The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

  • Wallace Stegner’s On Teaching and Writing Fiction

    Picked up this Wallace Stegner book at a local used bookstore, and what a treat it turned out to be. For readers who value clarity and linear writing, humor amid serious topics, sound advice for writers, readers, and teachers, delivered with challenging claims in aphoristic style, Stegner’s your man. Published posthumously, this short book of 121 pages collects all of Stegner’s writings on writing, proportionately small compared to his total output, some pieces previously unpublished.

    So what’s he have to say?

    “It is a common misconception that an image invariably involves a figure of speech” (p. 19)…. “…comparison is a sort of judgment” (p. 20).

    “In spite of the exercise books and the negative approach of our schools, language stays alive; it is often more alive in the mouths of truck drivers than in the correct mouths of people who feel that there is a single proper or correct way to say everything” (p. 24).

    “…a playful way with language is always better than a solemn one” (p. 27).

    “The words that fit are the words to choose, and it does not matter whether they come to us from the Greeks or from a singing commercial” (p. 28).

    “Every book that anyone sets out on is a voyage of discovery that may discover nothing” (p. 34).

    “…good writing is an end in itself…” (p. 35).

    “…many people don’t know their own potential…some misread their potential…different kinds of writers display very different stigmata of gift” (p. 36).

    “Any life will provide the material for writing, if it is attended to…Any experience, looked at steadily, is likely to be strange enough for fiction or poetry” (p. 41).

    “Writers teach other writers how to see and hear” (p. 43).

    “It is fairly easy for teachers of writing to become ex-writers” (p. 51).

    “Fiction always moves toward one or another of its poles, toward drama at one end or philosophy at the other” (p. 76).

    “They [critics] tend to run in packs…we ought to have pluralist literature and pluralist literary criticism” (p. 88).

    “…reality is not fully reality until it has been fictionized” (p. 98).

    The little book closes with a short story illustrating Stegner’s values: “…I believe in fiction, not only in its do-ability but in its importance. For the writer, whose life is as often as not a mess, it can clean up a murky and littered mind as snails clean up a fish tank” (p. 97).

    Stegner, W. (2002). On teaching and writing fiction. New York: Penguin Books. Edited and with a foreword by Lynn Stegner.

  • Every day is moving day on the Internet streets

    In Love’s Body, Norman O. Brown places the origins and evolution of thought in and from the body. Everything outside the body, in the social world created by humans, is metaphor, the secondary term an externalization of the body. Brown resurrects the dead metaphors to illustrate his thesis, “The fall is into language” (p. 257). Brown worked on Love’s Body from 1958 to 1965, so there is no discussion of how the Internet might be changing our thinking.

    Gaston Bachelard, in his The Poetics of Space (1958), did for the house what Brown did for the body: “…the house is one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories and dreams of mankind” (p. 6). “A house constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability” (p. 17).

    Bachelard, writing in the late 1950’s, does not discuss the Internet, yet says, “In this activity of poetic spatiality that goes from deep intimacy to infinite extent, united in an identical expansion, one feels grandeur welling up. As Rilke said: ‘Through every human being, unique space, intimate space, opens up to the world…’” (p. 202).

    On the Internet streets, one is essentially homeless, houseless, curiously wired yet wireless, and every day is moving day.   

    Bachelard, G. (1969). The poetics of space. (Maria Jolas, Trans.). Boston: Beacon Press. Foreword by Etienne Gilson. First published in French under the title La poetiquie de l’espace, Presses Universitaires de France, 1958.

  • Strangers to the future

    When Nicholas Carr tries to walk a straight line in the web, he’s a different kind of stranger in a strange land. Google’s goal is not to make us smart, but rich, a goal it has surpassed. What passes for smart in the land of Carr is linear and vertical, long and deep, but what is it? Here’s a clue: deep dives like War and Peace can’t be comfortably experienced on the web, where readers value clarity, conciseness, and the ability to jump around with the speed of a photon.

    Carr complains about blogging and bloggers, but his real lament may be for the adulteration of the professional writer’s medium, for the paid writer is accustomed to being compensated a spot in the box, but now has to sit in the general admission seats behind the center field fence with the blue-collar fans.

    McLuhan said each new medium fills with the content of the old (e.g. vaudeville > radio > TV), before it develops its own content, and that every technology is an extension of the senses. He thought electronic media an extension of our central nervous system; no wonder we feel wired and jittery sitting at the computer surfing the web. And we prefer our posts short, with a picture or two; for what’s a book without pictures and conversations? Go ask Alice.

    Blogs are not usually filled with essays. When they are they surely get skimmed by surfer-readers, one of Carr’s complaints; but isn’t that the way we read newspapers (mosaics) and most periodicals (mosaic-hybrid-newspapers)?

