The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

Category: Writing

  • Where East Meets West

    For the past week, we’ve been living in a deep wintry freeze, cold north air winds from the east out of the Gorge mixing with rain from the warmer ocean west to form local ice – sticking to the tree branches, the power lines, the streets and sidewalks, your nose if you stick it out. The weather here, in the confluence of two river valleys, the Gorge, and the hilly city pockets, is hard to predict, and the weather folks you turn to when you’re not sure which way the wind blows got it all wrong day after day throughout the week. The great thaw from the west never came. Where east meets west, we lost power, the temperature in the house dropped to 30F, and we lit out for the next county, navigating the icy roads like surfers lost in a snowy desert.

    Our power was miraculously restored in just over 48 hours, a miracle considering the number of trees down and the winds continuing to blow out of the Gorge, bringing in more freezing air. The linemen can’t go up in their buckets if the wind is blowing in the 20mph range, so the lines dangled dangerously about our heads. I wrote about the ice storm on location here. So this post is just a bit of an update to show a few pics of the ice. And to give the hot and cold poetry talk on the blog a rest. It’s still cold, 33F outside as I type this, 66F in the house. We should be able to get out to the store for provisions later today, if any remain – we heard yesterday the delivery trucks have been unable to get anywhere close-in. Winterlude. What was it Dylan sang?

    Winterlude, Winterlude, oh darlin’
    Winterlude by the road tonight
    Tonight there will be no quarrelin’
    Ev’rything is gonna be all right
    Oh, I see by the angel beside me
    That love has a reason to shine
    You’re the one I adore, come over here and give me more
    Then Winterlude, this dude thinks you’re fine

    Bob Dylan, Winterlude, 1970

  • The Poetry Game

    Is poetry a game? A game of solitaire. But inasmuchas one might anticipate an audience, a gnip gnop match. Or on a polo grounds, the sport of kings, but some riders on stallions and others on donkeys. But if poetry is a game, or even if just at times it might be considered a game, in a certain environment or context, so what?

    How does one play poetry? What are the rules of the game? A chase, in pursuit of meaning. Or mere entertainment, in which meaning may or may not play a role. We read that Wittgenstein found game useful in his thoughts on language. From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

    “Language-games are, first, a part of a broader context termed by Wittgenstein a form of life (see below). Secondly, the concept of language-games points at the rule-governed character of language. This does not entail strict and definite systems of rules for each and every language-game, but points to the conventional nature of this sort of human activity. Still, just as we cannot give a final, essential definition of ‘game,’ so we cannot find “what is common to all these activities and what makes them into language or parts of language” (PI 65).”

    Biletzki, Anat and Anat Matar, “Ludwig Wittgenstein”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2023 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2023/entries/wittgenstein/&gt;.

    Is poetry maybe a “language-game”? Looking around for a suitable answer, I found this in the online “Wittgenstein Initiative”: Wittgenstein said,

    “Philosophy should really be written only as one would write poetry.”

    WRITING PHILOSOPHY AS POETRY: LITERARY FORM IN WITTGENSTEIN 7 July 2015 ARTICLES
    by Marjorie Perloff, Stanford

    But reading on, I find this not all that helpful to our opening question (Is poetry a game?). And it didn’t take long to be subsumed online by articles relating to Wittgenstein and our use of words, in poetry or otherwise. But another maybe significantly different translation, by the way, shows Wittgenstein saying,

    “Philosophy ought really to be written only as a form of poetic composition.”

    Ioana Jucan. Date: XML TEI markup by WAB (Rune J. Falch, Heinz W. Krüger, Alois Pichler, Deirdre C.P. Smith) 2011-13. Last change 18.12.2013.
    This page is made available under the Creative Commons General Public License “Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share-Alike”, version 3.0 (CCPL BY-NC-SA)

    Will come back to form, but for now, so I backed out of search mode and returned to my own thoughts, if I can be said to own a thought, which of course is absurd. But to move on.

    But even if we are to satisfactorily say what a game is, it would still be left us to consider a definition for poetry. A search for a definition of poetry of course brings into view a petri dish full of ideas. Then this, again from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

    “Hegel considered a mode of understanding fundamental nature to be more advanced the more that it abstracts from concrete sensuous presentation and the more that it can turn contemplation back onto itself. There is a scale within types of art in this respect; visual art is less advanced than music, which is itself less advanced than poetry (1807 [1979]). While self-conscious Romantic poetry allows us to see our rational self-determining nature as minded beings, it nonetheless remains imperfect as a mode of knowledge of spirit. Philosophy, in its endless capacity for self-conscious reflection, “is a higher mode of presentment” (in Cahn and Meskin 2007, p. 181) and can ultimately supplant art as a mode of knowing the world’s essential structure.”

    Peacocke, Antonia, “Aesthetic Experience”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2023 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2023/entries/aesthetic-experience/&gt;.

    I include form as a rule of poetry. Poetry is first a game of forms. Form still may not be enough to make poetry a game. But to cut to the chase, poetry I claim shares many of the characteristics of a game: competition (for publication, recognition, awards); rules (of form and content, even if self-made and one-off, but historically many rules of form); players and spectators; a field (the page, a stage). But that is all in the game world of entertainment, one might argue – what of the world of art?

    Well, art is the biggest game of all. But again, so what? I’m not using game there as a pejorative. We take it as a given that games are useful, productive, redeeming forms of human experience and expression. But there might be a pejorative sense in some context of using the word game to describe poetry. One cheats, one competes unfairly, engages in gamesmanship, one joins the politics of academia and writes up yet more rules to ensure one’s seat is not taken or shaken, one cancels another often for reasons the critic can’t find jurisdiction over or legal standing for in terms of the writing itself, one joins a group or school of poets or poetry where surely games are played. One questions purpose, occasion, argument, claims. One finds that a poem is an argument, with its statements and claims clothed in metaphor or other hide-and-go-seek maneuvers. And out of bounds we find the critics who act as line judges.

