Going about without making any noise is perhaps the most difficult task of our day. If we try to make sense of the noise, we discover music.
I was thinking the blog was a silent activity, but then I began hearing my fingers striking the keyboard, padded notes, which, if given time, could be organized into a piece of music.
The quieter we try to be, the more noise we hear.
We might think of silent noise, tinnitus, for example, an apparent oxymoron, a noise but silent because it’s not really a sound, but simply the perception of sound, hearing a sound that has no outside source. Others can’t hear it, no matter how hard they listen. But they have their own silent noise playlists.
The keyboard went quiet as I reread the above paragraphs. I’m in real time for the moment, but my reader, if there is one, will not be in the same time. Thus the blog is like a recording, but the reader will not be able to hear the keyboard as I type, or as I typed, unless I made a recording.
There are 24 time zones around the globe. They allow for music to occur internationally. But not everyone pays strict attention to the time zones. In China, for example, everyone uses the same time, all the time, regardless of which of the five geographically separated time zones they might be in. What time is it becomes an interesting question, since sunrises and sunsets can occur hours apart, depending on where you are at the time. In other words, to awake at sunrise for one person, could be sleeping in for another, not getting up until noon! For some reason, we try to match our time with the position of the sun. But most people work inside, unlike our ancestors, so what does the sun have to do with it? Circadian rhythms. We can’t hide from the sun.
I’m making a recording now of the keyboard, using my cell phone. Note the pauses, as I try to figure out what to say. The spaces between the notes create music, because they are separated in time (duration). But is there rhythm? The recording has now gone on for just over one minute.
A default has given the keyboard recording the title “Voice 0061.” I’ve tried to upload the recording to this blog post, so readers can follow along, hearing the typing as they are reading the paragraph, but I received a message saying I’m unable to upload the file, to wit: “Sorry, you are not allowed to upload this file type.” Thus we discover that learning to play an instrument is harder than we might think. Undaunted, I’ll now try a video, using the keyboard and my cell phone.
I’ve set the phone against the screen, and I can’t see what I’m typing now, feeling much like the player in a jazz band. But I type on, being video-recorded. I don’t feel much like continuing the experiment, but having pushed on this far, I keep typing. As Cage said, “What we re-quire is silence; but what silence requires is that I go on talking.”1 Similarly, what music requires is that I go on typing. Many mistakes in this typed paragraph, like playing the worong [sic] notes on the guitar or piano, but I’ve gone back and corrected the text, but the mistakes, as recorded, sound just like all the other notes, no problem.
Now I have the video recording on my phone. Because I set the phone so close to my screen, the video is a white grey cloud, but the viewer can hear the keyboard. Now I have to figure out how to get the video from my phone into this blog post, so readers can listen to it as they read along. Alas, I try to email it to myself, but get a Gmail message saying it’s too big a file. Yet it’s only 1:33 minutes.
But you can perform your own keyboard music. All you have to do is type and listen. You don’t even have to type real words, but that should probably be the subject of a different blog post.
John Cage, “Lecture on Nothing” (1959), from “Silence” (First printing 1961. Wesleyan Paperback, 1973). ↩︎
One summer, I worked for one of my Dad’s friends in the body and fender shop at a Ford dealership in Culver City. He entertained the idea of getting a race car and I would be his driver. He foreshadowed the advent of the short surfboard. “Why are the boards so big?” he asked. “You could ride a two-by-four if you could get up the momentum.” Another summer my Confirmation sponsor hired me to work as a lab assistant at UCLA, where he was working on a graduate degree, the chalkboards in the lab covered with formulas and equations that looked like hieroglyphs left by sanderlings bicycling around the wavelets at El Porto.
The first thing my Dad taught me about plumbing was to name the tools, so I could hand them to him when needed. And I learned to dig a trench with the correct slope, for “shit falls downhill.” I worked odd plumbing jobs with him and knew enough of plumbing to know a plumber by trade was not what I wanted to be. Today, though, I feel some affinity for the plumber’s craft, even if my Dad would not now recognize it as the same trade, the new plastic pipe, the special tools, the glues that have replaced the lead and oakum joint jobs. Boiling the molten pig of lead in a lead pot then working the cooling lead sealing the oakum with a cold chisel around the lip of the cast-iron pipe. Yarned and roped, poured and caulked.
