The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

Category: Writing

  • Baseball and the parts of speech

    Opening day of baseball should be declared a national holiday. Today’s the big day. In our area we’ve experienced snow flurries, rhubarbs of hail, and sleet, wind, and everyday rain this past week. But now the sun is supposed to make an appearance. Yet we know everything remains imperfect. We know the sun will not shine on every game. And we’ll let Malcolm Gladwell worry about baseball and drugs. We’re concerned about baseball and the parts of speech.  

    E. B. White encourages us to write with nouns and verbs: “The adjective hasn’t been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place” (p. 71). William Zinsser agrees, admonishing, “Most adverbs are unnecessary” (p. 69); and “Most adjectives are also unnecessary” (p. 70). But sage advice can mislead. Francis Christensen, in his book “Notes Toward a New Rhetoric,” views the game differently, quoting from John Erskine’s “The Craft of Writing”: “‘When you write, you make a point, not by subtracting as though you sharpened a pencil, but by adding.’ We have all been told that the formula for good writing is the concrete noun and the active verb. Yet Erskine says, ‘What you say is found not in the noun but in what you add to qualify the noun…The noun, the verb, and the main clause serve merely as the base on which meaning will rise…The modifier is the essential part of any sentence’“ (p. 4). 

    We may not catch the parts of speech as they fly over our head or roll between our legs, yet they are always visibly in play. From most seats, a fan can’t tell if a pitch, upon delivery, is a fastball, a curve, a slider, a splitter, a cutter, a knuckler, a screwball, or a changeup, not until we see what the batter does with it, and even then we’re often unsure. Yet knowing the pitches and observing how the pitcher-catcher battery mixes them up against the batter is the best way to watch a game. Pitches are like words. There’s hardly time for a sentence from the ball leaving the pitcher’s hand to crossing the plate, but from windup to swing is a complete thought.  

    We had the opportunity a couple of years ago to speak with Dave Niehaus, the voice of the Mariners. We wondered how he was able to call each pitch: “Freddy taking his time, now ready, shakes off a sign from Wilson, reads another, gets set, and here’s the pitch – fastball on the outside corner for call strike one.” Or it could have been a slider, or any of the other eight basic pitches of baseball. Niehaus delivered his answer in an anecdote: when he was broadcasting with the Angels, he said, owner Gene Autry came into the box one night after the game. “You called a great game tonight, Dave,” Gene Autry said; “I’m just not sure it was the same game that I saw.” 

    Another time we were invited to watch an inning up in the broadcast booth. We sat next to Ron Fairly, LA Dodger first baseman of the 1960’s, who was keeping box score with a pencil, in a thick, oversized scorebook. There was a laptop in the booth, and a stats expert who worked it, feeding Niehaus and his sidekick Rick Rizzs notes and numbers they might fit into their commentary, but Fairly was keeping score the old-fashioned way, one pitch at a time, marking essentially the effects of each pitch. The broadcast booth framed a particular view of the game. The open window framed the field like a camera, directly behind and up from home plate, omitting the fans down the first and third base lines, thus forcing a sharpened focus onto the field of play. The broadcast booth afforded an enhanced view of the field, a very different view from any other seat we’ve occupied in the ballpark. 

    We write for an audience, even if imaginary, but if you are going to call a game, you must block out the game the fans are watching, and call your own. Some coaches encourage pitchers to stick to the fastball and curve. Others admonish avoiding screwballs and changeups. Most pitchers specialize in only a few pitches they use repeatedly, mixing the rotation so the ball comes at the batter with surprise, and modifying with location and speed, depending on the age and condition of their arm – fastballs often lose their pizzazz as the arm ages.  

    In the 1960s, in Los Angeles, roofed in blue, Dodgers fans often took their transistor radios to games to listen to the play by play by Vin Scully and Jerry Doggett. One learned some of the tricks of the game. A homerun flies quickly out of a ballpark. “Homerun” adequately describes the hit, in the time it takes the ball to clear the fence, yet Vin Scully knew, as Christensen and Erskine did, that writing is “essentially a process of addition” (p. 4). For Vin Scully could be heard on the radio still talking about a long fly ball to deep right center field, Mays going back, way back, to the wall, it’s gone! – the ball having flown over the fence some time ago, the slugging Dodger already rounding second base. So it goes with writing as with baseball. There are tricks built into the skills. But now it’s time to call it quits for the day, quit writing, that is, because there’s a whiffle ball game starting up out on the block, and we don’t want to miss the first cut – it’s opening day!    

