The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

Category: Reading

  • Leslie Fiedler and the Either/Or Fallacy of Poetic Criticism

    Perhaps there are only two kinds of poetry, still only two kinds of poems. Dichotomy makes for easy argument by eliminating all other possible alternatives. We often hear there are two schools of thought, and any ambiguity is quickly brushed away. The one poetry might be represented by T. S. Eliot, and is characterized by recondite allusion, objects removed to libraries for safe keeping, the other poetry represented by William Carlos Williams, and characterized by everyday objects close at hand, the red wheelbarrow, the icebox. How quickly though this argument ignores the actual words, as we forget Eliot’s elusive but simple, figurative cat hidden in the fog of Prufrock’s meandering thoughts, and we forget too Williams’s “The Yachts,” a poem that discourages an easy swim.

    Leslie Fiedler, in his essay for Liberations (1971), “The Children’s Hour: or, The Return of the Vanishing Longfellow: Some Reflections of the Future of Poetry,” argues that there are two kinds of poetry, or poetics, identified by the poems we sing and get by heart, and the poems we must read and read again to recall, for the latter can exist only on a page, poems that Fiedler says are “…dictated by typography…; for it is a truly post-Gutenberg poetry, a kind of verse not merely reproduced but in some sense produced by movable type” (150). These poems are contrasted with popular song lyrics, automatically memorized, that simply don’t work when typed on a page. To illustrate, one goes to a poetry reading, where the poet himself appears not to have his poems by heart, since he must read them from pages; or one goes to a Bob Dylan concert, where the wandering minstrel still has all the words by heart. But Dylan Thomas, reciting from memory, singing unaccompanied, disposes the either/or fallacy of the poetry reading/pop-concert argument.

    Speaking of either/or, last night’s snow, still a surprise this morning, has us thinking of our south Santa Monica Bay home again, where we were surprised and nostalgically saddened on a visit to Hermosa some time ago to find the old Either/Or bookstore closed. But then again, not surprised, for the either/or fallacy often leaves too much unresolved, fails to reach the heart of any poem, fails to hear the coming of the end of one song, and the beginning of another. The bookstore was now a clothing store; apparently someone fell into the old either/or fallacy of either books or clothes, but not both.

  • Theodore Dreiser and Flannery O’Connor were Neuroscientists, too

    Over at The Frontal Cortex, Jonah Lehrer has posted his Wall Street Journal article in which he takes the pow out of will power, arguing the busy brain is to blame for human frailties. It’s a classic defense of the human condition (Dreiser used it in An American Tragedy), and a blow to the motivational-speaker market.

    The reduction of will power also suggests the neuroscientists may be close to removing the free from free will. No wonder a good man is hard to find. There might be some will left, but not enough to satisfy being saved as a one-shot deal. Flannery O’Connor explains in her short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find”: The Misfit, having provided the grandmother with her final jolt of grace, says, “She would have been a good woman, if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.” This is Flannery’s depiction of the Catholic view of will and grace, and it explains the Catholic necessity of being saved every moment of one’s life, of the necessity of being reborn daily, not just once, for one could live, in the Catholic tradition, a good life for 80 years, but a single hanging curve ball that goes against the signs and you’re yanked and sent down the tunnel, for in Catholicism, as in baseball, it’s not about what you did for me yesterday; it’s what you can do for me today that counts.

    Motivation depends on the quote, a bite of sugar; motivation is entertainment – motivetainment, ads directed at the brittle brain. Quotes are empty calories. If losing weight is a resolution for 2010, skip the motivation; instead, read Theodore Dreiser, go for long walks, and eat bananas. Bananas are funny and literary – you’ll need both after reading Dreiser.

  • Christmas Platterful

    Dickens’s A Christmas Carol has been filmed again and again, but one must read it to savor the chef’s cloves of exclamation points that spice the prose of the platterful Cratchit Christmas table: 

    “Hallo! A great deal of steam! The pudding was out of the copper. A smell like a washing day! That was the cloth. A smell like an eating-house and a pastrycook’s next door to each other, with a laundress’s next door to that! That was the pudding! In half a minute Mrs. Cratchit entered – flushed, but smiling proudly – with the pudding, like a speckled cannon-ball, so hard and firm, blazing in half of half-a-quartern of ignited brandy, and bedight with Christmas holly stuck into the top.” 