One day, my Dad, a plumber by trade, he would say if asked, asked me what I wanted to do, to be: a carpenter, an electrician, a plumber. I wanted to surf, which he knew, his garage a surfboard shop, but while I was a good surfer, I wasn’t an excellent swimmer, like my two best friends who were county lifeguards, but we all knew we weren’t going to surf our lives away. And I played guitar, but as an ambition as aimless as walking on a surfboard, for while I was a good guitarist, I wasn’t an exceptional musician, and had no taste for the business. And cars, beginning with the 1956 Chevy I bought for $75 from Gary, who was headed for Vietnam. I became a wheeled and track vehicle mechanic, MOS63BC20, which helped see me through school, that talk with my Dad over and out.
What’s all this got to do with Benjamin Wood and his novel “Seascraper,” recently longlisted for the 2025 Book Prize?
“The horse needs feeding up and harnessing. He gets into his boots on the back doorstep, rolls a ciggie underneath the rusty canopy his grandpa built from corrugated iron – it’s hanging by loose screws, and one more heavy rain could bring it down. He’s not repaired it yet, as mending stuff like that requires an aptitude he doesn’t have. His talent is for something else – his grandpa would decry it as a waste of time if he were still alive to hear him sing a tune, and if his ma knew anything about the pocket watch he gave to Harry Wyeth in trade for his guitar, then she would make a bonfire of it in their own backyard” (5).1
That talk with my Dad I replay like old vinyl, now full of scratches of course. I might pick an electrician to be, and maybe I’d specialize in electrical musical instruments. Or I might have moved from carpentry to lutherie. Those are indoor jobs. Do you want to work indoors or out was not a key question for a kid growing up in Southern California, where the weather was taken for granted. There were a dozen guys I knew having conversations with their Dads similar to the one I described above. Families just scraping by, recovering from one war and beginning another, and then another, or couples with a cache of war bonds that would see their two kids through USC or Stanford.
“It never used to foul his mood this much, the cold, the loneliness, the graft, but that was long before he harboured any aspirations for himself besides what he was raised to want. He used to think it was enough to fill the whiskers up with shrimp each morning and accept the cash for them by afternoon. Providing is surviving – that’s what Pop would tell him, and what else should any man desire? Perhaps a wife, if he could find one that’d have him” (12).
He has more than a job, an occupation, he’s a seascraper by trade. He both loves and hates it. For love, the culture and tradition, the brawn and brack, the freedom. For hate, the cold and wet and muddiness, the poverty, and not enough time to devote to his true calling:
“He was thirteen when he first went out to sea with Pop and, in those days, few adaptations to the old equipment had been made – the cart still had two wagon wheels with metal rims, and he felt queasy after half an hour of riding in the seat with him. It was supposed to be a weekend job, that’s all, and it was something he would beg his ma to let him do, believing it to be a rite of passage. Every other Flett had been a shrimper, going back to his great-grandpa who had putted barefoot on the beach alone with just a push-net and a basket on his back” (34).
Scraping for money, too. There’s the rub. And he learns and loves to read, fatal flaw. And comes under the spell, though he’s naturally wary, of an outsider who sees just some kind of romance in the beach and sea and fishing for a living, and who wants to make some kind of movie about it, with him the star, and the promise of some big bucks. He’s not sure.
“The folk club at the Fisher’s Rest begins at eight, and if he wants to play tonight he’s got to put his name down on the list by quarter to. Perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad to wait a week, rehearse his songs a few more times before subjecting people’s ears to them. He’s not in a position to refuse that kind of money. ‘I dunno,’ he says” (32).
What’s the catch? The empty promise of a false calling. And who is calling? You’ll meet all kinds of charlatans wanting to hear your story and help you to tell it. How could you tell? He’ll make a tourist scene of your livelihood. Tom Flett is the only seascraper around who still works with a horse and wagon. The others use motorized carts. He’s like a plumber who might still be using lead and oakum. Idealized and sentimental. The tourist view doesn’t see behind the facade. There’s no money in the songs. There’s no money in the seascraping. What’s he waiting for? To know his song well before he starts singing?2 What’s he going to sing about? Seascraping. Dangerous work, and just scraping by.
“He’s committed now and has to see it through. ‘Bear with me, then. I’ve got to work the nerve up.’ The guitar of Harry’s is much bigger at the body than he’s used to and its neck seems thicker when he takes hold of it. At least it’s strung the right way up. The frets are old and blackened, but it sounds in tune. ‘I need to warn you, I’ve not sung this more than twice from start to finish. It’ll come out ragged, but you’ll get the gist’” (161).
