The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

Tag: Diary

  • More Notes on “Forbidden Notebook”

    Never mind why, but so you have a notebook, or a blog, what do you write, and when? You begin to ignore other interests and responsibilities. You quickly become preoccupied with the possibilities of writing, and don’t see, or ignore, consequences. In “Forbidden Notebook,”1 Valeria begins to obsess over her writing and her notebook, which for Valeria are one and the same:

    “Michele wanted to keep me company and I said, ‘No, thanks, you go ahead, go to bed.’ But it was because, afterward, I intended to write. Now, under everything I do and say, there’s the presence of this notebook. I never would have believed that everything that happens to me in the course of a day would be worth writing down. My life always appeared rather insignificant, without remarkable events, apart from my marriage and the birth of my children. Instead, ever since I happened to start keeping a diary, I seem to have discovered that a word or an intonation can be just as important, or even more, than the facts we’re accustomed to consider important. If we can learn to understand the smallest things that happen every day, then maybe we can learn to truly understand the secret meaning of life” (35).

    Valeria writes mostly about what she can see and hear and reactions within reach. It’s 1950, and she’s aware there’s talk of the possibility of a new war. But she stays focused on her household and family, and on her job and friends and acquaintances. I keep reminding myself it’s a novel, not a real notebook. But that effect is part of Alba’s, the author’s, intent.

    Reading along, I began to think the unfolding household dramas amounted to a kind of soap opera. But Italian television in the 1950s did not include serial shows like those originating in New York City, fueled and sustained by TV advertising, akin to today’s social media set-up, where the audience easily confuses the real with the make believe. Nevertheless, I looked forward to each new installment-like chapter with a soap opera addiction.

    It wasn’t until I finished the book and went back to read the Introduction, followed by a Note from the Translator, that I discovered that “Forbidden Notebook” was indeed first produced as a serial, in an Italian weekly magazine, in real time, from December 1950 through June 1951.

    Coming to terms with the smallest things that happen every day can be difficult. We would probably have to let go of the fortunate distractions of the news, the media, radio, and television, reels and reels and reels of distraction – fortunate because without them we are forced to stare at an empty screen:

    “If we can learn to understand the smallest things that happen every day, then maybe we can learn to truly understand the secret meaning of life. But I don’t know if it’s a good thing. I’m afraid not” (35).

    Having decided its worth as a bad thing, how do you get rid of it? Valeria writes for herself, but in constant fear someone in her family will find her notebook, and, since she’s writing about them, and what’s outside their purview, the intimate details of her family interactions and her work life, her criticisms and disappointments, her thoughts and wishes, resentments and humiliations, her contradictions and doubts, to be discovered would jeopardize her standing as “mamma,” a name so full of assumptions and presuppositions it’s smothering, but to be rid of it is something she both wants and doesn’t want.

    “But maybe everything I’ve been thinking I see around me lately isn’t true. Maybe it’s the notebook’s fault. I should destroy it, I will certainly destroy it: I’ve decided” (39).

    She continues to debate with herself the value of her notebook, why she continues with it, worrying about it being discovered, where to hide it from her family, what and how to write:

    “Sometimes I think I’m wrong to write down everything that happens; fixed in writing, even what is, in essence, not bad seems bad. I was wrong to write about the conversation I had with Mirella when she came home late and, after talking for a long time, we separated not as mother and daughter but as two hostile women. If I hadn’t written it, I would have forgotten about it. We’re always inclined to forget what we’ve said or done in the past, partly in order not to have the tremendous obligation to remain faithful to it. Otherwise, it seems to me, we would all discover that we’re full of mistakes and, above all, contradictions, between what we intended to do and what we have done, between what we would desire to be and what we are content to be” (47).

    The writing in “Forbidden Notebook” is epistolary, as if each short chapter is a letter Valeria is writing to you, the reader, her audience, or, more to the point, letters to herself that you, the reader, have discovered. You have found her notebook, and are reading about her fears that someone might find her notebook.