    Carr claims that internet reading distracts us from linear and deep thinking, thus making us dumb. Linearity and “deep-reading,” the ability to read in a straight line for a long time, holding one’s intellectual breath long enough to absorb the view deep down, are capabilities Carr values, but he can’t prove that without them we grow stupid. Moreover, he’s filling the new medium with old content, which can only last temporarily, according to McLuhan. 

    McLuhan, paraphrasing David Hume, said in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, “…there is no principle of causality in a mere sequence. That one thing follows another accounts for nothing. Nothing follows from following, except change. So the greatest of all reversals occurred with electricity, that ended sequence by making things instant” (p. 27). In choosing War and Peace to reason his claim, Carr signifies his value, for why didn’t he choose Finnegans Wake? “In other words, cubism, by giving the inside and outside, the top, bottom, back, and front and the rest, in two dimensions, drops the illusion of perspective in favor of instant sensory awareness of the whole. Cubism, by seizing on instant total awareness, suddenly announced that the medium is the message. Is it not evident that the moment that sequence yields to the simultaneous, one is in the world of the structure and of configuration? Is that not what has happened in physics as in painting, poetry, and in communication? Specialized segments of attention have shifted to total field, and we can now say, ‘The medium is the message’ quite naturally” (p. 28).

    It’s not clear that Carr wants people to think as much as he wants them to think like him, not what he thinks, necessarily, but the way he thinks. The issue in controversy asks if the internet is changing the way we think (of course it is), and then asks a question related to the quality of thinking, but a different way of thinking is not automatically a worse way of thinking. The brain adapting yet again is not proven a bad change. Carr’s argument, that internet reading is making us stupid, suggests we were smart, but there’s unfortunately inadequate evidence to support that claim also. In any event, by the time we can determine if the change was for the better or worse, it’s likely that the written word as we now enjoy it will be a relic or fossil of some earlier culture. We are all strangers to the future.

  • Theory of nothing, something, and everything in between

    Then we saw Wallace-Wells’s “Surfing the Universe,” in the July 21 issue, and we quickly skipped to this Annals of Science piece; for since seeing the Nobel Prize winning physicist Robert B. Laughlin lecture locally, our old curiosity to know if the physicists will ever solve their “Theory of Everything” has been expanding. 

    There’s apparently enough string theory going around that if the physicists studying it were Christo they could wrap the universe. We like Lisi’s new idea for a Theory of Everything because while it exposes string theory for the cat’s cradle it is, it also makes use of something called E8, at once suggesting an error on a guitar chart (he must mean E7, or E9 – what’s an E8 shaped like?), and our old drill sergeant at Fort Bliss (an E8), Fall 1969, who also toyed around with a theory of everything.

    We had our own theory of everything nearly completed, but it contained no math, actuarially speaking, though it was based on the number system we developed to illuminate the guitar fretboard. Like many of our great ideas, it was written on one of our Joe Mitchell note sheets, got left in a back pocket of a pair of jeans, and went out with the wash.

    Criticizing string theory in his book A Different Universe, Laughlin says “A measurement that cannot be done accurately, or that cannot be reproduced even if it is accurate, can never be divorced from politics and must therefore generate mythologies” (p. 215). In lecture, Laughlin was a card. Expecting a mega-PowerPoint, instead we got cartoons from an overhead. “Just look around you…Even this room is teeming with things we do not understand” (p. 218).

    Anyone lucky enough to have surfed, that is, surfed in the water, salt water, in real waves, may not understand physics, but certainly comprehends that, as Laughlin says, “there is much, much more yet to come” (p. 218).

  • The cover’s title

    Both the July 7 & 14 (double issue) and the July 21 issues arrived today. For those curious still about the July 21 cover controversy, already of course fizzling out, Emdashes provides a clearing house. We were still curious only with regard to the cover’s title, having not seen mention of it, and seeing it (“The Politics of Fear”), were reminded of Gary Snyder’s essay touching on the subject in Earth Household (pp. 90-93), written during the Cold War, but still pertinent, but settled, finally, on this to share, which says even more about contemporary politics:

    There is a Zen saying that “while studying koans you should not relax even in the bath,” but this one is never heeded. (p. 52)

  • Joyce’s “allforabit”

    If at first glance we can’t figure out what Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is all about we might at least recognize one of its themes as the alphabet. Beckett told us Wake is about normal things in the usual sense: “Literary criticism is not book-keeping.” Explaining Vico, Beckett said, “When language consisted of gesture, the spoken and the written were identical.” Later, “Convenience only begins to assert itself at a far more advanced stage of civilization, in the form of alphabetism.” Beckett argues that Wake is “direct expression,” in a pre-alphabet way. “They (words) are alive. They elbow their way on to the page, and glow and blaze and fade and disappear…His writing is not about something; it is that something itself.” 

