The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

  • Susan Sontag and a Valentine for Flannery O’Connor

    Flannery O’Connor’s stories stir a natural absurd mix of violence and comedy. Characters argue and alienate themselves from one another. They have difficulty communicating, and they torment one another. Yet, throughout the stories, we find humor – comedy in situation, language, and setting. What better day to read a Flannery story than Valentine Day?

    In O’Connor’s short story “Parker’s Back,” Parker, having experienced the epiphany at the scene of the tractor crash, drives straight to the tattoo parlor, where he’s a frequent visitor, yet the tattooist at first doesn’t recognize Parker, and there’s humor in their brief exchange, Parker calling out that surely the tattooist must know him. “You must have been in jail” the tattooist says. “Married,” Parker answers.

    That “The world of the absurd delighted her” (Sally Fitzgerald) is clear in any reading of Flannery’s stories. Albert Camus also delighted in the absurd. But it’s Susan Sontag who best illuminates “Parker’s Back.” Borrowing Sontag’s terms, from her essay on Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death, Parker is body, and Sarah, his wife – well, is not body, but what is she?

    Sarah dislikes color, and color, for Flannery, is sacramental raiment; her stories create a collage of peacock feathers. “Christian asceticism,” O. Brown writes, “can carry punishment of the fallen body to heights inconceivable to Plato, but Christian hope is for the redemption of that fallen body.” Sarah, who is “saved,” rejects Parker’s vestmented body. “…by putting his ideas in the framework of Christian eschatology,” Sontag tells us, “…Brown’s analysis, by allying itself with some of the submerged promises of Christian eschatology, opens up the possibility of a psychoanalytic theory of history which does not simply reduce cultural history to the psychology of individuals.”

    Of course, Sontag also gave us this – from “Against Interpretation”: “…interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities. In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art…it is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world – in order to set up a shadow world of ‘meanings.’” Happy Valentine Day, Flannery.

  • Albert Camus on the Economic Collapse

    RefugioAn old friend from our South Santa Monica Bay days writes, “Did I hear that right? 5 day forecast for around here is in the upper 80’s.  Visibility for miles.  Air quality is wonderful. But, this is January.”

    In the mornings we went surfing, and in the afternoons we played whiffle ball in the yard or in the street. Maybe we walked to the five and dime for a pack of baseball cards, but if there were no good cards in the pack there was still the bubblegum, the smell like a perfume. Summers we camped on the beach at Refugio and for days wore nothing but our swim-trunks. 

    Camus Lyrical and Critical EssaysWe are reminded again of Camus’s “The Sea Close By”: “I grew up with the sea and poverty for me was sumptuous; then I lost the sea and found all luxuries gray and poverty unbearable” (p. 172). And this, from “Return to Tipasa”: “In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer” (p. 169).

    Camus, Albert. (1970). Lyrical and critical essays. Vintage Books: New York.

  • E. B. White and the plumber

    By the Nose

    In December of 1930, E. B. White wrote a piece for the New Yorker about the garbageman. “They have the town by the tail and they know it,” White concluded, after a brief study of the can collector’s habits. We like to watch the trashman too, the descendants of White’s subjects, wrestling now with new regulations, recycling, knowledge of toxic waste, but still masters of noise and dust, their barking trucks heard for blocks, avalanches of glass announcing last call for trash. But while today’s garbageman may still have the city by the tail, surely it’s the plumber has it by the nose.

    My father was a plumber, and asked us to join him in the trade; shucks, I wanted to continue school. But I worked with him summers and accompanied him on enough evening calls to achieve a kind of apprentice status. A neighbor would knock, a friend would call, a parishioner, a friend of a friend – a brief diagnosis on the phone and I was told which tools to grab from the garage and we were off, a doctor making a house call. Dad almost never accepted money for these evening jobs. He would accept a beer, sit, and talk.

    No job was too awful, foul, or hard. With his bare hands he swept away monstrous crawl space spiders, reached into cold plugged up toilet bowls, chiseled oakum into cast iron joints – which I sometimes got to pour the molten lead into with the long handled ladle from the boiling pot. Our antagonists were usually stripped threads, worn washers, busted pipes, and all manner of backened slop. Dad did not relish repair work; by day he was a new construction plumber, working with new parts, not used. What he did relish was the opportunity to get out of the house and talk to people. He was the James Joyce of the plumbing trade. He could talk to anyone, for he had them, and he knew it, by the nose.

    Time passing and enter George, the veteran plumber we now call when wet to the knees and elbows but I still can’t fix it. We called George recently to help us with a pipe cracked during the big freeze and snows. After the job we sat with George in the living room; he did most of the talking, and we listened. Before the pipe broke, I had been reading E. B. White, but after George left, I let E. B. sit, and I paused to think of my father, the plumber, and my decision to continue school.