Mariposa Surfboards
“Seascraper,” Benjamin Wood, recently longlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize. Penguin Random House UK. ↩︎
“A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” released in 1963 on the album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. ↩︎
Patrick Modiano’s novella “In the Cafe of Lost Youth” opens with an epigraph attributed to the French philosopher Guy Debord:
“At the halfway point of the journey making up real life, we were surrounded by a gloomy melancholy, one expressed by so very many derisive and sorrowful words in the cafe of the lost youth.”
I was unable to track down the source of the quote. It’s possible it comes from a memoir or some throwaway magazine article. But it reminded me of the opening to Dante’s “Inferno”:
“Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray from the straight road and woke to find myself alone in a dark wood.” John Ciardi translation, 1954.
Dante is comparing having lost his purpose or direction in life in middle age, 35 or so, to getting lost in a wilderness where one has wandered off a steadfast, well-worn path. He’s unable to locate himself on some reputable and credible map, either from an external or internal viewpoint. Why doesn’t he back up, retrace his steps? Instead, he forges on in the dark on a crooked path. At that point, a step forward could just as well be a step backward.
Dante both forges purposefully ahead and rambles on, caught in the web of the woods, presses on like some point man cut off from his platoon, tracking deliberately with some goal of trying to map a new way out. Though he lacks an immediate target, he’s not aimless.
“I placed the typewriter on the small pitch-pine table in my room. I already had the opening sentence in my mind: ‘Neutral zones have at least one advantage: They are only a starting point and we always leave them sooner or later.’ I was aware that once I sat down in front of the typewriter, everything would be much less straightforward.” (89-90, “In the Cafe of Lost Youth,” Patrick Modiano, 2007 Editions Gallimard, 2016 NYRB, 118 pages).
Modiano was the recipient of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature. The only other book of his I’ve read is “Young Once” (1981 Editions Gallimard, 2016 NYRB, 156 pages):
“Does life ever start over at thirty-five? A serious question, which made her smile. She would have to ask Louis. She had the feeling that the answer was no. You reach a zone of total calm and the paddle boat glides all by itself across a lake like the one stretching out before her. And the children grow up. They leave you.” (5).
Both novels are sepia-tinged with the kind of suggestive noir one begins to associate with normal life, which is to say there is no normal, but everyone you meet is obsessed, or ought to be, with their past and future but are actually caught up in the web of their now, hopelessly trying to live in the moment but forced to move on, like Dante, or Beckett, in spite of having lost track of where they are in the moment. Even trying to move back is another futile move forward. Yet at some point, maybe that middle age point, one is given pause, a kind of grace – to reflect, to look back, to sense forward, lost in that very stillness:
“They did not know that this was their last walk through Paris. They did not yet exist as individuals at all; they were blended together with the facades and the sidewalks. In macadam roads, the stones, patched together like an old cloth, have dates written on them to indicate when the successive layers of tar have been poured, but perhaps also recording births, encounters, deaths. Later, when they remembered this period in their life, they would see these intersections and building entryways again. They had registered every last ray of light coming off of them, every reflection. They themselves had been nothing but bubbles, iridescent with the city’s colors: gray and black.” (154)
You may never feel so alone as when wandering around in a crowd of strangers. Or sitting in a church pew at the wedding of an old friend you can’t really say you know anymore back in town for the ceremony then on the road again. Or sitting with a parent who keeps asking you what your name is, or during a visit with your child you no longer recognize. Or at a reunion luncheon with some past coworkers.
You buy a ticket to the baseball park and settle in with a box of Cracker Jack1 to watch the game and feel a part of something bigger than yourself, not the team, but the cheering crowd, then comes news three of your favorite players have been traded away, and by the 7th inning stretch, the crowd starts to thin, the score lopsided, the bullpen early emptied.
“The apparition of these faces in a crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough.”2
And you don’t really know the players, and from the distance of your outfield seat, all the players look the same. Still, nowhere to go, you sit until the fans have all gone home, the players off the field hitting the showers, and security comes to check on you and escort you out a side gate.
