The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

Category: Writing

  • Behind the Facades

    Behind the Facades

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

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

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

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

     

  • Virtually Nowhere

    Virtually Nowhere

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

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

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

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

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

  • She Shakes Me Out

    She Shakes Me Out

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


  • What is Essential?

    What is Essential?

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

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

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

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

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

  • Charlatan Beckett

    Charlatan Beckett

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

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

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

  • In a Frenzy

    In a Frenzy

    Why are the TV newscasters shouting, frantic, frenetic, in a frenzy, like callers at auctions, preachers at land’s end, the newsboy on the corner hawking papers: Extra, Extra, Read All About It! It now being this constant state of emergency, impossible to keep up with, put on loops. Truth be told, it’s torture. Truth be bold, it’s boring.

    The news so quickly grows old, must keep it from petering out. So stories and comments on loops, ostinato. Even when the story seems about to change, the background keeps looping, looping around the talking head, the face masked in makeup, the expert, the one we might trust, still wearing a suit and tie, a dress, symbols of serious purpose, uniform press. On location, back to you, Jack, in the studio. Thank you, Jill.

    “Oh, when there’s too much of nothing
    No one has control” (Bob Dylan).

    Usually, ahead of disaster, a catastrophe, people go on the run, head for the hills, or run down to the water, pick up and go, evacuate. Or shelter in place until it’s passed – the hurricane, tornado, earthquake, battle, swarms of locusts.

    But this one’s different. We are told to stay in, and if we do go out, to keep our distance. There is no safety in numbers. On the contrary. We must go it alone. When has there been a more existential crisis? We must decide for ourselves what to do, what’s news.

  • The Epic Virus and Examined Life

    The Epic Virus and Examined Life

    Nothing like an Epic Virus to remind one how connections work. Members of this current batch of humans share just about everything of themselves, like it or not, even their money, some more some less than others.

    Life swarms with sounds we can’t hear, and teems down pouring itself empty with flying bugs and crawling things, birds and fishes, and the smallest creatures invisible to the naked eye that can make bread rise and turn grapes to wine and hops to beer, life that enters and exits the great smoking and stoking train of the body, riding one car to the next, to and fro, round trips, never holding an official ticket. Life is idiomatic.

    In Astra Taylor’s film Examined Life, Kwame Anthony Appiah reflects on how the ways in which humans are connected have changed over time. Gone are the days, Appiah explains, when the only people you ever saw in your entire lifetime were the members of your own family or small tribe:

    “As a species that was designed for living in bands of a hundred-odd people for much of its evolutionary history, we have to figure out how we’re going to live in a planet with 6, 7, 8 billion people. Billions not divided into lots of little bands of a hundred, but constantly interacting – and interacting in units of hundreds of millions. The United States, for example, has a population of 300 million right now. So as an American, you exist in this kind of virtual relationship with 300 million people. If you’re lucky enough to be Chinese, your virtual relationships are soon with 1.5 billion people or something like that” (p. 88, Examined Life: Excursions with Contemporary Thinkers, Edited by Astra Taylor, The New Press, 2009; Interviews from the film Examined Life, 2008).

  • Every Writer Has A Thousand Faces

    Every Writer Has A Thousand Faces

    I first met the poet David Biespiel sitting in the green wooden bleachers at a Southeast Portland Little League baseball game. His son Lucas was on the same team as my son Eric. I had climbed out to get something from the snack shack, and when I got back, Susan pointed out to me the guy sitting a few rows down from us watching the game while reading a book of poems by Dylan Thomas. After the game, I said hello and asked what was up with Dylan Thomas. I didn’t that season get to know David, but neither did I forget his telling me about his Attic writing studio. I was working my corporate gig at the time, where poetry, unless you had X-ray vision, remained hidden behind any number of cubicle kept faces.

    Over a decade later, finding “myself growing grim about the mouth,” as Melville’s Ishmael said, I took early retirement, returned to adjunct work, and eventually found my way back to David at his Attic studio, where I volunteered to help build bookshelves and organize the library, and also joined a seven month writing cohort called “Hawthorne Fellows” (the Attic being located in digs on the second floor of an old building on Hawthorne Boulevard), where I worked on “Penina’s Letters.”

    I started reading David’s work, attended the book launch reading at Powell’s on Hawthorne of his Charming Gardeners, later putting some notes up on the Toads about that experience. I stayed in touch with a few of my cohort acquaintances made in the Hawthorne Fellows, dropped out of the Attic library volunteer work, growing increasingly busy with new adjunct work. It wasn’t hard finding adjunct gigs that provided no benefits or job security, and pittance pay, and while the work was hard, I felt at home in my newfound community, and found more time but more importantly more desire to write. And I continued to learn – about writers, about the academic tyranny of composition rules, about writers and readers, about writing and reading venues and communities.