    But what about poetry as art and art as sacred? Poetry with a capital P that stands for Word – with a capital What? Yes, the screed of the scrawl. Of course, any game can be perverted, which is why amateur games may be preferable to professional games, usually better. To play for financial gain or fame sometimes puts a burden on the player to maintain the integrity of the game. Betting and lotteries bring in another round of running about where most folks lose. The worse for wear is when pretensions creep onto the field, or when one pretends to gain access to the field. And of course one can always be ejected from the game, or kicked off the team, sent back to the minors. The values of poetry change from time to time.

    And the question arises, if poetry is a game, what of the other genres: fiction, memoir, the essay. Just earlier tonight, watching Walter Matthau with Glenda Jackson in the film “Hopscotch” (1980), and Matthau’s character sits down to write a book. His memoirs, he tells Jackson. He says he’s going to tell the truth. Oh, she replies, fiction. Why do we so often equate poetry with truth? Aren’t poets as capable of lying (and pretension) as the rest of us? Of playing games in that pejorative sense? And in the positive sense of game I’ve tried to propose above, borrowing in part from Wittgenstein, the poet who can’t play the game of poetry won’t be a winning poet.

  • Lugubrious Fog

    Lugubrious etymologically descends from the dinosaurs in “Allegro Non Troppo” (1976) when the great reptilian gargantuans gentle and armored alike move south ahead of the ice and melt into tar. In Bach fugue file they march.

    I was sitting in bed four nights ago typing this, under a pile of covers, plus fully clothed, wearing two pairs of pants, three shirts, a sweater, a vest, a wool watch cap, and a pair of wool socks. It was 12 degrees Fahrenheit outside, windchill below zero. The house had lost power eight hours ago, years ago, the vicious east winds having blown down enough trees around town to put mist local folks in a freezer. But I gave up the typing in the cold. It was now 30 degrees inside the house. I pulled my hands inside the covers like a turtle for the long cold night and we decamped the wood igloo the next morning moving happily south to a warm house full of warm children.

    Frost’s promises to keep keep us sustained, moving, to keep warm. Yes, “The woods are lovely, dark and deep,” but what melancholy invites us in? Our horse still questions why we might stop here. The museums are also lovely, though well lit, still dark and deep, security guards meandering the lost empty halls, the paintings wired, the statues as still and as cold as ice sculptures, and they don’t allow horses in. Anyway, we prefer trees wandering in the wind full of birds and squirrels and lost kites and balls and flying saucers and climbing kids.

    Earlier that afternoon, I was in the backyard, preparing a place for Zoe, when I heard a rushing sound, a falling dinosaur come to roost, and heard the voice of the tall Sauroposeidon, a wind and wood splintering crash and crush, and looked north to my neighbor’s backyard to see the 100 foot 100-year-old east Pine limbs still shaking off the ice and snow where it had come to rest breaking through the ridge beam, the tree’s upper girth shattering off and coming to rest in the front yard.

    The frightfully freezing cold day moves slowly lugubriously on and we learn that pine tree but one of hundreds of trees falling all about town in the east wind in soaked soils across power lines, cars, streets, houses, parks and lots.

    Back home now, five days on, power restored, but morning after ice storm moving across last night, but still now, windless, half inch of ice coating tree limbs, cars, street, wires, the downed dinosaur leaning across the roof next door. Fog. The dickens of a cold fog. But should we lose power again the air is at least warmed up some, to just below freezing outside.

    A lugubrious fog has settled in, sifting down through the firs, down the street, over the houses and yards dotting the rotting old volcano.

  • Notes on Christian Wiman’s “Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair”

    Wiman’s title comes from an Emily Dickinson poem, about a snake, “A narrow Fellow in the Grass” (1096). Diabolic, symbolic, and fearful (particularly for those with no fear of spiders), snakes glide through the grasses of Wiman’s prose. Self-deprecating, Wiman attempts to hide his ego in the grass of selected poems (his own and by others), copious quotes, anecdotes and memoir, and essays. He begins with a dedication based on “a whole new naivete,” that one might profess to know more having eaten the fruit of the tree of poetry. (“Zero at the Bone” is also, unfortunately, the title of a true thriller. I’ve not read that one, but it also sounds like it deals in despair.) The Zero in Wiman’s title suggests the silence of God. Shame figures throughout, beginning with an epigraph, a quote from Wordsworth: “…to my shame I speak.” The book begins and ends on Zero, the snake swallowing its tail, having shed skin over the fifty entries. “I have no idea what this book will be,” Wiman says in the opening entry, titled “Zero.” Various themes will interweave throughout the book. It is a quilt being sewn, a mosaic, or menagerie. It would have made an interesting blog. The prose does growl along though, as he warns us in the opening “Zero”: “And what, pray tell, is the source of this slowly rousing growl?” That we will discover.

    For readers looking to assuage their own despair, this is probably not the book. It’s not a self-help book. It’s not a bromide. It provides few closed answers and not much good news. Wiman doesn’t appear to believe in Happiness. In this, of course, he’s not alone. Still, to say “One doesn’t follow God in hope of happiness,” hardly seems to go on the offensive against despair. And why shouldn’t one hope for happiness? Why should we not be happy? The opposite of despair is not happiness, but awe, Wiman suggests. There is no panacea. Depression is here to stay. But we can still be awed.

    In entry 1, Wiman mentions a night when his daughter could not sleep. Every time she closed her eyes she had unwanted thoughts. Wiman suggests “she pray to God.” Seriously? The idea of something “erases what it asserts” appears again and again, like “comfort and anguish.” One begets the other: we all need comfort who are anguished, and if we are not tormented, we feel not comfort. There’s this constant dichotomy at work. No permanence save good and evil, the parents of despair. Build it up to take it apart. The kids go to a daycare, “so my wife and I could write.” Maybe writers should not have kids, if that’s how it is. But why can’t a good writer write with the kids around? Joyce did. No art equals no god, no perfection. But if god is so perfect, why the mess? The question of religion, but is faith an answer? This is what comes of taking poetry too seriously.

