We may have been taught in Grammar School to see the comma as a pause and the period as a stop, the comma a quarter note and the period a whole note. The semicolon a half note? The hyphen a rest. The dash a recess, the open parenthesis time to go home.
Adorno, in his essay titled “Punctuation Marks,” stops to consider a comparison to traffic signs:
“All of them are traffic signals; in the last analysis, traffic signals were modeled on them. Exclamation points are red, colons green, dashes call a halt.”
But Adorno quickly moves on to a consideration of punctuation as a kind of musical notation, but what then, he questions, becomes of that comparison when modern music begins to ignore tonality.
Of the exclamation point, Adorno gets historical, calling its use an example of expressionism:
“…a desperate written gesture that yearns in vain to transcend language.”
As for the dash – well, it no longer comes as a surprise:
“All the dash claims to do now is to prepare us in a foolish way for surprises that by that very token are no longer surprising.”
Why Adorno limits quotation marks to words being quoted suggests a fondness for rules that will always “call out” to be broken.
“The blind verdict of the ironic quotation marks is its graphic gesture.”
The loss of the semicolon Adorno attributes to market surveillance, not that anyone was looking anyway, but the use of the semicolon is perhaps the most difficult punctuation mark to establish conformity; the semicolon is the most personal of punctuation marks. It’s gone the way of the tie.
For Adorno, the test of a writer’s punctuation proficiency can be found or proven in how one handles parenthetical material; interruptions to the lineal flow of thought, which of course isn’t lineal at all, which is why we need punctuation. He uses Proust as an example of a writer’s need for parenthetical expression, where simple commas won’t do, because we are running on but actually stopping, without coming to a full stop, to check our shoelaces.
Interesting, even surprising, maybe, is that Adorno does not compare punctuation marks to editing in a film. Adorno disapproved of movies, jazz, and advertising, the sleep inducing drugs of what he called the cultural industry. Advertising makes enormous use of the exclamation mark, yelling and fist banging, even in ads without words – it’s the threat that numbs.
How does Adorno conclude in such a way that might be helpful to a writer either concerned over “correct” use of punctuation (incorrect, Adorno would say, that use of ironic quote marks; but it highlights – calls out – the irony of the rules as a kind of code, not code as in writing computer code, but as in work completed and awaiting inspection), or of wanting to use the tools available effectively, precisely, but at the same time creatively, interestingly?
It might come as some degree of solace to the punctuation befuddled writer (although some might feel worse) to know that Adorno considered all writing subject to an unsolvable “punctuation predicament”:
“For the requirements of the rules of punctuation and those of the subjective need for logic and expression are not compatible.”
Adorno’s essay “Punctuation Marks” is included in “Notes to Literature: Theodor W. Adorno,” Columbia University Press, 2019. ↩︎
Sketches from the edges of notebooks, nine images under a thematic title.
This week’s theme, cafes, is taken from Hemingway’s short story titled “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” in which two waiters, one younger and complaining, the other older and empathetic, wait to go home while a lone customer, an old man, lingers on, drinking.
Click anywhere in the gallery for scroll and captions.
I carried a three ring canvas binder between classes first year of high school that rubbed against my shirt and pants, stained indelibly a light purple from my doodle drawings on the binder covers front and back in red and blue ink pen. I wasn’t “The Illustrated Man,” but I sure had a tattooed notebook. Alas, there was no time-travelling girl helping me draw. Four years later when I started spending time in Venice, Ray Bradbury was long gone, but I was still doodling.
I wrote in books, marginalia and notes, and doodled in notebooks. I couldn’t sit through a class without doodling. I was never that into comic books, which are more artistic than the common doodle. The beauty of the doodle is that it is not art, and it’s useless criticizing something for not being what it was not intended to be. And I took copious, effective notes in lecture classes; when neighboring students missed a class, they wanted my notes. Bonus the cartoons. There seems to be a relationship connecting the doodling brain to notetaking.
A doodle isn’t automatically a cartoon. Doodling might be likened to automatic writing, where the subconscious develops surreal on a cafe napkin. The doodle may or may not have a model or subject, though often one emerges. The doodle is disposable, like the napkin it’s drawn on.
