Pausing then to pull a few old paperbacks off the shelf and peruse the notes and underlining (I rarely write in books anymore, but some of the old ones are full of notes – a reading method), and here are a couple more from high school days with passages I somehow thought noteworthy of underlining or circling whole paragraphs.
In my novel “Penina’s Letters,” Henry Killknot finds Salty reading Jerzy Kosinski’s “The Painted Bird, and tells him he should be reading “Mr. Blue” instead:
“Have you ever heard of a little book titled ‘Mr. Blue’ by Myles Connolly?”
“Yes, we read it last year in Mr. Ford’s English class.”
“Well, you should read it again. Read it once a year. That’s how you treat classics. Read them once a year. You should not be reading this crap Kosinski spews out.”
“Have you read ‘The Painted Bird’?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “I’ve been re-reading ‘Mr. Blue.’ You should consider falling in love with Our Lady, as Blue did, devoting your life to a worthy cause. This Kosinski fellow is a hack.” (93)
I was in the 10th grade at Saint Bernard in Playa del Rey. I was getting to know the kid in front of me, whose background and home life was radically different from mine. He was reading a paperback, clandestinely, keeping it close in as he leaned over his desk. Curious, I asked him what he was reading. He ended up lending me the book, “The Painted Bird,” by Jerzy Kosinski, telling me as he passed it back under my desktop: “If you get caught with it, don’t tell where you got it.”
“Suddenly I realized that something had happened to my voice. I tried to cry out, but my tongue flapped helplessly in my open mouth. I had no voice. I was terrified and, covered with cold sweat, I refused to believe that this was possible and tried to convince myself that my voice would come back. I waited a few moments and tried again. Nothing happened. The silence of the forest was broken only by the buzzing of the flies around me.” (“The Painted Bird” p. 125).1
We were talking, Susan and my sisters and me, about why keep books, the old musty paperbacks with crackling old pages and covering old themes. Every out of print book adds value to a library. In 1996, folks in San Francisco did not think that: “The S.F.P.L. is now essentially broke, and relies on corporate benefactors. It has sent more than two hundred thousand books to landfills – many of them old, hard to find, out of print, and valuable.” (“The Author VS. The Library,” The New Yorker, by Nicholson Baker, October 14, 1996, p. 50).
Working on this post, I picked up my copy of “The Time Machine,” by H. G. Wells, and the cover fell off. I was looking for the passage where the Time Traveller finds the library of the future:
“I went out of that gallery and into another and still larger one, which at the first glance reminded me of a military chapel hung with tattered flags. The brown and charred rags that hung from the sides of it, I presently recognized as the decaying vestiges of books. They had long since dropped to pieces, and every semblance of print had left them. But here and there were warped boards and cracked metallic clasps that told the tale well enough.” (103-104).2
The Time Machine on display at Movie Madness, from the 1960 film.
Jerzy Kosinski, “The Painted Bird,” Houghton Mifflin, October, 1965. My copy, a Pocket Book edition, November, 1966, 5th printing, August, 1971, $1.25. (Not the copy lent me, since that would have had an older print date.) ↩︎
H. G. Wells, “The Time Machine,” 1895, Berkley Highland Books Y789, New York, Tenth Printing, no date, 40 cents. ↩︎
We were talking about books, not the content of books, but why keep them, as they stack up, one after another, placed then a few on a bedroom window ledge, the book’s fore-edge facing out, the row then expanding, one after another, paperbacks, written in, too, the worse for wear, then the need for a bookcase, and the inevitable question: why all the books, probably won’t read them again, any one, maybe, but not all of them? And, of course, why not just get them from the library?
In his autobiography, Benjamin Franklin talks about individual libraries, and knowing the friends in his reading group all have personal libraries, he suggests pooling them together, and thus the first subscription library is launched. Where did he get his calling to read books? He mentions his early enjoyment of reading and his father’s library:
From my infancy I was passionately fond of reading, and all the little money that came into my hands was laid out in the purchasing of books. I was very fond of voyages. My first acquisition was Bunyan’s works in separate little volumes. I afterwards sold them to enable me to buy R. Burton’s historical collections; they were small chapmen’s books and cheap, forty or fifty in all. My father’s little library consisted chiefly of books in polemic divinity, most of which I read. I have since often regretted that at a time when I had such a thirst for knowledge, more proper books had not fallen in my way, since it was now resolved I should not be bred to divinity (26).1
Doubtful I was destined for the divinity, nor did my father own any books. It was my Confirmation sponsor who encouraged me to read. He found me reading a comic book and suggested I read Classics Illustrated. We walked across the street to the Village Liquor Store to browse through their rack and he bought me copies of “Kidnapped” and “Moby-Dick.” Alas, I did not save those. Introduction to Saint Bernard High School in Playa del Rey included summer reading prior to entering the 9th grade – a reading list was sent, and I duly read, collected, and displayed the books on my bedroom window shelf, perfect size for paperbacks.
