The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

Tag: Marginalia

  • Guitars (Sunday Cartoons & Marginalia)

    Click anywhere in the gallery for scroll and captions.

    Red guitar outline with text tooth pick and guitar pick.
    yellow outline of guitar on blue field
    squiggly black pen outline of guitarist
    distorted guitar angled with text b3 5 b-7 and 9
    Smiling guitarist wearing blue bowtie and holding blue guitar
    Frowning guitarist wearing a polka-dotted bowtie holding blue guitar.
    Yellow figure next to five strings, the sixth string he's wearing as a tie
    outline of guitar on light blue field
    Notebook page of six string banjo with two surreal characters on page and text reading "Mr Guitar plays banjo"
    Guitar in front of house porch with woman and man in foreground.

    “they brush         
    The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush         
    With richness”1

    “And that’s life, then: things as they are,
    This buzzing of the blue guitar.”2

    “What slight essential things she had to say
    Before they started, he and she, to play.”3

    “Useless
    to silence it.
    Impossible
    to silence it.”4

    “I opened its lid and saw Joe
    written twice in its dust, in a child’s hand,
    then a squiggled seagull or two.”5

    1. “Spring” Gerard Manley Hopkins. ↩︎
    2. “The Man with the Blue Guitar” Wallace Stevens. ↩︎
    3. “The Guitarist Tunes Up” Francis Cornford ↩︎
    4. “The Guitar” Federico Garcia Lorca ↩︎
    5. “The Black Guitar” Paul Henry ↩︎

  • Learning Code

    I’ve been working on the coderoad
    Just to pass the time away
    Someone’s in the kitchen with AI
    Bowing on the old cello

    Soprano alto tenor bass
    The four each know their place
    One has a deja vu
    Looking back at you

    Oats peas beans and barley grow
    Timeline full of doodly squat
    Do you or I or anyone know
    How code from AI grows 

    Rounding off we come to end
    Our four part harmony
    She prompts you and you bump him
    Tomorrow we’ll meet again

    Four square play-court sections, each with round face: top left, brick gold A 4 star; top right, salt air C 2; bottom left, sand silver D 1; bottom right, pier water 3 B.

  • Writing and Other Categories

    What is writing? I’ve been pulling maintenance on the blog. Too many categories clutter the recipe. Is blogging writing? Not if the blog is photographs only. Then again, notice “graph” in the word photograph. In a photo, we are doodling with light. Is turning wrenches blogging?

    What is coding? I was also working on trying to code. Options may work differently depending on blog template, but clicking on the three vertical ellipsis dots next to the Publish button in the upper right corner of my post draft reveals a drop-down menu that includes, under EDITOR, both Visual and Code editor options. Coding is editing that results in how what you say looks.

    I experimented enough to resolve not to mess with coding. For one thing, results are seldom what you saw is what you got. Format often changes depending on user device but also depending on WordPress built-in preferences – in the Reader alone there are several view options, and they often seem to apply the code differently. Sometimes the magic works; sometimes it doesn’t.

    I was interested in making letters joggle and words dance, slip and slide up and down the page, dressed in wild and varied colors, and of varying size and shapes. Not gonna happen. There are wheels within wheels, codes within codes, and editors, supervisors, and principals insisting on consistent behavior.

    I abandoned my brief foray into coding and set to work on the maintenance of categories and tags. Did you know WordPress limits attention per post the total of Tags plus Categories to 15? If you go over 15, the post won’t appear in tag searches. That I did not know. And major service maintenance required if you want to find those posts over 15 and whittle them down under the limbo bar. Not absolutely necessary to know or act on, but the mechanic in me wants to know how things work and how to handle the tools.

    Or is it all a distraction from writing? What category to assign this? How to tag it? I’m often not sure. Meantime, under the heading of pulling maintenance on the blog, I added a Tag Cloud and a Category drop down menu to the bottom footer. And I added back the subtitle to the blog: A Literary Notebook – Since 2007. How had it come unattached? Probably my mettlesome mechanic meandering.

    Writing is distraction. From what?