  • A word of one’s own

    Comfortably ensconced in our reading lair, hidden behind the arras of the Dec. 8 New Yorker, perusing the cartoons, time passing easily, and find our Eric has been at work on his French, annotating the Mankoff cartoon caption “A la Recherche des Cheveux Perdus” (p. 68) with the translation “Remember Hair Lost.”

    What is past is lost, but still we recall – writing is a lure; reading, a way of walking.

    Menand, Jan. 5: “Feiffer’s strips are about borrowed ways of talking, about the lack of fit between people and words, about the way that clichés take over” (p. 43).

    Blake: “No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings” (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “Proverbs of Hell”).

    Nabokov: “…minor readers like to recognize their own ideas in a pleasing disguise” (Lectures on Literature, “Good Writers and Good Readers,” p. 2).

    In Nabokov’s teaching copies, his annotations include his own translations; in his copy of  “The Metamorphosis,” for example, he substitutes the Muirs’s “uneasy dreams” with “a troubled dream,” and “a gigantic insect” with “a monstrous insect” (p. 250). Monstrous means marvelous and strange, and Nabokov starts his students off with a different view of Gregor, beginning with Kafka’s first sentence.

    Woody Allen: “Honey, there’s a spider in your bathroom the size of a Buick” (Annie Hall).

    For Nabokov, reading meant rereading in excruciating detail, never straying from the text, bringing to exact light and color the watermarks of the text, like working a coloring book.

    As for the uneasy, or troubled, dreams, Kafka reveals in the second paragraph that “It was no dream.”

    But one’s own words? Where does one find them? Sometimes a word of one’s own seems no more possible than a room of one’s own. For some answers, we might turn again to E. B. White’s Elements of Style, where we are warned to “Write in a way that comes naturally”; “Avoid fancy words”; and “Avoid foreign languages” (Chapter V).

    As for using words of one’s own to find lost time, Nabokov says: “…to recreate the past something other than the operation of memory must happen: there must be a combination of a present sensation (especially taste, smell, touch, sound) with a recollection, a remembrance, of the sensuous past” (p. 249). It took Proust 1.5 million words to illustrate that we are “…not free…to choose memories from the past for scrutiny” (Nabokov, p. 248).

  • Walt Whitman and a Letter of Ourself

    letter-of-11-dec-19691

    Thirty-nine years ago this month, I sat on a bunk in a barracks in Fort Bliss, Texas, writing letters. This week, one came back. I wrote dozens of letters during my stay at Fort Bliss; alas, all are lost – to time’s sometimes worrisome and weary but always wealthy passing and tossing. But no, wait, here’s one returned, to tell a tale.

    The letter came wrapped in a Christmas card sent by my oldest niece, whose mother, my oldest sister, passed away a few years ago. “I’m going through boxes of pictures, albums and letters & cards of my parents,” my niece wrote, “and thought it would be fun to return to the sender.”

    Today’s Fort Bliss soldiers are no doubt writing emails home. The Internet intoxicates, and perhaps the future return of an email forty years old will be as remarkable as the forgotten letter is now. But later today I’ll walk down to the Bipartisan Café and sit at a window and write some letters, on paper, with pen and ink.

    Walt Whitman said, in “Song of Myself,”

    Houses and rooms are full of perfumes….the shelves are crowded with perfumes,

    I breathe the fragrance myself, and know it and like it,

    The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.

    It’s difficult to think of Whitman composing Leaves of Grass on his computer. We can save emails with a click, without much thought or sentiment, but saving letters requires something more, a deeper commitment, perhaps, a foreshadowing of snow and love, of blank beaches and empty waves.

  • Our 2008 Believer Book Award Choices

    believer-postcard-blankThe 2008 Believer Book Award Reader Survey postcard came this year in the Fifty-Eighth issue: “Aroma Prom,” an art issue (including a somewhat cantankerous interview with Frank Stella; an engaging interview with cartoonist Keith Knight; Weschler interesting on Hockney and Irwin; very much enjoyed the “This is Corporate America” article).

    Our postcard choices this year (following the postcard instructions to name “three works of fiction, each published in 2008, to be the finest of the year. By ‘finest’ I mean the most affecting and the best-written”) are as follows:

    The City and the Mountains by Eca de Queiros: A break from high tech city wealth of 1895 to the mountains of Portugal.

    On A Day Like This by Peter Stamm: A sense of self-impending doom that begins and ends in the enormity of the ordinary.

    A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz: The numerator is 530.

    sailboat-face

    We have this year again added a bit of drawing to the poor featureless face of the mid-60’s student on the cover of the postcard (this year, using acrylic paints, giving her a sailboat face).

  • Reading Roland Barthes’s Writing Degree Zero on Line 15

    What would Roland Barthes have said about the snippets of poetry published among the ad displays, public service announcements, and caution notes headlining the interior of local bus Line 15?