Reasons for maintaining a personal library might include nostalgia that grows new rings with each reading year, sentimental journey, collecting books as a hobby or investment, or books close by used for reference and research, and the aesthetics of books and bookcases, or of course simply a hoarding impulse.
With a personal library comes personal borrowers, many who consider a borrowed book a given. And indeed I have given books away. A couple of years ago, I posted that at around 3,000 books I gave away half. One should have an affinity of some sort for a book to keep it. And I do reread books. And some books are read through again and again, never finished, it seems, the James Joyce books, for example. Barbara Pym’s “Excellent Women” and Penelope Fitzgerald’s “Offshore” I’ve read several times in the last few years, and read them aloud to Susan.
One of the oldest books in my library is Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher And Other Tales,”2 read in the 9th grade at St Bernard. I forget what we did that so annoyed Mr. Subiando one day, but I remember copying longhand “The Pit and the Pendulum” one long weekend, a class penance.
Another book from that bygone bedroom window shelf, “Looking Backward,” by Edward Bellamy.3 The year is 2000 when Julian West awakes from the year 1887. Things have changed, of course, but for the better, and there is no need for a personal library:
“Under the present organization of society, accumulations of personal property are merely burdensome the moment they exceed what adds to the real comfort” (89).
Books in a collection can be burdensome, particularly when having to move abodes or rearrange a room. And old pages grow musty, stiff, spines arthritic. Books of the number I own suggest a sedentary lifestyle as well as a preference for private ownership unnecessary in Bellamy’s year 2000 and certainly obsolete, antiquated, old hat in 2025’s era of e-books:
“I cannot sufficiently celebrate the glorious liberty that reigns in the public libraries of the twentieth century as compared with the intolerable management of those of the nineteenth century, in which the books were jealously railed away from the people, and obtainable only at an expenditure of time and red tape calculated to discourage any ordinary taste for literature” (115).
Which brings me to Bluesky. I’ve opened a Bluesky account4 with the intent to use it to build a kind of catalog of my library. As such projects of mine go, cartoons on Substack, for example, now twice defunct, I don’t know how long I’ll keep up adding to and maintaining the catalog. And Bluesky is probably not the best place for such a project. I do prefer a simple life, free from adornment and tackle and stuff. Maybe I should concentrate on getting rid of the books rather than spending time cataloging them. But already the Bluesky project has proved useful in giving me pause to open and enjoy a few old paperbacks I’d not looked at for some time.
A Bluesky personal library catalog? A personal library at all? What do you think?
Benjamin Franklin, “The Autobiography and Other Writings,” Signet Classics, 1961, CP377, Eighth Printing. From the copyright page: The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, a Restoration of a ‘Fair Copy’ by Max Farrand, copyright 1949.” ↩︎
Edgar Allan Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Tales,” Signet Classics, 1960, CD29, 50 cents. Afterward by R. P. Blackmur. ↩︎
Edward Bellamy, “Looking Backward,” Signet Classics, First Printing, August, 1960; Fourth Printing, May, 1964. CP122, 60 cents. ↩︎
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.
“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. ↩︎
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.
“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. ↩︎
More rain. More “Traveling Sprinkler.” Paul Chowder hasn’t been playing his new guitar much, though. Instead, the former bassoonist has found an interest in electronic music, and he’s bent on creating jingles and jangles and hums and beats and calls it dance music.
“I worked for several hours today on a new song called ‘Honk for Assistance.’ I saw the sign at a convenience store, near the ice machine, and I thought, Now that is a dance song, in the tradition of Midnight Star. I sampled a few honks from my Kia’s horn and set up a beat and fingered up some harmony using an instrument I hadn’t tried before, the Gospel Organ, which has a slightly percussive sound in the attack phase of each note. I added more chords on a Mark II keyboard and some homegrown handclaps and some rhymes made with the Funk Boogie Kit” (190).
Where is music, today? Where was it in Claude Debussy’s day? I’m listening now, suggested by Paul Chowder, our narrator of “Traveling Sprinkler,” to Debussy’s “Preludes,” via YouTube Music on my Chromebook. I don’t have my hearing aids in, and the Chromebook speaker is not exactly a Marshall Super Lead 100 Watt amplifier stacked with two humongous speaker cabinets towering overhead, so maybe I can’t really say I’m listening to Debussy’s “Preludes,” anymore than I can say I’m in the kitchen nook typing while getting wet from the drizzle outside.