    Later in the book, she reads through a collection of old letters Michele wrote to her when he was stationed across the sea, in World War II, and she confides she doesn’t recognize him or herself. But are not the letters a kind of notebook? Maybe, but letters are edited. The letter you write to your mother sounds very different indeed from the letter you write to your wife or mistress, boss or senator, different if written in times of happiness and safety versus times of stress and bombardment. Indeed, you are a different person as your circumstances undergo upheaval or fall to sleep.

    “Every time I open this notebook the anxieties I felt when I began to write in it return to mind. I was assailed by regrets that poisoned my day. I was always afraid that the notebook would be discovered, even if at the time it contained nothing that could be considered shameful. But now it’s different. In it I’ve recorded the chronicle of these last days, the way in which I’ve gradually let myself be drawn into acts that I condemn and yet which, like this notebook, I seem unable to do without. Now I’ve got into the habit of lying; the gesture of hiding the notebook is familiar to me, I’ve become very good at finding the time to write; I’ve ended up by getting used to things that, at first, I judged unacceptable” (189).

    She considers taking her notebook to the office, and finding time to write and a place to hide it there, but she still fears it being found and her being laughed at and losing prestige.

    “It’s strange: our inner life is what counts most for each of us and yet we have to pretend to live it as if we paid no attention to it, with inhuman security. Also, if I took the notebook to the office, I’d find nothing of my own when I came home” (199).

    And what if she dies, the notebook’s secrets revealed; but she thinks Mirella, if she finds it, would not read it. She thinks the notebook is the reason her life seems to be changing, her self-image evolving, and the fact she’s hiding something so important from her husband has her feeling she’s living in sin. Is to know one’s self a sin?

    “I know that my reactions to the facts I write down in detail lead me to know myself more intimately every day. Maybe there are people who, knowing themselves, are able to improve; but the better I know myself, the more lost I become” (233).

    She’s in the middle of her life, in the middle of her family, in the muddle of her thoughts, feeling alienated, even if being alone with her notebook is what she wants:

    “It began in wartime, because of the housing crisis. Or maybe because suddenly you could die and things had no importance compared with the lives of human persons, all equal, all threatened. The past no longer served to protect us, and we had no certainty about the future. Everything in me is confused, and I can’t talk about it with my mother or my daughter because neither would understand. They belong to two different worlds: the one that ended with that time, the other that it gave birth to” (247).

    She remembers a reason why she wanted the notebook to begin with:

    “I hoped that in it I would be able to fulfill without guilt my secret desire to still be Valeria” (252).

    In the end, Valeria’s notebook is out of place. What she imagined her family would think of her writing is probably right. She’s wasting her time and writing is causing herself grief and gaining her nothing. There are those who should not write, even if they can, even if they happen to be good at it, but what is good is also of course debatable. Her husband has written a screenplay, ironically his secret from Valeria. He reveals it when Valeria meets up with her old friend, Clara, now a filmmaker, and Clara agrees to look at Michele’s screenplay, but later she tells Valeria it’s not going to work out:

    “He’d like to change his life, leave the bank to devote himself to the movies. But you have to persuade him not to, Valeria….They wouldn’t have any faith in a man like Michele, who has spent all his life in a bank. They’d always judge him a dilettante; and in fact he would be, it couldn’t be otherwise” (196).

    Clara claims the script is too risque for producers to risk, but that might be hard for some readers to accept as true given the history of Italian cinema. In any case, we don’t get any of the script in Valeria’s notebook because she hasn’t read it, but we do get snatches in passing from her talks with Clara so we have some idea, but it remains vague, while Valeria’s concerns are modeled on the conservative, class, and religious values she has come of age in, even if her behavior flirts at times with betrayal of those values. When a rule is violated, is the offender blamed or the order behind the rule?

    If there are writers of secret notebooks today, of course we don’t know them. We assume they are there, working away, learning about themselves, maybe with productive results, maybe not, but either way, filling notebooks then throwing them out with the trash, or, maybe worse, saving them – for what? And of those who for various reasons try to share their writing, we find many forms of occasions of writing, of simple to outlandish claims with and without backing, full of personal details or no mention or sign of the author whatsoever, an anonymous blogger. But readers seldom have the same picture of the writers the writers have of themselves. Like flowers, some writing is perennial, some annual; some take root and in a friendly environment thrive, some wilt. Or writing is not a flower at all, more like a weed, an invasive, non-native weed, growing prolifically out of a crack in a street.

