The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

Category: Writing

  • The Guitar: From Garage to Museum

    I first picked up a guitar when I was around 12 years old. A late blooming prodigy? No, simply one of hundreds of thousands of kids directly or indirectly influenced by the rise of popular music through the 1950s and 60s. To pick up the guitar was an essentially existential post WWII experience. Guitar know-how had traditionally been handed down informally and orally, self-taught or augmented by mixing one way with another, a folk working class pastime, played for small get together often sit-out entertainment, and that’s how I began, with a guitar gifted to me by one of the neighbor boys, who had gone off to a minor seminary where he’d joined a band with some dormmates. He came home for the summer with an electric guitar and passed on his old acoustic to me. He taught me to play “Washington Square” and “The Green Leaves of Summer.” A year later, after my girlfriend at the time landed on the guitar jumping off the top bunk, I purchased another acoustic used from an ad in the South Bay Daily Breeze.

    A guitar wasn’t always a cheap instrument. The industrial revolution and mass production changed the guitar from a hand crafted parlor instrument to, some might still argue, an adulterated version, easily purchased, or scrap apple made. If living in a rural area in the late 19th or early 20th century, you could buy a guitar through mail order, via a Sears or Montgomery Ward mail catalog. Today you can buy a playable guitar (one that holds its tuning and is easy on the fingers) for around $200.00. That’s roughly the same price (proportionately) a similar guitar would have cost in the 1960’s or the 1920’s or in 1900. A good example today is the Gretsch Jim Dandy model, available via mail order from Sweetwater for $189.00, more for an electric or solid top version, but that 189’ll work fine.

    The Gretsch Streamliner I played in the previous post I bought via mail order from Sweetwater during the pandemic for $500.00. The Fender amp was another $120.00. My Yamaha Red Label FG180 is the first new guitar I bought, for $100 in 1970, when I got home from active duty. That Yamaha was a Martin dreadnought knockoff. It looked, and arguably sounded like, a custom made and more expensive Martin guitar. My Yamaha still does, after years of sitting quietly set aside while I played other guitars, the Yamaha resting long after the abuse it suffered as a member of the 140th Engineers motor pool. But unlike the Martin I might have purchased in 1970, the Yamaha FG180’s value has not increased much. It’s probably still worth around $100, there’s a hairline crack in the headstock, otherwise, maybe $300; doesn’t matter, it’s not for sale, nor is it likely to go on loan to a museum.

    There is some evidence and certainly rumor of music groups playing Yamaha guitars while on tour in the 1970s – to protect and save their more expensive Martins and other collectibles from potential damage or theft given the rough travel they had to experience while on the road. In the 90’s, Martin created a practical line, called “Road Series,” guitars made for touring, made tough and cheaper than their custom lines. Can anybody hear the difference? Aficionados or snobbish critics may argue so, and maybe you can in a recording sound booth with machine listening aid, but in an auditorium or outdoor venue, at a stadium concert, through the hum and hee-haw of a crowd? Doubtful. Back in the 70’s, Yamaha had developed a more expensive line than the FG’s, which stood for Folk Guitar, called the L Series, where the L signalled Luxury.

    Is the brouhaha over vintage instruments warranted – where the provenance (who played it and where) is worth more than the materials, the labor, or the sound of the actual guitar? Some guitars are better than others, but how much better? Ornate decorative designs don’t make a guitar sound better. Some features will attract one player but not another. How a guitar fits, how it feels in the hands or on the lap, its weight, its fretboard width and length, are all arguably more important than the guitar’s aesthetic appeals.

    Then there are the Picasso guitars, 1912 to 1914, on display on-line at MoMA. Hard to think of anyone actually playing any of those designs, according to the MoMA introduction notes, “Cobbled together from cardboard, paper, string, and wire, materials that he cut, folded, threaded, and glued.”

    Back in May, Nick Paumgarten, in The New Yorker, wrote about a huge but unknown collection of vintage guitars that was about to become an unprecedented Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibit. The previously eschewed low class industrial made and played guitar was about to go live, or dead, depending on your point of view. As Dylan sang in “Visions of Johanna”: “Inside the museums, infinity goes up on trial.” In any case, there does seem to be some strange kind of commodification happening when the value of an object is magnified by who touches it, and some might feel a guitar being inside the museum ironically betrays the guitar’s meaning. Paumgarten quotes The Met curator:

    “Except the guitars exhibit a higher art and artistry themselves—first, as objects. There’s high-quality craftsmanship, but it’s different. The guitar is the object of the people. We always talk about it as ‘the people’s instrument.’ American music is bottom-up. So many art forms are top-down. It’s different from the rest of our instruments collection, which is often for the élite.”

    “You shouldn’t let other people get your kicks for you,” Bob Dylan sang in “Like a Rolling Stone.” Nor should you spend more than necessary for a guitar if you want to sound like Bob Dylan. Or the Stones, or Metallica. And if you want to sound like The Ramones, well, Johnny Ramone bought his Mosrite guitar used in 1974 for around $50. It might be worth a bit more than that today, about a million dollars more, but its value today has nothing to do with the sound it might make.

    Gear changes (swapping out pickups, for example) players or their techs make to factory models, and modifications made to recordings in the studio by sound techs, make a guitar difficult or impossible to reconstruct or imitate, no matter how much you pay for the guitar. Amplifiers, pedals, and other sound changing devices further complicate guitar provenance if what you’re looking for is an original sound not your own. `A player needs to make things their own. There’s little point in trying to sound exactly like your guitar hero, whether it’s Segovia or Django. Guitar value is enhanced by the provenance of its player and the venues and recordings where it was played, but players need to create their own space. A guitar needs to sit out, always accessible, or it won’t get played. The more you pay for a guitar, the less likely it will be allowed to sit out. And sitting out is what it’s all about, if you want to be essentially existentially experienced.

    Looking over readings related to The Met exhibit, I’m reminded of the scene in Antonioni’s film “Blow Up” (1966), where the main character, Thomas, played by David Hemmings, wrestles for the guitar neck thrown into the crowd by Yardbird player Jeff Beck, only to toss it onto the sidewalk upon running out of the venue. That’s the same Jeff Beck who donated equipment to The Met and provided a congratulatory statement used in their press release upon the opening of their guitar exhibit. And Antonioni doubled down on the irony at the end of what is now referred to as The Yardbird Scene when a curious passerby picks up the guitar neck, looks it over, and tosses it back down onto the sidewalk. It was just a prop; it’s not in The Met exhibit.

