The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

  • Birdbrain, Bird-witted, and more on Thought

    Reflecting yesterday afternoon on my morning post, “On the Coast Starlight,” in which I suggested thought, if we are to try to compare it to anything, seems more bird-like than the train of thought first found in Thomas Hobbes’s 1651 “Leviathan,” I thought, to force thought onto a track where ideas are coupled one after another in forward motion toward some predetermined destination results from printing press technology, as McLuhan has shown. Thinking like a train does produce advantages, but the linear notion of thought may put us in a cage. Then it came to me that a reader might have commented that I seem birdbrained.

    Since I’ve had comments and likes off for recent posts, no such reader was able to suggest it, so I’ve come forward to suggest it myself. (Readers intent on comment, like, or dislike, btw, will find an email address at the bottom of the Toad’s About page.)

    But why we have come to disvalue flightiness to the extent we have, I’m not sure. Birdbrain, according to Google Ngram, is a word product of the second half of the 20th Century, while bird-witted has a more storied past, with interesting spikes of usage in both the 1720s and the 1820s.

    I readily agree that my brain seems to be more bird-like than train-like. But upon discussion with Susan, she informs me that only the hummingbird is able to fly backward. Trains, of course, can travel forward or backward, but not at the same time. Yes, but trains can’t leave the track (except to switch to another track), and two trains running in opposite directions on the same track – well, in a quantum train world, perhaps a train may indeed run forward and backward at the same time. In any case, the intelligence of birds is not in question. The question is whether to think like a bird offers the human any advantage over thinking like a train. But we are only speaking to the metaphors, of course, because of course trains don’t actually think at all, and people don’t and can’t and will never think like birds any more than they’ll be able to fly like a bird.

    It’s probable that in the era of trains, people did think more like trains than bird-like, while before artificial locomotion was mass produced, people thought more like other animals think. Now, people no doubt think more like automobiles. And we might update Hobbes to suggest an automobile of imagination.

    The poet Marianne Moore, in her poem “Bird-witted,” leaves no doubt that to think like a bird is to think like a human:

    parent darting down, nerved by what chills 
  the blood, and by hope rewarded -  
of toil - since nothing fills 
  squeaking unfed 
mouths, wages deadly combat, 
and half kills 
    with bayonet beak and 
    cruel wings, the 
intellectual cautious- 
ly creeping cat.
    The last stanza of “Bird-witted,” from The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore, Penguin, 1982, p. 105-106.
    Photo: Susan and Chicken, Culver City, circa 1952.

  • On the Coast Starlight

    We climbed aboard the Coast Starlight in Portland, bound for Los Angeles, 24 train-ride hours away, but we stopped unexpectedly somewhere up in the Cascades southeast of Eugene. Snow was falling. In those days, you could walk between the cars and open the top of the dutch door for some fresh air. The air was raw and cold, the woods dark, and the smell as strong as a cigar of pine sap. The tracks followed rivers, valleys, passes, built along paths of least resistance. It’s possible now to consider the railroad a naive form of travel.

    When we speak of losing our train of thought, we are comparing thinking to a train, I suppose to indicate how one thought after another coupled together are all headed in the same direction, or should be, if the logic holds water, but thought does not move like a train, the engine a thesis statement, the coal car fuel of claims, the cars one example after another, all following the same track of thought, the dining car full of opposing arguments, the caboose a bright red conclusion.

    News travelled slowly on trains in those days. Long and longer minutes passed without anyone new coming into our car. Our conductor reappeared and explained we were stopped because a freight train ahead of us had derailed. At first, it wasn’t clear how long we would be delayed. Equipment to reposition the freight train was en route to the wreck. Minutes, as it turned out, became, as they always do, hours. The conductor came through our car again to announce we would all be treated to a free dinner in the dining car. There was also a club car where we could hang out while waiting.

    Thought, if it moves at all, is more like the flight of a bird. But Thomas Hobbes, in his 1651 book, “Leviathan”, put us on the track of thinking of thought as a train, to wit:

    “Of the Consequence or TRAYNE of Imaginations. BY Consequence, or TRAYNE of Thoughts, I understand that succession of one Thought to another, which is called (to distinguish it from Discourse in words) Mentall Discourse. When a man thinketh on any thing whatsoever, His next Thought after, is not altogether so casuall as it seems to be. Not every Thought to every Thought sueceeds indifferently. But as wee have no Imagination, whereof we have not formerly had Sense, in whole, or in parts; so we have no Transition from one Imagination to another, whereof we never had the like before in our Senses. The reason whereof is this. All Fancies are Motions within us, reliques of those made in the Sense: And those motions that immediately succeeded one another in the sense, continue also together after Sense: In so much as the former comming again to take place, and be predominant, the later followeth, by coherence of the matter moved, in such manner, as water upon a plain Table is drawn which way any one part of it is guided by the finger. But because in sense, to one and the same thing perceived, sometimes one thing, some times another succeedeth, it comes to passe in time, thatjn the Imagining of any thing, there is no certainty what we shall Imagine next; Onely this is certain, it shall be something that succeeded the same before, at one time or another.”