    Yet this is nothing compared to Joyce’s engorging in “The Dead,” the last story in Dubliners. Here he sets the stage for a food fight good and large: 

    “A fat brown goose lay at one end of the table and at the other end, on a bed of creased paper strewn with sprigs of parsley, lay a great ham, stripped of its outer skin and peppered over with crust crumbs, a neat paper frill round its shin and beside this was a round of spiced beef. Between these rival ends ran parallel lines of side-dishes: two little minsters of jelly, red and yellow; a shallow dish full of blocks of blancmange and red jam, a large green leaf-shaped dish with a stalk-shaped handle, on which lay bunches of purple raisins and peeled almonds, a companion dish on which lay a solid rectangle of Smyrna figs, a dish of custard topped with grated nutmeg, a small bowl full of chocolates and sweets wrapped in gold and silver papers and a glass vase in which stood some tall celery stalks. In the centre of the table there stood, as sentries to a fruit-stand which upheld a pyramid of oranges and American apples, two squat old-fashioned decanters of cut glass, one containing port and the other dark sherry. On the closed square piano a pudding in a huge yellow dish lay in waiting and behind it were three squads of bottles of stout and ale and minerals, drawn up according to the colours of their uniforms, the first two black, with brown and red labels, the third and smallest squad white, with transverse green sashes.” 

    Hemingway, reporting from Switzerland for The Toronto Star Weekly, in a piece entitled “Christmas on the Roof of the World” (December 22, 1923), tells how, after a day of skiing, they 

    “…hiked up the hill towards the lights of the chalet. The lights looked very cheerful against the dark pines of the hill, and inside was a big Christmas tree and a real Christmas turkey dinner, the table shiny with silver, the glasses tall and thin stemmed, the bottles narrow-necked, the turkey large and brown and beautiful, the side dishes all present, and Ida serving in a new crisp apron. It was the kind of a Christmas you can only get on top of the world.” 

    Meantime, at the bottom of the world, Faulkner’s people eat a Christmas dinner of “possum with yams, more gray ash cake, the dead and tasteless liquid in the coffee pot; a dozen bananas and jagged shards of cocoanut, the children crawling about his [Bayard Sartoris’s] feet like animals, scenting the food.” 

    We are neither at the top nor the bottom of the world this Christmas eve morning, but we are where we have chosen to be, with the smell of a fresh cut tree mixing with coffee and the sound of jazz and family filling the air – our platter is full.

  • Ivan Illich, Education, and The Good Life

    Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society (1972) exposes our assumptions that a degree is an education, that medicine is health care, that security is safety, that institutionalization of jobs in corporations, schools, and government creates our freedom. We’ve come to confuse degrees, medicine, jobs, and security for the good life.

    When what we value, what we want, becomes institutionalized, our values grow frustrated, and what we want turns against us: “…the institutionalization of values leads inevitably to physical pollution, social polarization, and psychological impotence: three dimensions in a process of global degradation and modernized misery…this process of degradation is accelerated when nonmaterial needs are transformed into demands for commodities; when health, education, personal mobility, welfare, or psychological healing are defined as the result of services or ‘treatments.’”

    It’s not a question of spending more money on education, but of a lack of respect (value) for alternative forms to institutionalized education: “Rich and poor alike depend on schools and hospitals which guide their lives, form their world view, and define for them what is legitimate and what is not. Both view doctoring oneself as irresponsible, learning on one’s own as unreliable, and community organization, when not paid for by those in authority, as a form of aggression or subversion.”

    Modern segregation of family, church, job, and school leads to specializations of each, which in turn results in our feeling confined in each, able to do only one thing at a time. In “the medieval town…traditional society was more like a set of concentric circles of meaningful structures, while modern man must learn how to find meaning in many structures to which he is only marginally related. In the village, language and architecture and work and religion and family customs were consistent with one another, mutually explanatory and reinforcing. Education did not compete for time with either work or leisure. Almost all education was complex, lifelong, and unplanned.”