    In entry 2, we find Wallace Stevens, “Domination of Black,” a poem about, I thought, camping out? Wiman says he doesn’t know what it means, but then goes on to say what it means, erasing what it asserts in so doing, and says it’s about death. Still, with Stevens in the campsite, this is a good entry: “Unreal things have a reality of their own, in poetry as elsewhere.” That is Stevens explaining the human imagination. How to live free from God, not just free from strictures.

    Entry 3 is a single poem, ending “unraptured back to man.”

    In Entry 4 we find Kandinsky again, mentioned with his wife in Entry 2. More quotes, out of context like threads, making the quilt, or is it a jigsaw puzzle, these pieces, not visions. Fragments. What’s the point, if you want to talk about points, of quotes out of context? Wiman’s audience may in large part be made up of divinity students whose lot it will presumably be to balance out angst and joy.

    Dostoyevski fans might remember his line, “Suffering is the sole origin of consciousness.” I kept waiting for Wiman to quote it. But why not of joy? Why can’t joy be an origin of consciousness? Remember, we’re making a quilt here. “One grows so tired, in American public life, of the certitudes and platitudes, the megaphone mouths and stadium praise, influencers and effluencers and the whole tsunami of slop that comes pouring into our lives like toxic sludge.” No kidding, and we’re only on page 30. Then there’s the dinner party honoring Lucille Clifton. Poetry never had it so good. But why does Wiman have to criticize e. e. cummings in his effort to praise Clifton, comparing their use of small case i instead of I? idk. And why take it out on the faces of the waiters? What might be interesting is how the waiters might have described the faces of the poets. For that, we’d need Samuel Beckett, but he’s been dismissed as a trap for minor writers. And there it is, the hierarchy of the cannon, with Dodo and Didi at the bottom of the heap, self-published but nevertheless awaiting instructions from the top.

    And Nietsche? Why not Kirkegaard, Augustine, or Buckminster Fuller – whose treatment of the Our Father prayer is instructive and entertaining and most certainly against despair. But Nietsche is imminently quotable, and Wiman is given to quotes. The quilt makes for a hefty syllabus.

    The poet’s dog. The Holocaust. The bullet we all feel lodged somewhere in the skin muscle of our soul. Christ walks in us. A sermon. Sometimes he walks right through us. Doesn’t stay long.

    It’s a death quilt. Not sorrow. Sorrow is not at zero nor at the bone. Sorrow remains above freezing. Sorrow is a song that doesn’t get sung. Some people can’t sing. A poem says, “Tragedy and Christianity are incommensurable,” in entry 7, then, we get, “The story of Jesus is, in an inescapable sense, a tragedy.” I remember the “Laughing Jesus” image appearing in the church we attended at the time. But Wiman says, “Suffering and death, at some point, will be all that we know.” How does one move against that?

    A poem, “a lullaby of bone,” and “dawn a scald of joy.” Sounds like despair against which nothing can hold back. Where’s the against here?

    Another poem. No comment. Throughout the book, single poems, collections of poems, like posters stapled to a telephone pole advertising little concert events already passed. And comes Ted Hughes, of all poets, singing of joy. Sort of. “Joy! Help!” The Beatles sang it better. Ah, and here’s Kirkegaard: “What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music.” And I’d like to read more of Norman MacCraig, who says: “I am a happy man…and nearly all the poems I write are in fact praising things.” Entries of quotes and poems. Remember, we’re making a quilt.

    So he disses Samuel Beckett. But Beckett was a happy man. A humanistic writer, a kind man. But who are the “minor talents” Wiman refers to in his diss of Beckett? Bloggers? “This is a toy despair. It’s entertaining, brilliant at times, but it cannot help me.” Wiman explains the meaning of “against” in the title: “By ‘against’ in the subtitle of this book I don’t mean to imply a ‘position.’” A leaning, then. Shoulder against the wheel.

    Yet another poem. No comment.

    Dichotomy. There are two kinds of writers, we’re told. Yes, minor and major. Like guitar chords. Diminished and augmented. Wiman seems unforgiving about Virginia Woolf. Why even mention her if you can’t say something nice? He doesn’t mention her depression, her womanhood, the war raging. For someone who really is suffering from despair, as Virginia obviously was, this book by Wiman won’t be helpful. It might even make matters worse, as his response to Woolf’s suicide makes clear: “A prison gets to be a friend.” Wiman says she “embraced the oblivion that she had spent a lifetime creating out of, and in spite of, and against.” That is a complete misreading of everything. And mean-spirited to boot.

    Wiman says, “Me, I can’t conceive of a god who can’t laugh.” Well, let us hear some laughter, then.

    Another poem. Shooting pool. More despair. Haven’t we enough?

    At the gym. This is a kind of Roland Barthes entry, or a topic Barthes would have used, like his American wrestling piece. “I’ve never been in a gym I didn’t like,” Wiman says. I’ve never been in one I did like. The smell of sweaty socks. Exercise going on but apart from any obvious need, like digging a ditch to lay a sewer line. Honest work. Of course one can be assigned physical therapy, and a gym comes in handy for that. But we should get outside for our exercise, and work for a living. But I can easily see why a writer might need a gym. Get away from the solo desk and into some camaraderie, even if you don’t actually meet or talk to anyone. Maybe even hire a coach, a trainer. But Rocky’s raw eggs? Really? And then we get some humor, finally, or at least some talk about humor. We missed a good chance with the Beckett stuff – well, that was just a footnote, anyway. But now, Wiman showers us after the gym with: “It [humor] can have existential reach and significance, can imply a world in which the comic, not the tragic, is ultimate.” This entry ends, by the way, with a footnote referencing Langston Hughes, a little quote from a letter he wrote. Fine, but Langston should have an entry all his own.

    And now we’re back to snakes again. “Why does one create?” Wiman’s italics, not mine. Some to sound important. And of course the snake anecdote brings us round “commodious vicus” to Adam and Eve, story which with the help of Larkin, Wiman conflates with sex, not knowledge of good and evil. “Then, friend…” First, don’t call me friend. I’m your reader. It’s Eve creates consciousness. Hmm. And then God is the snake. What version is Wiman reading from? And then comes the Weil paradox. Destruction of the I. Hard to understand I guess for a poet, whose sole purpose is the creation of the I. And then it’s sustenance. And what of the others? If I drink it to death? And then comes the snake in the mouth. “There is nowhere to stand and see, nowhere to escape the stink of being human.” One must love that stink as Jesus did. And then this absurd comment: “Poetry is the only sanity.” Really? Then why does so much of it sound so crazy?