Around page 128, Paul spends ample time discussing the benefits of stereo versus mono. What he does not mention is asymmetrical hearing loss, a condition where you hear less volume in one ear than the other. You’re sometimes unsure which direction a sound is coming from, and it can make you a bit paranoid as you navigate your way around town. You have to be extra careful crossing the street, particularly if there are electric vehicles in the neighborhood. And bicyclists and joggers coming up behind you and passing full of assumptions and presuppositions about their position startle the shite out of you.
“I put the headphones on, and I lowered the needle on Zubin Mehta conducting The Rite of Spring, and suddenly I was there, enclosed in the oxygenated spatial spread of stereophonic sound. I was there with the panicked piccolo, and the bass clarinet was a few feet away, and the timpani surged over to the left, mallets going so fast you couldn’t see them. I couldn’t believe how big a world it was – how much bigger and better stereo was than mono….You need two ears” (129).
Or three, or four. One day, back home, I rode my bike down the Strand to Mike Mahon’s place in Hermosa, carrying with me Archie Shepp’s “Fire Music,” on the Impulse label, from 1965, still new and noisy around the early 70s. Mike was a classically trained pianist, although like Paul Chowder, had decided he wasn’t good enough to make a career of it, and went back to school for a PhD in English Literature, specializing in Yeats and Joyce and company, but still Mike was an audiophile, and had the latest equipment. He took my album and ran it through an electronic vinyl record cleaning machine he had, then we listened to some of it on his impressive and expressive and expensive sound system. Then he pulled from his album collection a copy of Stravinsky’s “The Firebird,” and we listened to the “Infernal Dance” piece. Talk about “attack phase.”
I played a bit of “The Firebird” just now, switching off the Debussy. I’m immediately reminded of Poe’s “The Bells”:
Hear the loud alarum bells— Brazen bells! What tale of terror, now, their turbulency tells! In the startled ear of night How they scream out their affright! Too much horrified to speak, They can only shriek, shriek, Out of tune, In a clamorous appealing to the mercy of the fire, In a mad expostulation with the deaf and frantic fire, Leaping higher, higher, higher, With a desperate desire, And a resolute endeavor Now—now to sit or never, By the side of the pale-faced moon.
I can only handle a minute or two of “The Firebird” this morning (or Poe) before switching over to Segovia playing Bach on his acoustic guitar, from Andrés Segovia: Bach – Gavotte from 4th Lute Suite for guitar, Allegro Films.
In butterfly mode, Paul Chowder continues, in “Traveling Sprinkler,” from acoustic guitar to electro sounds to his girlfriend Roz and his neighbor Nan, parking his car here and there to get some writing done, in other words, in and out and back in again, listening to every day sounds and how they wrap around the cans and cannots of one’s thoughts. But Chowder keeps mentioning songs and music I’ve never heard of. Where have I been? And I asked myself again when and how and why it was I got Nicholson Baker’s “U & I,” and “Traveling Sprinkler” to begin with. So I looked them up. I thought I had purchased (and said in a previous post) “Traveling Sprinkler” used from Alibris. Not so. I purchased it new from Amazon in June of 2023 (though it was not sold by Amazon – a bit confusing all of that, how Amazon works sometimes). And just now, about two years later, I’m getting around to reading it, “Traveling Sprinkler” (though I had given it a try a couple of times before), while “U & I,” I got used on Alibris in February of 2019, also giving it a couple of tries, but unable to fall into it, yet.
Anyway, it’s all old stuff, the books, the references, the music, not to mention the many political digressions, arguments with backing but often rants of a sort, Paul Chowder takes off on. He’s a pacificist, who, as I mentioned, attends meetings, though he’s not a full member, but which is why I thought the acoustic guitar was a good fit, him being a pacificist. But it depends on how you hear sounds. Last night late (after watching the Dodgers beat the Athletics in a record-breaking score of 19 to 2) before bed I played through a few of the Leo Brouwer “Etudes Simples” pieces, as I do almost every night, on my 1977 acoustic Takamine C132S. Number 1 is not all that pacific sounding, but Number 2 is lovely, particularly setting the tone for sleep.
The political arguments, by the way, though now aged, just over a decade away, are effective today, without stirring up too much dust. I’m increasingly finding I’d rather listen to decade old or older music too. Timeless music. Anyway, thinking back to that business about stereo and mono, I’m reminded of the Jimi Hendrix album “Axis: Bold as Love.” The first piece, titled, “Exp,” is an amazing example of stereo at play. It’s very short: 1:56. You can give it a listen here.