    1. “Forbidden Notebook,” by Alba De Cespedes. Originally published in book form in Italian as Quaderno Proibito in 1952 by Mondadori. I read the first paperback edition 2024 from Astra House, Translation by Ann Goldstein and Forward by Jhumpa Lahiri. ↩︎

  • Forbidden Notebooks; Prohibited Blogs

    I wonder why some bloggers blog anonymously. Maybe the answer can be found in a novel I just started reading, titled “Forbidden Notebook,”1 that starts with a diary entry of November 26, 1950, the first person narrator, Valeria Cossati, explaining her illegal purchase of a notebook:

    “I saw that the tobacconist had assumed a severe expression to tell me: ‘I can’t. It’s forbidden.’ He explained that an officer stood guard at the door, every Sunday, to make sure that he sold tobacco only, nothing else. I was alone now in the shop. ‘I need it,’ I said, ‘I absolutely need it.’ I was speaking in a whisper, agitated, ready to insist, plead. So he looked around, then quickly grabbed a notebook and handed it to me across the counter, saying: ‘Hide it under your coat’” (10).

    Having obtained the notebook, Valeria must now find a place to keep it hidden in her apartment, secret from her husband, Michele, and her two children, Mirella and Ricardo. And she conspires with her would-be writing self to find time when the others won’t notice to write in her notebook:

    “For more than two weeks I’ve kept the notebook hidden without being able to write in it. Since the first day, I’ve been constantly moving it around – I’ve had a hard time finding a hiding place where it wouldn’t be immediately discovered. If the children found it, Ricardo would have appropriated it for taking notes at the University or Mirella for the diary she keeps locked in her drawer. I could have defended it, but I would have had to explain it” (11).

    Her anxiety builds, and she finally starts to write, but says,

    “I have to confess – I haven’t had a moment’s peace since I got this notebook” (11).

    Yet she looks forward to finding the opportunity to write, writing that no one will read but herself:

    “I always used to be a little sad when the children went out, but now I wish they’d go so I’d be left alone to write” (11).

    Then of course the metatheme makes itself obvious:

    “The strangest thing is that when I can finally take the notebook out of its hiding place, sit down, and begin to write, I find I have nothing to say except to report on the daily struggle I endure to hide it” (12).

    She asks for a drawer, one she can lock. “For what?” her husband asks. “I answered, “some notes. Or maybe a diary, like Mirella” (15).

    “They all, including Michele, began laughing at the idea that I might keep a diary. ‘What would you write, mamma?’ said Michele.”

    They more than laugh; they make fun of her, until, “Suddenly, I burst into tears” (16).

    Michele suggests a cognac to settle her down, but she refuses, because,

    “Embarrassed, I looked away. In the pantry, next to the cognac bottle, in an old biscuit tin, I had hidden the notebook” (17).

    I first started my blog, The Coming of the Toads, back in 2007. I had been reading and following – dare I say, studying – a few blogs, and had even tried my hand at a few comments when I decided to deal myself in (solitaire though the game was). After a few posts, I deleted everything, then almost as soon randomly reinstated it. Of course I had no readers, no “followers,” to begin with, so no worries, but I tried to take the writing seriously nevertheless, which is to say with literary decorum, as oxymoronic as that might sound to some readers, but one is never alone, after all, and must address the possibility against the assumption no one will read it that someone might read it. But either way, so what? Such irony might immediately call for self-deprecation, which might be a way of keeping one’s intentions, one’s writing, hidden, self-prohibited.

    1. “Forbidden Notebook,” by Alba De Cespedes. Originally published in Italian as Quaderno Proibito in 1952 by Mondadori. At first, it seemed hard to find. I tried Alibris and Amazon, and I now somehow have two: a first paperback edition, 2024, Astra House, and a Pushkin Press edition, also 2024, both Translation by Ann Goldstein and Forward by Jhumpa Lahiri. ↩︎

