The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

Tag: Discuss

  • A Sane and Ordinary Blog Post: Paula Byrne’s “The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym”

    In 1963, at the age of 50, having since 1950 written six excellent novels successfully published, the British writer Barbara Pym submitted with confidence her seventh novel to her publisher, Jonathan Cape. But this one, An Unsuitable Attachment, was rejected out of hand. The rejection story comes as a plot twist in Paula Byrne’s biography, The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym (2021, William Collins).

    Then, as now, publishers were trying to respond to changes in their operating environment. After being rejected by her publisher Cape, Pym sent her new novel off, on a long successive round of submissions, to publisher after publisher, where it met with the same rejection fate, as if she were a writing newbie lost in the slush pile.

    Publishers are expected to make a profit. New books have always been expensive. Books are, after all, not a necessary. Yet few novelists, and even fewer, if any, poets, can survive financially off the royalties from their book sales. The occasional blockbuster book followed by a movie is the rare exception that has often helped support a publisher’s efforts to produce less popular works with literary merit. Detailed numbers of what might have been necessary to recoup publishing costs and turn a profit in 1963 are a small but important part of Byrne’s Pym biography, and because Pym continued to write without publishing, then over a decade later did publish anew and with even greater positive critical reception (including a Booker Prize nomination in 1977 for Quartet in Autumn), an interesting theme is suggested where we might find some insight into what gets published (and unpublished) and when and why.

    How many prospective sales were necessary in 1963 to get a publisher’s attention? Pym’s good friend British poet Philip Larkin suggested 4,000 as a break-even point: “I’m told that the economic figure for novels is 4,000 – and has risen a lot recently. The circulating libraries are diminishing, too – Smith’s gone, Boots going” (Byrne, 533). Larkin’s own book, The Whitsun Weddings (a collection of 32 poems published in February 1964), sold 4,000 copies in the first two months, an unusual poetry bestseller (504). Pym mentions to Larkin that “she heard Cape were about to publish a book by one of the Beatles: John Lennon? I think?” (497). The book in question was Lennon’s In His Own Write, which sold, according to Wikipedia, 300,000 copies in Britain, and was also a best seller in the US market. Wiki shows, citing Hazel Holt, that Barbara Pym’s book Excellent Women, published by Cape in 1952, had sold 6,577 copies by 1960. Writers decide what will be written, publishers decide what might be read, critics decide what’s good, and readers decide what to purchase. And then there’s the remaindered, not remembered.

    How do books get into the hands of readers? Public libraries, generally assumed to be in the public interest and of great cultural benefit, arrived at a cost to publishing. In England, since the mid 1700s, prior to public libraries, books were made available to the reading public through the use of “Circulating Libraries.” These were not free public libraries. They rented books for a fee. Nor were they housed in buildings. They traveled, by rail and wagon. Still, the rental fees were affordable only down to a middle class clientele. Later, stores carried books for rent, but usually as part of a store’s variable lines of business. Renting or selling books wasn’t enough to keep a stand-alone book business afloat. But the effect of renting books on publishing was simply this: readers could rent far more books than they could afford to purchase. It was therefore in the interest of the circulating library business for publishers to keep prices of new books high. If readers could not afford to buy new books, they would have to rent them.1

    All of that of course before the Internet, ebook, etc. Still, paper books persist. Past changes like the mass market, cheaply produced paperback brought book prices down, but still the book market is supply and demand driven, and it’s not easy determining what drives demand. Dime novels in the US and the Penny Dreadful in England were relatively cheap and brought literature to working class readers. I was a working class reader, started with comic books, graduated to Classics Illustrated at the suggestion of my Confirmation sponsor, who also encouraged me to read novels and to start my own library, six paperback books sitting on a window ledge of my bedroom. I still have a few of them. That books are a commodity, no more no less, may seem like a paradox to some readers:

    “One could make an argument that the book’s own history mitigates against seeing it as a commodity. For centuries, after all, the book’s primary place was at the center of religious practice. It is historically associated, as a result, with the evanescent, spiritual, not-for-profit world. But printed books, as Elizabeth Eisenstein and Raymond Williams have shown, have always had as much of a secular as a spiritual existence. Their history in the modern west is synonymous with the development of industrial production and the rise of consumer culture that went with it. If the book has maintained some sort of transcendent identity, it has done so despite its position at the center of the world of goods, not because of some privileged position outside it.” 2

    After the Cape rejection, Pym kept writing, kept submitting, and kept getting rejected. She reached a point where she told a friend, “All I want now is peace to write my unpublishable novels” (Byrne, 530). And, Byrne says, “Her friend Hazel Holt even suggested that she should think about publishing her novels privately for her loyal following of readers” (524). Today, of course, Pym could easily self-publish her novels. But would she? In any case, all of her books are today still in print, with many used copies of Pym books available for sale via sites like Alibris. And a quick check at Multnomah County Library shows ten Pym books available, but only one copy each, and six copies of the Byrne biography in stock.