  • The smell of print culture

    Believer readers have commented recently on the monthly magazine’s odor. Redolent of what is the question, for we too succumb every month, sticking our nose deep between the pages for a potent snort or two. We find the Believer’s suggested explanation spurious: “…foil stamp on the cover. That’s probably what it was” (Dear the Believer, March/April 08, p. 2). Surely, some Lotus Eater is at work here. 

    But we’ve always stuck our nose into books, savoring the ink and pages, a happy habit started no doubt in one of Sister Maryquill’s classes, when we got to work the mimeograph machine, producing those luscious handouts smeared with wet blue ink, the students all smelling the pages up close, blue tipped noses betraying the practice like ashes on the forehead.

    But of course the blue ink dried and faded, leaving one with the dull task of completing the worksheet. The Believer pages also seem to lose their odor over time. We conducted an experiment: March 05, slight humus smell still in the pages, though this copy was at the bottom of a stack, so maybe it wasn’t breathing properly; April 06, slightly stronger, faint taste of compost; June/July 07 (the music issue), stronger still, a bedroom in the morning, windows closed; March/April 08 (the film issue), potent, redolent of the mimeograph machine and the pages it produced.

    There you have it. The experiment suggests something organic, some herbal ingredient either in the ink or in the pages, which decays over time. The Believer pages are thick and rough, like old coloring book pages, thicker and rougher than glossy magazine pages – some of those, we’ve noticed lately, are tinged with perfume advertisements, an obvious attempt to address reader attrition by simulating the mimeograph effect. The Believer pages are alive. 

    Whatever permeates the Believer’s pages, one thing is certain: to our sense, eBooks carry no odor, fair or foul, and that we find distressful; but readers here might smell something funny in this post.

  • Into the valley of rejection rode the 850

    Having read Dana Goodyear’s “The Moneyed Muse” (New Yorker, February 19 & 26, 2007), we were surprised to hear that the Willesden Herald received only 850 entries in this year’s annual short story contest, then again surprised at the outcome, for into the valley of rejection rode the 850.

    The follow up on the Willesden Herald site, including finalist judge Zadie Smith’s letter of explanation, is the interesting part of this story. The judges decided there will be no prize this year, all 850 of the entries failing the requisite “make it good.” Zadie says, “…we didn’t receive enough,” after the editors have already described an overdose reading experience. From Goodyear’s article, readers might recall: “At last count, several years ago, Poetry, which prints some three hundred poems a year, had to choose from among ninety thousand submissions.” One wonders how even a fraction of those get read – and how do they select which ones to read?

    But Willesden Herald’s total rejection may have been a response informed by a pre-determined argument rather than a reader confronting any actual story. From Zadie’s letter: “Just like everybody, we at The Willesden Herald are concerned about the state of contemporary literature. We are depressed by the cookie-cutter process of contemporary publishing, the lack of truly challenging and original writing, and the small selection of pseudo-literary fictio-tainment that dominates our chain bookstores.” Does that describe the stories they received? We don’t know. And is there ample evidence to support that “everybody” is concerned? The number of those concerned is probably closer to nobody than to everybody.

    It’s apparently no fun being a judge: “…by the start of November, all three short-listing judges started having to give up between 12 and 20 hours every week of their time to reading. Eventually, the volunteer that opened the envelopes and did the initial data entry was swamped and at one point, while keeping the entrants’ names secret to all the judges, SM had to help out with tedious data entry by staring at a spreadsheet through the night.” Perhaps a fresh crop of volunteer readers might have read things differently.

    “No bird has the heart to sing in a thicket of questions,” Rene Char said, nor read in one, no doubt. While we have been struggling in the current reading crisis to identify a common reader, here is evidence of a common writer. How is it possible that the publication these writers are reading received not a single entry that matched the quality of what they publish, or would like to publish? How can the number of writers be growing while the number of readers is declining? Was the quality of writing really the issue, or is there a warrant in the Herald’s justification, an attempt not to devalue as much as revalue? What does the common reader (in this sentence defined as a reader who is not also a writer or a would be writer) want to read? What if next year they get 90,000 submissions; how will they handle that?