    For Illich, the problem is that “members of modern society believe that the good life consists in having institutions which define the values that both they and their society believe they need.” A wise man, Aristotle argues in Nicomachean Ethics, is one who knows what is good for himself and for everyone else. What will happen to Education? Given our current confusion of wants, as Frank Sinatra sang, we may have to “just wake up,” and “kiss that good life goodbye.” And learning to live without our good life as we have come to know it just might be something we should want.

  • The Eutobiography of Benjamin Franklin

    CP377 Signet Classic 60 cents c 1961

    What would Benjamin Franklin, electrical experimenter and founder of our first public library, have thought of today’s electronic readers? 

    Of his first attempt at building a public library, he says, “…reading became fashionable; and our people, having no public amusements to divert their attention from study, became better acquainted with books…” (90), and he claims strangers noted the effects. 

    Having successfully completed the kite experiment, he invents the lightning rod (234-236), but he doesn’t seem to know when he’s having a good time: “Reading was the only amusement I allowed myself. I spent no time in taverns, games, or frolics of any kind” (91). Apparently, flying a kite in a lightning storm with one’s son is not frolicsome. 

    Early he had been turned into a practical person: “I now took a fancy to poetry and made some little pieces…They were wretched stuff, in street ballad style…,” but “the first sold prodigiously”; nevertheless, “my father discouraged me by ridiculing my performances and telling me verse-makers were generally beggars” (27). 

    The first library consisted of collective contributions – electronic books could not have been so shared. Nor printed, nor borrowed: “This bookish inclination at length determined my father to make me a printer…Often I sat up in my room reading the greatest part of the night, when the book was borrowed in the evening and to be returned early in the morning, lest it should be found missing or wanted” (26-27). 

    Franklin thought men most satisfied when employed, and best employed when able to handle their work independently from start to finish. He wrote of cleanliness, but lived, as we always do, in a time of muddiness. EBooks can’t be loaned or borrowed or returned. No foxing of the pages, no crimping, no dog-eared dirty garage sale wet basement copies. EBooks can’t be gifted, dedicated to someone we love, later to be second-handed at the local book sale, the dedication a fiction within a fiction. EBooks are to print books as cars are to walking, as the transistor radio is to live music, as a televised game is to the loose frapping of the ballpark. 

    We’re not sure what Franklin the scientist and printer would have preferred: book or electronic reader. “A book, indeed, sometimes debauched me from my work” (79). But for such debauchery, acoustic or electric should work.

  • Where readers eSurface but authors lose control

    One advantage of the eBook is lightness. And library books “just disappear” from the little light box on the due date – so no overdue notices, an article in this week’s Christian Science Monitor (print edition) illustrates (we’ve noticed our print books disappearing occasionally, reminding us of bumbling Polonius’s advice, “Neither a borrower nor a lender be”).

    We read a gloomy hope, for at least reading is in the headlines: gloomy in that “deep reading” is failing; hopeful in that readers appear to be surfacing. Some consider that’s a problem. The CSM article references Marianne Wolf, whom we first glimpsed in Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” still concerned about the loss of “deep reading.” But “deep reading” may simply be floating, detachment: “The alphabet and print technology fostered and encouraged a fragmenting process, a process of specialism and of detachment,” McLuhan said.

    Carr, Wolf, and others are concerned that electronic reading is changing brain circuitry. Of course it is: “All media are extensions of some human faculty – psychic or physical…Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perceptions. The extension of any one sense alters the way we think and act – the way we perceive the world. When these ratios change, men change,” McLuhan argues: “Electronic circuitry is an extension of the central nervous system.” If that’s so, then what? The end of books?

    The eBook returns us to the middle ages, before copyright, before individual authors, before fixed points of view. The problem for some is now authorship and ownership: “Medieval scholars were indifferent to the precise identity of the ‘books’ they studied. In turn, they rarely signed even what was clearly their own…Many small texts were transmitted into volumes of miscellaneous content, very much like ‘jottings’ in a scrapbook, and, in this transmission, authorship was often lost” (McLuhan). Sounds like blogging.