    I read a number of popular as well as hard to find how to books: Stephen King, On Writing; Annie Dillard, The Writing Life; William Zinsser, On Writing Well; Walter Mosley, This Year You Write Your Novel; Ted Kooser, The Poetry Home Repair Manual; Francis Christensen, Notes Toward a New Rhetoric; The Use and Misuse of Language, an old paperback from my shelves, edited by S. I. Hayakawa; Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several short sentences about writing; and Every Writer Has A Thousand Faces, by David Biespiel.

    Any kind of writing can be a good teacher to a discerning reader. We’ve as much to learn from bad writing as from good writing. But we can’t know bad from good if we don’t know how to read. And most of us are poor readers, particularly of our own writing. That’s because, in part, it’s harder to read our own writing, to proofread our own writing, than it is to read another’s writing. We don’t see what we don’t expect to see. And we read for our favorite mistakes, and happily call them out, as if that criticism somehow makes us better writers or more discerning readers. And, as we don’t necessarily see ourselves as others see us, our pictures of who we are or what we look like don’t match up, so too we don’t see our own writing as others see it.

    And all of that is what I like most about David Biespiel’s Every Writer Has A Thousand Faces. It’s as much about how to read as it is how to write. In it, David talks about looking:

    “What Phil created in that time was version after version of my face, throwing dozens upon dozens of discards onto the floor of his studio or hanging them up on the wall until he came to a point of an understanding about drawing my face that provided him with, well, further understanding about drawing my face. He wasn’t going to revise to make a finished product. He was going to make versions from the same material in order to make more versions from the new material. One version of my face after another” (page 68 of the 2010 edition).

    And that might help explain why the 10th Anniversary edition of Every Writer Has A Thousand Faces, launching today, March 30, 2020, from Kelson Books, adds four more faces to the cover of the 2010 edition, pictured here:

    I’ve ordered a copy of the 10th anniversary edition, and I hope you do, too. In doing so, you’ll be supporting more than just David. You’ll be supporting a writing community. But that’s not the main reason for showing an interest in it. And, as David makes clear in his book, it may or may not help improve your writing. But it will help you look at yourself and what you’re trying to do in different ways and means. It will help you discover new faces of yourself.

    Check out a copy of the new 10th anniversary edition of Every Writer Has A Thousand Faces at one of these venues: Broadway Books Annie Bloom’s Powell’s Amazon SPD Kelson Books

  • Home-word Bound #1

    Home-word Bound #1

    Social distancing guidelines now include no more than 10 people gathered together in one place, and, anyway, to stay home. I grew up one of ten kids. The doors and windows to our house were never locked. I never even had a key to the place. And friends and friends of friends roamed freely across the threshold, in and out. A restriction of no more than 10 at any one time might have come as a welcome rule for my parents – but they rarely objected to visitors.

    I’ve lived at 19 different addresses over time, never alone, not including the room in the garage at the back of our lot my dad and I built when I got back from the army and found my digs in the house usurped by younger siblings.

    But I’ve lived in the house I’m in now for 30 years. It was built in 1907 in what was then a mostly truck farming community or trolley commute from downtown Portland. The street name is now Southeast 69th Avenue, but it was originally named East View Street. A house this old comes with stories, particularly one that has been home to several households over the years. Those stories are often told by neighbors who have overlapped stays with other neighbors.

    Not long after we first moved in, I was digging around in the backyard and uncovered a large clam shell. The occupants just prior to us lived in the house 12 years before we moved in. The shell, we learned from one of our old-timer neighbors, predated those years. There had been a family, lived in our house, who hosted South Pacific sailors who regularly came to port for the annual Rose Festival (the first Rose Festival Parade was held downtown in 1907). One year, one of the sailors brought the shell as a gift for the house hosts. We learned from that same old-timer neighbor that another year one of the sailors died in the house. He collapsed from a heart attack in the entry room. His name was Joe. His host would later also die in the house, in the downstairs bathroom, also from a heart attack. His name was also Joe.

    Lately, homebound by local decree, I’ve increased my walks around the neighborhood, reflecting on houses. Local neighborhood lore tells of one house that was once a tuberculosis sanatorium, another that was a brothel, another that was a small barbershop, another that was a local post office. It’s not a neighborhood of any spectacular historical interest. While a few of the houses might maintain historical value, there’s no doubt that in another hundred years they will all be replaced. The clam shell might still be somewhere around, though. Maybe something still will be living in it.

    From Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” Act II:

    Ham. Then is doomsday near: but your news is not true. Let me question more in particular: what have you, my good friends, deserved at the hands of Fortune, that she sends you to prison hither?

    Guil. Prison, my lord!

    Ham. Denmark’s a prison.

    Ros. Then is the world one.

    Ham. A goodly one; in which there are many confines, wards and dungeons, Denmark being one o’ the worst.

    Ros. We think not so, my lord.

    Ham. Why, then, ’tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so: to me it is a prison.

    Ros. Why, then, your ambition makes it one; ’tis too narrow for your mind.