Over the weekend, I read two articles somewhat related to one another: “How Much Are We Paying for Newsletters” (apparently some subscribers are losing track) in The New York Times, and “Is the Next Great American Novel Being Published on Substack?” (If a tree falls in the forest?) in The New Yorker. Too many subscriptions, paid or free, and the emails begin to pile up like old zines on a rusty rack in an empty barbershop, and come to be treated like spam and deleted, at issue, at bottom, simply this: more than we have resources to profitably or efficiently manage. Millions of miles of Substack track and only one effort is nominated. And part of the success formula is still will you get picked up by a traditional publisher. But there are great novels precursors to Substack serials: Dickens, George Eliot, Trollope. Maybe serializing your novel no one hears on Substack is the theme of the Great American Novel.
Having finished “The Paris Library,” and in long pause from Substack, I perused my small shelf (24 and 1/2 inches, to be exact) usually full of still barely opened or half read or unread books, but also some to-read-again books (as over the last few years I seem more inclined to reread something I particularly liked in a previous reading life rather than risk something new to me that might leave a bad taste or go permanently unfinished, a yucky slice of green pizza). Today, I counted 25 books on the to-read shelf. I feel no urgency about reading from the shelf. Every so often (periodically, but without a period), I wipe it clean and replace the books with a little vase of a freshly cut sprig or two.
About that phrase above, “to be exact.” Am I the type of guy who says things like “to be exact”? I don’t want to be. I knew a guy who habitually talked about other guys, and he frequently introduced his comments or opinions using the phrase, “He’s the type of guy….” He was the type of guy who used the phrase, “He’s the type of guy.” Well, there you have it. And even if he didn’t use the phrase, you felt categorized nonetheless. You got typed, along with the other guy, for you are either the type or not the type, and if you’re not that type, you’re some other type. So, to correct matters, it’s best to avoid any such shorthand phrases, for they are cliched and unnecessary, like most comments or opinions, I hasten to add, this one included. In fact, and in any case, the shorthand ends up making things longer, as I think I’m in the process of showing here. Of course, once you start to strike through stuff, you might end up with nothing. Hang out the shingle, “No Post Today.”
From the shelf of the unread, I picked “Traveling Sprinkler” (Penguin, 2013) by Nicholson Baker. I like Nicholson Baker, though I’ve only read one of his novels, “The Anthologist” (2009), which I enjoyed. But I’ve read most if not all of his New Yorker pieces (but I’ve not seen him there in awhile). I purchased “Traveling Sprinkler” used from Alibris some time ago. It’s a sequel to “The Anthologist.” It must have got wiped from the to-read shelf, not sure when, because it was just a few weeks ago I discovered it on another shelf and moved it back to the unread shelf. It had been sitting next to Baker’s “U and I: A True Story,” which twice I’ve tried to break into, both times unsuccessfully. “U and I” sat on the to-read shelf for weeks before I consigned it to a distant shelf. But I’ll get back to it, sooner or later, maybe.
Anyway, I like Nicholson Baker for several reasons. First, I very much enjoyed “The Anthologist.” I even did a bit of research, the basis for a fun post titled “Nicholson Baker, Nicholas Carr, and Googling Clothespins.” Second, Nicholson seems like a nice guy. For example, he seems to be one of the few fairly well known writers who if you follow them, on Instagram, for example, they’ll follow you back. Not that they actually check you out ever, but still, it’s nice to get followed back once in a while. I’ve not conducted a study on this, but I’m willing to guess that more than, say, 99 followers or following, assuming regular postings from either, and keeping up becomes an impossible challenge.
Baker’s latest appearances on Instagram tracked his efforts to draw, and then he came out with a new book, “Finding a Likeness: How I Got Somewhat Better at Art” (April, 2024). I’ve not read it, nor am I likely to add it to the to-read shelf anytime soon. Speaking of his wife, who’s an artist, Baker says: “She also draws with colored pencils and weaves fabric. She doesn’t make a big deal of it, she just does it.” I like that, not making “a big deal of it.” I saw it in the “Read sample” of “Finding a Likeness” at Amazon. Anyway, “Finding a Likeness” looks like a cool book, but I’m already out of room on the to-read shelf. Not that I have to self-limit to the 24 and 1/2 inches, but really, enough is enough.
And I’m enjoying “Traveling Sprinkler.” I’m only about a third of the way through it, through page 109, which ends Chapter 12, to be exact, so I probably shouldn’t try saying too much about it, until I finish it. It’s about the type of guy that’s largely unsuccessful in his career, though he doesn’t seem to have put that much into a career. In fact, I’m not exactly sure what his career is. He’s a poet of some sort, but I don’t think being a poet qualifies as a career. One reason you become a poet is to avoid a career, or to hide what you really care about from a career. Although there’s not much need to hide anything in a poem, given the unlikelihood anyone’s going to read it anyway, or if they do, understand it. He, Paul Chowder is his name, the narrator, started off as a musician, playing the bassoon. He gave up on the bassoon because he didn’t think he’d ever be good enough to make a fixed go of it. He sold his bassoon, a gift to him from his grandparents, for $10,000. I didn’t know bassoons cost that much. And that’s old dollars, before a tariff or two. He had a Heckel bassoon. He comes to regret having sold it. A major regret. I looked up bassoons just now. You can get a Moosman bassoon today for around ten grand. And if you don’t have that kind of dough (or a well endowed grandfolk) to blow on a bassoon, you now have two words to juxtapose in a poem. But what Paul wants now, and, in fact, has purchased, at Best Buy, no less, is a cheap acoustic guitar.