    ~~~

    Readings:

    “A Secret Trove of Guitars Heads to the Met,” Nick Paumgarten, The New Yorker, May 19, 2025.

    “The Met Receives Landmark Gift of More than 500 of the Finest Guitars from the Golden Age of American Guitar Making,” May 19, 2025, The Met Press Release, retrieved 10 Aug 2025.

    “Picasso: Guitars 1912 – 1914,” Feb 13 – Jun 6, 2011, MoMA.

    “Road Series,” Martin Guitar Website, retrieved 10 Aug 2025.

    “L Series,” Yamaha Guitar Website, retrieved 10 Aug 2025.

    “Former Rolling Stones Musician Mick Taylor Claims His Stolen Guitar is at The Met,” Smithsonian Magazine on-line, 4 Aug 2025.

    ~~~

    1970 Yamaha Red Label FG180

  • Country Afternoon in the City

    “Country Afternoon in the City,” a mellow piece played on the Gretsch G2420 Streamliner Hollowbody Electric Guitar with Chromatic II Tailpiece (year 2021: with Maple Top, Back, and Sides, Nato Neck, Laurel Fingerboard, and 2 Humbucking Pickups. “Village Amber” finish). Strings are D’Addario Chromes Flatwound Jazz Light. Fender Champion 20 amplifier set to: Voice = 02 Tweed Deluxe (Green) and FX = 10 Delay+Reverb (Orange). Gain, Volume, Treble, Bass, and FX Levels all set to 5. Filmed with cell phone, 3 mins 14 secs.

  • The Art of Being Alone

    You may never feel so alone as when wandering around in a crowd of strangers. Or sitting in a church pew at the wedding of an old friend you can’t really say you know anymore back in town for the ceremony then on the road again. Or sitting with a parent who keeps asking you what your name is, or during a visit with your child you no longer recognize. Or at a reunion luncheon with some past coworkers.

    You buy a ticket to the baseball park and settle in with a box of Cracker Jack1 to watch the game and feel a part of something bigger than yourself, not the team, but the cheering crowd, then comes news three of your favorite players have been traded away, and by the 7th inning stretch, the crowd starts to thin, the score lopsided, the bullpen early emptied.

    “The apparition of these faces in a crowd;
    Petals on a wet, black bough.”2

    And you don’t really know the players, and from the distance of your outfield seat, all the players look the same. Still, nowhere to go, you sit until the fans have all gone home, the players off the field hitting the showers, and security comes to check on you and escort you out a side gate.

    You might have been a clean-cut kid and been to college too,3 but in spite of the degrees earned, or maybe as a result of them, you never learned to be alone, to enjoy inertia. If all the other pool balls would just sit still, you could sink the 8 ball and call it a thrill.

    Not to worry, Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) has come to save the day4.

    “It may prove hard to resist an artificial companion that knows everything about you, never forgets, and anticipates your needs better than any human could. Without any desires or goals other than your satisfaction, it will never become bored or annoyed; it will never impatiently wait for you to finish telling your story so that it can tell you its own.”5

    At issue is can a machine substitute for a human in building a satisfying relationship where only one party enjoys, and suffers from, consciousness, while the other party observes and salves and solves (an artificial Jeeves6) your every agony, while themselves unable to actually feel what you are feeling, or even what they are feeling, for they can’t feel either way. They will never be able to cry real tears with you, just shed crocodile tears. But then we get this:

    “Solitude is the engine of independent thought – a usual precondition for real creativity.”7

    “Engine” seems a poor word choice given the context. If the mind is an engine, why can’t A. I. have a mind?

    Loneliness, not to be confused with alienation, detachment, isolation. We can feel lonely, apparently, anywhere, with anyone, in any setting or activity. Is loneliness therefore an existential decision made over time as we negate the possibility of others to be with us, for us to be with others? In other words, is it our own fault? Thoreau wasn’t lonely; why can’t we be more like Thoreau?

    “I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will. Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows.”8

    Paul Bloom, writing in The New Yorker, about the possibility for A. I. to cure loneliness, emphasizes that for the terminally lonely (“the elderly or the cognitively impaired” p. 57), A. I. could indeed be a good thing, but for the rest of us, loneliness is part of being human and to give it up would make us less human. Ouch: that’s caring authority. And it is against that authority that the artist retreats.

    1. “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” Norworth and Tilzer, 1908. ↩︎
    2. Ezra Pound, “In a Station of the Metro,” Poetry Magazine, April, 1913. ↩︎
    3. “Motorpsycho Nightmare,” Bob Dylan, 1964, from the album “Another side of Bob Dylan. ↩︎
    4. Mighty Mouse theme song. ↩︎
    5. “What will it mean for A.I. to solve loneliness?” Paul Bloom, The New Yorker, July 21, 2025, p. 55. ↩︎
    6. “Jeeves seems to know when I’m awake by a sort of telepathy. He always floats in with the cup exactly two minutes after I come to life. Makes a deuce of a lot of difference to a fellow’s day.” The Inimitable Jeeves. ↩︎
    7. p. 56, Bloom, The New Yorker. ↩︎
    8. Henry David Thoreau, Walden, from the chapter “Solitude.” ↩︎
    9. “All Alone Am I,” Brenda Lee, 1962. ↩︎
    All Alone Am I9

  • The Art of the Blog

    Is blogging an art form? We might talk about art and craft and trade. Crafts and trades are necessities as cultures move from survival mode to commercialization and commodification and eventually to increasingly artificial realms; art is not necessary, and its very lack of necessity is what gives it integrity. Art is innate and therefore authentic. It can be faked; when it is, it becomes precious. You might reply that art is necessary for the soul, but you won’t find the soul in a museum. Visitors to the Louvre spend about 15 seconds viewing da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa,” during which time their attention is diverted as they snap a few pics. But I’m actually not all that driven by such pronouncements as Art is whatever. Or whatever is art, or not. Art is a verb, as in the Buckminster Fuller sense, when he said, “I seem to be a verb.” A to be verb. If blogging is an art form, surely it must be part of the to be genre.