You might have been a clean-cut kid and been to college too,3 but in spite of the degrees earned, or maybe as a result of them, you never learned to be alone, to enjoy inertia. If all the other pool balls would just sit still, you could sink the 8 ball and call it a thrill.
Not to worry, Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) has come to save the day4.
“It may prove hard to resist an artificial companion that knows everything about you, never forgets, and anticipates your needs better than any human could. Without any desires or goals other than your satisfaction, it will never become bored or annoyed; it will never impatiently wait for you to finish telling your story so that it can tell you its own.”5
At issue is can a machine substitute for a human in building a satisfying relationship where only one party enjoys, and suffers from, consciousness, while the other party observes and salves and solves (an artificial Jeeves6) your every agony, while themselves unable to actually feel what you are feeling, or even what they are feeling, for they can’t feel either way. They will never be able to cry real tears with you, just shed crocodile tears. But then we get this:
“Solitude is the engine of independent thought – a usual precondition for real creativity.”7
“Engine” seems a poor word choice given the context. If the mind is an engine, why can’t A. I. have a mind?
Loneliness, not to be confused with alienation, detachment, isolation. We can feel lonely, apparently, anywhere, with anyone, in any setting or activity. Is loneliness therefore an existential decision made over time as we negate the possibility of others to be with us, for us to be with others? In other words, is it our own fault? Thoreau wasn’t lonely; why can’t we be more like Thoreau?
“I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will. Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows.”8
Paul Bloom, writing in The New Yorker, about the possibility for A. I. to cure loneliness, emphasizes that for the terminally lonely (“the elderly or the cognitively impaired” p. 57), A. I. could indeed be a good thing, but for the rest of us, loneliness is part of being human and to give it up would make us less human. Ouch: that’s caring authority. And it is against that authority that the artist retreats.
“Jeeves seems to know when I’m awake by a sort of telepathy. He always floats in with the cup exactly two minutes after I come to life. Makes a deuce of a lot of difference to a fellow’s day.” The Inimitable Jeeves.↩︎
I’d been asking, like a smart aleck or wise guy school-kid, a couple of Artificial Intelligence apps (Gemini and ChatGPT) questions to see if I could stump them. The apps provide disclaimers. ChatGPT cautions, “ChatGPT can make mistakes. Check important info.” I questioned ChatGPT what is meant by “important.” In short, important is any fact or idea that you might rely on to your detriment if proven wrong.
I was also thinking of the Universe, and William Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence”: “To see a world in a grain of sand….The questioner, who sits so sly, Shall never know how to reply.”
I asked ChatGPT how many photos had been uploaded to Instagram since its beginning:
Based on the latest available data, here’s what we know about Instagram:
Estimates from mid‑2024 to early 2025 indicate that:
Roughly 1,074 photos/video posts are uploaded per second
That equates to about 95 million posts per day, or almost 4 million per hour
I retrieved that data a few days ago, so I caution my reader to recheck the numbers with ChatGPT if important. The universe is expanding.
I then asked ChatGPT about blogs, how many new blog posts go up daily:
WordPress.com alone sees roughly 2.3 million new blog posts per day.
All blogging platforms combined—WordPress.org, Tumblr, Medium, Blogger, self-hosted setups, and more—generate around 7.5 million posts daily.
I then asked, considering social media formats, at what point, a tipping point or a break-even point – what is the number or percent a user can functionally follow other users? ChatGPT’s answer was long and involved, including definitions I had not specifically asked for:
Tipping Point in Following Behavior This is the point at which a user starts experiencing diminishing returns from following more accounts — the quality of their feed drops, content becomes more generic or algorithmically filtered, and they lose meaningful engagement with individuals.
Breakeven Point for Social Value This could be defined as the point where a user’s following count results in reciprocal value — e.g., they follow others and start receiving useful content or engagement in return.
I might have thought ChatGPT would quote John Cage somewhere in its answer, but it did not. The Cage quote I might have suggested, my paraphrase here: “If you don’t know the answer, why are you asking the question”?
One day down at Black Mountain College, David Tudor was eating his lunch.
A student came over to his table and began asking him questions.
David Tudor went on eating his lunch.
The student kept on asking questions.
Finally David Tudor looked at him and said, “If you don’t know,
Why, indeed, not to mention who. Who (or what) do you ask? (And before you get your red pencil out, I know all about who and whom, but I’ve my own style book here at the Toads, and I’ve unfollowed whom, so don’t bother.) I first read “Indeterminacy” in John Cage’s book titled “Silence” (1961, 1973, Wesleyan) – from page 260:
“In oral delivery of this lecture, I tell one story a minute. If it’s a short one, I have to spread it out; when I come to a long one, I have to speak as rapidly as I can” (260).
