remains hidden or flouts itself in the raw. The third stanza might be me. I often find myself waltzing in the wind. Beats blowing in the wind. Ah, but I am too in search of the grand metaphor! Especially if it’s a baby grand! But whenever the universe comes up, I’m reminded of Annie Hall, where Alvy’s mom tells him: “What’s the universe got to do with it? You’re here, in Brooklyn!”
Anyway, here’s the artificial intelligence poem supposedly written in (inspired by) my style. I might add I rarely write poetry in the first person, and when I do, I usually try to persuade the reader the narrator is not to be confused with the author. I’ve made that argument till I’m blue in the gills, but I know readers who continue to disregard the advice. Finally, so that there’s no misunderstanding, this AI poem is very poorly written. It’s trite, self-centered (narcissistic), abstract with almost no reference to any of the five senses which might have brought it to life, cliched – words like stardust, pondering existence, fragility – have no place in poetry. Ah, gads! Maybe it is in my style!
We spend a fair time waiting, waiting for this, for that, for them and those to come and go, to start and end, to rise and fall, full and eclipse. And for Spring to spring, our world coiled like hair in plastic curlers held in place with bobby pins (see F. Scott Fitzgerald’s, “Bernice Bobs Her Hair”).
We don’t wait in Winter, when we freeze in place and live in the cold moment (waiting is Samuel Beckett’s dry theme), but as the great slow thaws finally come we start to wait for a stronger sun and almost believe again in Spring and Spring does come slowly over the horizon and up the sky climbing a ladder of weathered trellises where last year’s climbing vines still cling frozen in place.
We anticipate Spring with its cartoon-like colors unfolding:
The gravity of social media at times it seems profoundly influences our every move. By gravity I mean that mutual attraction force that pulls us under and down, down rabbit holes, sink holes, the vortex created by following. By social media I mean to refer here to the sites that are for the most part vertically inclined, up and down, the newest appearing at the top, the oldest nudged down to an endless bottom where they are forgotten relics or remaindered in the fossil record. These social media sites are not formatted as mosaics, like newspapers, but like scrolls – though scrolls, even the most ancient, were often formatted horizontally as well as vertically. And the newspaper could be taken apart and shared: “Who has the funnies?” By profoundly I mean the unlimited hours an addiction to social media at any site soaks up the dark energy of our otherwise beachcombing days.
There are the followers and the following, not always the same, and often as not unknown to one another. How many and how often seen or read? And there’s the rub. I’ve been working on a formula. What number of followers or following beyond which to say one is actually following in any meaningful sense of seeing and responding to even if only to think about without comment or response – beyond which any significant number of posts, tweets, pics, etc., is no longer possible?
In other words, for example, the Instagramer I might follow who posts daily several pics multiplied by 100 other Instagramers I also follow equals hours of staring at Instagram until I can no longer honestly say I’m following all the number of individuals my account accounts for. Something like that. I could say, attending a live football game in the huge arena where sit 80,000 fans, that I’m following them all. Likewise, the social media follower who says they are following me back but who also follows say 5,000 others can’t possibly be paying much attention to me. Thus Instagram, recognizing we’ve a problem here, initiates a feature like close friends. Close friends, good neighbors, faithful followers, on the same team, family (though of course this latter often may come fraught with unfollowing in biblical proportions).
What has all this to do with “The Best of the Toads”? Just this: Here too the posts have been falling, a long way down, since my first post in December of 2007, and at least monthly since. There are now 1,463 posts. Where did they all go? And which ones might a reader most enjoy, find interesting, not to mention well written? The latest post is not necessarily the best.
So, I’ve made a Best of the Toads page, that visitors to the blog might be able at a glance to view the most successful posts since the beginning of the blog in 2007, successful as defined by number of views, but also including some posts that are my favorites no matter the number of views. You can view the new page here, or click on it in the blog menu. Happy falling!
Rarely if ever does my élan vital express itself in such a way that I’m spirited to imagine a life writing away from the blog and appearing in other rags mags zines or dreams. So I’m not sure what had come over me when a short time ago I submitted alas unsolicited a piece intended as humor if not hilarity but certainly on the droll side of the street to not one but two unsuspecting webzines. It was the same pitch but each written from a different angle etched or drawn to what I felt might be the proper editorial lilt of the zines in question. After a few days my vital on the wane I withdrew one and a short time after that the other was returned declined. Not to go too deep into these waters, but I then decided to post the piece or pieces here at the Toads, such was my confidence in my own funny business. But it’s hard to be funny when you are thinking about it, and which piece would I post? One view was a bit more sarcastic, not very helpful, and not in keeping with the gentle persuasion usually practiced here at the Toads. The other was perhaps a bit too light, like leaves falling but not from a wind.