    So, an Ars Poetica follows. “If I could let go / If I could know what there is to let go / If I could chance the night’s improvidence / and be the being this hard mercy means.” The work song.

    Hearing music is better than poetry, sans words. Save the sound of a poem’s words.

    More circularity. “The knowledge of love and the knowledge of death are the same, and neither is knowledge.” Is Wiman just trying to sound important here? Like a philosopher might? What indeed is the point? Yes, back on page 3: “To write a book against despair implies an intimate acquaintance with the condition. Otherwise what would be the point?”

    And now more quotes. Bloggishness.

    A six-line poem.

    Loneliness and its solution.

    William Bronk, at the expense of Wallace Stevens. Potato chips. Betcha can’t write one. Aphorisms, like this one from page 118: “Nothing is worth saying, nothing is worth doing except as a foil for the waves of silence to break against.” Yes, and “our ears are now in perfect condition,” John Cage said in his manifesto for music. As for Bronk, metaphor is everything and nothing, since it can point to what is, or what might be, but can never actually be that person, place, or thing. Buckminster Fuller: “I seem to be a verb.” That is not found in Wiman. Instead, we get, via Bronk: “I deal with despair because I feel despair. Most people feel despair but they are not prepared to deal with it except pretend that it’s not there. I think it’s there metaphysically, that it is not a matter of an individual predicament. It’s in the nature of reality and not to be denied.” Another sadist who wants people to think for a living. Isn’t it better to work for a living? “…a man lashed to a mast in his own living room,” is Wiman’s final statement on Bronk.

    Barely bearable. Yes, because there is no “ugly” landscape. It’s all tremendous and awe full. That is the nature of Beckett’s landscapes. Only the human remains.

    Pascal – the dedication to Wiman’s book is now explained, “a whole new naivete,” explained or illuminated.

    Another poem.

    Etheridge Knight. What poetry maybe can do is what “Jesus promises.”

    Poem. “toot” (ish) footed.

    Why is “common reader” in quote marks? Contradictions. Contraindications. Don’t mix this poetry with… Rabbits. Hot rats. “Poetry makes nothing happen.” Yes, precisely. “In the beginning…was the word.” Was. What now? Out of nothing something happened. But why this something? Why not some other happier circumstance? Burning worlds.

    Another poem.

    Out of “this tumbleweed nowhere” now here. And ends in laughter, really is, this entry, “against despair.” This is the autobiographical piece, the memoir, writing worth the price of admission. The memoir piece where Wiman describes his father and sister living like Becket characters trapped in a Southern Gothic play, is the heart of the quilt. Wiman has already tried to dismiss Faulkner’s characters, yet here they are, living a Flannery O’Connor dream. Here Wiman is at his best when it comes to the writing. It’s an American quilt.

    Another poem: hailstorm.

    “I am tired of the word ‘despair,’” Wiman says on page 170. No kidding. Me too. And we three? Remember the speaker is not necessarily the author. We might keep that in mind when we’re hearing voices.

    Another poem. More rats.

    Writing in the sand. Could he write? “Against closure.”

    “Who ever anywhere will read these written words” (Joyce).

    Poem. Hamburger.

    Assumptions and predispositions – toward despair? “Ouroboros.” Our boring into belief. Burrowing? Borrowing from?

    All quotes. “Faith becomes an instrument.” A tool? A piano stool?

    Sermon calling. “Was it your own idea or were you poorly advised?” Funny. Either or. “Who do you say I am?

    25 more quotes. Quip qwop gnip gnop.

    Poem.

    Traces. A play. “What’s the point, then…” Yes, of reading anything at all, never mind writing. What’s the point of worrying over points?

    Entropy. Loss of the big. Who cares about “poise?” At a time like this? At anytime. Well, we’ve got to attend to the niceties. We aren’t in our own living room. And what of the obsessive and the compulsive and the disorders? Will Jesus cure us of those too?

    A poem about pain.

    10 more quotes. What’s the point? Like Melville’s “Moby Dick.” He wanted to write a big book.

    A four-line poem on unbelief?

    A found poem, created by “delineating” a piece of prose. Ok. Mentions Meister Eckhart.

    One’s personal Jesus. Love – what is it? A miracle. Agape. Mouth open. Prayer for, as opposed to prayer against. The universe more strange than we can even ever imagine. In which Wiman reconciles science (physics) with the spirit. Fragments of a big bang. Of course, since it was the only bang, how would one know if it was big or small? Doesn’t matter.

    Wiman makes clear to be against despair is not necessarily to be for joy. His book is not a 7 habits of highly joyful people. But why can’t joy create consciousness as easily as despair? Is humanity an experiment in anhedonia?

    “…want want.” Not, not. Knotty. “Woman With Tomato,” poem.

    Poem. Family. “buoys”

    Cancer and television. “Why must my mind…” I get that. “I’m not chipper…” And the children of war? Children and cancer in the war zones. Wiman teaches a class called “Suffering.” He’s had an overdose of it. But is there another class he might teach called “Joy”? But Wiman says suffering and joy are alike. It’s the same class, turns out. The cancer chair. And Eli Whitney. Job (The Book of) and poetry. Values. Joy over despair. “Of course, of course, of course.” This renders a lot of comments – put your hands down. “One considers the meaning of…” (I’m on page 277 if you want to follow along – in Entry 49.) Not quite true, otherwise placid, readers of this book may attest.

    Comes to a sum, page 278. “…feeds in blood” (281).

    And a final poem: Bewitched, bothered, and bewildered.

    Coda: Zero again. Nothing, nothing.

    Not a book for someone trying to stare down despair. There’s the personal, individual kind of suffering, the stuff of sitting in the cancer chair. There’s the universal, general kind of suffering – “the sole (soul) origin of consciousness.” And there’s the week work and war and worry that wears most of us weary.