    All bloggers confront the same form, the template or layout, and one can spend forever and a day figuring it out, while one’s content sits waiting for something to happen. For the writer, the question arises, do you want to write or become a programmer? The photograph on a blog is not a photograph, in the same sense that Magritte’s pipe is not a pipe. For the poet who thinks poetry is about sound as much as sense, the phrase “mouth watering” might not wet a reader’s lips. Likewise, pics of food don’t always do much for the appetite. As for argument, the use of ALL CAPS quickly tires the eyes.

    Of course there are all kinds of blogs, evidenced in ongoing varieties of designs and templates and categories and tags. And almost any pursuit can be used as a unifying topic: photography or painting, travel and sightseeing, nature and gardening, music or poetry, fiction and memoir, literature or linguistics, criticism and notes and comments, politics and religion, comics and cartoons, news and history, advice and cooking, do it yourself and repair work, sports and leisure. Opinion and argument. The makers behind most blogs probably are not concerned with whether or not they are engaged in some sort of art form. But if a blogger is serious at all about being taken seriously, even if their theme is satire or sarcasm or humor, they will want to set up their blog as efficiently and effectively as possible to ensure an appropriate welcome to their target audience. If they have a target; that’s not a requirement for a successful blog. What is a successful blog?

    Without further Ado, I give you my Top 10 list of the characteristics of a successful blog, a site I can appreciate and that I’ll come back to. In other words, here is a list, limited to ten items, of some attributes of a blog that might warrant repeated visits:

    1. Original Content: I prefer original content rather than seeing copying and pasting from some third party source. I’d rather see an original photo of any quality, an original poem, an original sketch. I suppose there is an art to curating, selecting and collecting together pieces for a show, but too often these shows are too long or overwhelming or redundant to what one’s already experienced elsewhere. There are also issues of copyright, the use of Artificial Intelligence, and other forms of spam, quackery, or hoaxes which corrupt one’s reading.
    2. Identified Source: I tend not to read a blog the author of which is completely anonymous. There are no doubt valid reasons any individual blogger may have for remaining anonymous, privacy concerns or insecurity; those same concerns in turn make me want to know enough about sources to guarantee both originality and reliability.
    3. No Ads. This is a tough one, since to remove ads usually requires a subscription or premium of some kind, which some bloggers can’t afford. But ads are intrusive and distracting, often way off target, and sometimes aesthetically ugly, designed to raise a welt. Of course there’s also opportunity for bloggers to earn money from ads. I recently read that Substack is experimenting with ads, and of course there is one kind of blog that is an ad, promotional material, a link to elsewhere.
    4. Frequent Posting: I prefer blogs that post frequently, but not too often. Frequently could mean daily, weekly, or bi-weekly, depending on the length and complexity of the post, while too often might mean multiple postings per hour or day.
    5. Most of the blogs I read, I view via the WordPress “Reader.” There are advantages and disadvantages to the Reader. One disadvantage is you don’t see the blogger’s actual site, with all its bells and whistles, and formats appear differently depending on what device you’re using (which is one reason I keep moving more toward a minimalist format at the Toads). If there’s a way to view the whole blog in a reader, I’ve not discovered it. Some bloggers simply use excerpts in the Reader, and you must go to the full site to view the whole post, which can be rewarding because you get the full meal deal, not the à la carte entry. I don’t know what the answer is to using or not a reader. To subscribe via email, to a newsletter or alert, is an opening of a floodgate. Were I better organized and satisfied with having found ten or so of the best blogs in the world, blogs that answered every aesthetic and practical need, I would simply bookmark them and check them manually daily. Fickleness appears on both sides of the viewing platform. And by the way, the Reader does not contain ads, even if ads do appear on the actual blog.
    6. I prefer writing that is quirky, that ignores style guides, that is not fashionable, but presents a good fit for its subject. At the same time, I often enjoy the rants of the rule bound, the arguments over what tie goes with what shirt, even when, or especially when, it’s obvious no one wears ties anymore except for costume, uniform, or kitsch. “At no time,” Jeeves tells Bertie, “are ties unimportant.” But where’s Jeeves when you need one?
    7. Some blogs venture toward becoming full-blown sites, multiple pages and interactive tools, like the old TV variety shows. But the bed of the blog is the individual post, a diary entry, about experience rooted and grounded outside the blog. But the mirror blog is also interesting. It’s not about itself, but about you, its reader, without being intrusive; it’s subtle, seductive. A post starts off being about jam and ends up a preserve.
    8. I like learning how to do things, seeing how things are done. So if I see a photograph, some explanation of where and how and with what it was taken adds value to the blog post visit. Not that I only value the professional photo, quite the opposite; the amateur unposed snapshot often captures the most moving light. And of course descriptions take time and effort and might spoil a photo’s effect by focusing too much on technicality. There are times when sources should be revealed, footnotes added, links provided, though these can also ruin a visit with too much pomp and falderal.
    9. I enjoy arts and crafts blogs, particularly when they illustrate and track the process. These bloggers of course would be hard-pressed to post daily. It’s a lot of work, blogging, or can be, and posts are often obviously cut short or abandoned for lack of time or inability to get things right, whatever that might be. Which brings up the question of length. How long should a successful blog post be? I don’t know, but reading back over this one, it’s beginning to look too long, and I wonder what readers will have made it this far.
    10. I’m a general interest reader. I don’t have favorite or niche needs. But I do enjoy blogs dedicated to a particular mode or form. The original blog was called a weblog, a log posted to the web, like a ship’s log or an economic diary, updated frequently. Often a community evolved and comments or discussion ensued. I’m not myself these days given to commenting. It’s enough to do a post. Likewise, the blog or post dedicated to sending me elsewhere in the form of links galore can overdo it. I’m not sure how many bloggers remain that spend all day working on their blogs.
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  • If you don’t know, who do you ask?

    I’d been asking, like a smart aleck or wise guy school-kid, a couple of Artificial Intelligence apps (Gemini and ChatGPT) questions to see if I could stump them. The apps provide disclaimers. ChatGPT cautions, “ChatGPT can make mistakes. Check important info.” I questioned ChatGPT what is meant by “important.” In short, important is any fact or idea that you might rely on to your detriment if proven wrong.