    Ham. O God, I could be bounded in a nut-shell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.

    East Portland, 1907. Mt Tabor is dark, tree covered hill, middle right.
    Photo: Oregon Historical Society.
    East Portland, 1891 (OHS). View looking east from Mt Tabor.
  • Motti, Lazzaro, and Django

    Motti, Lazzaro, and Django

    The Awakening of Motti Wolkenbruch (Swiss, 2018) is a coming of age story, Motti’s single marital status of existential concern to his mother, who tries to set him up with any number of, for Motti, unsuitable but available girls whose mothers are equally concerned about the marriage status of their daughters. But Motti has his own ideas about attractions and family values, even as his young and tender heart is yanked from his body by the carefree girl he falls off a cliff for, and a parental sponsored trip to Israel banking on his finding a girl the family can approve of only makes matters worse. Expect much laughter, and crying, out loud, with actors speaking German, Yiddish, and Hebrew. The Awakening of Motti Wolkenbruch is about the surprise of life.

    Happy as Lazzaro (Italian, 2018) is another coming of age story. Lazzaro does, literally, fall off a cliff, but not for love, and his heart remains surreally whole, inviolate, even as his body is bruised and abused. He’s a static character, the same at the end as at the beginning, even as life around him changes dramatically. The dwelling settings, country and city, are brutal but beautiful. The lives of the sharecroppers, under imprisonment and later emancipated but just as poor, still captives of poverty, illustrate that poverty is protean, affecting both the poor and the wealthy.

    Django (French, 2017). A dramatization of the life of the guitarist Django Reinhardt and his family during World War II. The Nazis persecuted the Gypsies, many of whom tried to flee to relatively safe zones, joined the resistance, or were caught, killed on the spot, or transported via train to the Nazi concentration camps. The film focuses on Django’s one attempt to escape France, and while he did try to escape to Switzerland, according to the book Django: The Life and Music of a Gypsy Legend (2004, Michael Dregni, Oxford University Press), Django spent most of the war in Paris, where he was allowed to continue playing his music because by then he and his music had become so popular. But he had to play for the occupiers as well as for the locals, his safe treatment thus coming at the cost of a kind of debt bondage. From the book:

    “Hitler bore a deep hatred for Gypsies…From 1933, German Gypsies were doomed. The Nazis barred Romanies from cities, shuttling them into settlement camps. Nazi doctors began sterilizing Romanies as early as 1933. And German Gypsies were required to wear a brown triangle sewn on their chest marked with the letter “Z” for zigemer, German for “Gypsy” – a precursor of the yellow Stars of David pinned to Jews (168)….Yet in Paris, Django was flourishing. Never did he have so much work or live in such sumptuous surroundings. Just as the Germans permitted jazz in Paris, they allowed Romany musicians to continue to play – and paid to come hear them every night” (169).

    Still, Django worried for his family and for his own life, and if some considered him a hero, others thought of him as a conspirator: “Being in the spotlight saved him from the fate awaiting other Gypsies, but Django began to sweat under the glare” (182). Django takes off with his pregnant wife and his mother. They get caught and are imprisoned, but then, in the absurd way these things seem to happen, Dregni says, “A miracle arrived in the unlikely form of the German kommandant. He was a jazz fan, and when he came to question his new prisoner, he was astonished. ‘My good Reinhardt,’ he said, ‘whatever are you doing in this fix?’ Django promised not to try to escape again, and was freed” (184).

    Django the film is must see for anyone interested in Gypsy jazz. But it’s also just a classic film – the acting, the setting, the timing, the war, the family and country drama and suspense. It features much magnificent music, including the organ “Mass” piece Django created. Django the book by Dregni should also be read. Django never learned to read or write, save at a most rudimentary level, and that late in his life (he died age 43). The book reveals a deep history of jazz music in Europe, particularly Paris, including stories of the many Black American musicians who traveled through Europe, most stopping in Paris, many playing with Django, following both World Wars. It covers the business of music and recording and performance management, popular success and failure, the changing style of jazz as musicians work to assimilate new music experienced from new exposures.

  • “end tatters” 1st Review, and a Cover Revision

    “end tatters” 1st Review, and a Cover Revision

    The first review of “end tatters” is in, received via cell phone text:

    “Finished End Tatters; especially liked About Confusion, Bells, and To Surf, which I hope to do this morning. Milk made me very sad. Waiting for your next novel. Alma and Penina my favorites.”

    To drive down, stop, and check out surf spots at the end of a beach town road is part of surfing. A second text from our first reviewer came in that evening, with a couple of pics and a note that he had made it into some waves:

    Meantime, still not entirely satisfied with the “end tatters” cover (having already made several changes pre-publication), I made a post-publication cover revision. Copies sold with the blue back cover are now considered to have some increased value for collectors. New cover photos below:

    Original back cover shown below:

    Go here to order your copy. Write a review and send it to thecomingofthetoads @ gmail dot com, and I’ll post it to the blog.