I didn’t know Best Buy sold guitars. Best Buy is where I bought the Chromebook I’m now typing on. I’m pretty sure I didn’t see any guitars in the Best Buy where I purchased this laptop. And Paul wants to ditch poems for songs. You might begin to understand why I said I like Nicholson Baker and “Traveling Sprinkler.” You learn a lot of footnote worthy stuff reading Nicholson Baker, that the poet Archibald MacLeish was a founder of the CIA, for example (105-107). And Baker himself played the bassoon. So is Paul a stand-in for Baker? No, I don’t think so. It doesn’t work like that. That’s too easy. All I wanted to suggest is that what Paul says about bassoons is probably reliable. He says Debussy was a fan of the bassoon, but then anyone could look up something like that.
Paul reads a lot, and attends Quaker meetings, though he’s not a full member. When he was younger (he’s on his 55th birthday as the book opens), he wanted to be a composer. He listens carefully to popular music now, but he divulges he’s never really heard or paid attention to lyrics, but he does now. I’ve made a note of a few of the songs he mentions, that I’ve never heard of, thinking I might look for them on YouTube. Kind of funny, looking a song up now, since the book is now 12 years old, and I’ve never heard of the songs he mentions, and most popular songs don’t have a very long shelf life. But then why would I have heard of his songs? And even if I had, I don’t hear lyrics either, unless it’s a Patti Page or Hank Williams song. In most rock songs, the voice is just another instrument, part of the noise. So he goes on about songs and poems, and Paul gives us the good lines from some poems, so we don’t have to waste time reading the whole poem. There’s much so far, in the first 109 pages, that I relate to. Not that you need to relate to everything you read, or anything you read. It might be better if you don’t relate. Develop new tastes. I wish I’d have discovered Penelope Fitzgerald, Barbara Pym, Elizabeth Taylor, Elizabeth Bowen, and Henry Green earlier, but sometimes you have to wait until you’re ready for something.
Paul clarifies the difference between the oboe and the bassoon, and I was reminded of the jazz appreciation class I took in college, and the instructor told the class the oboe was not played in jazz, no jazz oboe players, and I raised my hand and corrected her, pointing out that Yusef Lateef played jazz oboe. Turned out, she didn’t know that much about jazz, lectured from notes, said I was wrong about Lateef and jazz oboe. Yusef Lateef also played the bassoon. Paul probably knows that, or Nicholson Baker does, but they haven’t mentioned it yet, through page 109 of “Traveling Sprinkler.”
And so Paul buys the cheap guitar, takes a lesson, though it doesn’t sound like the lesson was much help, but he’s enthusiastic about making up some songs:
“Everything’s different when you write a song. The rhymes sound different and they happen naturally, and the chords don’t sound like the same chords played on a piano. Your fingers make choices for you. The guitar is your friend, helping you find chords you’d never have found on your own, and then these chords help you find tunes you’d never have thought to sing. It’s such a simple and glorious collaboration” (104-105).
That’s a perfect rebuttal to the academic’s put down of popular song lyrics when compared to poetry.
One of my sisters recently visiting, one the guitarist and both patient artists on paper and cloth, not in any particular hurry, so riding the Coast Starlight for a bit of adventure and fun you don’t get on an airplane these days, and knowing my affinity for books, upon leaving for the southbound trip, left me a gift of “The Paris Library.”1
As genre, it’s a historical novel, and thematically covers some of the same ground found in “Suite Francaise,” the novel by Irene Nemirovsky,2 the setting of both books the World War II German occupation of France and its effect on the French population. In the preface to the French edition, a quote from Irene in a letter to a friend: “How could you think I could possibly forget my old friends because of a little book [she’s talking here about her first novel, “David Golder”] which people have been talking about for a few weeks and which will be forgotten just as quickly, just as everything is forgotten in Paris?” (421-422).
That everything is forgotten is why we write and read, and why sometimes there are those who would destroy or ban books, or close libraries. At the same time, given the ongoing repetition of predicaments that lead up to those books, one wonders if one really wants to repeat a given experience vicariously yet again, or why.