    Good is that which suits its purpose. A good story is one that achieves its goals, even if we happen to dislike those goals. We don’t like horror films, but we’ve no doubt there are good ones. We go to Edmund Wilson, speaking of Flaubert and Baudelaire, who “exerted, in dealing with the materials supplied them by their imagination, a rigorous will to refrain; that their work might thus fortify their readers as well as entertain them…” Further, Wilson maintains, “…fine workmanship itself always contains an implicit moral… experimentation is necessary: one must allow a good deal of apparently gratuitous, and even empty or ridiculous work, if one wants to get masterpieces.” And, finally, Wilson: “…they may not be good for anything, but, on the other hand, they may be valuable – one has to wait and see what comes of them, what other writers may get out of them.”  

    Perhaps the Herald should have spent the prize money to publish all 850 stories, thereby letting their readers decide. Or we may leave literature and go into social science, where we will find that a preference for a particular story is the result of class privilege, for taste is not a virtue; it is distilled.

    Edmund Wilson quotes above taken from “Notes on Babbitt and More,” from Edmund Wilson, A Literary Chronicle: 1920-1950, Doubleday Anchor Books.

  • Joyce’s agenbite of books and boots

    The slowly falling Mr. Dedalus, Stephen’s father, gives his daughter Dilly two pennies: “Get a glass of milk for yourself and a bun or a something. I’ll be home shortly” (p. 239). Dilly’s on her own now her mother’s passed, and needs money for food for herself and her siblings still at home. She knows her father’s habits. “Did you get any money?” (p. 237). But a few pages later Dilly surprises Stephen at an outdoor “slanted bookcart.” Stephen recalls a time Dilly’s face had “…glowed as she crouched feeding the fire with broken boots” (243):

    -What have you there? Stephen asked.

    -I bought it from the other cart for a penny, Dilly said, laughing nervously.

    …-Mind Maggy doesn’t pawn it on you. I suppose all my books are gone.

    -Some, Dilly said. We had to.

    Earlier at the bookcart Stephen considered, “I might find here one of my pawned schoolprizes” (p. 242).

    Of this scene Frank Budgen said, “Stephen has a strong sense of family solidarity…But who would save drowning people must first be a good swimmer” (p. 132), forgiving the resourceful Joyce for abandoning his family for a life of books they would have to burn to keep warm. But here’s Dilly, hungry in frayed clothes and broken boots, willing to spend one of but two pennies on a used book.

    One thing’s certain, we won’t keep warm with eBooks. But maybe Budgen’s point was that Stephen was not a good swimmer. (Joyce was afraid of water.) 

    Of books and boots, and their life-span, two “leathern vessels,” a term found in OED:

    [ME. bote, a. OF. bote (mod.F. botte), corresp. to Pr., Sp., Pg. bota, med.L. botta, bota, of uncertain origin. Identified by Diez, Littré, etc. with F. boute (also, in mod.F., botte) butt, cask, leathern vessel; but ‘the phonology of the two words in OF. shows that they are quite distinct’ (P. Meyer). In med.L. also butta ‘butt’ and botta ‘boot’ are never confounded, though bota is frequent as a by-form of both, which has probably misled etymologists.]

  • Henry Miller: more on reading influences and touching again on the reading crisis

    One can almost never go wrong with a New Directions Book. We’ve a stack on the shelves, including, among our favorites, Williams Carlos Williams’s “Selected Poems,” (NDP131); Ferlinghetti’s “A Coney Island of the Mind (NDB74); Pound’s “Selected Poems,” (NDP66); Djuna Barnes’s “Nightwood,” (NDP98); Borges’s “Labyrinths,” (NDP186);  Nathanael West’s “Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust,” (NDP125).

    One NDB we haven’t look at in some time but that came to mind when thinking of reading influences is Henry Miller’s “The Books in My Life,” (NDP280). The subject isn’t books though as much as it is Henry Miller, which is fine with us. He makes this clear early in his preface: “The purpose of this book…is to round out the story of my life. It deals with books as vital experience. It is not a critical study nor does it contain a program for self-education” (pg. 11).