    I ordered a salmon steak and a glass of red wine. I don’t remember what Susan ordered, but since she dislikes fish, I suppose she might have had a filet mignon with a glass of white wine. We were not in a hurry. Had we been in a hurry, we would not have taken the train in the first place.

    By the time we pulled into the station at Santa Barbara, the train was five hours behind schedule. Another, new conductor had come aboard in San Louis Obispo. A group of passengers who had been on board even longer than us, having boarded in Seattle, were told to wait at the door at the end of our car. It was noted this door had not previously been used at any of our stops; nevertheless, our new conductor insisted the group wait at this door. An anxious wait ensued. The door did  not open. The train began to move. The group would have to travel with us all the way to Los Angeles, where Amtrak would put them on a bus which would drive them back to Santa Barbara.

  • In Another Clean, Well-Lighted Place

    He turns to an empty
    whiskey barrel,
    wondering if there is life
    on the red planet,
    or under the Venus cloud cover,
    or inside her
    granny panties.

    He reaches for his watering can,
    always a few drops to go,
    dribbles a few words
    of too late love.

    They sit across the bar
    from one another,
    smiling back and forth.

    The water runs out his mouth,
    over his lips,
    and down his chin,
    his clear-cut neck,
    a waterfall of love’s
    last cleaning.

  • Behind the Facades

    Perhaps symbols have some meaning after all; otherwise, why bother trying to erase them? But if the symbol is a mask for a truth, why can’t the truth speak for itself? We all have a particular picture of ourselves, seldom the same picture others have of us. This seems true even with intimate relationships, long married couples, for example. We might come, after much experimenting, to value the simple and functional over the ornate and symbolic. But every creation of the human seems to suggest some facade, some outer covering or wrap behind which one might find origins, occasions, old arguments, claims, proposals – opposing viewpoints.

    In Richard Ellmann’s “Yeats: The Man and the Masks” (1948), we may conclude the mask for Yeats was not necessarily a cover for something else (personality, argument, belief) but was the essence of being human. One is born with a mask:

    “To start with its simplest meaning, the mask is the social self. Browning had spoken of two ‘soul-sides, one to face the world with,’ and one to show the beloved. But Yeats’s doctrine assumes that we face with a mask both the world and the beloved. A closely related meaning is that the mask includes all the differences between one’s own and other people’s conception of one’s personality. To be conscious of the discrepancy which makes a mask of this sort is to look at oneself as if one were somebody else. In addition, the mask is defensive armor: we wear it, like the light lover, to keep from being hurt. So protected, we are only slightly involved no matter what happens. This theory seems to assume that we can be detached from experience like actors from a play. Finally, the mask is a weapon of attack; we put it on to keep up a noble conception of ourselves; it is a heroic ideal which we try to live up to. As a character in The Player Queen affirms, ‘To be great we must seem so. Seeming that goes on for a lifetime is no different from reality.’ Yeats used to complain that English poets had no ‘presence,’ because they insisted upon looking too much like everyone else; a poet should be instantly recognizable by his demeanor. The poet looks the poet, the hero looks the hero; both may be deceiving others and they may even be practicing a form of deception upon themselves” (172-3).

    Nations and communities, too, wear masks. We see them at holidays, parades, celebrations. Sometimes ideas are codified in by-laws, rules, expectations official and informal. I’ve never been much of a fan of fireworks, or for the 4th of July. The flag covers the coffin of the soldier coming home. Independence Day, though of course not independence for everyone. I used to look forward to the 4th because it was an extra day off work, and the block picnic, if there was some guitar busking going on, beer and potato salad – beans, burgers, and dogs grilled to a crisp, sure, why not? But the fireworks, dangerously loud, the dogs and cats howling and scurrying for cover, the smoke and the intersection filling up with the burnt cardboard shells. And all of it, as celebration, such a facade, a mask. Well, but comes the opposing viewpoint, maybe not. Maybe what we see on the 4th is not a facade, but the truth of things. Irreverent and irrelevant, bombastic. Or, as the poet Robert Creeley put it: “Ritual removed from its place of origin is devoid of meaning.”