Job changes, and then involved in business meetings, I continued to doodle, unable to pay attention otherwise. I suppose I doodled like others smoked cigarettes. On the five minute phone call, I could fill a ream. Sometimes, in a meeting, over my arm, someone would notice a doodle and comment. My notes and doodles were mosaic, non-linear.
At some point I started looking at my doodles a bit differently. They went from a means to get through a class or meeting or phone call to a hobby of drawing and sketching, which meant trying to doodle outside the captive occasion and saving them, and turning them into cartoons. But it’s not so easy to draw when it isn’t improvised or made from a distraction, the mind mostly still focused on something else, and captions complicate the process, an attempt to explain a dream.
Maybe doodling is a way of handling experience outside the rules of what children see as the adult world. The doodle is usually not an attempt at representational art, and so the doodler is free from linear perspective requirements. That’s one difference between the doodle and the sketch. At the same time, a true artist like Picasso might have drawn like a child because he had the skill to do so. It’s hard for an adult to doodle like a kid.
Below are some doodled fragments. Click anywhere in the gallery to scroll and view single pics with captions.
Visual jazz riff sketches from the edges of notebooks, some drawn with phone, nine images under a thematic title. Click anywhere in the gallery for scroll and captions.
What is the logic of a hotel, its language, the action? In the 1960 black and white film The Bellboy, the hotel functions as a circus, its logic dreamlike, its language a dialect derived from silent films, its action as surreal as Fellini’s later 8½ (1963). Silent cinema can feel surreal as the action suggests sound which somehow fails. Stanley, Jerry’s bellboy, says not a word during the film, not until the very end, when he’s asked why he never speaks. Circus scenes shift from one ring to another without obvious transitional phrasing that might link to form some sort of logic. The spotlight moves around the hotel setting, the rest of the world remaining in darkness until awoken for its local act. The language is impressionistic, like the scene where Stanley conducts the empty orchestra on stage in front of an empty audience. Here we can see him speaking, even read his lips, but can’t hear his words, while the band plays on, with percussive emphasis. The film makes no attempt to describe some inner truth. The Bellboy scenes focus on perception as reality. The plot is stream of consciousness, the scenes like dream fragments.
And the two dimensional black and white aspect of the film functions like a cartoon, just as a hotel is a cartoon for its two dimensional lifestyle – it’s not a real home. In the orchestra scene, Stanley stands on the stage, his back to the empty hall, conducting with a baton and music stand. He’s a bit severe, kicks out the drummer, whose rhythms we’ve been enjoying, but who then comes back, as if on cues. And that’s the cartoon – cues, commands, gestures. How is a hotel constructed? Corridors, an infinite number of doors and windows, elevator boxes like cartoon panels read up and down, and the lobby, with its front desk and bellboy stand, the artificial intelligence of the entire enterprise, a system of cues and responses.
The Bellboy is like a drawn cartoon, geometric, architectural – straight lines and right angles, like Jerry’s body. Watching it the other night on the Criterion Channel, I was reminded of the night I stood in the lobby of a now defunct mid-century modern designed movie theater in Los Angeles, in usher uniform with flashlight, about ten feet from Jerry Lewis, who had left his seat in the last row on the center right aisle, from which he was controlling the sound volume, at an opening night, red carpet special, of his less successful film, Which Way to the Front, ten years after The Bellboy. Jerry wore glossy black tuxedo pants with even glossier stripes down the long straight pants legs, a starched white shirt, no tie, and a cardinal red cardigan sweater, and shiny reflective black patent leather shoes, his short black hair equally glossy and waxed matching above. He looked so natural in that mid-century lobby setting, inside, interior, not a word or nod to me, though he must have recognized me, boy in bellboy like uniform, both of us in cartoon like panels, his legs like stilts, while I felt stilted in a different way, wanting out, while Jerry wanted in.
“Why are you always yelling?” “Why are you always asking so many questions!”
Like real lives, a book’s life changes over time. And some are longer, others shorter, extreme change, usually passing out of fashion, or none at all. Or we might think of, as Henry Miller did, “The Books in My Life,” a book startling mainly for how bad it is, its list of books so obscure one wonders where to begin, but probably true to one’s own rambling random reading. Miller thought people read too much. Or, as for Ezra Pound, reading the wrong books is worse than reading none at all (as Henry Miller thought hypocrisy worse than bad manners). And of course Pound supplies us with a list of the right books.