    “Must we wring the neck of a certain system in order to stuff it into a contemporary pigeon-hole, or modify the dimensions of that pigeon-hole for the satisfaction of the analogymongers? Literary criticism is not book-keeping.”1

    As for jiggling letters and dancing words, we shouldn’t rely on code:

    “When the sense is sleep, the words go to sleep. (See the end of ‘Anna Livia‘) When the sense is dancing, the words dance.”2

    A three dimensional three story building in the shape of the letter E, windows on the right side of each floor, the letters P, Oe, m reading vertically down the front facing side.
    1. Samuel Beckett, “James Joyce / Finnegans Wake,” first published in 1929 by Shakespeare and Company, Paris, 1939 by New Directions, and as New Directions Paper book 331 in 1972 (pages 3-4). ↩︎
    2. Same as above (page 14). ↩︎

  • Cafes (Sunday Cartoons & Marginalia)

    Sketches from the edges of notebooks, nine images under a thematic title.

    This week’s theme, cafes, is taken from Hemingway’s short story titled “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” in which two waiters, one younger and complaining, the other older and empathetic, wait to go home while a lone customer, an old man, lingers on, drinking.

    Click anywhere in the gallery for scroll and captions.

    A Clean, Well-Lighted Place

    Hand-drawn cafe interior couple at a table and waiters in background, yellow traffic lights, bold black border.
    Orange brick sidewalk cafe, couple at table, each with a red wine glass.
    Lone person with drink at a table talking to a cell phone that fills the chair opposite.
    Waiter taking order at a table for two.
    Couple at a table in a cafe, the word Coffee in high window over door, letters backward, the word Noir on the floor in foreground.
    Stick figure couple at a table, one drinking wine, the other a beer. Quote bubbles say, "Check the legs on this wine" and "This beer is very hoppy."
    A cup of coffee looks like a face, eyes drawn over the cup, the handle an ear, a mouth, and a shirt collar saucer. Cursive text reads "Coffee au lait."
    A cup of coffee with a scribbled face emerging from the foam like latte art; the word 'Barista' is broken into vertical syllables: Bar, is, and ta.
    A dark cafe at night with couples at the bar and tables. Three red pendant lamps with yellow stylized light rays hang over the bar. Two waiters stand behind the counter at opposite ends.

  • Doodles

    I carried a three ring canvas binder between classes first year of high school that rubbed against my shirt and pants, stained indelibly a light purple from my doodle drawings on the binder covers front and back in red and blue ink pen. I wasn’t “The Illustrated Man,” but I sure had a tattooed notebook. Alas, there was no time-travelling girl helping me draw. Four years later when I started spending time in Venice, Ray Bradbury was long gone, but I was still doodling.

    I wrote in books, marginalia and notes, and doodled in notebooks. I couldn’t sit through a class without doodling. I was never that into comic books, which are more artistic than the common doodle. The beauty of the doodle is that it is not art, and it’s useless criticizing something for not being what it was not intended to be. And I took copious, effective notes in lecture classes; when neighboring students missed a class, they wanted my notes. Bonus the cartoons. There seems to be a relationship connecting the doodling brain to notetaking.

    A doodle isn’t automatically a cartoon. Doodling might be likened to automatic writing, where the subconscious develops surreal on a cafe napkin. The doodle may or may not have a model or subject, though often one emerges. The doodle is disposable, like the napkin it’s drawn on.

    Job changes, and then involved in business meetings, I continued to doodle, unable to pay attention otherwise. I suppose I doodled like others smoked cigarettes. On the five minute phone call, I could fill a ream. Sometimes, in a meeting, over my arm, someone would notice a doodle and comment. My notes and doodles were mosaic, non-linear.

    At some point I started looking at my doodles a bit differently. They went from a means to get through a class or meeting or phone call to a hobby of drawing and sketching, which meant trying to doodle outside the captive occasion and saving them, and turning them into cartoons. But it’s not so easy to draw when it isn’t improvised or made from a distraction, the mind mostly still focused on something else, and captions complicate the process, an attempt to explain a dream.