  • The 6 W’s

    Keep working on the 5 W’s, Sylvie suggested after she’d asked if I’d written anything in my diary yet, in the little pocket notebook she’d given me, and I said no, nothing. Who, what, when, why, and where, she said. That’s what people want to know. How about how, I asked. Sylvie’s conference now over, we had one more night in the Ocean Beach bungalow. We could stay on longer, Sylvie said. But I felt pressed up against the ocean here, Highway 8 spilling into our backyard, the town crushed with twenty-something teenyboppers, the yachts and ships and sailors and tourists, the rich and homeless mingling for a spot to be seen and unseen, Cagetan and Sot lurking about, though I didn’t mention that. How about we make our way north, I said, visit Refugio for a time, drop in on Salty and Penina. You think they’re not pushed against the water? I talked to Salty on the phone today. He said they never go to the beach on the weekends anymore, only on weekdays. We’ll pick them up, get a boat, sail out to the islands. Thus it was planned. We would leave tomorrow heading north to Refugio, but arrival uncertain, since we’d be taking our time and remain open to other sorties and such. Meantime, we went out to sit on the front porch, me with a beer and Sylvie with a wine cooler, and she saw my diary sitting on the railing where I had left it open to dry in the sun. What happened, she wanted to know. Oh, yeah, turns out there’s a 6th W: Wet.

    “The 6 W’s,” is episode 65 of Inventories, a Novel in Progress in Serial Format at The Coming of the Toads.

  • Dear Diary,

    Sylvie suggested I keep a diary, to care for my days, to reel in my foul funny feelings, to reflect, contemplate, light a candle in the dark corner of the mind’s attic. She even bought me a little pocket notebook, with which I now wobbled down to the beach, wondering what to write, when, how, where. I had laughed, because my days were so full of nothing, nothing sure to write about. At first I thought she was kidding. But she said I missed the point, which was to interrogate oneself, one’s actions and inactions, hits and misses. At that I balked. Keep track of your seven deadly sins, she said, giving me some ideas to write about. Those were, she reminded me, in alphabetical order: anger, envy, gluttony, greed, lust, pride, and sloth. Notice how commonplace the words are, Sylvie said. It’s almost impossible to pass a day without experiencing one of them. If you fast, for example, are you not being a glutton of denial. I wasn’t likely to go on a fast, I said, but again, I apparently missed the mark. We fast from things other than food, Sylvie said. We all the time fast from what is good for us, and that’s a deadly sin. But to complicate matters even more, I had forgotten to pack a pen with me down to the beach with my little notebook. It was also a beautiful morning, full of graceful offshore breezes as the Santa Ana devil winds had abated. I wanted to run down the tide berm run into the water high stepping the expelling waves and dive under a thin lipped curl held up by a breeze, waiting for me. The water was cold and the cold bees stung the skin and I sprinted and dove and swam out past the break, all seven deadly sins flying off from the cold and sudden exercise. Outside the break I stopped and treaded water and turned to watch the beach from the water and suddenly remembered the little notebook Sylvie had given me, which was in the pocket of my swim trunks, soaking wet. Uh, oh, I said to myself and any fishes nearby, an eighth deadly sin.

    “Dear Diary,” is episode 64 of Inventories, a Novel in Progress in Serial Format at The Coming of the Toads.

  • Diary

    Diary

    A diarist keeps a daily record of everyday experience, regardless of relevance or importance to the outside world. The prototype might be Pepys. One of the characteristics of a diary is that it is usually meant to be private, and it might become more interesting the farther it gets from its time of origin. In that sense, a diary might be that letter to the world that never wrote to you, because it was unable, that world being a future after your time. A diary is not a blog.

    “Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)” was a John Cage project that went on for 16 years. And Cage made it a public project. A diary need not have rules. It doesn’t even need to be written. It might make use of photographs, or drawings, or quilting or needlepoint. A diary might be impressionistic, or some other artistic or technical expression. Or it might be cut and dry and matter of fact and as unambiguous as possible. But of course what readers can’t know is what the diary has left out.