  • Out of Time

    What will we do with Live at 5 in the new year? The shows began at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic and at their peak featured a different host player going live most nights of the week, sharing guitar, songs, stories, and readings (live via the Instagram video venue) to an audience of similarly homebound family and friends of family. The shows ran evenings for about an hour starting at 5. The hosts included, on a rotating schedule, myself, my brothers, a nephew, and over time a few guest hosts and visitors – more family and friends. Shows were home-staged from Portland, Salem, Healdsburg, Ione, Drytown, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia. The format was loose and forgiving. Audience clicked on, paused, maybe stayed for the whole show, as people do passing buskers on a sidewalk, and through the Instagram feed anyone tuned in could place comments for the performer and the rest of the audience to read, and many an audience-controlled conversation took off. (Unfortunately, Instagram does not save those conversations – the comments disappear even if the host saves the video to their Instagram feed.) The Live at 5 shows diminished through 2022, timing out as the voluntary pandemic isolations began to lift.

    I played guitar in a neighborhood jazz band for the last couple of years. It was fun, I met some new folks, and learned more about music and the guitar – particularly about playing “in the pocket,” a term that means playing in time, in sync with the other musicians, a skill I’ve never satisfactorily mastered. You might think jazz would be more forgiving, but no. I left the band to concentrate on gypsy jazz guitar, renewing my subscription to Robin Nolan’s “Gypsy Jazz Club,” which includes players from all around the world. One of the features of the club is a “Sunday Club Zoom Hangout” – 8 in the morning my time, but I manage to wake up in time most Sundays, for a Gypsy djass reveille. For the most part, the Hangout hour is devoted to live, short performances by club members.

    “Step in time, step in time
    Step in time, step in time
    Never need a reason, never need a rhyme
    Step in time, we step in time”

    from the song “Step in Time,” lyrics by The Sherman Brothers, in “Mary Poppins,” 1964.

    Time waits for nothing, to begin, “to boldy go where no man [which is to say, everyone] has gone before,” pen in hand, splitting infinitives out of time, rubato, robber of time:

    “For three years, out of key with his time,
    He strove to resuscitate the dead art
    Of poetry; to maintain ‘the sublime’
    In the old sense. Wrong from the start—”

    from “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” [Part I], Ezra Pound, 1920.

    Anyway, the question I’m entertaining now is whether or not to try to resuscitate an ongoing Live at 5 show. The need for homebound, not to mention amateur, entertainment may have passed for the time being. Still, there developed a core group of loyal listeners, not enough to fill Shea Stadium, or the Ash Grove, for that matter, of course, but would even those few return for a new season? It’s dinner hour, kids are back in school, the work-at-home movement is weakening, and pizza parlors, pubs, and wine bars have reopened, many featuring live entertainment. And the movies are back up and running. But some of us have emerged from the pandemic isolation years eschewing the old forms. We don’t go out anymore. We are aging. We are stepping out of time. We could fill a living room.

    Most of the Live at 5 shows were improvisational, maybe the host wrote down a few notes before going live with some intro comments, checking in with the audience, a few songs, some outro comments. Audience requests were popular. The videos remain on their host’s Instagram, where saved, complete with mistakes and random rambles, unedited. I don’t want to overstate, but I think the shows in the various locales were looked forward to and enjoyed. Where they were not joined live, Instagram followers caught up later.

    My brother Charles, at the height of the show’s exceptional ratings, had some shirts made:

    By the way, none of this post is to espouse Instagram as a preferred tool. But that’s a topic for another post altogether.

    I’m now picturing a Live at 5 Never Ending Tour, maybe with a reading list for the audience to keep in tune:

    John Cage’s “Silence”
    Bob Dylan: “The Philosophy of Modern Song”
    Dunstan Prial: “The Producer – John Hammond and the Soul of American Music”
    Michael Dregni: “Django – The Life and Music of a Gypsy Legend”
    Greil Marcus: “Mystery Train”
    “The Real Frank Zappa Book”: Frank Zappa with Peter Occhiogrosso
    Alex Ross: “The Rest is Noise”
    Robin D. G. Kelley: “Thelonious Monk – The Life and Times of An American Original”

    But you see how easy it is to get carried away.

    Closing this post with a quote from John Cage, “written in response to a request for a manifesto on music, 1952”:

    instantaneous       and unpredictable

    nothing is accomplished by writing a piece of music
       "  "    "    " hearing "  "  "  "
       "  "    "    " playing "  "  "  "

    our ears are now in excellent condition
    xii/Silence, John Cage, Wesleyan University Press, 1961 (paperback 1973), reformatted somewhat here to fit block.

    Note: This is a Happy Birthday! post for Matt Mullenweg.

  • Another Year from Monday

    Sometimes it seems a step backward is the way to go, but I’m not sure painting over yesterday’s canvas is movement forward or reverse. But why think in these lineal terms to begin with? In spite of tidal waves of news pouring in from every mode, it seems keeping informed about what’s going on is ongoingly increasingly difficult. At the same time, as John Cage said in his essay on Jasper Johns, “Why does the information that someone has done something affect the judgment of another? Why cannot someone who is looking at something do his own work of looking?”

    Today, later this evening, to be more precise, is the solstice. If all goes as planned, the days will begin to grow longer again. There’s no keeping still, even if forward and backward amount to the same thing. In fact, I read just last night, the sun has already been going down later in the day in these environs, but the sun has still been coming up a bit later each day, and will continue to do so for some time yet, despite the solstice. So the moment, the epiphanic slice, the exact time of the solstice, when you feel the bump at the top of the amusement ride just before the reverse tilt comes true, you probably won’t feel.

    Nevertheless, we celebrate the solstice, for reasons old and new, and take the opportunity to consider what new lectures and writings, poems and songs, essays and cartoons we might make up between now and the coming spring equinox, which is planned for Tuesday, March 19th (Saint Joseph’s Day, if you’re keeping track of that too). New ways of measuring time are always being considered. But if you adopt a new calendar, you’ll have to then come up with a proleptic view. So we might anticipate objections before they’re even brought up. Remarks.