    The poetry placards please riders through a program called, somewhat fancifully, Poetry in Motion, though the poems move relative only to someone off the bus. For the rider/reader, the poems move at the same speed as everything else on the bus, with the exception of the rider just boarding, stumbling down the aisle in the opposite direction of the bus lurching forward. It’s a good idea to wait until seated before trying to read the poetry. In any case, why not call the poems, simply, “Bus Poems”?   

    But what’s remarkable is the number of riders and therefore potential readers of the poetry, “reaching an estimated 15 million daily [countrywide],” according to the Tri-Met site. Poetry never had it so good.

    Readers may be reminded of Johnny Tillotson’s 1961 hit song “Poetry in Motion.” The refrain of Tillotson’s song seems particularly apt to the riders on Line 15: “…For all the world to see.

    a-woe woe woe woe woe woe.” Find out more about Poetry in Motion at the Poetry Society, or at the Tri-Met site: Selections for 2007, or check out the British original Poems on the Underground, including Autumn/Winter 2008 selections, which celebrate the 1918 Armistice.

    A random search adds to the randomness of the entire enterprise with this from Charles Bukowski, the bard of beer, on poetry and motion– locomotively, as Bukowski is seen displaying his full critical license (not for the poetically squeamish). We’ve not seen any Bukowski poems on the bus – though there are times on the bus when we feel we are in his company.

    Which brings us back to Barthes, who found deconstructing poetry difficult, since the pieces already cover the floor in various stages of disassembly: “…what is attempted [in modern poetry] is to eliminate the intention to establish relationships and to produce instead an explosion of words…since…modern poetry…destroys the spontaneously functional nature of language, and leaves standing only its lexical basis” (p. 46). This sounds like a bus ride. “The Hunger of the Word, common to the whole of modern poetry, makes poetic speech terrible and inhuman. It initiates a discourse full of gaps and full of lights, filled with absences and over-nourishing signs, without foresight or stability of intention, and thereby so opposed to the social function of language…” (p. 48). “…modern poetry destroyed relationships in language and reduced discourse to words as static things” (p. 49). Maybe that’s why they decided to put some on the buses.

    The audience on the Line 15 bus shifts slightly at every stop, and every bus ride is already a poem in motion, riders hopping on, hopping off, each a word, or a line, some a full verse, the bus curtsying occasionally, its caution bell bleeping, as it leans down to pick up a rider unable to hop, poems and riders waiting patiently motionless, the big scurrilous bus a measure of notes transpiring.

    "On the Road," a Bus Poem by Ted Kooser on Line 15
    “On the Road,” a Bus Poem by Ted Kooser on Line 15

  • Gaston Bachelard’s book as shell

    In Gaston Bachelard’s the Poetics of Space, a philosophical study of the spaces we inhabit, open, and close, our houses, chests, nests, and more, in the chapter titled “Shells,” we find this quote from Gaston Puel:

    “This morning I shall tell the simple happiness of a man
    stretched out in the hollow of a boat.
    The oblong shell of a skiff has closed over him.
    He is sleeping. An almond. The boat, like a bed, espouses sleep.”

    But we are reminded of Hamlet’s “Oh, God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space were it not that I have bad dreams” (Act II, sc. ii).

    Reflecting on the “capacity of shells” to both protect and trap, Bachelard arrives at a “suitable moral” to the habits of the inhabitants of shells, found in da Vinci’s Notebooks: “Like the mouth that, in telling its secret, places itself at the mercy of an indiscreet listener.”

    Hamlet, in the space and bad dreams line, is talking to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, a pair of hermit crabs, old friends “sent for” by the king to sneak into and inhabit Hamlet’s shell, but it will not be easy to crack the nut of Hamlet’s loneliness.

  • Harold Bloom’s How to Read and Why

    Harold Bloom prefers his literature neat, and not served with a twist. Adverse to literary criticism that substitutes a doctrinaire reading for the actual text, Bloom’s approach to reading is summed up in his epigraph, from the Wallace Stevens poem “The House was Quiet and the World was Calm”: “The reader became the book; and summer night / Was like the conscious being of the book.” 

    Bloom’s book on reading consists of a short introduction, which sets the stage for the kind of reading he prefers, followed by sections devoted to short stories, poems, novels, plays, more novels, and an epilogue.

    Bloom’s favorite writers are Shakespeare and Samuel Johnson. But it’s Francis Bacon who provides the prose equivalent for Stevens’s poem: “Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider.”

    Bloom augments Bacon: “I urge you to find what truly comes near to you, that can be used for weighing and for considering. Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.”

    Bloom hopes to inspire an “authentic reader.” Yet, “It is not the function of reading to cheer us up, or to console us prematurely.” 

    “You are more than an ideology,” Bloom says.