Irene’s daughter Denise discovers while copying her mother’s notes over 60 years after World War II, “These were not simply notes or a private diary, as she had thought, but a violent masterpiece, a fresco of extraordinary lucidity, a vivid snapshot of France and the French – spineless, defeated and occupied: here was the exodus from Paris; villages invaded by exhausted, hungry women and children battling to find a place to sleep, if only a chair in a country inn; cars piled high with furniture, mattresses and pots and pans, running out of petrol and left abandoned in the roads; the rich trying to save their precious jewels; a German soldier falling in love with a French woman under the watchful eye of her mother-in-law; the simple dignity of a modest couple searching amidst the chaos of the convoys fleeing Paris for a trace of their wounded son” (Preface to the French edition, 430).
But “The Paris Library” remains in wartime Paris, where not everyone is “spineless” or even “defeated,” but half the story includes, almost absurdly, in split-time alternating chapters, a setting some 40 years later in the US state of Montana. Letters play an important role, another way of remembering, should they be stashed away for some future generation to discover – or for the letter-writer to re-discover an old self. And in “The Paris Library” the human frailties uncovered or challenged by universal circumstances of the results of one’s actions prove the human possibilities of self-empowerment and resilience and rehabilitation. Challenging too, the constant reminder that one constant of the human condition seems to be the constant seemingly contradictory struggle for peace.
“The Paris Library,” by Janet Skeslien Charles, first published in Great Britain by Two Roads (John Murray Press, Hachette UK), 2021. ↩︎
I have the First Vintage International Edition, May 2007, translation (2006) by Sandra Smith, originally published in France as Suite Francaise by Editions Denoel, Paris, in 2004, and subsequently in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus and in the US by Knopf, 2006. ↩︎
Eugenio Montale, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1975 (for his poetry), would have made a great blogger. In 1946, he started writing for a newspaper, a form ill-suited to his poetic writing style, and for his articles created a new form, based on the characteristics of the personal essay:
“To write about those silly and trivial things which are at the same time important” (Montale, quoted in Introduction, p. x)1.
And since the blogger doesn’t write for today’s formal critic (who eschews the amateur writer), or for the reader of tomorrow (who delights in the undiscovered), but for today’s casual scroller (who has no patience for the esoteric), Montale could knock out his pieces on demand:
“I write the articles in two hours, with no trouble,”
(Sounds about right, given this blogger’s experience; what flows easily for one writer may trouble another, but either way, one should still carefully select from one’s personal Library of Babel)
“but when I’m out of ideas (and it happens often) I feel lost” (xi).
How could you ever run out of ideas when your subject is everyday life? To write, maybe it’s best to first be lost.
“If I was not a born storyteller, so much the better, if the space at my disposal was limited, better still. This forced me to write in great haste. To cater for the taste of the general public, which is little accustomed to the allusive and succinct technique of the petit poeme en prose, created no problem” (x).
And what are those characteristics of the personal essay one might find in Montale’s “sketches”?
“…humor, irony, self-irony, and a ready supply of nostalgia, across fictional vignettes, memoir, literary and cultural opinion, travel writing, and music criticism” (xi – Galassi, Introduction).
The sketch form (which is neither news nor opinion), to get it right, must be written askance or on a slant less it become straightforward autobiography, which by definition most will find boring, for readers must be able to find themselves in the writing, even if the picture they find might not be particularly flattering.
To give some idea of the length of the sketches, Montale’s newspaper pieces, there are 195 pages of them in the NYRB book I’m quoting from, which is divided into four parts that total 50 pieces, so an average 4 pages in length. The longest are 7 pages, of which there are only 2, and the shortest are 2 pages, of which there are 7.
The titles of the “Butterfly of Dinard” pieces don’t always give much of a clue as to the topic. Take for example, “Success,” which turns out to be a music experience piece which includes a consideration of “claqueurs,” who were a kind of precursor to the canned laughter of television sitcoms, and the piece turns out to be not about success at all but about its opposite, failure; fair enough, since the early sitcoms and soap operas, one might theorize, did borrow from the classical melodramas, and in terms of art consideration, fit the bill. Of course the soaps lived without laughter of any kind, unless the audience had cried itself silly.
I’ve often thought John Cage, Marshall McLuhan, and Buckminster Fuller each would have made efficient and excellent bloggers. I was reminded of Cage when reading Montale’s “Success” piece. Montale is recruited by his barber (and vocalist who would then become Montale’s bel canto teacher) to join “his team of claquers” for a night to applaud a musician, Jose Rebillo, who could not “read notes but nonetheless he composed music for the pianola by cutting and punching holes in cardboard rolls with scissors and awls.” (There are 73 “Translator’s Notes”: #26 explains that Rebillo is based on the real composer Alfredo Berisso). Of course Cage could read notes, but still, the method described evokes Cage. And not only the method; Montale says, “Music such as that of Signor Rebillo, all dissonance and screeching, had never been heard before” (50).