    I was also thinking of the Universe, and William Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence”: “To see a world in a grain of sand….The questioner, who sits so sly, Shall never know how to reply.”

    I asked ChatGPT how many photos had been uploaded to Instagram since its beginning:

    Based on the latest available data, here’s what we know about Instagram:

    📸 Total Photos & Videos Shared

    Instagram has seen over 50 billion photos and videos uploaded since its launch on October 6, 2010 wired.com+4en.wikipedia.org+4time.com+4increditools.com+4earthweb.com+4predis.ai+4.

    📈 Recent Upload Rates

    Estimates from mid‑2024 to early 2025 indicate that:

    • Roughly 1,074 photos/video posts are uploaded per second
    • That equates to about 95 million posts per day, or almost 4 million per hour

    I retrieved that data a few days ago, so I caution my reader to recheck the numbers with ChatGPT if important. The universe is expanding.

    I then asked ChatGPT about blogs, how many new blog posts go up daily:

    WordPress.com alone sees roughly 2.3 million new blog posts per day.

    All blogging platforms combined—WordPress.org, Tumblr, Medium, Blogger, self-hosted setups, and more—generate around 7.5 million posts daily.

    I then asked, considering social media formats, at what point, a tipping point or a break-even point – what is the number or percent a user can functionally follow other users? ChatGPT’s answer was long and involved, including definitions I had not specifically asked for:

    Tipping Point in Following Behavior
    This is the point at which a user starts experiencing diminishing returns from following more accounts — the quality of their feed drops, content becomes more generic or algorithmically filtered, and they lose meaningful engagement with individuals.

    Breakeven Point for Social Value
    This could be defined as the point where a user’s following count results in reciprocal value — e.g., they follow others and start receiving useful content or engagement in return.

    I might have thought ChatGPT would quote John Cage somewhere in its answer, but it did not. The Cage quote I might have suggested, my paraphrase here: “If you don’t know the answer, why are you asking the question”?

    One     day                                                     down     at
       Black     Mountain     College,
                                                                          David     
    Tudor     was     eating     his     lunch.

                                               A     student     came     over
        to     his     table     and     began     asking     him
     questions.

                                           David     Tudor
                                                                      went     on
     eating     his     lunch.

              The     student
                                         kept     on     asking     
    questions.

                                       Finally
                  David     Tudor     looked     at     him     and
     said,
                                 “If     you     don’t     know,

                                                 why     do      you      ask?”

    Copied from “Indeterminacy,” compiled by Eddie Kohler, here.

    Why, indeed, not to mention who. Who (or what) do you ask? (And before you get your red pencil out, I know all about who and whom, but I’ve my own style book here at the Toads, and I’ve unfollowed whom, so don’t bother.) I first read “Indeterminacy” in John Cage’s book titled “Silence” (1961, 1973, Wesleyan) – from page 260:

    “In oral delivery of this lecture, I tell one story a minute. If it’s a short one, I have to spread it out; when I come to a long one, I have to speak as rapidly as I can” (260).

    Part of ChatGPT’s answer to my question regarding the number of social media accounts one can follow or be followed with meaningful contact referenced “Dunbar’s Number”:

    📊 Data-Based Estimates and Psychological Limits

    1. Cognitive Limit — Dunbar’s Number (~150)

    • Humans can meaningfully maintain social relationships with around 150 people.
    • In social media, this is often expanded because of the passive nature of interaction — but past ~500–1,000 follows, users typically experience:
      • Less meaningful engagement
      • Algorithmic filtering becomes dominant

    👉 Tipping point for meaningful social following: ~150–500 follows
    Beyond that, you don’t “functionally” follow people — the algorithm filters most content out.

    What is meaningful or reciprocally engaging of course differs depending on one’s purpose or goal and the type of social media format one’s using. I did know the answer, but I wanted ChatGPT to confirm and provide some data with support. I was just playing around. But I had not heard of Dunbar’s Number. Dunbar’s Number is 150 – humans can interact meaningfully with 150 others. A further breakdown of Dunbar’s Number as supplied by ChatGPT follows:

    Dunbar’s Number (~150) is more than just a single limit. Robin Dunbar, a British anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist, proposed that human social relationships are layered in discrete tiers, each with its own emotional closeness and frequency of interaction.

    🔹 Dunbar’s Social Group Layers

    These layers form a hierarchy of relationships, expanding by a rough factor of ~3 at each level:

    LayerApprox. SizeRelationship TypeCharacteristics
    1. Support Clique3–5Closest relationshipsDaily contact, deep emotional support (best friends, close family)
    2. Sympathy Group12–15Good friendsWeekly contact, trusted confidants
    3. Close Network~50Friends you would invite to a partyMonthly contact, mutual interest, still emotionally meaningful
    4. Casual Network~150Dunbar’s NumberPeople you know and recognize by name/face, occasional contact
    5. Acquaintances~500Recognizable individualsLow or no emotional intensity, weak ties (colleagues, mutuals)
    6. Faces Known~1,500People whose faces you recognizeStored in memory, but not personally connected

    🔸 What This Means for Social Media

    • Most people can recognize ~1,500 profiles, but only maintain meaningful interaction with ~150.
    • Your Instagram close friends list or Twitter DMs likely reflects the 15–50 layer.
    • Follows, likes, or casual comments beyond the 150–500 range are often algorithmically or socially shallow. 

    I don’t mention any of this to cause or reflect distress, and I think most users intuitively realize a law of large numbers at work with regard to social media accounts, but I want to emphasize the importance, significance, or value of any relatively small number of followers writers may have, or may be following, not necessarily as “follow backs” without ever looking again, but in efforts to maintain meaningful reading and writing encounters, effort that takes time and trust and mutual engagement.

    There is of course much more to this discussion one might pursue (the phenomenom of likes and comments, or lack thereof, for example), but this has been question and answer enough. To follow is not necessarily to befriend; to unfollow is not necessarily to defriend. In summary, I’m reminded of the advice Shakespeare’s Polonius gives to his son Laertes:

    “Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel” (Hamlet, Act I, Scene 3).