Anyway, I then posted the piece on my own blog, here at the Toads, and then withdrew it myself, a self declining procedure. And then Susan asked why did she get two emails with the same title and both unable to read. What tangled webs we weave when weaving loose and goose via the web. I figured out my mistake. The first piece I had started back on March 8, and it sat in my unpublished (and unpolished) bin where I let it stew awaiting a reply from the zines I’d submitted to. When I did pull it out from the in progress bin and let it fly to the blog yesterday, March 16, it posted with its start date of March 8, thus confounding. Interesting. In any case, here it is yet again a third time a charm, but with a few additives, the two different voices brought into one. Is it funny? Well, what’s funny?
The Expressionist Poem
You can’t even draw a cartoon sketch using stick figures – how are you going to make an oil painting? But you love color, and vivid, oily, oozing wet paints. You squeeze a tube of pea green onto a cream white canvas and using a squeegee smear the paint into the coarse warp and weft, dripping drops of black, yellow, and white paint as you go. Composing an expressionist poem is like the paint scenario above, but you use words instead of paints. No one will notice the difference, but some will complain they don’t understand, to which you might reply, what’s to understand about hue?
The Political Poem
You want peace, and you’re willing to fight for it. Your poem is a protest sign, a bumper sticker, a lawn sign, graffiti on a post, a bill on a telephone pole. You don’t count syllables and you don’t take no for an answer. You submit and resubmit relentlessly. You are not patient – you are stubborn. Then some nasty neighbor you think is the enemy lends you a gratuitous hand. Senseless. Unjustified. Nevertheless, you try to thank them, but they turn the other cheek. The pecuniary poem is often disguised as a political poem, or mistaken for one. The question is not, who will have the money, but who will have the poetry, but the answer is the same. Two examples of political poetry can be found 100 years apart, the first in Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” and his other writings, the next in Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and his other writings. Whitman and Ginsberg remain the best examples of political poetry and also provide the template for the line that works best for the sub-genre.
The Funny Poem
From the rear of the classroom you heckled a joke at the teacher and the other students laughed. You thought it might be fun to be a stand up comedian, but when you get in front of an audience you break out in hives. But the funny poem doesn’t just tell a joke. It is witty and wise and takes a long time to master. It is the poem of the mime. Sarcasm is not necessarily satire. The master of satire is still Jonathan Swift, whose essay “A Modest Proposal” could have been written yesterday in as much as it’s still about today.
The Anti-Poem
You abhor poetry, it’s a hateful thing, and you attempt to infiltrate its postmodern ranks with rants and fury, rhyme and sense, rhythm and music. Your hate is epic, but your talent is nought. You find a job pumping gas. You come to realize the anti-poem has become de rigueur in the house of living poets. To write an anti-poem today, you must reinvent the wheel of poetry. You will begin a new trend, the anti-anti-poem. You consider changing your name to Gilgamesh when some lady riding a Pinto pulls in and wants her windows washed. You join the Big Quit, walk away from the filling station, as you realize too that poetry is a wheel without an axle. If you find yourself feeling anti, or anti-anti, or however many antis make a day, remember these words from the Preacher: “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.”
The Moody Poem
Apropos of absolutely nothing, three pieces of rusty apple, a chunk of Garrotxa goat cheese, and a half-full bottle of Vouvray in your knapsack, three college degrees framed and hanging on your office walls (office hours M-W-F, 1 to 2), and a long list of successful publications (albeit in paywalled journals not well read by even your peers), leaving a reading, a blue mood like gauze cheesecloth falls over your fizzog, and you escape to a local pub where you start your first modish moody poem, about a feeling of loss in the midst of plenty, which turns into a four pint memoir. The master of the moody poem might be Leonard Cohen. Surprisingly though many of his songs are not in minor keys. Nor did he as far as I know keep office hours, publish in obscure journals, or what have you.
Poem Standard
The poem standard usually is about a lovelorn topic: a waning moon, a laundromat at 3 in the morning, a simple puppy love jilt, dubiety, trains, solitude, leaving home, returning home – but everyone’s moved away. Cars, surf, homesickness are all permissible topics. Keep it short and sweet, or bittersweet, but avoid sounding angry. The poem standard is bi-partisan. To get inspired, think slow dance wearing socks on the gym floor while a live band plays “Louie Louie” at a time when there was no such thing as a crappy instrument.
The Theoretical Poem
The theoretical poem is never actually composed, only discussed.
The Mother’s Day Poem
The Mother’s Day Poem is not theoretical. You should write one every day, even if it’s never discussed.
once again we sing this silly song of time as if God’s clock rings wrong twice a year but round ’twas when took aback last fall against the strong headwind westward ho we all fell for it but now (& leap to it too) spring daff & doff ahead toward summer & round we’ll be come fall harvest fat fed oblong & elongated from all these pushes & pulls springs & falls leapings & bounds round & round we go egads & for all that why not take some few years off & fall all the way back to say 1964 & Beatlemania! but no not a second time not one second time around you’ve danced your chance.
The Coming of the Toads 