     

  • Virtually Nowhere

    Writing for the New York Times Sunday edition for June 28, California veteran-reporter Shawn Hubler, reporting from Davis, California, on the ghost town effect Covid-19 is bringing to college towns across the country, and wandering around the abandoned town UC Davis keeps flush, notes, apparently sans irony: “Outside the closed theater, a lone busker stood on a corner playing ‘Swan Lake’ on a violin to virtually no one.” I know the feeling.

    Meanwhile, musicians across the globe are turning to virtual possibilities to keep their chops up in front of a live audience. Amateurs too are getting into the act, as evidenced by the creation of the “Live at 5 from the Joe Zone” shows, nearly nightly live broadcasts (5 pm PST) via Instagram “stories” and “IGTV” posts, featuring myself, a nephew, and three brothers, to wit: “The Joe Zone nightly Live at 5 with Joe, @ketch3m, @johnlinker, @charleslinker, @kevin_linker: Portland, Salem, Healdsburg, Ione, Drytown.” Listeners tune in to hear music and stories while watching the player, and comment live, often talking, virtually, to one another, via their online comments.

    The shows last anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour. These are not group performances. If we could figure out how to do that virtually, we might give it a go, but for now, each of us takes a night in our respective hometown pandemic quarantine digs and creates a solo show for the live entertainment of our loyal followers. The other night, I had 5 listeners in my audience (go ahead: irony, satire, and sarcastic comments all accepted with good grace). There were, at one point, 6 listeners, but one apparently came and went. It happens. But that was also a slow night. I’ve had as many as 14 live listeners, at once. Ok, ok, still not exactly Arena Rock. And, but, in any case, that’s not the point.

    If one saves the live show via IGTV, most followers eventually find it, but at which point it’s a kind of rerun. The key is to catch it live. But of course 5 in the evening is not necessarily the best time-fit for any given listener. I’ve not saved my shows beyond a few hours, if at all. I caught grief last week for an immediate delete, since Susan thought it was my best show yet, but the rerun dilutes the live effects. And the show is intended as a real quarantine activity, a virtual get-together, a virtual hoedown or hootenanny.

    Of course, all towns are potential ghost towns (there appears to be a gene for it they are born with), and all performances are played potentially “for virtually no one.” Still, Davis is but a rock’s throw from the much larger Sacramento (about a 20 minute drive) and just over an hour to the Bay. Not to mention it’s a major Amtrak stop for the north-south Starlight Special. In many other small college towns across the country you can already hear the whistle’s last blow and watch the tumbleweeds filling the streets.

  • If You’ll Be My Love

    I’ll paddle out through sharks for you
    live on Desolation Row with you
    burn all my books for you
    if you’ll be my love

    I’ll walk the pirate’s plank for you
    smoke a cigarette or two
    join the National Guard for you
    if you’ll be my love

    I’ll sleep with deadly snakes for you
    crawl through caves of spider nests
    I’ll be a bee for your nectarine
    but I won’t sting your sweet flower

    I’ll barbecue my ribs for you
    wash the dishes and take out the trash
    change the cat litter and watch TV with you
    if you’ll be my love

    I’ve nowhere to go to take you to
    no gold ring from Saks Fifth Avenue
    I’ll write a letter of love to you
    if you’ll be my love

    Now these days I sing to you
    memories of long-ago
    don’t you think it’s time that you
    let me be your love?

    But you don’t want to live yesterday
    and not necessarily for all time
    and love seems so far away
    in a song like some kind of oldie

    The song “If You’ll Be My Love” performed Live at 5 (PST) from the Portland Joe Zone on June 20, 2020.