    The proportion of ideas might be considered important. If an idea is too big, or too small. To warrant further development. I thought I might try some reconnections, might even write a few letters, though my initial attempts at this, very much no doubt excited by the solstice, have met with instant failures to communicate. The art of the steel sculpture. Then again, I’ve never been much of a letter writer, not like the folks in the old days who might spend half the day reading mail and the other half answering mail. Pastime. Mail which had taken days or even weeks to arrive during which time rendered moot much of its news, feelings, ideas.

    Speaking of letter mail, the kind written on paper and requiring a postage stamp, we get very little here these days. Even junk mail seems to have diminished. We’ve received two Christmas cards, both kept on prominent display. Of course, one must send mail to receive mail; not always, but usually. As for blog exchange, comments are problematic. They aren’t really letters in reply, and often say more about the commenter than what’s being commented on. The art of the quip, the comeback, the rejoinder, retort, riposte. But that’s the cynic in me coming out. Get back! Get back! The blog, “The Coming of the Toads,” turns 16 this month. I’m not even sure what a blog is anymore.

    The most effective blogs (or whatever they might be called) seem those dedicated to a single purpose: photography (and photos about something specific – e.g. birds, architecture, surfing), politics, poetry, how to, music, art, opinion, travel. But the personal essay seems the most resilient form of writing (personal essay as illustrated, for example, in Philip Lopate’s anthology “The Art of the Personal Essay.”) I’m not sure where the idea of a pic necessary to accompany every piece of blog post writing ever came from. The Header, I guess. In case you’ve not noticed, The Toads has for some time now sported a minimalist attitude illustrated by a mostly blank white page dotted with black text – might be one way to describe the setup. This allows for the least distraction for both reader and writer. Indeed, blog posts past, I spent more time coming up with an appropriate pic than I did on the writing. Back when the blog began, most readers read on a computer screen. The display of any post is now changed by format depending on what kind of device the reader’s using: phone, tablet, computer – so what you see is not always what the reader gets or what the writer might have intended (a problem which of course is not new to any kind of writing).

    Anyway, I’d like to take this opportunity to restate a few of the underlying interests of the writing here. It’s original, without recourse, it must now apparently be officially stated, to any borrowing from an Artificial Intelligence (AI). That includes all the essays and pics, cartoons and poems, songs, unless of course specifically quoted and cited yada yada yada. That’s not to say influences won’t be discerned: John Cage, Marshall McLuhan, Buckminster Fuller, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, the Beats, Guitar and Music in all its forms but increasingly Gypsy Jazz guitar – to name a few.

    But back to the solstice! Happy Solstice to all of you writers and readers. Please feel free to leave a comment if you still have time.

  • On the Chicken and the Egg

    An old friend I’d not heard from for some time recently wrote to say she was sitting on something big. Apparently, Amazon would provide the answer. She had placed an order for a chicken and an egg.

    She was conducting an experiment, and, handled correctly, she wrote, she would not be surprised at an eventual Nobel nomination.

    It took a bit for me to figure out where she might go with her hypothesis formulation, for there didn’t seem to be a prediction one way or the other. Subsequent emails clarified, but, alas, the experiment ran awry, as must often be the case, the non-scientist can only speculate, happens all the time.

    The experiment seemed cartoonishly simple: place the order, wait and see, and record the results. Meantime, I wrote back to tell her she might have easily bought a dozen chickens and fifty eggs on her next trip to Costco. No, no, no, she said, I didn’t get it.

    In any case, the first signs of the experiment going amiss came with the delivery alerts, an email for each stage of the order, shipping, and delivery: a thread of emails for the chicken, another thread for the egg. There was tracking to be done. A few days passed. Still no chicken, nor egg.

    End of the line emails suggested a fox had got the chicken, a crow the egg. It came as no surprise that the email delivery updates, the so-called alerts, included little detail. Ignoring this, she argued for spontaneous singularity – the chicken might have come with the egg, appearing, as Amazon deliveries often apparently do, from out of nowhere. Or maybe the chicken and egg weren’t really, in actuality, separate entities, so the question of which came first was null out of the gate. Same box. Or maybe you stick the egg into a chicken like you would a battery into a toy. Would the egg come enveloped in bubble wrap?

    I might mention that one of my own observations is that often people suffer from a surplus of thought. This leads to an imbalance between the mind and body and may make simple and clear communication with others difficult. Exercise is the solution. I mentioned to my friend that Plutarch and Aristotle before him – they both a long time ago satisfied the question of the chicken or the egg. But it’s not as simple as what came first, the very concept of first being itself subject to argument. But Aristotle said, “In our discussion of substance everything which is generated is generated from something and by something; and by something formally identical with itself.” Yes, that’s fine, returned my chicken and egg Nobel-bound interlocutor, but what substance a posteriori is he talking about?

    A what?

  • Notes on “How to Know a Person” by David Brooks

    David Brooks’s latest book, “How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen,” in the tradition of how-to books, suggests a panacea – it’s about how to cure social ills caused by failures toward wisdom, wisdom being the ability to know and see others. Of course everyone knows and sees others. But deeply is a metaphor that Brooks uses to mean wisely. This is where the wise guy gets wise and sheds the skin of the old self. Brooks suggests if one examines one’s life, as Socrates explained is the ticket to a life worth living, a good place to start is to examine the life of someone else. To know oneself means to cut through the fog of one’s birth situation and predicament, and, in the existential meaning of existence precedes essence, define for oneself what one’s existence amounts to, while simultaneously to know oneself means to understand the limitations and privileges handed down by the many hands of one’s cultural birth and upbringing and accept that view as true and unassailable. The ability to handle this apparent contradiction is necessary if one wants to be wise. The symbiotic relationship between one’s self and others is necessary for those who would wise up. You can’t be wise alone. You can’t know yourself without knowing another, and you can’t know another without knowing yourself.