    But Polonius, in spite of his reputation for sound advice, is a bumbling fool and not to be trusted, and anyway, who wants to be grappled to another’s soul with a hoop of steel, particularly where grapple means wrestle and struggle?

  • A Cat’s Up

    About the only thing my folks brought with them when we moved to California was their accents. We kids brought ours too. “Can we all borrow ay catsup bottle from you all,” Peggy Ann asked our new next door neighbor Aunt Marty who lived with Uncle Hugh and their four boys and a Persian Blue. They were not our real aunt or uncle but we had many real ones but we would never know them. Ray called Mom Patty, but her real name was Mary, and Aunt Marty and Uncle Hugh called Ray, John. Uncle Hugh and Aunt Marty and their four boys and Persian Blue cat that used to sit atop the wall and stare into our bedroom moved away. The new neighbor mom Pennye’s real name was Mary too. When we first got Out West I went to public school, put ahead a grade, even though I’d never went to kindergarten, because the LA kids were slower. I remember sitting in class another kid reading aloud and I waited for the teacher to come down on him because he was saying his ay’s wrong. He said a cat with a soft article a, short and not at all sleek. It came my turn to read and I gave ay cat a hard ay, as long and hard and wiry as a cat’s tail when it’s a bottlebrush, and was astonished to hear the teacher interrupt me and correct my pronunciation of ay. Gradually we older kids lost most of our hard a’s and other quirks but the foibles of pronunciation still fool my tongue, like pass the catsup, and I wonder how his little tale might be changed had the author of my second grade book said the cat instead of a cat.

    • Oak Street Pad
    • Awake and asleep
    • Footloose and Fancy Free
    • Wolf
    • Frankie
    • Portrait of a Cat
    • Cat on a Cold Snowy Roof
    • Oliver in a window
    • Zoe found some shade
    • Halloween cats
    • Personality Types
    • Spooling Bee Cat
    • A Cat Trio

  • To Have and Have Not

    Somewhere along the way we are taught that writing is hard, and we come to believe that writing is hard. Hua Hsu thinks writing is hard, and he’s a professional writer, and teaches writing to boot, so he should know:

    “Writing is hard, regardless of whether it’s a five-paragraph essay or a haiku, and it’s natural, especially when you’re a college student, to want to avoid hard work—this is why classes like Melzer’s are compulsory. ‘You can imagine that students really want to be there,’ he joked” (p. 24, “The End of the Essay,” The New Yorker, July 7 & 14, 2025).

    Most activities seem hard if you’d rather be doing something else. “It is not irritating to be where one is. It is only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else” John Cage said, in his “Lecture on Nothing.” But what about Hua Hsu’s claim that college students “avoid hard work”? Is that true?

    Definitions are hard: what is writing; what is work? Is avoidance not hard work? While it might be easier not to write, does it necessarily follow that writing is hard?

    Writing is easy. Most kids by the second or third grade can write. But keeping inside the lines as they are later taught, and writing becomes harder, until finally they quit trying to write and now apparently go to some Artificial Intelligence application where their writing is done via surrogate.

    “A.I. has returned us to the question of what the point of higher education is,” Hsu says (22). It might be too late, as the question seems in the process of being answered in the dismantling of institutions, and the answer for some currently sounds like, there is no point. In any case, the question is not new, being asked, and answered, over time, from John Henry Newman’s “The Idea of a University,” to Ivan Illich’s “Deschooling Society.” Illich’s ideas seem ripe for our time:

    “Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is thereby ‘schooled’ to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is ‘schooled’ to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work. Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavor are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve these ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the management of hospitals, schools, and other agencies in question” (Ivan Illich, “Deschooling Society,” 1973).

    Writing is learned, like learning a musical instrument, developmentally and incrementally; writing is a process of addition, as Francis Christensen taught. His solutions described in his “Notes Toward A New Rhetoric: 9 Essays for Teachers (3rd Ed., 2007) to the teaching and learning of writing are among the best. Verlyn Klinkenborg’s  Several short sentences about writing (Vintage, April 2013) is also excellent and should be used in today’s English 101 classes (if there still are any) – though neither of these solutions do I put forth as absolute. I’ve met veteran classical musicians who cannot improvise, cannot play their instrument without a piece of sheet music to read from.

    Could Hemingway write? And if he could write, or maybe more importantly if you think he could not write, where did Hemingway learn how to write? In the beginning was the essay, English 101. Everyone had to take it, even the math majors. But Hemingway never made it to English 101. He wrote in high school, but it seems he learned to write while writing.

    “My name’s Laughton,” the tall one said. “I’m a writer.”
    “I’m glad to meet you,” Professor MacWalsey said. “Do you write often?”
    The tall man looked around him. “Let’s get out of here, dear,” he said. “Everybody is either insulting or nuts” (135).1

    1. Ernest Hemingway, “To Have and Have Not,” 1934, Hearst Magazines Inc. Scribner Classics, 1970. 0-684-17952-0. ↩︎

  • Notes on Youssef Rakha’s “The Dissenters”

    I’m not long into Youssef Rakha’s “The Dissenters” before being reminded of Joyce’s cracked looking glass:

    – It is a symbol of Irish art. The cracked looking-glass of a servant.

    But Stephen is able to think and express so as a result of his Jesuit training, a “wellfed” education, even while his family fortunes have ebbed:

    Across the threadbare cuffedge he saw the sea hailed as a great sweet mother by the wellfed voice beside him.

    And the question, as Humpty Dumpty put it, is which is to be master: the fed or the unfed.

    – After all, I should think you are able to free yourself. You are your own master, it seems to me.

    Stephen is in conversation with one of his roommates, Haines, an Englishman.

    – I am a servant of two masters, Stephen said, an English and an Italian.

    Still, surely we can think for ourselves, even with our poor or uneven educations? And where, after all, do we learn to think? And having mastered it, or enfolded it in fine arts, what do we think, and what do we think about what we think?

    – You behold in me, Stephen said with grim displeasure, a horrible example of free thought.

    – I can quite understand that, he [Haines] said calmly. An Irishman must think like that, I dare say. We feel in England that we have treated you rather unfairly. It seems history is to blame.