    Note: the last two lines in the third stanza were substituted in the live version with these:

    I’m a bee flying around your room
    looking for the flower of your love



  • Goodbye, Joe

    Hey Joe, where you going all tangled up in blue?
    Gonna change my attitude, walk on down the avenue
    Fly away on a magic carpet ride down to Graceland.
    Goodbye, Joe

    Hey Joe, what kind of mood you in with that cat-like grin?
    I’m moving off the dark side of the moon
    Going over to see Jerry Lewis at the Paradise.
    Goodbye, Joe

    Hey Joe, what’s that seaweed vine around your neck?
    After months at sea I washed up on a beach
    Now I’m drinking water from a coconut cup.
    Goodbye, Joe

    Hey Joe, who you seeing, hanging out with these days?
    When the going gets tough, the tough get lonely, that’s what she said to me.
    Gonna put on a tie and suit up for a career in the red dust.
    Goodbye, Joe

    Hey Joe, where you going with that book in your hand?
    This here book is Penina’s Letters.
    Going down to the water and toss the whole book off the jetty at D&W.
    Goodbye, Joe

    Hey Joe, why do you sing songs when we know you can’t sing?
    This is my song to the world that’s always singing to me.
    I’m taking voice lessons from a locomotive trapped in a tree.
    Goodbye, Joe

    Hey Joe, what’s that in your DNA?
    Trains, uniforms, wheeled and track vehicles
    Off the rack guitars and SWR surf films.
    Goodbye, Joe

    Hey Joe, been down to the cathedral lately?
    You don’t need a church to pray.
    Jesus said, two of you gathered in his name,
    and he’ll take you home, he’ll take you home.

    I’ll be performing “Goodbye, Joe” from the JoeZone, live at 5 (PST), tomorrow, Sat Jun 6, on Instagram: @joe.linker

  • She Shakes Me Out

    She shakes me out, she jiggles me down
    starts me dancing like a rodeo clown.
    Twist to the left, twist to the right
    never do we get too way up tight.

    She stays so near, she goes so far
    she ain’t no Facebook or Internet star.
    She’s seen over here, she’s been over there
    all night and day, everywhere.

    Turn it up loud, turn it down soft
    turn it all the way off.
    She never says yes, she never says no
    she knows when to say let it all go.

    She don’t wear silver, she don’t wear gold
    she’s never been bought, she’s never been sold.
    She rides me high, she rides me low
    she rides me fast, and she rides me slow.

    Turn me loose, I have no choice
    she rides me like a pet mongoose.
    She be hep, she be cool
    she never ever don’t be cruel.

    She sings the old songs, fingerpicks a guitar
    she don’t care if all the words go wrong.
    She walks the streets, visits the sick
    she don’t mind being in the thick of it.

    She knows how to live, knows how to die
    she looks me straight in the eye.
    Color me blue, color me green
    she’s the best thing I’ve ever seen.

    She heats my beans, toasts my buns
    and I hardly ever get the runs.
    She shoots pool, shoots the shit
    she ignores all the rules of it.

    She hits a home run, lays down a bunt
    she lays it all on the line.
    She knows how to fly, knows how to fall
    knows how to climb this here wall.

    She knows how to pray, knows how to sin
    she always knows the shape I’m in.
    She knows how to work, knows how to play
    knows to go home at the end of the day.

    She knows how to give, knows how to take
    she knows how to ask if there is some mistake.
    She knows how to swim, knows how to sleep
    she knows how to make that midnight creep.

    She knows how to laugh, knows how to cry
    not every guy in a suit is a spy.
    She likes a tete-a-tete with a cat or two
    down by the water.

    She likes it slow, takes it easy
    drinks a bourbon in the salsa garden.
    The sun makes her happy, but rain makes her glad
    Her blue eyes seldom cry.

    She forgives, she forgets
    she’s got rooms to let.
    I do her dishes, scrub her pots
    change the diapers, that’s my lot.

    The bells of Saint Mary’s, down by the sea
    the waves they did cry.
    The day she got married, on the radio
    angels they did fly.

    She took a walk, on the mild side
    she went to bed, and fell asleep.
    She shakes me out, jiggles me down
    I get up in the morning like a working clown.

    “She Shakes Me Out” is a song I wrote and performed on my show “Live at 5 from the JoeZone” on Instagram on Monday, May 18 (now deleted). I used the chord progression:

    Bb7  Bb9  Bb7b9  Bb9 
Eb9  Eb7b9  Eb7  Eb7b9 
Bb7  Bb9  Bb7b9  Bb9 
F9   Eb9   Bb7   F9

    Tune in to Live at 5 from the JoeZone most nights (PST), a pandemic quarantine social distancing live video hour (or less) of music, talk, stories, and such to help pass the time and ease the mind.


  • Two Riders Were Approaching

    Two riders were approaching
    on hogs and wearing leather.
    “Let’s stop here,” said one to the other,
    “for a cool drinking beer.”

    They passed the time on songs
    that ofttimes rhymed.
    On the trail or in the big city.
    They parked the hogs in the gutter.