    “Chekhov and Beckett were the kindest human beings,” Bloom says. Reading Bloom, here and elsewhere, one wants to add his name to the list of the kindest readers, writers, and teachers.

    Bloom, H. (2000). How to read and why. New York: Scribner.

  • Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life

    Maybe Higgins wanting to read aloud is explained by Annie Dillard’s claim that “The written word is weak” (p. 17). Yet for Dillard writing is a trade, like carpentry, or plumbing, hard work. The writer is a day laborer, digging a ditch, head down, not looking at anything, the ditch caving in, dirt falling back in with every shovelful pulled out. Dillard’s book is more lyrical than the books on writing by Higgins and Stegner, figurative, full of metaphorical explanations. But she affirms that writing is hard work. Here’s an example that illustrates how hard, in her figurative style: “Half naked, with your two bare hands, you hold and fight a sentence’s head while its tail tries to knock you over” (p. 75).

    “Writing is hard, even for authors who do it all the time,” Roger Angell tells us in the foreword to the fourth edition of The Elements of Style, the E. B. White classic. Stegner politely offered that writing is hard work; Higgins gave the sentiment a powerful place in his book. 

    And Annie Dillard agrees: “It takes years to write a book – between two and ten years” (p. 13). She points out a few exceptions, Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying: “…in six weeks; he claimed he knocked it off in his spare time from a twelve-hour-a-day job performing manual labor” (p. 13). We get the point; Faulkner embodied the idea of the exception. But like Higgins, Annie doesn’t want us paddling out short of wax, so she repeats and clarifies: “Writing a book, full time, takes between two and ten years…On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes he must throw them away” (p. 14).

    But hard how? “Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark” (p. 26). We see Annie in some of her writing hideaways, and while the locations look like vacation spots, she convinces us that writing is hard mainly because of the isolation, the solitude, the boring act of sitting. “I write this in the most recent of my many studies – a pine shed on Cape Cod. The pine lumber is unfinished inside the study…” an 8 by 10 shed, “Like a plane’s cockpit…” (p. 25). The plane motif introduced here foreshadows the last chapter, devoted to a stunt flying ace Annie met and went up with but who later crashes – and flying solo in a small plane performing tricks above the heads of an audience becomes an extended metaphor for writing. Then she’s in another cabin, this time on Haro Strait, in Puget Sound, where “The cabin was a single small room near the water” (p. 41). 

    In fact, “It should surprise no one that the life of the writer – such as it is – is colorless to the point of sensory deprivation. Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world” (p. 44). No doubt, yet it’s still somehow difficult to square this writing is hard, lonely work business with “During some of the long, empty months at work on the book, I was living in a one-room log cabin on an empty beach” (48). Add a little sun and a few waves and what’s the problem? Of course, we wouldn’t get much writing down.  

    Dillard knew “a joyful painter” who became a painter because “He said, ‘I liked the smell of the paint’” (p. 70). It’s apparently not as easy to like the smell of sentences, and this also makes writing hard work: “…I said I hated to write. I said I would rather do anything else” (p. 53). But, “It is no less difficult to write sentences in a recipe than sentences in Moby-Dick. So you might as well write Moby-Dick” (p. 71). 

    Dillard, A. (1989). The writing life. New York: Harper & Row. (111 pages)

  • George V. Higgins’s On Writing

    Unlike Stegner’s, Higgins’s On Writing is unexpected, full of convoluted sentences (the kind lawyers reputedly cast) and five dollar vocabulary. Higgins values readers, but they are a dime a dozen, and critics, penny each, and, as it turns out, editors are the true friends of Eddie Coyle.

    Higgins emphasizes repeatedly what he considers his most sage advice for writers: “…read good prose aloud” (p. 8), and, to stick the point in your gut, inserts samples of some of his favorite writers, in some cases entire stories, and asks you to read them aloud. So you get to read, interspersed throughout the chapters, the prose of Dickens, Hemingway, Gay Talese, William Manchester, Irwin Shaw, John O’Hara, James Thurber. Then Higgins explains how their writing works, from a street level viewpoint, and that’s the value in this book. 

    Not a bad idea, the inserts; takes the attention off of Higgins for a spell. Higgins opens his book calling Edmund Wilson, the august critic of most of the 20th Century (see his Twenties; Thirties; Forties; Fifties; and Sixties), a professional torturer (p. 1). Speaking of torture, try this Higgins sentence on for fit: “Conformably to that presumption, this manual includes numerous selections by writers whose work I consider exemplary” (p. 9).

    Like Stegner, and others, Higgins thinks “Writing is hard work” (p. 6). In part, perhaps, that’s because you may “Never tell your reader what your story is about” (p. 82).

    George V. Higgins’s On Writing is worth reading, for its prose personality, and for how he shows how writing works. 

    Higgins, G. V. (1990). On writing: Advice for those who write to publish (or would like to). New York: Henry Holt.