    In other words, a book about books for the common reader? Well, maybe, but Miller leads with a double challenge: “One of the results of this self-examination…is the confirmed belief that one should read less and less, not more and more. I have not read nearly as much as the scholar, the bookworm, or even the ‘well-educated’ man – yet I have undoubtedly read a hundred times more than I should have read for my own good. Only one out of five in America, it is said, are readers of ‘books.’ But even this small number read far too much. Scarcely any one lives wisely or fully” (pg. 11).

    Henry Miller is a talker, a conversationalist, so easy reading, but this book is dated and full of obscure references with signs we may not understand pointing down back roads that look like dead ends. There are funny passages, including, we thought, the very title of Appendix III, a long list of “Friends who supplied me with books,” and we were suddenly reminded that a friend gave us our copy, years ago, with the comment, “It’s notable for how bad it is.”

    Our friend had marked this passage, on page 29, characteristically surprising coming from Henry Miller: “The writer is, of course, the best of all readers, for in writing, or “creating,” as it is called, he is but reading and transcribing the great message of creation which the Creator in his goodness has made manifest to him.” Miller may be the least of common writers, if there is such a thing as a common writer, but he’s a perfect match for Woolf’s common reader. He sways back and forth, moving forward in much the same way that Woolf suggests in her definition of a common reader, without regard for anything other than what seems to suit his own needs.

  • Reading influences

    “He judged on one question: influences. -Who’re your influences?” He is Jimmy Rabbitte, protagonist of Roddy Doyle’s first published book, the first novel in what would become his Barrytown Trilogy, “The Commitments.”

    He’s put an ad in the paper, Jimmy has: “Jimmy spent twenty minutes looking at his ad in Hot Press the next Thursday. He touched the print. (-J. Rabbitte.) He grinned” (p. 20). It’s 1987, or earlier; no tellin’ what Jimmy’d done with a blog had he one – Doyle initially self-published “The Commitments.”

    “When I’m writing I just think there’s only the page and me and nobody else” (Roddy Doyle, interview in Salon, Oct, 1999).

    So there’s no reader, not an audience yet, looking over his shoulder. But sure the music’s on, and all the books you’ve ever read stacked clumsily all around, falling off the bookshelves you’ve built by hand in your mind, and there’s all these voices you’ve heard over the years, rattling around in your head, echoing off the walls, a confusion of some sort, like a ruckus going on outside, only it’s inside, and not only that but the sound’s stuck, stuck like a needle in a vinyl groove going round and round but not getting anywhere, not advancing toward some sort of completion, rest, respite, pause.

    So, who are your influences? But it’s a question to ask yourself. And it’s a question that matters, and must be resolved.     

  • Jazzskin

    Words are sounds, first; then what do we do to them, to the sounds? Jung thought grief gave human voice to sound. This is the meaning of Norman O. Brown’s “The fall is into language” (Love’s Body, p. 256), though it seems equally plausible that joy, close friend to grief, might also be capable of producing a word or two. Dostoevsky contributes to the modern discussion in “Notes from Underground” with his often quoted “Suffering is the sole origin of consciousness.” If so, the first words uttered by conscious man must have been sounds of pain: Ouch! If you prefer cartoons, a caveman accidentally rolling the stone wheel across his big toe. Joyce spelled it:

    The fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonner-ronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!)

    (Finnegans Wake, p. 3).

    Norman O. Brown: “How to be silent. In a dialectical view: silence and speech, these two, are one. Apollonius of Tyana said silence also is a logos. And words do not spoil the silence for those who have ears to hear what is left unsaid” (p. 256). Listen to Ella Fitzgerald scat singing. Instruments reproduce the human voice, first (another reason Cage objected to jazz – and worked with sounds apart from voice). Louis Armstrong thought his trumpet an extension of his voice, and he sings as he plays. What we do to words is similar to what Cage thought we do to sounds in making music (anthropomorphizing sounds we hear in nature). Words give conscious order to sound, allowing for the reproduction of sounds with fidelity, creating self-consciousness through language.

    Here’s something recently dug out that might illustrate in a playful way:

    JAZZSKIN was published in the fall 1973, issue 3, of silent quicksand, a magazine published by students of El Camino College.