“For two gross of broken statues, For a few thousand battered books.”
And having read a few of them, what to do with them, where to put them, bibliophile or purveyor, bookworm or hoarder. Bring the oldest to the front, begin again, but sitting there in that place on the shelf of history, still “botched,” or do you mean begin again with something new, with the old lies dressed in new fashion, under the clothes fresh off the catwalk the same bent cover boards framing a new fame.
Such was the mental weather, under an atmospheric river, no less, as we made our way to visit one of the newly remodeled Multnomah County Library bibliothecas. Wandering among the few fiction book stacks, wondering how they decide among the thousands of books which ones to put out, a librarian, perhaps sensing we appeared lost in a woods, approached and asked if she could help. We asked her how they decided which books to shelve for physical browsing. Her answer, in short, involved automation and algorithm, referring to neither Henry Miller nor Ezra Pound. Yet we were surprised to find a 1955 first edition of Elizabeth Hardwick’s “The Simple Truth,” noteworthy but not necessarily read worthy. The librarian asked us what kind of book we were looking for. A book like a clean, well-lighted place, but we didn’t put it that way, and we left with, for us anyway, a terrible choice, which we’re now anxious to return.
We had just finished reading aloud yet another book from the 1920’s, this one exactly 100 years old, and also part of our historical hotel reading project, “Gentlemen Prefer Blonds,” by Anita Loos. Of course we’d heard of it, maybe saw the movie, certainly heard the song famous from the Broadway play (1949), “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” Lorelei says in her entry of April 27th:
“So I really think that American gentlemen are the best after all, because kissing your hand may make you feel very very good but a diamond and safire bracelet lasts forever.”
The book, a diary novel, would today make for an interesting blog. Lorelei is an unreliable narrator, but at least she’s consistent. Part of the satire is that she’s a writer, by virtue of her actually writing, without ever having read a book.
“A gentleman friend and I were dining at the Ritz last evening and he said that if I took a pencil and a paper and put down all of my thoughts it would make a book. This almost made me smile as what it would really make would be a whole row of encyclopediacs.” (Mar 16)
There are only a couple of books Lorelei actually names; though quite a few are suggested indirectly. One that is mentioned directly follows, and her plan for reading it:
“April 2nd: I seem to be quite depressed this morning as I always am when there is nothing to put my mind to. Because I decided not to read the book by Mr. Cellini. I mean it was quite amuseing in spots because it was really quite riskay but the spots were not so close together and I never seem to like to always be hunting clear through a book for the spots I am looking for, especially when there are really not so many spots that seem to be so amuseing after all. So I did not waste my time on it but this morning I told Lulu to let all of the house work go and spend the day reading a book entitled “Lord Jim” and then tell me all about it, so that I would improve my mind while Gerry is away.”
The book was a gift from one of Lorelei’s gentlemen friends:
“Well I forgot to mention that the English gentleman who writes novels seems to have taken quite an interest in me, as soon as he found out that I was literary. I mean he has called up every day and I went to tea twice with him. So he has sent me a whole complete set of books for my birthday by a gentleman called Mr. Conrad. They all seem to be about ocean travel although I have not had time to more than glance through them. I have always liked novels about ocean travel ever since I posed for Mr. Christie for the front cover of a novel about ocean travel by McGrath because I always say that a girl never looks as well as she does on board a steamship, or even a yacht.” (Mar 22)
Lorelei’s interests in culture seem inexhaustible, and her number one gentleman very very much wants her to get educated.
“And of course Mr. Eisman has sent me quite a lot of good books as he always does, because he always knows that good books are always welcome. So he has sent me quite a large book of Etiquette as he says there is quite a lot of Etiquette in England and London and it would be a good thing for a girl to learn.” (Apr 11)
We quickly see that Lorelei talks about books more than she reads them. Her learning is experiential, anecdotal, though none the less purposeful and well learned.
“I have decided not to read the book of Ettiquette as I glanced through it and it does not seem to have anything in it that I would care to know because it wastes quite a lot of time telling you what to call a Lord and all the Lords I have met have told me what to call them and it is generally some quite cute name like Coocoo whose real name is really Lord Cooksleigh. So I will not waste my time on such a book.” (Apr 12)
There’s no question that diamonds are more valuable than books, or that reading and writing are both time consuming chores, so of course one should read only the best books.