    Maybe doodling is a way of handling experience outside the rules of what children see as the adult world. The doodle is usually not an attempt at representational art, and so the doodler is free from linear perspective requirements. That’s one difference between the doodle and the sketch. At the same time, a true artist like Picasso might have drawn like a child because he had the skill to do so. It’s hard for an adult to doodle like a kid.

    Below are some doodled fragments. Click anywhere in the gallery to scroll and view single pics with captions.

    Ten square doodles like a block of houses, five on each side.
    Bedroom and frowning bed at being awoken and told in caption, "Time to get up."
    Outline of house as face with outline of hat for mouth.
    Page of book with marginalia blue ink face with exaggerated features on thin extended neck, wild hairdo.
    Four characters with text: double date
    Figure in dress.
    Pocket notebook page of scribbles, an audience at a concert, viewed from stage.
    Instructions for heat wave.
    Three stick figures.
    Smiling woman glancing down at man with wavy hair frowing looking out of corner of eyes up at woman. Satirical drawing of the famous painting titled "American Gothic."
    Three faces with circular heads, similar but each with different eyes and mouths.
    Doodle figure carrying bag labeled H2O and text that reads Who What (Predicament) Why Where (Setting) and Why (Argument) and How (Style).

  • Media (Sunday Cartoons & Marginalia)

    Visual jazz riff sketches from the edges of notebooks, some drawn with phone, nine images under a thematic title. Click anywhere in the gallery for scroll and captions.

    Scroll, scroll, scroll your boat…

    A table with two chairs in a bright blue-walled room lit by a yellow lamp hanging from the ceiling near a grey window.
    Speech bubble with tail, inside the bubble, handwritten words that say "the Art of the Personal comment."
    Bright red open mouth emits an empty speech bubble with tail pointing into the mouth.
    A bed in a room with ceiling lamp. Arms and legs appear from under the bed. On the blanket in handwritten letters, "Bed App."
    Close-up of a couple with a city skyline behind them; the man talks on a cellphone, and the woman wears a disappointed frown.
    Cell phone instructions: two vertical lines, one pointing down reads scroll down, the other points up.
    Social Media Instructions. Two hands at the edges with fingers pointing to comment, like, share, copy & paste, and link.
    View from car in drive-in theater, up on the big screen the handwritten words: Drive-in facebook.
    Three ring binder, the cover with handwritten words: facebook (the hard copy).
  • Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer”

    Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer”

    Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer” contains everything Hemingway left out of “The Sun Also Rises,” which had left Ernest with the tincture of  a refined sentiment. That is one difference between the Jazz Age and the Great Depression. Turned out, we didn’t always have Paris; most of us never had it. From page 1 of Miller: “I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive.”

    I don’t remember when I first read “Tropic of Cancer,” probably ’68 or ’69. From my notes written on the back of the last page and inside the back book cover:

    art sing 1
    Liby 36
    whore – Germaine 40-43
    Popini 58
    artist 60
    America 86
    change 87-90
    room dream 114-116
    woman want 117 (45, 26)
    pimp & whore 143-144
    Matisse 146-149
    Russia America 154
    working with boss 158
    mona 160-166 (smile)
    Paris 162-188
    book 163
    moon 167
    paragraph (style) 167, 202, 216
    converse 171
    army 200
    Whitman 216
    gold standard 219
    writer 224
    what’s in the hole 225
    earth 225, 226
    idols 228
    task of artist 228
    inhuman 230
    art 229-280
    human 231-259 (view on goodreads)

    “Tropic of Cancer” was first published in France, 1934, Obelisk Press.
    My edition is First Black Cat Edition 1961 Fifteenth Printing B-10, $1.25.
    Introduction c 1959 by Karl Shapiro first appeared in “Two Cities” Paris, France.
    Preface by Anais Nin, 1934.
    No ISBN appears in the book, but the number “394-17760-6” appears on the bottom right of back cover.

    Yes, trying to do something with Goodreads for the new year. I’ll be putting up short reviews like the one above from some of my old reads.