    At the bar the one he uttered,
    “What’s that you got in the vat?”
    “Saltwort Ale,” the barkeep did tell,
    combing his beard with a hand.

    “Two lights for us, my friend,
    the day grows warm and thin,
    the dust is finding its corners,
    the dogs want shade and water.”

    “No light here,” the barkeep says,
    “and we don’t serve no rhymesters.”
    “But we are the two riders,
    two riders who were approaching.”

    “This here’s a craft brew pub,
    not some seedy tavern.
    Take your hogs and dogs across the tracks,
    go see John Wesley’s mother.”

    The two riders went back to riding.
    On the trail where we last heard their cry,
    they were still approaching.
    Two riders were approaching.

    “Yippi-yi-yo,
    yippie-ki-yay,
    we’re gonna go
    our own way.”

    Yippi-yi-yo,
    yippie-ki-yay,
    we’re gonna go
    our own way.”

    “Two Riders Were Approaching” is a song I wrote and performed on my show “Live at 5 from the JoeZone” on Instagram on Saturday, May 9. I used the chord progression Am Dm E7 Am. I changed a few words and lines here, and I discarded here a few of the lines sung live, as follows:

    “…where the hodads hang their hats”;
    “The hogs are hot and tired”;
    “I don’t care if you’re the four horses of the apocalypse.”

    If I ever play “Two Riders” again, I’ll probably change it some more.
    Meantime, tune in to Live at 5 from the JoeZone Saturday nights (PST), a pandemic quarantine social distancing live video hour (or less) of music, talk, stories, and such to help pass the time and ease the mind.

    I wrote this song, as I explained on “Live at 5,” to celebrate the latest Bob Dylan recordings, his first with all original songs in eight years. The title of my song, “Two Riders Were Approaching,” is the penultimate line in the Dylan song “All Along the Watchtower.” As I asked my audience, “Have you ever wondered what happened to those two riders?”

    Photo: Pic I took of a photo at the Oregon Historical Society “Barley, Barrels, Bottles, and Brews” exhibit in 2019: two musicians and a bartender at the Cowdell Saloon in Antelope, Oregon, 1913.



  • What is Essential?

    In John Cage’s “Lecture on Nothing,” we find the following comment: “It is not irritating to be where one is. It is only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else.” Likewise, we may find that when we are alone, we find ourselves wanting company, but when we are in company, we may find ourselves wanting to be alone.

    As we find ourselves now, confined to quarters, advised to advance toward others (nor permit them to advance toward us) no closer that 6 feet, and even then advised it might be a good idea to wear a face mask and gloves and carry a sanitizer, we are reminded of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Once a lower but more essential need is met, we may climb a rung higher on the pyramid until we reach the nirvana of self-actualization.

    We must now assume that top rung to have a base of 6 feet, so that there is only room for one person, that one being, of course, one’s self. And to be fully self-actualized means being able to stay home perfectly content with staying home.

    But then we find Maslow adding on yet another rung to the top of his hierarchy of needs (even if, in practice, this would mean expanding the original base and subsequently the base of all the other rungs leading up to the top). The new top of the pyramid, reached after self-actualization is achieved, might be described as staying home without staying home, otherwise known as self-transcendence.

    All that work on meeting one’s needs only to discover at the top of the climb one leaves one’s self behind. It might be that only by staying home can we come to grips with the differences between our needs and our wants such that we may find our essentials.

  • Charlatan Beckett

    The biographer Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett’s first official biographer, has passed away, the Times reports: ‘His first words to her, she wrote in “Parisian Lives,” were, “So you are the one who is going to reveal me for the charlatan that I am.”’

    Beckett may have hoped so. He certainly gave her that start, for he just gave away two key insights to his work. The etymology of charlatan includes “to prattle,” and “I talk nonsense.” And Charlie Chaplin’s work was fully enjoyed by Beckett. Chaplin was popular in France, and was colloquially called “Charlot.” Many (if not all) of Beckett’s characters seem inspired by the clown, the tramp, the outsider, the vaudevillian villain, whose humor reveals deep suffering truths of the human condition. We could die laughing.

    “You might say I had a happy childhood,” Deirdre Bair’s biography of Beckett begins. But the 1978 Times review frowns on the biographer’s focus on what appeared to be Beckett’s lifelong condition of anhedonia. For Bair, Beckett seemed the kind of person who had fun once, but didn’t enjoy it. Of course, Beckett himself fueled this kind of confusion, what he called tragicomedy.