“So I told Major Falcon that I told Mr. Bartlett I would like to write the play but I really did not have time as it takes quite a lot of time to write my diary and read good books. So Mr. Bartlett did not know that I read books which is quite a co-instance because he reads them to. So he is going to bring me a book of philosophy this afternoon called “Smile, Smile, Smile” which all the brainy senators in Washington are reading which cheers you up quite a lot.” (Apr 14)
The “Smile” book might be a reference to Wilfred Owen’s World War I poem of the same title, “Smile, Smile, Smile,” a contemplation in irony on those who died, published posthumously in 1920, Owen himself having died in the war, one week before the Armistice was signed.
It might come as no surprise to the perspicacious reader that Lorelei is not her given name.
“So it was Judge Hibbard who really gave me my name because he did not like the name I had because he said a girl ought to have a name that ought to express her personality. So he said my name ought to be Lorelei which is the name of a girl who became famous for sitting on a rock in Germany.” (Apr 13)
Lorelei, like the rock sitter of German folklore, similarly ruins her gentlemen. But the reader feels no loss. Loos might have had in mind the Heine poem when she named her character after a famous siren:
“I think the waves drink up off the rocks ironman and dory for with her song Lorelei has done them very wrong.”
Heinrich Hein, “Die Lorelei,” 1824, Creative translation by yours truly, changing location from the Rhine to Redondo Beach.
But it’s not on the River Rhine where Lorelei finds her men, but hotels:
“So we came to the Ritz Hotel and the Ritz Hotel is devine. Because when a girl can sit in a delightful bar and have delicious champagne cocktails and look at all the important French people in Paris, I think it is devine. I mean when a girl can sit there and look at the Dolly sisters and Pearl White and Maybell Gilman Corey, and Mrs. Nash, it is beyond worlds. Because when a girl looks at Mrs. Nash and realizes what Mrs. Nash has got out of gentlemen, it really makes a girl hold her breath.” (Apr 27)
Loos book in form is a cartoon, the characters exaggerated, satirical types, the writing a string of captions. Our edition (1998 Liveright paperback) contains actual cartoons, with captions taken from the text, the title page describes as “Intimately Illustrated” by Ralph Barton, the 1920’s productive but troubled cartoonist. There’s a 1998 introduction by Candace Bushnell, author of “Sex and the City,” who says, “Now that changing hair color is almost as easy as changing underpants, a more appropriate moniker might be Gentlemen Prefer Breasts” (XVI). And a second introduction, titled “The Biography of a Book,” by Anita Loos herself (for the 1963 reissue), in which she relates a television interview where she was asked what theme today might she write about, and she replied, “Gentlemen Prefer Gentlemen,” which, she adds parenthetically was “(a statement which brought the session abruptly to a close).” Loos had lost none of her sarcasm or satirical bent. Writing about the success of her book, she added, “But I feel that Lorelei’s accomplishments reached a peak when she became one of the few contemporary authors to be represented in the Oxford Book of Quotations” (XXIV).
The waters deepen quickly – an important book, in terms of success or influence, doesn’t have to be a book of realism, naturalism, literal representation, doesn’t have to be a serious book. “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” is satire, like Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” which comes to mind as Loos closes her reissue introduction: “But if that fact is true [that gentlemen prefer gentlemen], as it very well seems to be, it, too, is based soundly on economics, the criminally senseless population explosion which a beneficent Nature is trying to curb by more pleasant means than war” (XXIV).
Maybe the most profound theme of “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” if one’s interest is in seriousness (tragedy) in the face of comedy (happy endings), is class, social distinctions, climbing ladders to successful benchmarks where one finds the benches are not as comfortable as one had thought they would be. In that regard, Loos book might indeed warrant the Edith Wharton opinion that it is the Great American Novel. If so, it might be refiled under the title, “Gentlemen Prefer Books,” for it did seem that most of Lorelei’s gentlemen pushed books upon her, wanting to smarten her up, oblivious to her intellect already superior to theirs, and to the fact that reading books rarely if ever smartens us up, or we’d certainly be smart by now, after those two thousand books in our lives, but hardly anyone seems to be, while being smart actually suggests being able to take advantage of another for one’s own advancement, regardless of class.
The Coming of the Toads 