    “We’re not going to change the code,” Reid Lyon says. No, we’re not, but perhaps readers will, or non-readers – perhaps the code is changing (under our very ears), for, as McLuhan argues, it’s impossible to be illiterate in a non-literate culture. We may be coming close to “the end of the line.”

    McLuhan, M. (1967). The Medium is the Massage. Bantam Books.

  • Me epistle on “Moopetsi meepotsi”

    Whenever challenged with words unknown we go first to the OED then to Finnegans Wake. We did so this morning looking for meep, following yet another Language Log thread. We found meep in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, on page 276, in footnote number 4:

    “Parley vows the Askinwhose? I do, Ida. And how to call the cattle black. Moopetsi meepotsi.”

    A meep, then, is a calf, and a moop, the calf’s mom.

    The moral of me epistle can be found in today’s Boston Globe, where the principal barning the word learns who abuses meep, steps in moop, for the pot (principal), trying to silence the kettles (students) back, starts them whistling, creating a word stampede:

    “That was the first joke of Willingdone, tic for tac. Hee, hee, hee! This is me Belchum in his twelvemile cowchooks, weet, tweet and stampforth foremost, footing the camp for the jinnies. Drink a sip, drankasup, for he’s as sooner buy a guinness than he’d stale store stout” (p. 9).

    Let the peeps meep, for as Robert Frost said, “…there must something wrong / In wanting to silence any song” (“A Minor Bird”).

  • Where Sarah Palin Meets Andy Warhol

    Andy Warhol is everywhere. That sentence is everywhere. Andy’s fame has lasted longer than his predicted 15 minutes of world-wide fame for all of us. But one place he’s currently not to be found is on the New York Times bestseller list, which is full of Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue, already topping the million mark, according to the CSM’s tomatoes and books review.

    What is fame? These days fame appears to be some light travelling in a motor home coach across the malls of America. The ubiquitous mall is where we might all go to “look for America,” as Simon and Garfunkel sang.

    But a book purchased is not always a book read, as a review of our own bookcase shows. There sits Nabokov’s Ada, added to the stack decades ago and still not cracked, and McEwan’s Atonement, a paperback picked up at a garage sale last summer, the first few pages read a few times. Still, most do show signs of reading’s wear and tear. Our 1966 Love’s Body is falling apart – we’ll need to replace it soon.

    We would like to think that the teens with their moms in lines at the malls to get Sarah’s book autographed will actually read it, but as Flannery O’Connor said: “I would be most happy if you had already read it, happier still if you knew it well, but since experience has taught me to keep my expectations along these lines modest, I’ll tell you that this is the story of a family of six which, on its way driving to Florida, gets wiped out by…” some misfit’s ill-tossed tomato. For “Words can be overlooked,” P. G. Wodehouse said; “But tomatoes cannot.”

    The word value, often abused, as in “family values,” or “good, old fashioned ‘Good Country People’ values,” means nothing but what we desire, what we want. And what we want, as individuals and as communities, isn’t always what’s good for us.

    Reading is good for us, but we doubt that many of the millions who have purchased Sarah’s book want reading. It takes longer than 15 minutes to read a book. Still, we hope they do read the book. We wish the book well, for in the midst of the Reading Crisis, it’s a rose in winter. We don’t want to read Sarah’s book; but we hope that the millions of shoppers who did buy it do read it – such is our faith in reading; such was Andy Warhol’s faith in art.

  • Written after a visit to Language Log

    We look forward to our daily dose of Language Log. Language has undone so many. This morning there’s a post on the mateless orange, for she can’t be rhymed, yet she’s not alone. 

              The Mateless Orange

    The shelves are bare of rhymes for orange.

    Not only that, but my dish is empty of porridge.

    You’ve heard that girl before, right?

    Orange is popular, purple not,

    not even for Steven Earle.

    For it’s rindlessness that’s comic.