  • Jazzcage

    “Music as discourse (jazz) doesn’t work,” John Cage said, in his “DIARY: HOW TO IMPROVE THE WORLD (YOU WILL ONLY MAKE MATTERS WORSE) 1965,” the first text in his collection “A Year From Monday.” “If you’re going to have a discussion, have it and use words” (p. 12). David Revill, in “The Roaring Silence,” his biography of Cage, discusses “the puzzling attitude he [Cage] develops toward jazz” (p. 9). “He [Cage] says simply, ‘I love sounds, and I actually like them more than what we’ve done to them’ (p. 121 – Revill’s source notes don’t indicate where he got this Cage quote, and in a quick skim of my Cage books I’m unable to find it).

    I’ve always found Cage’s “…(jazz) doesn’t work” statement surprising, given how he integrates chance into his structures. Cage often sets up a rigorously defined structure only to let chance determine what comes next. For example, from his preface to “Diary:…” “I used twelve different type faces, letting chance operations determine which face would be used for which statement” (p. 3). Isn’t that jazz?

    I think Cage’s classical training explains his attitude toward jazz. Classical players don’t improvise. Composers improvise, as Bach probably did, but the classical musician has to play the thing as written. Jazz’s frequent use of popular songs as sources for improvisation probably also annoyed Cage, since he was more interested in sound than sentiment.

    Let’s substitute “words” for “sounds” in Cage’s statement that begins “I love sounds”: This gives us “I love words, and I actually like them more than what we’ve done to them.” And we might make the reverse substitution in the opening quote above, which would give us: “If you’re going to have a discussion, have it and use sounds.” Is it possible to enjoy words but not writing or reading? Cage appears to have preferred raw sounds to music that refines those sounds in an attempt to communicate something, even if that communication is an attempt to mimic nature.

    But we are nature, and the guitar sounds like a train coming down the line, and the drummer’s brushes sound like salt water receding over smooth stones. All sounds carry some meaning. Besides, Cage’s “Diary” follows with “(Dialogue is another matter.)” What? Another matter (discussion, music, discourse?) wherein jazz does work?

  • The amateur spirit in writing

    We do not have the New Yorker DVD library (though we do have in the basement a stack of paper copies we regularly prune for mold), but we do have E. B. White’s “Writings from the New Yorker, 1927-1976,” edited by Rebecca M. Dale (HarperPerennial paperback edition published 1991).

    The “Talk of the Town” pieces these days only occasionally reach White’s wit or brevity. He often captures a moment of his own time while gazing into some distance, foretelling. A case in point, his May 11, 1929 piece, where he writes: “’Writing is not an occupation,’ writes Sherwood Anderson. ‘When it becomes an occupation a certain amateur spirit is gone out of it. Who wants to lose that?’ Nobody does, replies this semi-pro, sitting here straining at his typewriter.”

    Yet today, as the reading crisis spreads its tangential wings to include newspapers pruning peripheral departments, some semi-pro and pro writers are forced back into an amateur spirit.

    Where will they go? Continued White: “Nobody does, yet few writers have the courage to buy a country newspaper, or even to quit a city writing job for anything at all. What Mr. Anderson says is pretty true. Some of the best writings of writers, it seems to us, were done before they actually thought of themselves as engaged in producing literature.”

    Or before, in other words, they thought of themselves as real writers at all. One blogs in the hopes the amateur spirit will prevail, painfully aware that blogging also makes it easier, as White later said, “for persons who are not artists and writers to continue the happy pretence” (May 21, 1938).

    But it’s not only to gain even amateur status that we might entertain the doubtful purposes of writing – for self or for others; it’s because even though we know full well we’ll never play right field for the Dodgers, we still enjoy shagging balls in the back-yard; we will still ride a skateboard down the hill, though of course we are no Tony Hawk, as our spouse reminds us, shouting she’s not taking us to emergency when we fall; and though we could never follow “Da Bull” into the big waves, when we’re back in El Porto, we’ll always paddle out for a small one.

    Whatever happens to the pros, this amateur writing spirit hopefully encouraged and evidenced in the best blogging, whether pretence or preface, may enable those who agree that writing is learned while writing, and in no other way, to find a subject, knowing that subjects often reveal themselves only once we’ve made the commitment marked by a few hundred words.