    As critic, Larkin described what he liked to read, and he did not find fault with work devoted to a narrow alley of life, provided ample detail was given to bring that life into profound focus:

    “‘I like to read about people who have done nothing spectacular, who aren’t beautiful or lucky.’ He wanted to read about people who can see ‘in little autumnal moments of vision, that the so called big experiences of life are going to miss them.’ That such things are ‘presented not with self-pity or despair or romanticism, but with realistic firmness & even humour’” (521).

    Larkin, with connections in publishing, and as England’s popular poet, gave Pym emotional support and advocated on her behalf. Still, it took time to convince the publishers to reconsider. In a letter to Charles Monteith, editor at Faber, Larkin wrote:

    “Turn it down if you think it’s a bad book of its kind, but please don’t turn it down because it’s the kind of book it is…I feel it is a great shame if ordinary sane novels about ordinary sane people doing ordinary sane things can’t find a publisher these days. This is in the traditions of Jane Austen & Trollope and I refuse to believe that no one wants its successors today” (521).

    What kind of books were being published in 1963? John le Carre’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (which a couple of years later would be assigned reading in one of my high school English classes); Thomas Pynchon’s V.; John Rechy’s City of Night; Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle. And when the publisher Little, Brown republished in book form The New Yorker stories of 1955 and 1959, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction, by J. D. Salinger, it was the third best-selling novel in the US in 1963 (Wiki). (I remember seeing Mr. Abney, my 9th grade Language Arts teacher, reading it at his desk at the front corner of the room, stage right, next to our ground floor windows, which looked into the Breezeway, where the girls were at lunch recess.) While there were of course many other kinds of books published in 1963, those just mentioned probably would not qualify as the kind of book favored by Philip Larkin.

    There’s no critical advantage gained in trying to put down the 1963 books mentioned above, that’s not the point, they’re already classics, or of pooh-poohing John Lennon’s book as silly. The point is, what’s good is what achieves its purpose, even if that purpose might be considered bad, or if it’s not the purpose you want. Lennon’s book is successful on its own terms. It’s good because it achieves what Lennon wanted. It’s also good because it’s entertaining and clever and also gives a nod to James Joyce and his technique in Finnegans Wake. Few would have thought Lennon at the time might have been a Joycean. No amount of marketing could have achieved for a Pym book the kind of sales Lennon’s In His Own Write racked up. But Pym’s books also are good because they achieve what she wanted, are entertaining and clever, and her style, while original, gives a nod to Jane Austen, master novelist of them all.

    There is much more to Paula Byrne’s biography “The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym” than the discussion above regarding what gets published. Byrne’s biography of Pym is 20th Century history as viewed from a specific writer who lived according to detail. Pym kept copious notebooks, always writing. She rethought, reconsidered, reconnoitered her every conversation, meal or tea, dress and dance, kiss or hug, relationship, experience. No detail was too small, the smallest maybe the most important. Bryne’s Pym biography might inspire any would-be writer, for we see Pym at work and play, see the ups and downs, the approvals and dismissals, the potential loneliness of life sitting at a typewriter, the rewards of completion and the hopes for a bite of recognition. We see where ideas for fiction come from and how life experience might be formed into fiction. In the end, the ordinary life, realistically rendered, given due attention, is exceptional and impressive and universally shared.

    1. “Circulating Libraries,” Oxford Reference, The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature. ↩︎
    2. “Ideas and Commodities: The Image of the Book.” Trish Davis. MIT Communications Forum. Undated. ↩︎

  • Fear of Formatting; or, Where What You See Is Not What You Get

    The wig is a kind of disguise, and you can flip your wig to attract attention or to disappear into a crowd. To wig out. Harder for the bigwig to change identity. It’s an old word, wig, starts with steed or horse, to ride, hence to battle. To wig out is to try to change perception, the opposite of to relax, which is no need to go any direction. Equilibrium. Balance. Which is the clown’s trade, who traffics in wigs. Mime, which requires no words.