Part of ChatGPT’s answer to my question regarding the number of social media accounts one can follow or be followed with meaningful contact referenced “Dunbar’s Number”:
📊 Data-Based Estimates and Psychological Limits
1. Cognitive Limit — Dunbar’s Number (~150)
Humans can meaningfully maintain social relationships with around 150 people.
In social media, this is often expanded because of the passive nature of interaction — but past ~500–1,000 follows, users typically experience:
Less meaningful engagement
Algorithmic filtering becomes dominant
👉 Tipping point for meaningful social following: ~150–500 follows Beyond that, you don’t “functionally” follow people — the algorithm filters most content out.
What is meaningful or reciprocally engaging of course differs depending on one’s purpose or goal and the type of social media format one’s using. I did know the answer, but I wanted ChatGPT to confirm and provide some data with support. I was just playing around. But I had not heard of Dunbar’s Number. Dunbar’s Number is 150 – humans can interact meaningfully with 150 others. A further breakdown of Dunbar’s Number as supplied by ChatGPT follows:
Dunbar’s Number (~150) is more than just a single limit. Robin Dunbar, a British anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist, proposed that human social relationships are layered in discrete tiers, each with its own emotional closeness and frequency of interaction.
🔹 Dunbar’s Social Group Layers
These layers form a hierarchy of relationships, expanding by a rough factor of ~3 at each level:
Layer
Approx. Size
Relationship Type
Characteristics
1. Support Clique
3–5
Closest relationships
Daily contact, deep emotional support (best friends, close family)
2. Sympathy Group
12–15
Good friends
Weekly contact, trusted confidants
3. Close Network
~50
Friends you would invite to a party
Monthly contact, mutual interest, still emotionally meaningful
4. Casual Network
~150
Dunbar’s Number
People you know and recognize by name/face, occasional contact
5. Acquaintances
~500
Recognizable individuals
Low or no emotional intensity, weak ties (colleagues, mutuals)
6. Faces Known
~1,500
People whose faces you recognize
Stored in memory, but not personally connected
🔸 What This Means for Social Media
Most people can recognize ~1,500 profiles, but only maintain meaningful interaction with ~150.
Your Instagram close friends list or Twitter DMs likely reflects the 15–50 layer.
Follows, likes, or casual comments beyond the 150–500 range are often algorithmically or socially shallow.
I don’t mention any of this to cause or reflect distress, and I think most users intuitively realize a law of large numbers at work with regard to social media accounts, but I want to emphasize the importance, significance, or value of any relatively small number of followers writers may have, or may be following, not necessarily as “follow backs” without ever looking again, but in efforts to maintain meaningful reading and writing encounters, effort that takes time and trust and mutual engagement.
There is of course much more to this discussion one might pursue (the phenomenom of likes and comments, or lack thereof, for example), but this has been question and answer enough. To follow is not necessarily to befriend; to unfollow is not necessarily to defriend. In summary, I’m reminded of the advice Shakespeare’s Polonius gives to his son Laertes:
“Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel” (Hamlet, Act I, Scene 3).
But Polonius, in spite of his reputation for sound advice, is a bumbling fool and not to be trusted, and anyway, who wants to be grappled to another’s soul with a hoop of steel, particularly where grapple means wrestle and struggle?
About the only thing my folks brought with them when we moved to California was their accents. We kids brought ours too. “Can we all borrow ay catsup bottle from you all,” Peggy Ann asked our new next door neighbor Aunt Marty who lived with Uncle Hugh and their four boys and a Persian Blue. They were not our real aunt or uncle but we had many real ones but we would never know them. Ray called Mom Patty, but her real name was Mary, and Aunt Marty and Uncle Hugh called Ray, John. Uncle Hugh and Aunt Marty and their four boys and Persian Blue cat that used to sit atop the wall and stare into our bedroom moved away. The new neighbor mom Pennye’s real name was Mary too. When we first got Out West I went to public school, put ahead a grade, even though I’d never went to kindergarten, because the LA kids were slower. I remember sitting in class another kid reading aloud and I waited for the teacher to come down on him because he was saying his ay’s wrong. He said a cat with a soft article a, short and not at all sleek. It came my turn to read and I gave ay cat a hard ay, as long and hard and wiry as a cat’s tail when it’s a bottlebrush, and was astonished to hear the teacher interrupt me and correct my pronunciation of ay. Gradually we older kids lost most of our hard a’s and other quirks but the foibles of pronunciation still fool my tongue, like pass the catsup, and I wonder how his little tale might be changed had the author of my second grade book said the cat instead of a cat.