    Turning to Finnegans Wake itself, directly (never-minding the book-keepers), we find the alphabet itself. “(Stoop) if you are abcedminded, to this claybook, what curious signs (please stoop), in this allaphbed! Can you rede (since We and Thous had it out already) its world?” (p. 18).

    Finnegans Wake, like most of Joyce’s work, is, in fact, memorable; its auditory impact sticks long after its photographic memory fades. For example, we continue to hear “When a part so ptee does duty for the holos we soon grow to use of an allforabit” (pp. 18-19) long after we read it.

    Wolfram von Eschenbach notwithstanding: “I don’t know a single letter of the alphabet” (last paragraph Book II, Parzival, translated and with an introduction by Helen M. Mustard & Charles E. Passage. Vintage Books Edition, March 1961).

    Our Exagmination Round His Factification For Incamination Of Work In Progress, first published as New Directions Paperbook 331 in 1972.

  • Cage bop Monk lit

    John Cage, as we’ve mentioned, seemed to have little tolerance for jazz, suggesting that if musicians want to have a conversation they should use words, and we’ve always found this attitude surprising coming from an otherwise tolerant and peaceful composer – but who named one of his own books Silence, which contains, among many innovative works, our favorite, his “Lecture on Nothing.”

    “I have nothing to say, and I am saying it, and that is poetry,” Cage said, as he is often quoted, but incompletely, for the third column (measure) in that line is “as I need it.” Two lines up we find three empty measures. The fourth measure of that line starts the sentence “I have nothing to say.” The first measure of the next line is empty. The second measure reads “and I am saying it.” The third measure is empty. The fourth measure says “and that is.” The first measure of the next line contains “poetry,” the next measure is empty, the next contains “as I need it,” and the final measure contains the period to the sentence. You begin to see why we have always liked John Cage, and find ourselves coming back to him again and again, to read and to listen. 

    To round out the discussion, it’s worth mentioning, perhaps, that Silence also contains Cage’s “Lecture on Something,” suggesting a compare and contrast essay just itching to be written.

    For some reason we’ve always paired John Cage with Thelonius Monk, thinking, for one thing, maybe Monk did for jazz what Cage did for classical, which is to say, in short, put some fresh wax on the board, unafraid to paddle out solo. Then again, we’ve always thought much of Cage’s music closer to jazz than to classical, for he admitted random access to sounds, in notation and performance. What bothered him about words was probably the many connotations, too many to contain, to orchestrate, or that words distract from sound with meaning. For Cage, the tree falling in the forest with no one listening certainly makes noise; the question is, what sounds does it make, the sounds no one hears?

    Monk’s song titles provide clues to his intentions, “Rhythm-a-ning,” for example. Monk’s titles often convey what he has to say, his audience and purpose, if not his strategy. Monk had something to say, and said it, but, with the exception of the song titles, without words, and that is jazz, as he needed it.

    In response to a request for a statement on music, Cage wrote “…nothing is accomplished by writing a piece of music…” Or, Cage continued, “…by hearing…playing a piece of music} our ears are now in excellent condition.” What’s more, in the opening of this statement, he writes “instantaneous and unpredictable.” That seems to describe Monk, and isn’t that jazz, as we all need it?

  • Leisurely reading habits

    A sense of something missed appears during the reading lull of the New Yorker double issues, for they don’t take two weeks to read. This far west, practically in the water, it’s not unusual for the posts to run late, and sometimes not at all, which brings on another sense, of not knowing what day it is, let alone what day to reasonably expect the next issue. And the missing of the weekly post brings an additional reminder of the amicable anticipations that used to accompany the now extinct, longer, serialized stories and articles that used to span several weeks. But it must be admitted, forced to read every page or go hungry, certain valuable discoveries appear, opera reviews, for example. Not that opera has supplanted jazz, but there was no way of knowing how enjoyable “Sing Faster: The Stagehands’ Ring Cycle” was going to be, or that it would lead, improbably, to “Schultze gets the blues.”