    Out, for a morning walk up to the park, my thoughts distracted by a sign at the outset: “Drive Like Your Kids Live Here.” I thought of the days I was busy with rhetoric, argument. That sign was an argument of proposal. The appeal is logical but also of pathos, for it causes us to think of our own kids. But what if we have no kids? Or, we do, but we are not particularly safe with them, either? Another assumption the sign makes is that children are in harm’s way. No doubt. But if you care about your children, shouldn’t you keep them out of harm’s way? And what of old people? Should we not also drive as if our grandparents live here? Maybe a more effective sign would read: Drive as if you love your neighbor like yourself. But note that assumes one love’s oneself. I’ve never quite understood that biblical proposal, having known so many people whose behavior, full of bad habits, suggested they did not love themselves. Maybe an even more effective sign might read: Drive Like You Are The Child.

    By the time I got up to the park, my thoughts had cleared of argument, and I was in among the trees, and I continued as if they were my trees.

  • Dawdle Doodle Diary: Spring Fashions and Other Caution Signs

    Spring sNew striped work shirtlowly sprung the environs plush with dawdle walks and doodle weeds, tweets and posts poking up in the usual spaces, out of concrete poetry cracks, but in the midst of this year’s annual rush for life we were learning to breathe. Spring is just such the perfect answer to winter, one wonders shouldn’t one’s writing change, from Irony back to Romance? Never mind; summer will remind us there is no keener irony, no sharper disappointment, than romance. “Beware of all enterprises,” Thoreau said, “that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.” Advice which is everywhere ignored with regard to romance, not to mention writing. Poetry persists in prolonging winter while at the same time putting out the basil too early in spring. The doodle upper-right depicts a new striped shirt.

    Shorts and MuumuuSpring is the enterprise the clothing ads have been predicting since the Christmas ornaments were boxed for the basement. In the liturgical calendar, Lent accentuates the anticipation, slowing the heartbeat to the rhythm of nature. Pope Francis this year clarified that giving things up for Lent misses the point, unless what we give up we give to another. I was thinking of giving up clothes for Lent, but alas, the approaching Spring was simply too wet and cool. To the right we see the doodle remnant of an unseasonably hot spring day, when I broke out the shorts and Susan the muumuu.

    Each season puts a special pressure on the breath. In winter, the air Spring weatherinside is stuffy with recirculated dust. You go outside for a breath of fresh air, and there is Cassini taking pics of the ice rings around your heart. The winter cold constricts. The spring cold giggles. Summer laughs. Fall chokes and coughs. One might hold a romantic view of winter, the emptiness, the sleeping squirrels in the sleeping tree hollows, the squirrels quiet for the night in the roof eves. Snow falls from the fir limbs like the down from the mattress when your body is easily the hottest object in the house. Come spring you’ll be dancing in the rain, you sing. But all you do is slip and fall on the mossy deck, the bruise on your leg like a storm on Jupiter.

    Jokes mock truth, but as the season moves, truth mocks the joke. On Facebook, we posted a couple of Public Service Announcements (PSA). In one, we reminded friends to be cautious with their ear, eye, and nose drops. We were at the pharmacy, picking up some new off the shelf eye-drops, for the eye floaters, and stopped just short of purchasing instead a box of ear drops. It’s not just that we forgot our reading glasses, nor that our attention span is now the flight of a mosquito. We are simply not paying attention, spaced out, always spaced out, anticipating the next batch of Cassini pics to brighten our day. In the second PSA, we mix the good news that baby wipes can be used by adults to soothe hemorrhoids with the caution not to pull out the bleach wipe by mistake.

    Which season is the setup, which the punchline, we remain uncertain. We feel we are beginning to move backwards. In any case, when is it not a winter of discontent? Surely that is the message returning from Cassini. No sooner the heaters shut down the air conditioners fill the air, but you know it’s not still winter; winter was never so noisy.

    Spring’s fill flickers, now on, now off. Now shorts, now long pants. One day, we pull a few yard games out of the basement, badminton and whiffle ball and croquet and we get out the patio umbrella, and we even have a picnic on the lawn. We hug a leafy tree.

    We grow as silly as bees as the snow melts and as giddy as Cassini descending through the icy rings of Saturn. We clone around, all shook up. We sit out under a major league baseball pop fly. The ball goes up and up and up; it never does fall back to Earth.

    Exhausted with the turning from winter to spring, we cave in to sleep, and dream of books, mothers, lovers, and selfies. And we dream of breath and of breathing. We awake and feel our breath. It’s very relaxing, learning to breathe. Such a perfect breath. I’d like to share it with you.