    The Brooks book is a compilation of research in the fields of biography, psychology, philosophy, sociology, as well as neuroscience and field work, with ample anecdotal evidence and life experience examples that add support for claims and provide for reading enjoyment. There are seeming contradictions. Brooks eschews stereotypes, for example, but spends significant time categorizing personality types and other shorthand ways of talking about and seeing people. But at the same time he discards old ways of thinking and suggests better ways to experience one’s self and others. The naming of others and things is problematic. For example, we call a person an extrovert or introvert. What does this tell us about that person? There is a chapter titled “How Not to See a Person.” Brooks introduces new terms: Illuminator and accompaniment. He suggests there are wrong questions to ask – not, for example, what do you do (for a living), but, “What crossroads are you at?” Brooks acknowledges discouragement, but his book is positive and optimistic. He wants to be an illuminator, one who is wise, who knows others, sees and is seen. The book is not all that hard to understand. The challenge is to grow away from either the torment of self-doubt, of self-criticism, or the curmudgeonly habit of naming people to put them in their place, of holding people to rules that you yourself are not required to follow. Are you at peace or have you regrets that make you despair?

    “Despair involves bitterness, ruminating over past mistakes, feeling unproductive. People often evade and externalize their regret. They become mad at the world, intent on displacing their disappointment about themselves into anger about how everything is going to hell.”

    207

    Brooks distinguishes between smart and wise. And what is wisdom?

    “Wisdom at this stage of life [at the crossroads of peace, integrity, and despair] is the ability to see the connections between things. It’s the ability to hold opposite truths – contradictions and paradoxes – in the mind at the same time, without wrestling to impose some linear order. It’s the ability to see things from multiple perspectives.”

    207

    The wise don’t impose or regulate and tell you what to do. They listen. They are experts at listening:

    “Wisdom isn’t knowing about physics or geography. Wisdom is knowing about people. Wisdom is the ability to see deeply into who people are and how they should move in the complex situations of life. That’s the great gift illuminators share with those around them.”

    248

    There are identities we create, names we name ourselves, and narratives we stick to (or revise, as circumstances evolve), even as the plots don’t make any sense, one event not rationally leading to the next, like a walk through a circus. Like clowns, we “prepare a face to meet the faces,” as Eliot’s Prufrock said. Whereas, we might say simply, as Brooks summarizes:

    “I had some early blessing. I saw the suffering of others. I realized my moral purpose. I endured periods of suffering. I grew from my pain. I’m looking toward a beautiful future. If you’re talking with an American and you want to get a sense of who they are, find out if their life story falls into this pattern, and if not, why not.”

    223

    Or we could sing a simple song. This is not in the Brooks book; I just thought it might be a fun way to end these notes:

    “Getting to know you,
    Getting to feel free and easy
    When I am with you,
    Getting to know what to say

    Haven’t you noticed
    Suddenly I’m bright and breezy?
    Because of all the beautiful and new
    Things I’m learning about you
    Day by day.”

    “Getting to Know You” is a song from the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The King and I (1951). The song itself is “free and easy” and “bright and breezy.” That there is an underlying irony in the history behind the play it’s from may or may not say something about getting to know people:

    “In 1861, Mongkut wrote to his Singapore agent, Tan Kim Ching, asking him to find a British lady to be governess to the royal children. At the time, the British community in Singapore was small, and the choice fell on a recent arrival there, Anna Leonowens (1831–1915), who was running a small nursery school in the colony. Leonowens was the Anglo-Indian daughter of an Indian Army soldier and the widow of Thomas Owens, a clerk and hotel keeper. She had arrived in Singapore two years previously, claiming to be the genteel widow of an officer and explaining her dark complexion by stating that she was Welsh by birth. Her deception was not detected until long after her death, and had still not come to light when The King and I was written.”

    Wikipedia, The King and I, Retrieved 11 Nov 23
    Persons

  • The Psychology of Leaves

    We got a weekend leave from the fort and the five of us squeezed into Private Olivegreen’s brown bug and bugged out for the nearest big city, about 80 miles away: population 280,000. We were trainees in an occupational specialty school: MOS 63B20 – Wheeled and Track Vehicle Mechanic. There wasn’t much to do off hours around the fort, and with weekend leave you escaped extra details, kitchen police, or the bad boredom of the Post Exchange and its watery 3.2 beer. There was no movie theatre, no library, no gym, no swimming pool. There were no girls. The barracks were large two-story open wood walls and waxed linoleum floors and the latrines were not for holding privy. I was the only teenager still of the five. The others had already finished college before being inducted, and they treated me like a kid brother. In the small town just outside the fort there was one bar with one pool table. I went there one night with Mississippi, the hustler from Alabama, who cleaned up on a few locals. The guys from the southern states were run-on talkers with long drawn out tales and jokes told like we were not in the middle of hysterical winter. I was the only surfer of the five. In our Basic Combat Training weeks they had been somewhat envious of the ease with which I completed the calisthenics and confidence courses. We were all cut on the same orders, Basic through the AIT (Advanced Individual Training) schools, and presumably beyond (rumor said stay in schools as long as you could), and we hung loosely together throughout.

    The weekend leave plan drafted by Ward was to land at the University downtown and stay at his fraternity’s house nearby off campus. But the house folks weren’t comfortably receptive to five GI Joes invading their space, and on top of that the individual rooms were taken and the common area wasn’t very big and the facilities were sparse. It was just a house, not a mansion. So we canned the frat house idea and got a motel room. The Army paid you in cash monthly. We had no credit cards and anyway there were no ATM machines, no card swipe machines. Maybe a couple of the guys had bank accounts somewhere. I did not. This was an era prior to cell phones, personal computers, social media. Radio and TV – that was it. And mail call.

    The motel room had two double beds. It was quickly decided who would sleep where and I got the floor. We got pizza somewhere, and we then broke up and went out on the town, and Hunter and I hitchhiked our way up and down the local bright lights big city dubious drag strip, drifting and delving into dive bars where I might or might not have been asked for ID for a glass of beer. At some point Hunter and I got separated. Some time later I found myself in the backseat of a car full of high locals cruising one of the outlying highways. I got hit with a jolt of paranoia and told them to pull over and let me out. They were incredulous, we were now miles outside of town, going where there seemed no inkling, and they didn’t want to just let me out on the side of the road, but I insisted. They pulled over and I hopped out and they drove off laughing and yelling. The road was empty. I jogged along the shoulder back into the big city, illuminated on the highway every few hundred yards or so by the overhanging streetlamps.