    Bereft, then, of fresh cartoons and talks, having wandered and watered the salsa garden, following a spell in the morning shade with a bowl of fresh blueberries and raspberries with a bit of shredded wheat, washed down with a cup of French pressed Roast, we find the musty shelves now press, and out comes, of all things, The Rise of Silas Lapham, which originally appeared, we are reminded by George Arms in his introduction to the Rinehart Edition (intro. copyrighted 1949; the paperback edition n.d.), “serially in the Century Magazine, where, in keeping with the leisurely reading habits of the time, it came out in ten monthly installments (November, 1884, to August, 1885).” Arms said William Dean Howells’s novel was popular on the installment plan, but it apparently lost favor with the critics once published in book form – then, as now, apparently, critics having little affinity for realism. One wonders, though, what it was like to read in that “leisurely reading” time, when, Arms said, “The Bostonians and parts of Huckleberry Finn were serialized in the Century at the same time as The Rise of Silas Lapham.”

    Some clues are given, and some similarities between the times grow apparent: “Well,” said Corey, “you architects and the musicians are the true and only artistic creators” (p. 206). And then there’s the matter of the library. “If we have a library, we have got to have books in it. Pen says it’s perfectly ridiculous having one. But papa thinks whatever the architect says is right” (p. 121). 

    Our list for today does include a trip to the local library. We’ll probably stop by the new edition of Nick’s after the library. Hopefully, the new New Yorker will come before we head out.

  • Writer’s block

    Writer’s block is an affliction that may occasionally affect any writer, and perhaps does strike all writers, from time to time, excepting, perhaps, writers like Vollmann, but who knows, even the graphomaniac may come down with a cold pen now and then, and how much worse must it feel for a Beckett, who can’t imagine without words, than a Salinger, who, apparently, can. Other writers, or would be writers, develop graphophobia, reduced to wanting in effect to know where it comes from – presumably the same place any other phobia comes from, but that knowledge alone won’t remove the writer’s block.

    Writer’s block is like a hitless streak, the batter walking to the plate three or four times night after night and going hitless, walking head down back to the bench, bat in hand, each hitless at-bat adding to the streak. He resorts to superstition (wears the same pair of socks he was wearing when he got his last hit – inside out); changes bat size, alters batting stance; takes twice the number of pitches in batting practice before the game. But he grows silent, moves to the end of the bench, sulks. He runs out of distracting witticisms with which to amuse the sportswriter, rushes to the shower to avoid the radio interview. He’s given a night off, a night on the bench, and the batter who takes his place goes three for four and scores a run. The hit-blocked batter is living in a drought, and his muse likes water.

    The cure for writer’s block is the same as the cure for a hitting slump. Return to basics: shut out the crowd; keep your eye on the ball; swing purposefully; and don’t try to pulverize the ball – just meet the ball, swing through the ball, and, above all, relax, take it easy, stay loose. It’s just a game.

  • Max Shulman’s “Love is a Fallacy”

    Fallacies are fun. Errors in logic, deceptive, deliberate or accidental, fallacies accompany studies in critical reading and thinking, and provide us humble feelings of fallibility, for as A. N. Whitehead asserted in his “Fallacy of the Perfect Dictionary,” human consciousness cannot contain, or express through language, all the knowledge of its own experience.

    If that’s a bit heady, consider Max Shulman’s “Love is a Fallacy.” Shulman was a novelist, screenwriter, and TV script writer, most famous probably for his character Dobie Gillis. “Love is a Fallacy” is a short story set in old school days, involving raccoon coats and the traps and vicissitudes of courtship. Of course it’s dated; no one wears raccoon coats anymore, and fallacies have found their way, for the most part, from Latin into English versions. But it’s a short enjoyable read and makes for a fun introduction to fallacies.

     

     

     

  • Cold frame for improvisation

    Jazz musicians have long made handy use of so-called fake books. The best fake books condense a musical piece to one page. Full of popular songs and jazz standards, the fake books (and their now legitimate progeny, The Real Book series and other versions) allow the musician to gather the key, chords, melody, and lyrics at a glance to cover the piece close enough for recognition and loose enough to improvise and produce something new – new each time, for the cover sheets are cold frames for improvisation. Don’t be fooled by the word fake in the title; musical knowledge and familiarity with an instrument are prerequisites to successful fake book playing. But regular fake book playing improves a musician’s comprehension and capabilities.

    Kenneth Koch might have had fake books in mind when he came up with the idea that eventually became his books Wishes, Lies, and Dreams and Rose, where did you get that red?: Teaching Great Poetry to Children. In the introduction to Rose, Koch said he “taught reading poetry and writing poetry as one subject. I brought them together by means of ‘poetry ideas,’ which were suggestions I would give to the children for writing poems of their own in some way like the poems they were studying” (pp. 3-4). So we get the question for the rose from close readings of William Blake’s “The Tyger” and “The Sick Rose.”

     

    There are no fake books for writers. Still, writing is learned while writing, and a good writer is a good reader. Reading and writing brought together as one subject form frames for improvisation.