Other titles include “The Bat,” about a couple in a hotel room invaded by a bat. The woman freaks out while the man must find a way to evict the bat. And “Poetry Does Not Exist,” about a visit Montale receives from a German Sergeant during the war-winter of ’44, a would-be poet himself and a fan of Montale’s poetry. During the visit, Montale is hiding two compatriots in an adjoining room. And the title piece, “Butterfly of Dinard,” which may or may not have been real.
The four sections of the book align somewhat with Montale’s chronological history, explained in the Introduction, which itself includes 8 footnotes. Each piece is a self-contained reading experience that points in two directions, one outward, the other inward, and the reader may take either path. In the title and end piece, “Butterfly of Dinard,” the narrator tells of a cafe and a waitress, who may or may not be the butterfly of the piece, which is only about 500 words long, a single page. Was the butterfly real or a figment of the imagination is the unanswerable question.
Butterfly of Dinard, by Eugenio Montale, Translated from Italian by Marla Moffa and Oonagh Stransky, Introduction by Jonathan Galassi, New York Review Books, 2024, Originally published in Italian as Farfalla di Dinard, 1960. ↩︎
Human imagination is part of nature, turning light into food, like photosynthesis in plants. Imagination is a natural process that needs no teacher or school, theory or method. Thus poetry should not become a profession, nor should a poem profess anything, nor should poets become professors. Most formal education activity turns subjects into sports and competition. Imagination is not competitive.
We might see that William Blake, in his “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” (1790), explains the imagination as a natural means of protecting the human from an onslaught of reality:
“1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul. For that called Body is a portion of Soul discerned by the five senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.
2. Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.
3. Energy is Eternal Delight.”
William Carlos Williams associated the season of Spring with the imagination. It’s in his short book titled “Spring and All” that we find his now famous poem called “The Red Wheelbarrow.” But we’ve been reading that short piece sort of “à la carte,” or slightly out of context. It appears in “Spring and All” as a numbered poem in a series of poems interrupted in several places by Williams’s prose discussion about what he is doing and why in the way of poetry. There are a total of 27 poems in “Spring and All,” and “The Red Wheelbarrow” is number:
XXII
so much depends upon
a red wheel barrow
glazed with rain water
beside the white chickens
“The Red Wheelbarrow” appears in “Spring and All” on page 138 (Part II: pp 88:151) of my copy of Imaginations (New Directions Paperbook 329, 1971):
pp. 138-139 from “Spring and All” (1923) in Imaginations (NDP329, 1971)
Reading “The Red Wheelbarrow” in the context of “Spring and All” we begin to see how Williams invites the reader’s imagination to absorb the image. It is a well-lit poem. A painting is suggested, and the imagination creates the image (food) from the juxtapositions of color and light and things placed as if by hands (red, white, wheelbarrow, water, chickens, glaze), but will the chickens sit still? Probably not.
A few mornings ago, I walked into the kitchen, set about making coffee, and noticed a line of tiny ants climbing up and down a corner edge, starting from a small gap behind a molding where the wall meets the floor, and when the ants reached the countertop, they went meandering to and fro, around the toaster and coffee maker and compost bucket. And two nights ago, out walking, we came across a nest of what appeared to be the same ant species emerging from a crack in the sidewalk, a line of scouts working their way into a neighboring yard. And early yesterday, the weather still clement, in spite of thunderstorms and tornadoes forecasted for the later afternoon hours, I had taken a morning break with my coffee outside in the fine Spring morning, and when I swung the door open to come back in, a fly the size of Rodan nearly knocked me over as she flew into the house and proceeded to spin around and around near the ceilings, cavorting from room to room.
Spring begins with a pile of chores, and one recalls T. S. Eliot’s seemingly anti-intuitive start to his disillusionist poem titled “The Waste Land”:
“April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain.”
Not to mention the appearance of ants awaking from their winter diapause.
“Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers.”
Soon April, and signs of spring are breeding and mixing in the kitchen and in the air, inside and out. Across the grass, dandelions are sprouting and even flowering already, and the turf at the edge of the sidewalk needs edging. The list goes on, but never mind – I discovered this week Ruth Stout, whose practice of gardening is summed up in the titles to her mid-century books, notably: “Gardening Without Work: For the Aging, the Busy & the Indolent” (1963); and “The Ruth Stout No-Work Garden Book: Secrets of the year-round mulch method” (1971); and her first, “How to have a Green Thumb without an Aching Back: A New Method of Mulch Gardening” (1955).