    I made my way back to the motel. It was now very late, or very early. I knocked on the motel room door. I hadn’t been given a key. No one answered my knock. Olivegreen’s VW was in the parking lot. I knocked and knocked but no one opened the door. The motel was two linear stories, doors opened to the outside, the second story rooms onto a narrow balcony with metal railing hanging over the parked cars. I bedded down outside on the balcony concrete floor, curling up like an alley cat against the door to the room, not even a doormat for warmth, and fell asleep. I woke up shivering cold and banged hard on the door and Hunter suddenly opened it stupefied and I stumbled in and fell back to sleep on the floor, no pillow, no blanket, still in my street clothes.

    The next day we crammed back into the bug and crawled back to the fort and I was glad to get back to barracks and a hot shower and the cotton cot with wool blanket and fell asleep listening to Baton Rouge tell all about how much work he’d completed this weekend on his correspondence course toward becoming a cub reporter when he got out of the Army.

  • Halloween 23

    One of the lab techs is dressed as a witch, black hood and black full length cloak over white scrubs, masked, black witchy boots. No one else seems to be in obvious costume, other than their regular rigs, but a gargantuan pizza delivery dude has just come into the waiting room carrying a stack of four extra large pizza boxes. Halloween pizza party at the lab. But I’m on a fast, preparatory to a blood test, so I probably won’t get a slice of pizza, even if offered. Meantime, waiting in waiting room, pull out the phone and start a Halloween post.

    Mind-wandering. Outside, the last, forecast says, of a short string of sunny days, fall crisp and cool. Yesterday in morning sun south slant long walk in the park up and down trails around the rim during which I kept my phone running on a live Instagram video. The result was grainy and I’ve since deleted it, but a few viewers dialed in during the walk. I enjoy Instagram videos on location. In this week’s London Review of Books, an article mentions Albert Camus abhorred travel. I get that. But he did make a trip to New York one year. I’ve never been to New York. Maybe some day, if I ever get out of this lab.

    A voice keeps calling out names, every 30 seconds or so, more names than waiters. I’m beginning to…my name just called! I was about to suggest they were fake names, called out to give the rest of us some piece of hope, if not a piece of pizza. Alas, all they’ve done is check me in, and now I’m back waiting, names still filling the relatively quiet waiting room air, a canned music piano falling from the ceiling, the only other sounds the intake clerks quizzing patients their birthdate, address, doctor’s name, and such, for form’s sake. Another Joseph just called and I start up, but wrong last name initial. Some of the clerks call out first names only, others first name and last initial. I’ve not heard a last name called out. Several calls repeated for patients who have apparently given up the wait, dare I say, this Halloween day, given up the ghost.

    Should have brought a book with me to the lab. What am I reading? Natalia Ginzburg’s The Road to the City, one of the specialty ND books I bought awhile back – you’re supposed to be able to read them in a couple of hours, but my wandering mind disallows such taking it straight consumption, so I’ve been reading a short chapter each night before sleep. The new Dylan book, absurdly big heavy compilation of bits and pics and notes from the archives at the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa along with heady new essays from solicited writers. I first heard of the book from Alex Ross’s blog, The Rest is Noise – Alex has an essay in the new huge Dylan book. Ah! They’ve called my name again, this time for the escort deep into the lab, into the land of vials and needles. And suddenly back home, the whole lab episode taking no longer than an hour or so. And here I am, breaking fast with a bowl of cereal, banana, and finishing off a bag of leftover potato chips. Also reading, typing while I eat (to finish this thread, started back at the lab), The Dinner Party, a book of short stories by Joshua Ferris, which I pulled out of the corner library box sometime ago but only recently opened, started reading, and found he’s pretty good – urbanely witty, reader friendly, realistic. His themes include relationships and communication and miscommunication – misunderstandings that lead one problem to another, a bit of slapstick thrown in. I’ve only a couple of stories to go to the end. Most of Ferris’s characters would probably have not read How to Know a Person, the new book just out by David Brooks, which I was inspired to give a chance after seeing Brooks on the PBS News Hour a week or so ago talking clearly about the Middle East quagmire (to give it a Vietnam era name, which refers to the politics, not to the human disaster, for which a name has not yet been invented), as was Jonathan Capehart, clear and articulate, that is, Brooks’s supposed opposing viewpoint, but not so much. Anyway, I’m in Part One of the Brooks book, titled “I See You.” Now you see me, now you don’t. A magician’s trick. And a half a dozen or so other readings lying around here there and everywhere, work in progress, if you can call it work, reading, it’s not, unfinished, it’s play.

    Going to take a break from this writing now and work on my costume for tonight.

    Still later. Was joking about the costume. No costume. The day is ending, the evening come and gone, night now. No trick-or-treaters this year. Left the porch light off and watched Game Four of the World Series. After the game walked outside to see the night sky. A car pulls up down the block, stops in the middle of the street, lights out and flashers come on, and a couple of costumed characters alight and walk up to the only house on the block with holiday lights on. I head back inside. Play some guitar. Solo Halloween night. Then I return to this post and come down to this point, consider deleting the whole thing, like I deleted that Instagram walk video, for the same reason, too grainy, but I didn’t, obviously, do that. I think I’ll take a book with me to the next lab work appointment. Stay off the prose. Still, there’s something positive about mind-wandering. It’s a good antidote to all this live in the moment and give it your full attention pressure, the mindfulness movement. Playing guitar earlier I even started a new song, tentatively titled “Mind-Wandering.”

  • On Futility

    I was about to say
    something prosaic.
    In fact I was
    a paragraph
    into my theme
    when I decided
    to delete
    the whole idea
    and move on.
    The delete key
    is often
    a writer’s
    best friend.
    Maybe I should
    have hit it again.