    History. I recently read the “Fortunes of War” trilogies, “The Balkan Trilogy” and “The Levant Trilogy,” Olivia Manning’s collected novels set in World War II from the perspective of a British couple living in Bucharest then forced to move farther south in advance of the Nazi approach until they finally barely escape from Greece into Egypt and life in Cairo for the duration, and “Roman Year,” the Andre Aciman memoir of his family’s exile from Egypt to Italy, as a result of Nasser’s unfolding policies, where they attempt to settle in and live before relocating again to the US, and those readings now proved useful introductions to Rakha’s “The Dissenters.” But the first I read of Manning was her “School for Love,” which takes place in Jerusalem during the war, also an introduction now to the book at hand, “The Dissenters,” which in turn serves to see the Manning and Aciman books in different light.

    In the Aciman book, for example, we find Aunt Flora, who had moved to Rome two years earlier, “expelled from Alexandria” (27), correcting the writing style of the young Andre:

    “I didn’t tell her that I was typing letters to various American colleges. Aunt Flora had read my earlier drafts that week and said I was too poetic, too ethereal. I needed to have both feet on the ground. “There’s no room for your complicated, byzantine mannerisms in such letters – ‘I miss my homeland, what is my homeland, home is a metaphor,’” she mimicked, “none of that – I know your type” (215).

    I’m not sure if Flora is punning on type there. A typed letter hides all the clues a handwritten one might contain about the writer, and we rely on the typed letter’s style to reveal the sources of the writer’s mannerisms. And an epistolary novel allows for a freedom from both handwriting and typewriting, from thought bound by circumstantial rules of usage; the letter frees the author from expectations and whatever presupposed rules the reader might bring to impose on style.

    That letter to the world that never wrote to her, Emily Dickinson said – the letter is her world. A writer’s world of letters, a lighthouse.

    “May the house be mercy and light” (275, “The Dissenters”).

    What else can a mother hope for? At the end of a long day, decade…spouse, children…life. In which the mother is the country, the daughter those who left, emigrated and estranged, the son who turns to tell the tale in order to escape its meaning, “…past the time when I can build my personhood from scratch,” yet now free of “history and desire” (276).

    I’m not sure if it’s part of the novel or not, I think probably not, but “The Dissenters” book includes a “Timeline” (279) that begins with 1948 and ends with 2014. A good reading exercise might be to take that timeline and amend it with a like-brief description of what Mouna – well, to match Mouna’s situation, circumstances, at each stage of the timeline, for that’s essentially how the plot of “The Dissenters” works. For example, on page 82, Mubarak is stepping down, so we are in 2011, January 25-February 11, according to the Timeline. What’s Mouna doing? At first, I thought she was caught on television, but it’s one of Nour’s so-called “visions,” not something he sees on TV.

    “I whistle as I look up, ecstatic at her lack of headscarf. My mother is a movie star” (82).

    Then again, maybe the Timeline and the non-linear dates that serve as section titles are not all that necessary for the reader reading the book without a craving for – to know the real from the imagined. The “Jumpers,” for example. It took me awhile to realize this was the “Myth” referred to in the subtitle to the book, “Three Letters & a Myth.” At first I thought the jumpers were real, but I couldn’t remember anything from the news about them.

    “The Dissenters” blends political, family, religious, friendship, marriage circumstances for individuals with whatever everyday life they are bound up in or might for a host of reasons become unbound with something new always appearing just around the corner, and then the walk back, where one can neither don nor shed a hat without being accused of meaning something:

    “In the seventies the headscarf wasn’t as ubiquitous as it was to become, nor were we as attuned to immodesty” (28).

    The book might be somewhat confusing if one tries to read it solely as a history, particularly if looking for a linear timeline. And the book can make for somewhat daunting reading, like an overdose of nightly bad news. I was reminded in parts of Burroughs and “Naked Lunch,” of Poe’s stories, anecdotal dreamlike visions that reek of fantasy inspired by stress. You see or hear people laughing, but you either don’t get the humor or really it’s threadbare.

    At the same time, the writing is clear and concise, casual, the individual chapters often short, propelling, lots of white space, until you get to “A Vision of Lena” (107), two and a half pages of solid prose – and is it a letter too? No. And what of the chapters titled “White,” “Green,” “Red,” and their subtitles of individual names? More on the Jumpers, the “Myth,” where a few of the chapters are brief paragraphs. The reading is both easy and difficult.

    Nour is a journalist. Words are his trade:

    “None of this would be happening if words didn’t take up with her again. I can tell. Her life’s nomenclature changing anew” (86).

    Nour’s letters are to his sister, Shimo, expatted to California (but we never hear back from her), and are about their mother, Mouna, as Nour describes a history of her body and its changes, her attempts at control over herself, which parallel or compliment a history of the country. Mouna has tried antidepressants, or that was Amin, or both? (220). They have undone so many. No help.

    “Mouna had had plenty of opportunity to think about sanity and happiness, especially the connection between the two” (219).

    She loses weight, gains strength, and joins the marches. Nour is objective, a reporter, an observer:

    “Mubarak was bad and the revolution brought down Mubarak, but does it follow that the revolution is good?…

    Mass protest has restored Mouna to a fuller, feistier self and that’s a major achievement right there. But if things end up being the same or worse, soon or later Mouna too will feel bamboozled – her preeminent project predoomed – then who knows where she’ll go” (99).

    I was a bit confused by the Nour/Nimo partnership, relationship. (Shem and Shaun?) They are both journalists. But Mouna is also called Nimo. Maybe some of the letters might be read as reporter filed dispatches, field reports. We even get a sample of a story (101): “On July 28, 1963….” That chapter, by the way, contains a particularly satiric, ironic sex scene (105), if it can even be called that, in which we find another example of the picture one character has of another character is never the same picture that character has of themselves.

    Standing as one does, say waiting for a bus or sitting in a cafe, does the memory work sequentially? No, never. It jumps around, one thought to another, with no regard for links, yet something causes one thought to lead to another. Or no, just random. But it’s a novel, so one assumes some cause or reason for the back and forth. To be literary? To distinguish itself, the novel, from the history book? Then you get something like this:

    “It is midnight in Mohandessin by the time I settle into a kind of berth fashioned of the curvature at one end of the space. Frank Sinatra is warbling in the background…” (32).