  • Hank Williams sings Huck Finn

    “At the center of liberal education,” Northrop Frye gives us in “Ethical Criticism,” the second essay in “Anatomy of Criticism,” an attempt to create a science of literary theory, “something surely ought to get liberated” (p. 93). So what gets liberated?

    “Poetry can only be made out of other poems; novels out of other novels,” Frye says. “Literature shapes itself, and is not shaped externally: the forms of literature can no more exist outside literature than the forms of sonata and fugue and rondo can exist outside music” (p. 97). The writer is not alone, after all. In fact, “the real difference between the original and the imitative poet is simply that the former is more profoundly imitative” (p. 97).

    Not being alone means belonging to a community. Frye calls this “social aspect” of poetry archetype, by which he means “a typical or recurring image…which connects one poem with another and thereby helps to unify and integrate our literary experience. And as the archetype is the communicable symbol, archetypal criticism is primarily concerned with literature as a social fact and as a mode of communication. By the study of conventions and genres, it attempts to fit poems into the body of poetry as a whole” (p. 99).

    We find a working example of Frye’s subject in “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” a hit song by Hank Williams, written in 1949, and since covered by numerous musicians across the musical spectrum, the original lyrics often amplified, or augmented, (the great jazz guitarist Bill Frisell has recorded instrumental versions on “Bill Frisell, Ron Carter, and Paul Motian”; and “Ghost Town”).

    But what has all this got to do with Huckleberry Finn? In chapter I of Mark Twain’s novel, we find Huck, worn out by the parlor room evening with the widow and Miss Watson, alone in his room, trying “to think of something cheerful, but it warn’t no use. I felt so lonesome I most wished I was dead. The stars was shining, and the leaves rustled in the woods ever so mournful; and I heard an owl, away off, who-whooing about somebody that was dead, and a whippowill and a dog crying about somebody that was going to die, and the wind was trying to whisper something to me and I couldn’t make out what it was, and so it made the cold shivers run over me.” Hank removes Huck’s superstition and softens the tone, but the sentiment remains: “Hear that lonesome whippoorwill.”

    So what’s so liberating? The knowledge that you are not alone, for one thing. We are encouraged by Borges, in his essay “Kafka and his Precursors,” to suggest both that Huck is a precursor to Hank, and that Hank changes our reading of Huck: “…the heterogeneous pieces I have enumerated resemble Kafka; …not all of them resemble each other. This second fact is the more significant. In each of these texts we find Kafka’s idiosyncrasy to a greater or lesser degree, but if Kafka had never written a line, we would not perceive this quality; in other words, it would not exist. The poem ‘Fears and Scruples’ by Browning foretells Kafka’s work, but our reading of Kafka perceptibly sharpens and deflects our reading of the poem. Browning did not read it as we do now. …The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future” (Labyrinths, p. 201).

  • Virginia Woolf’s uncommon reader

    Virginia Woolf was not a common reader, not a common woman, not a common person at all. Yet we like her description of a common reader, defining as it does the utility player-fan, driven by “common sense,” and “uncorrupted by literary prejudices,” and so “differs from the critic and the scholar,” in that “he reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others.” Thus free from the confines of convention, he approaches reading with “affection, laughter, and argument,” and if he is “hasty, inaccurate, and superficial,” that is because he moves on “without caring where he finds it or of what nature it may be so long as it serves his purpose and rounds his structure.”

    Woolf was a common reader within her circle, her community, but her experience does not define a common reader nowadays.

    The discussion brings us now to the downside of reading, the “Martin Eden” experience, the Jack London experience, the blue-collar kid who discovers reading, books, adventures of the vicarious. But he will never feel comfortable in a Bloomsbury circle, made up, after all, of a non-working class. So he tries to drop back into the group waiting for waves at 42nd Street, for he has read, not too much, but too well, as Bloom says of Hamlet’s thinking. Of course, our common reader is no Hamlet, no T. S. Eliot, nor was meant to be, an attendant, perhaps, waiting, as Beckett said, which brings us, “commodius vicus,” to the reading crisis:

         Is there a crisis if new readers are reading not so much as so well?

         Is there a reading crisis among common readers? 

         But who, nowadays or ever, is or was this common reader?

    Woolf, Virginia. The Common Reader. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1925.