    Today’s question might be formulated: Which direction to go? We read English left to right, top to bottom; the page is not a mosaic, where we can start anywhere and go in any direction. When we view a mosaic, where do we start? Where do we end? “The present volume,” McLuhan begins “The Galaxy Reconfigured, or the Plight of Mass Man in an Individualist Society” (the last section of his book “The Gutenberg Galaxy,” University of Toronto 1962), “has employed a mosaic pattern of perception and observation. William Blake can provide the explanation and justification of this procedure. Jerusalem, like so much of his other poetry, is concerned with the changing patterns of human perception. Book II, chapter 34, of the poem contains the pervasive theme: ‘If Perceptive organs vary, Objects of Perception seem to vary: If the Perceptive Organs close, their Objects seem to close also.’” From where McLuhan goes to: “Blake makes quite explicit that when sense ratios change, men change.”

    Is the paragraph the basic unit of composition? The sentence, maybe, or even the single guttural utterance. Probably depends on purpose, occasion, audience – where do we go from here, the attendee at the conference asks at the end of yet another disconnected session.

    So I was thinking obelisk, in that last post (page back), as in single monolithic utterance, rising from a base, tapering to a point (as in an argument). Quite the opposite of how reading or viewing at any rate works on the cell phone, tablet, laptop, where one drops down, pages down, image after image disappearing above the horizon. How to format a monolith with the tools available to the blog (at least those I understand how to use). Begin with the white page. Writers today may seem to be living in a line-age. Lineage. Field. Map. Alternating forms. Insert image. Page down.

    The text would be somewhat ironic, white on black field. WordPress, though, in my experience, is not conducive to drawing. And, as I mentioned a few posts ago, what you put up looks different depending on what device it’s being viewed with. Which can be pleasant or annoying, depending on your point of view. Here are a few examples, from the same post, but viewed on different devices (left to their own…):

  • Relaxing Reads

    Barbara Pym’s novels are relaxing reads. I found her while reading and following Penelope Fitzgerald, Elizabeth Taylor, Elizabeth Bowen – other 20th-century British female writers I’ve been reading and have grown to appreciate and like and want to share. I finished the Hermione Lee biography of Penelope some time ago. Writers, like the rest of us, don’t always lead exceptional or excellent lives. And a biographer needs tools and supplies to work with. I recently read Susan Cheever’s biography of e. e. cummings – much material for a biographer to work with there: Harvard and its takes and mistakes; both World Wars and post-war worlds; the Great Depression; the eccentric poet at work and play; the effects of criticism and changing popular and academic tastes on a writer’s occasions for work; notes and diaries; interviews; and correspondence. But readers interested in 20th Century British history and literature will find good reference and enjoyable works among these women writers: Bowen was born in 1899, Taylor in 1912, Pym in 1913, and Fitzgerald in 1916. They are not modernists in the sense of James Joyce or Samuel Beckett or Virginia Woolf or Gertrude Stein, even if they constitute a newer generation. Their novels are characterized by realistic prose and dialog, and as for history, the settings are often domestic, about family and relationships, work, church as social community place (think jumble sale, what here we call rummage sale), not so much about historical events as about the effects of the great tides on individuals in society, but of the person in an outlier sense. Consider Nenna in “Offshore,” living on the barge Grace on Battersea Reach on the Thames with her two young girls, estranged from her strange husband who in a final desperate argument-ending-blow, yells at her, “You’re not a woman!”

    I ordered a copy of Paula Byrne’s Pym biography, “The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym” (2021, William Collins, London). I’m on page 179 of the close to 700 page tome. I started out reading the inside cover blurb on the author, Paula Byrne, which mentions, “She is founder and lead practitioner of ReLit, the charity for literature and mental health.” Having never heard of ReLit, I looked it up and found a site illustrating a small organization’s devotion to using literature to assist those struggling to handle the slings and arrows of daily life, whether king, knight, or knave. From ReLit’s About page:

    “ReLit is the Foundation for bibliotherapy: the complementary treatment of stress, anxiety and other conditions through slow reading of great literature, especially poetry. We believe in the power of words to restore and relight the human mind.”