    But let me ask you something:

    What the heck is this all about?

    If you stop and think about it,

    your head is jam-packed

    with oranges,

    with the curious result

    that there are those who will find this an insult:

    a banana is not yellow,

    and the mateless orange rinds,

    for she can’t be rhymed,

    yet she’s not alone.

  • “Off with their heads!” Rhetorical Images of Heads of States

    Mao: Another head in a different time and place.

    “Off with their heads!” shouts Carroll’s Queen in Wonderland. Just so, Platon has beheaded them all in “Portraits of Power,” in the December 7 New Yorker.

    The head of state is not a whole person, but a symbol, but of what?

    “The king is an erection of the body politic,” Norman O. Brown says in Love’s Body. “The king personifies the pomp and pleasure of the community; but must also bear the burden of royalty, and, as scapegoat, take away the sins.” Yet the head retaliates with tyranny over the body.

    The head of state is a figure, a doll, a clown, a puppet. But the heads glower like lead. The flash of the moment turns the head to metal. Platon’s photographs are like statues, busts; the heads in the color photos are surrounded with an eerie blue halo, as from a welder’s torch, echoed in Mugabe’s photo with a blue glow around his face, and a thin blue glow around his otherwise dark eyes.

    England’s Gordon Brown, left eye slightly askew, appears to be saying, like Mad magazine’s Alfred E. Newman, “What, me worry?” While across the Irish Sea, Brian Cowen looks like a Roddy Doyle character just informed Ireland has made it to the World Cup finals, eyes disbelieving, mouth ready for the celebratory pint.

    But not all the heads are smiling to be beheaded, nor are they all quite beheaded; two of the three women are spared, along with Qaddafi, who sports a paisley shirt that could have been worn by Sly Stone in There’s a Riot Goin On. 

    Some of the heads shed an animal sense: Ahmadinejad a fox, Mesic an old dog. Some smile like they just ate the opposition (South Africa’s Zuma), or mischievously, like the Imp of the Perverse (Italy’s Berlusconi).

    The electronic version of the portfolio contains a few more photos than the print version, and a couple of those are classics: Estonia’s Tooma Ilves, bespectacled with bowtie; and Lithuania’s Dalia Grybauskaite, looking very much like a Baltic Hillary. It’s not clear why these did not make the hard copy cut. The online recorded commentary by Platon on each head is remarkable for its detail and accessibilty to an otherwise “behind the wall” process that readers of the print version alone don’t have. Platon’s comments are devoid of political content, focus on the passion he has for his craft; he has time to barely brush against these men and women who surely have seen so much, and his task is to capture all that they have seen in a flash and convert it to metal, which he does with alchemical art. 

    And Obama? Give this man his body back; the photo is from a previous sitting – it was decided he would not sit for a photo like the others at this time and place.

  • In Twosome Twiminds: News from the Stroke Club – “Who Are We?”

    During our stroke, we picked up the Takemine to test our left hand, self-diagnosing our condition. We noticed our left hand with interest; it formed the shape of the chord we had asked for, but not on the frets and strings we wanted. The result was discord, the guitar sounding badly out of tune. We moved to the Telecaster. The sound was distorted, the guitar either badly out of tune, the amplifier’s speaker blown, or our hand forming some new nonsense chord. Yet, “It sounds fine,” Susan said. “It sounds like it always does.”

    In Finnegans Wake, Joyce recreates the experience of a stroke: “…and now, forsooth, you have become of twosome twiminds…” (188).

    From 12-1-09 Open Culture: “Jill Bolte Taylor’s ‘Stroke of Insight’ talk reaches the top of many lists. What happens when a neuroanatomist experiences a massive stroke and feels all the brain functions she has studied (speech, movement, understanding, etc) suddenly start to slip away? And how do these losses fundamentally change who we are? You’ll find out in a crisp (and at times emotional) 18 minutes and 40 seconds. You can also read her book that elaborates on her life-altering experience. See My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey.”

    Join the Stoke Club by finding a quiet 20 minutes to watch Taylor’s talk on  video.