It was in a New Yorker article of March 17 that I discovered Ruth Stout, sister, as I learned, of the famous detective fiction writer Rex Stout, best known for his protagonist Nero Wolfe. The subtitle to Jill Lepore’s article tells all: “Ruth Stout didn’t plow, dig, water, or weed.” Suddenly, Spring seemed a happier time than how T. S. Eliot described it.
Still, I had ants in the kitchen to deal with, for I learned to my dismay they had nested inside the coffee maker. I surrounded the coffee maker with a moat of vinegar, and when the ants appeared between the moat and the coffee maker, I knew they had to be coming from within the coffee maker, where they must have set up a new nest. Never one to rush for the can of spray that “kills bugs dead” (ad line attributed to Beat poet Lew Welch, by the way), after a bit of research, I decided to try Dr. Bronner’s peppermint soap, having read that ants don’t like peppermint oil. The soap certainly stops ants on contact, and it seems to slow new scouts from returning to the scene.
Meantime, our kitchen counter is cleaner than ever before. I had to retire the electronic coffee maker. I read ants like water and warmth (who doesn’t?), and they can also detect electric currents, including vibes from computers and cell phones and such – so we won’t be able to charge our devices on the kitchen counter anymore, for fear of ants. Imagine ants in your Chromebook, crawling in and out of the keyboard. And we’ve returned to a French press coffee maker, and while it takes a bit longer with more steps to brew, the coffee is robust. And immediately employing the Ruth Stout method, the yard work is quickly done, leaving more time for writing pieces, well, like this one.
But what of the fly the size of Rodan, the deep reader will be wondering? Advocating a catch and release policy toward all living but unwelcome things, I grabbed the fly catcher and went dancing around the house with the fly. I trapped it in the bathroom, where it had landed on the window screen. To catch a fly with the fly catcher, you have to wait until it lands, approach quickly but stealthily, cover it with the catch door open, then slide the catch door closed with the fly inside the trap. Might sound easy, but it’s often a cat and mouse game as the fly inevitably flickers away at the last second. After several attempts banging around the small bathroom, I caught the fly, then released it into Spring and all wilderness where all Earth life mingles half awake and half asleep.
“The Coming of the Toads” is the title of a short poem by E. L. Mayo:
“‘The very rich are not like you and me,’ Sad Fitzgerald said, who could not guess The coming of the vast and gleaming toads With precious heads which, at a button’s press, The flick of a switch, hop only to convey To you and me and even the very rich The perfect jewel of equality.”
E. L. Mayo. Summer Unbound and Other Poems, the University of Minnesota Press, 1958 (58-7929). Also, E. L. Mayo. Collected Poems. New Letters, University of Missouri – Kansas City. Volume 47, Nos. 2 & 3, Winter-Spring, 1980-81.
The young toads were ugly televisions, but those eerily glowing tubes contained a lovely irony. The toads invaded indiscriminately. The bluish-green light emitted from the eyes of the toads emerged from every class of home, all experiencing the same medium for their evening massage. Mayo’s poem is a figurative evaluation of the effects of media on class and culture.
In Fitzgerald’s short story “The Rich Boy” (1926), the narrator says, “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.” But Mayo doesn’t seem to be quoting from Fitzgerald’s story. He seems to be referencing the famous, rumored exchange by the two rich-obsessed, repartee aficionados Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Hemingway wrote, in his short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936):
“He remembered poor Julian and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, ‘The very rich are different from you and me.’ And how some one had said to Julian, Yes, they have more money. But that was not humorous to Julian. He thought they were a special glamourous race and when he found they weren’t it wrecked him just as much as any other thing that wrecked him.”
Did TV have a democratizing effect, or are its effects numbing? In Act 2, Scene 1, of Shakespeare’s “As You Like It,” Duke Senior, just sent to the woods without TV, mentions the toad’s jewel:
“Now, my co-mates and brothers in exile, hath not old custom made this life more sweet than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods more free from peril than the envious court? Here feel we but the penalty of Adam, the seasons’ difference, as the icy fang and churlish chiding of the winter’s wind, which, when it bites and blows upon my body, even till I shrink with cold, I smile and say ‘This is no flattery: these are counselors that feelingly persuade me what I am.’ Sweet are the uses of adversity, which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, wears yet a precious jewel in his head; and this our life exempt from public haunt finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones and good in every thing. I would not change it.”
Fitzgerald didn’t embrace television, but today he might cradle a metamorph tadpole in his lap. What would it convey? The toad’s jewel is more than a metaphor; the churlish shows of television are today the Duke’s counselors. We enter the space of the light box, and the toad’s jewel poisons us to the paradox of staying put, to electronic exile, but does it contain its own antidote, the toadstone?
The Coming of the Toads 