    Alas, that’s it for Frank. And I wonder, yes, Sinatra, but what was he “warbling?” Were this a movie, we would know. Live at the Pyramids, 1979? “Someone to Watch Over Me.” And that curved booth – red naugahyde? The waitress in uniform? Shimo in California? This sounds like California:

    “Amin has invested the few hundred guineas’ inheritance his elder brother forked over in a house off Road 9 in Maadi – a whitewashed cube with a crescent-shaped veranda that looks like a beach chalet except taller. Like a signpost on the road to Helwan, it is the only residence within several kilometers’ radius. Who would’ve thought, looking at the spottily paved desert all around, that within ten years it will be first among equals and, within twenty, one of a handful remaining David’s resisting the goliath of apartment blocks replacing the villas and bungalows of Maadi’s original treed avenues?” (55).

    What we think about something when it happens changes over time, and in that sense, our current situation helps explain what we were like before we got here. That’s a bit tricky. If we reread a book today it’s likely not the same book we read yesterday.

    But it’s not a movie, and this is not a book review, just a few notes. “If anyone can understand this, honestly” (59). And of the house: “The truth is I’ve already put the house up for sale” (275). So it goes. “For a few weeks she was famous on the web” (213). “Mouna feels more and more dismayed and uncertain” (217). The reader may share the feeling. And of the writer?

    “As I draw close to the end of her story – the point at which you know as much as I do anyway – I’m convinced of my own irrelevance. A man smuggling one woman’s life into another’s, in words. Without really being part of either. Once the procedure is over, I am no more” (230).

    What could be worse, that of the book reviewer on a blog? Yet there is none more relevant than the reader.

    ~~~

    Youssef Rakha, “The Dissenters,” 2025, Graywolf Press.

    Andre Aciman, “Roman Year,” 2024, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

    James Joyce on Writing: “write dangerously”

    Notes on Youssef Rakha’s “The Crocodiles“

    Friendship in Olivia Manning’s Balkan and Levant Trilogies

    Notes on Olivia Manning’s “School for Love”

  • A Personal Library Time Machine

    Pausing then to pull a few old paperbacks off the shelf and peruse the notes and underlining (I rarely write in books anymore, but some of the old ones are full of notes – a reading method), and here are a couple more from high school days with passages I somehow thought noteworthy of underlining or circling whole paragraphs.

    In my novel “Penina’s Letters,” Henry Killknot finds Salty reading Jerzy Kosinski’s “The Painted Bird, and tells him he should be reading “Mr. Blue” instead:

    “Have you ever heard of a little book titled ‘Mr. Blue’ by Myles Connolly?”

    “Yes, we read it last year in Mr. Ford’s English class.”

    “Well, you should read it again. Read it once a year. That’s how you treat classics. Read them once a year. You should not be reading this crap Kosinski spews out.”

    “Have you read ‘The Painted Bird’?” I asked.

    “No,” he said. “I’ve been re-reading ‘Mr. Blue.’ You should consider falling in love with Our Lady, as Blue did, devoting your life to a worthy cause. This Kosinski fellow is a hack.” (93)

    I was in the 10th grade at Saint Bernard in Playa del Rey. I was getting to know the kid in front of me, whose background and home life was radically different from mine. He was reading a paperback, clandestinely, keeping it close in as he leaned over his desk. Curious, I asked him what he was reading. He ended up lending me the book, “The Painted Bird,” by Jerzy Kosinski, telling me as he passed it back under my desktop: “If you get caught with it, don’t tell where you got it.”

    “Suddenly I realized that something had happened to my voice. I tried to cry out, but my tongue flapped helplessly in my open mouth. I had no voice. I was terrified and, covered with cold sweat, I refused to believe that this was possible and tried to convince myself that my voice would come back. I waited a few moments and tried again. Nothing happened. The silence of the forest was broken only by the buzzing of the flies around me.” (“The Painted Bird” p. 125).1

    We were talking, Susan and my sisters and me, about why keep books, the old musty paperbacks with crackling old pages and covering old themes. Every out of print book adds value to a library. In 1996, folks in San Francisco did not think that: “The S.F.P.L. is now essentially broke, and relies on corporate benefactors. It has sent more than two hundred thousand books to landfills – many of them old, hard to find, out of print, and valuable.” (“The Author VS. The Library,” The New Yorker, by Nicholson Baker, October 14, 1996, p. 50).

    Working on this post, I picked up my copy of “The Time Machine,” by H. G. Wells, and the cover fell off. I was looking for the passage where the Time Traveller finds the library of the future:

    “I went out of that gallery and into another and still larger one, which at the first glance reminded me of a military chapel hung with tattered flags. The brown and charred rags that hung from the sides of it, I presently recognized as the decaying vestiges of books. They had long since dropped to pieces, and every semblance of print had left them. But here and there were warped boards and cracked metallic clasps that told the tale well enough.” (103-104).2

    The Time Machine on display at Movie Madness, from the 1960 film.
    1. Jerzy Kosinski, “The Painted Bird,” Houghton Mifflin, October, 1965. My copy, a Pocket Book edition, November, 1966, 5th printing, August, 1971, $1.25. (Not the copy lent me, since that would have had an older print date.) ↩︎
    2. H. G. Wells, “The Time Machine,” 1895, Berkley Highland Books Y789, New York, Tenth Printing, no date, 40 cents. ↩︎

  • More On A Personal Library

    We were talking about books, not the content of books, but why keep them, as they stack up, one after another, placed then a few on a bedroom window ledge, the book’s fore-edge facing out, the row then expanding, one after another, paperbacks, written in, too, the worse for wear, then the need for a bookcase, and the inevitable question: why all the books, probably won’t read them again, any one, maybe, but not all of them? And, of course, why not just get them from the library?

