The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

Tag: New York Times

  • Waiting for a Cold Spell

    I’ve been reading aloud evenings to Susan, “Excellent Women,” by Penelope Pym. First published in 1952, the setting is London after the war. Soldiers are coming home, rentals are hard to find, some foods are still being rationed. The narrator is the understated, astute Mildred Lathbury, a bit over 30, who has a flat of her own, but must share a bathroom with the lodgers downstairs. She attends church regularly, helps with the jumble sales and flowers for the altar, and is drawn into relationships involving a cast of characters requiring her free and easy to come by assistance. Every character’s name seems effectively thought out. Not my favorite character, but certainly my favorite name, is Everard Bone, an anthropologist:

    “I crept quietly up to my flat and began to prepare supper. The house seemed to be empty. Saturday night . . . perhaps it was right that it should be and I sitting alone eating a very small chop. After I had washed up I would listen to Saturday Night Theatre and do my knitting. I wondered where the Napiers were, if they were out together, or if Helena was with Everard Bone” (57).

    It’s my third time reading “Excellent Women,” but just the first time reading it aloud. A few nights ago, a chapter began with this:

    “A list of furniture is not a good beginning to a letter, though I dare say a clever person with a fantastic turn of mind could transform even a laundry list into a poem.

    I sat for a long time at my desk, unable to put pen to paper, idly turning the pages of a notebook in which I kept accounts and made shopping lists. How fascinating they would have been, had they been mediaeval shopping lists! I thought. But perhaps there was matter for poetry in them, with their many uncertainties and question marks” (164).

    And I have been sitting this morning at my writing table wondering if I have time for some writing that might make for a good post for this here Hear ye blog. The electric folks are on the block this week replacing utility poles, and we’ve been told they will shut our power off for most of the day today, likely around 8 to 3, though it’s now 9 and the coffee is still hot and the temperature inside stable. The big inconvenience, once the power goes off, comes from it being only around 40 degrees out, and our old place does not hold heat any longer than a tee shirt and swim trunks in a dunk at Refugio.

    A few weeks ago, I bought a digital subscription to the New York Times for $4.00 a month. Little did I know at the time that I would spend as much time on their Games page as on their news. Like most things pocket phone related, the games are addictive. My favorite is Spelling Bee. Every day, a new circle of 7 letters is posted for you to type as many words over 3 letters long as you can find – all using the center letter. Today’s letters amount to a difficult episode: b c d y t e o. So far, I’ve found only 8 words: Body, Booty, Byte, Dotty, Eddy, Teddy, Toddy, and Toyed. My score at this point is “Nice,” the rankings ranging from Beginner to Good Start, Moving Up, Good, Solid, Nice, Great, Amazing, and Genius. A four letter word is worth only 1 point, longer words worth more, a pangram scores high. The longest word I’ve logged so far is Ineffective. Statistics are maintained in the game file. I’ve worked 35 puzzles, finding 755 words, including 16 pangrams, but only 4 times have I scored Genius.

    I doubt Barbara Pym succumbing to digital games, but maybe Mildred Lathbury would play along. Here’s a short poem I made using the words from the Spelling Bee mentioned above:

    Waiting for a Cold Spell
    Teddy swimming in the spilling morning waves 
    Dotty over having this morning scored Amazing 
    In the New York Times oft Toyed Toddy in hand 
    Testing word Bytes but Eddy and Bill stay away 
    For the Booty is holy Body alone and cold here
    Unlike marbles in a warm dust of green Spring.

    “Excellent Women,” by Barbara Pym, was first published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape in 1952, in the US by E. P. Dutton in 1978, and my edition by Penguin Books in 2006.

  • Hybrid Reading and “Sex and the vote”

    Newspapers are dying, but as they slide into immateriality, they’re looking for ways to merge into Internet traffic. Regular columnists are forced to blog to establish stronger and closer connections with their audiences. No doubt many regular columnists are already longing for the days when they had the highway to themselves. Blogging, of course, invites comments, which multiply, and comments are easier to post than letters to the editor, which often go unpublished, while comments, rarely edited for clarity or decorum, bring the commenter instant gratification, however short-lived or inconsequential, yet columnists don’t seem to be completely ignoring them. Stanley Fish regularly gets hundreds of comments to each of his posts at the Times Opinionator, as does Nicholas Kristof. Print periodicals are also struggling, but we are beginning to see engaging hybrid forms, offering a kind of communication in the round for readers, with several noteworthy add-on benefits. These benefits go beyond simply allowing on-line access, or putting the print copy on an e-Reader. At the New Yorker, added value on-line features include interactive live chats with authors, videos, audios, podcasts, and slide shows (some of the on-line features do require a subscription).

    The newspaper is a mosaic with boundaries, the Internet a mosaic without boundaries. As the newspaper continues to get watered down daily in new irrelevancies suggested by the instantaneous availability of information via the Internet, it continues to lose revenue from defecting advertisers and subscribers. Yet the hybrid forms suggested by the New Yorker have the potential to renew and revitalize public discourse. At the Oregonian, The Stump is essentially a group blog produced by the editorial board. The Stump is an on-line extension of the newspaper’s Op-Ed pages. We begin to see that the salvation of the newspaper may come from removing the mosaic’s traditional boundaries with a hybrid form that will include more interactive reading opportunities.

    One of the difficulties of programming the hybrid link from newspaper to Internet is still the newspaper’s limited space. The Stump, for example, prints the beginnings of articles on the editorial page, but readers must go on-line if they want to read the whole article (where they can also comment). I didn’t know my “Sex and the vote” (Nov 4) piece had made it to The Stump until a friend emailed me saying he had enjoyed my little piece in the paper. I wasn’t sure if he had gone on-line to read the entire piece or not. Then again, how often do any of us read to the end of a piece? That’s part of the nature of the newspaper. The mosaic character and layout encourages it; the hybrid link, a link frozen in hard copy, continues the tradition.