    Apt words have power to assuage / The tumors of a troubled mind / And are as balm to festered wounds (John Milton, Samson Agonistes)

    ReLit: reading for wellbeing, retrieved 7 Feb 24

    I discovered on the ReLit site, and ordered from Alibris a used copy, a book titled “Stressed, Unstressed: classic poems to ease the mind” (2016, William Collins, London). The poems are indeed for the most part classic, the youngest poet included born in 1952, Linton Kwesi Johnson. The book is divided into 12 chapters devoted to themes related to dealing with stress, for example, “meditating,” “feeling alone,” “living with uncertainty,” “positive thinking.” (Stressed, unstressed also of course about the forms of poetic syllabication and lines.) Each chapter is introduced by a short explanatory essay on the given theme. The book is not an escape portal, though. The poems may or may not help the afflicted in a time of need. But as Jonathan Bate says in his introduction: “If words can do the work of drugs, what is to lose by putting them in our mental health first aid kit? There is nothing to lose and everything to gain.” Of course there are many different kinds of poetry and poetic definitions. The book “Stressed, Unstressed” uses the Wordsworth definitions: “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” or “emotion recollected in tranquility.” Further into the book, we find mindfulness strategies discussed, and I was reminded of the Thich Nhat Hanh “how to books” (e.g. “How to Relax”), which focus on calm breathing and attentiveness to the moment.

    I think I might prefer, to the poetry as a means toward relaxation, the novels of Barbara Pym as well as Penelope Fitzgerald, Elizabeth Taylor, and Elizabeth Bowen. Too often, for me, poetry, like the classic country western song, often plays upon the emotions in the way of pathos, stirring the emotions rather than calming them. In any case, all of the subject of this post has me wondering if readers here at The Coming of the Toads find for the most part relaxing reads or stuff that gets the dander up. My hope is for the former, the relaxed, the three breaths you take while waiting for the page to change.

  • The Poetry Game

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Yet another poem. No comment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    And now more quotes. Bloggishness.

    A six-line poem.

    Loneliness and its solution.

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

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

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

    Another poem.

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

    Poem. “toot” (ish) footed.

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

    Another poem.

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

    Another poem: hailstorm.

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

    Another poem. More rats.

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

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

    Poem. Hamburger.

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

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

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

    25 more quotes. Quip qwop gnip gnop.

    Poem.

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

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

    A poem about pain.

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

    A four-line poem on unbelief?

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

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

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

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

    Poem. Family. “buoys”

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

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

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

    Coda: Zero again. Nothing, nothing.

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

  • Out of Time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    instantaneous       and unpredictable

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

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

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

  • Another Year from Monday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • On the Chicken and the Egg

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    A what?

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

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

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

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

    207

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

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

    207

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

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

    248

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

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

    223

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Labor Day

    I’m giving up
    I’ve quit drinking beer
    and now no more
    ice cream, potato chips,
    or salt peanuts.

    And I’m tossing out my books
    dumping the personal
    paperback library
    hard they fall
    off the emptying shelves.

    And friends no more
    I’m ditching them all
    who gave up on me
    long ago anyway.

    And my host
    from Galilee
    He becomes harder
    to follow as the trail
    narrows and winds
    up thru the dry hills.

    Today’s the day
    Labor Day
    I throw it all away
    beginning with this
    espresso poem
    for as you can see
    hopefully I keep
    a little poetry.

  • Theory of Meaning

    What is mental may mislead us,
    the physical, on the other hand,
    for example, in a cloud you see
    an elephant, but that elephant
    is mental, not physical, while a
    physical animal in a living room
    could be mentally misconstrued
    as a ceiling cloud; the mental
    is also physical, and vice versa.

    We might call, in this discussion,
    what is physical, the denotative
    meaning, and what is mental,
    the connotative meaning. They
    are both meanings, both valid
    experience, and one plays off
    the other. Denotative meanings
    describe, while connotative
    meanings suggest. Further,

    we may easily and without
    argument agree on clouds,
    but to say a cloud is an
    elephant is a statement
    about which there may be
    some disagreement. Either
    way, rain begins to fall and
    the farmer is happy while
    the weekend golfer pissed.

    Let’s make sense together, you and me:
    Our needs are simple:
    water and food, shelter, one another.

    We think we are thinking beings
    but that’s not to say
    this rock and paper don’t exist.
    The rock quivers to its icy core
    when the voice speaks its thunder
    and the elephant walks
    through the room.

    All thought is substantive, bears
    out, vindicates the light of all
    we see and miss which absolves
    the darkness. The rock too thinks,
    thinks, “I am a rock; I have it easy.”
    Don’t worry about meaning. We
    play hide and seek, turn sounds
    into music, shelter in rocks,
    plant tomatoes under elephants.

    By meaning we mean passing
    a baton in a conversational relay.
    Ask the easy questions first:
    who, what, when, where, why,
    and how – the architect built
    on nothing, why then should
    nothing distract you?

    Meantime, last night I slept
    on my guitar, while the blinds
    blew in the breeze of the open
    window, and night birds flew
    in and out, around the room,
    each with its own song.