    In his autobiography, Benjamin Franklin talks about individual libraries, and knowing the friends in his reading group all have personal libraries, he suggests pooling them together, and thus the first subscription library is launched. Where did he get his calling to read books? He mentions his early enjoyment of reading and his father’s library:

    From my infancy I was passionately fond of reading, and all the little money that came into my hands was laid out in the purchasing of books. I was very fond of voyages. My first acquisition was Bunyan’s works in separate little volumes. I afterwards sold them to enable me to buy R. Burton’s historical collections; they were small chapmen’s books and cheap, forty or fifty in all. My father’s little library consisted chiefly of books in polemic divinity, most of which I read. I have since often regretted that at a time when I had such a thirst for knowledge, more proper books had not fallen in my way, since it was now resolved I should not be bred to divinity (26).1

    Doubtful I was destined for the divinity, nor did my father own any books. It was my Confirmation sponsor who encouraged me to read. He found me reading a comic book and suggested I read Classics Illustrated. We walked across the street to the Village Liquor Store to browse through their rack and he bought me copies of “Kidnapped” and “Moby-Dick.” Alas, I did not save those. Introduction to Saint Bernard High School in Playa del Rey included summer reading prior to entering the 9th grade – a reading list was sent, and I duly read, collected, and displayed the books on my bedroom window shelf, perfect size for paperbacks.

    Reasons for maintaining a personal library might include nostalgia that grows new rings with each reading year, sentimental journey, collecting books as a hobby or investment, or books close by used for reference and research, and the aesthetics of books and bookcases, or of course simply a hoarding impulse.

    With a personal library comes personal borrowers, many who consider a borrowed book a given. And indeed I have given books away. A couple of years ago, I posted that at around 3,000 books I gave away half. One should have an affinity of some sort for a book to keep it. And I do reread books. And some books are read through again and again, never finished, it seems, the James Joyce books, for example. Barbara Pym’s “Excellent Women” and Penelope Fitzgerald’s “Offshore” I’ve read several times in the last few years, and read them aloud to Susan.

    One of the oldest books in my library is Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher And Other Tales,”2 read in the 9th grade at St Bernard. I forget what we did that so annoyed Mr. Subiando one day, but I remember copying longhand “The Pit and the Pendulum” one long weekend, a class penance.

    Another book from that bygone bedroom window shelf, “Looking Backward,” by Edward Bellamy.3 The year is 2000 when Julian West awakes from the year 1887. Things have changed, of course, but for the better, and there is no need for a personal library:

    “Under the present organization of society, accumulations of personal property are merely burdensome the moment they exceed what adds to the real comfort” (89).

    Books in a collection can be burdensome, particularly when having to move abodes or rearrange a room. And old pages grow musty, stiff, spines arthritic. Books of the number I own suggest a sedentary lifestyle as well as a preference for private ownership unnecessary in Bellamy’s year 2000 and certainly obsolete, antiquated, old hat in 2025’s era of e-books:

    “I cannot sufficiently celebrate the glorious liberty that reigns in the public libraries of the twentieth century as compared with the intolerable management of those of the nineteenth century, in which the books were jealously railed away from the people, and obtainable only at an expenditure of time and red tape calculated to discourage any ordinary taste for literature” (115).

    Which brings me to Bluesky. I’ve opened a Bluesky account4 with the intent to use it to build a kind of catalog of my library. As such projects of mine go, cartoons on Substack, for example, now twice defunct, I don’t know how long I’ll keep up adding to and maintaining the catalog. And Bluesky is probably not the best place for such a project. I do prefer a simple life, free from adornment and tackle and stuff. Maybe I should concentrate on getting rid of the books rather than spending time cataloging them. But already the Bluesky project has proved useful in giving me pause to open and enjoy a few old paperbacks I’d not looked at for some time.

    A Bluesky personal library catalog? A personal library at all? What do you think?

    1. Benjamin Franklin, “The Autobiography and Other Writings,” Signet Classics, 1961, CP377, Eighth Printing. From the copyright page: The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, a Restoration of a ‘Fair Copy’ by Max Farrand, copyright 1949.” ↩︎
    2. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Tales,” Signet Classics, 1960, CD29, 50 cents. Afterward by R. P. Blackmur. ↩︎
    3. Edward Bellamy, “Looking Backward,” Signet Classics, First Printing, August, 1960; Fourth Printing, May, 1964. CP122, 60 cents. ↩︎
    4. ‪@joelinker.bsky.social https://bsky.app/profile/joelinker.bsky.social‬ ↩︎

  • Tele Pieces

    “Tele Piece #1” is the title finally settled on for the first of a planned series of short pieces played on the Telecaster Squier guitar.

    Squier not to be confused with Squire, as in Chaucer’s “The Squire’s Tale.” I considered titling the piece “The Squire’s Tele.” Chaucer’s tale for the squire is characterized by a bit of rambling, seemingly planned for a long piece, if planned at all, but interrupted by the Franklin, who might be in terms of social class considered subservient to the up and coming squire. And the Telecaster Squier guitar is often considered subordinant to the Fender American made Telecaster. Fender acquired the name Squier when it bought the Squier brand, a family name, in 1965. The V. C. Squier Company out of Battle Creek, Michigan began in 1890 and made strings for violins, banjos, and guitars.

    But the early Telecaster Squier is now considered a classic in its own right. In short, it’s a good guitar. Close to 20 years ago now, I was playing my Tele on Thursday evenings at a local wine bar, which closed almost as soon as it opened, victim of The Great Recession. I wasn’t up front or on a stage. I set up with a small room amp (Crate GFX-15) in a corner and played background instrumental pieces, mostly impromptu and rambling, or taking off on standards and going often I wasn’t sure where. Anyway, one night a family of four with some time to spend before their movie started across the street stopped in for a drink. They seemed inordinately interested in what I was doing. Most patrons just ignored me. Then the son, in his twenties, came over to chat. He and his father played guitar, and from where they were sitting he said they couldn’t tell if I was playing what he called a real Telecaster or a Squier.

    One of the first guitars out of the new Fender factory opened in Japan in 1982, this one is fitted with aftermarket Dean Markley and Seymour Duncan pickups, and it’s strung with D’Addario ECG24 XL Chromes Flatwound Electric Guitar Strings .011-.050 Jazz Light.

    The amplifier used in “Tele Piece #1” is a Fender Champion 20, with the Voice knob set to 02 Tweed Deluxe, and the FX knob set to 03 Reverb Hall. This combination gives a bit of mild amped style without too much distortion or fancy effects taking over. Filmed with a cell phone leaning against the bottom of the amplifier.