I’m not long into Youssef Rakha’s “The Dissenters” before being reminded of Joyce’s cracked looking glass:
– It is a symbol of Irish art. The cracked looking-glass of a servant.
But Stephen is able to think and express so as a result of his Jesuit training, a “wellfed” education, even while his family fortunes have ebbed:
Across the threadbare cuffedge he saw the sea hailed as a great sweet mother by the wellfed voice beside him.
And the question, as Humpty Dumpty put it, is which is to be master: the fed or the unfed.
– After all, I should think you are able to free yourself. You are your own master, it seems to me.
Stephen is in conversation with one of his roommates, Haines, an Englishman.
– I am a servant of two masters, Stephen said, an English and an Italian.
Still, surely we can think for ourselves, even with our poor or uneven educations? And where, after all, do we learn to think? And having mastered it, or enfolded it in fine arts, what do we think, and what do we think about what we think?
– You behold in me, Stephen said with grim displeasure, a horrible example of free thought.
– I can quite understand that, he [Haines] said calmly. An Irishman must think like that, I dare say. We feel in England that we have treated you rather unfairly. It seems history is to blame.
History. I recently read the “Fortunes of War” trilogies, “The Balkan Trilogy” and “The Levant Trilogy,” Olivia Manning’s collected novels set in World War II from the perspective of a British couple living in Bucharest then forced to move farther south in advance of the Nazi approach until they finally barely escape from Greece into Egypt and life in Cairo for the duration, and “Roman Year,” the Andre Aciman memoir of his family’s exile from Egypt to Italy, as a result of Nasser’s unfolding policies, where they attempt to settle in and live before relocating again to the US, and those readings now proved useful introductions to Rakha’s “The Dissenters.” But the first I read of Manning was her “School for Love,” which takes place in Jerusalem during the war, also an introduction now to the book at hand, “The Dissenters,” which in turn serves to see the Manning and Aciman books in different light.
In the Aciman book, for example, we find Aunt Flora, who had moved to Rome two years earlier, “expelled from Alexandria” (27), correcting the writing style of the young Andre:
“I didn’t tell her that I was typing letters to various American colleges. Aunt Flora had read my earlier drafts that week and said I was too poetic, too ethereal. I needed to have both feet on the ground. “There’s no room for your complicated, byzantine mannerisms in such letters – ‘I miss my homeland, what is my homeland, home is a metaphor,’” she mimicked, “none of that – I know your type” (215).
I’m not sure if Flora is punning on type there. A typed letter hides all the clues a handwritten one might contain about the writer, and we rely on the typed letter’s style to reveal the sources of the writer’s mannerisms. And an epistolary novel allows for a freedom from both handwriting and typewriting, from thought bound by circumstantial rules of usage; the letter frees the author from expectations and whatever presupposed rules the reader might bring to impose on style.
That letter to the world that never wrote to her, Emily Dickinson said – the letter is her world. A writer’s world of letters, a lighthouse.
“May the house be mercy and light” (275, “The Dissenters”).
What else can a mother hope for? At the end of a long day, decade…spouse, children…life. In which the mother is the country, the daughter those who left, emigrated and estranged, the son who turns to tell the tale in order to escape its meaning, “…past the time when I can build my personhood from scratch,” yet now free of “history and desire” (276).
I’m not sure if it’s part of the novel or not, I think probably not, but “The Dissenters” book includes a “Timeline” (279) that begins with 1948 and ends with 2014. A good reading exercise might be to take that timeline and amend it with a like-brief description of what Mouna – well, to match Mouna’s situation, circumstances, at each stage of the timeline, for that’s essentially how the plot of “The Dissenters” works. For example, on page 82, Mubarak is stepping down, so we are in 2011, January 25-February 11, according to the Timeline. What’s Mouna doing? At first, I thought she was caught on television, but it’s one of Nour’s so-called “visions,” not something he sees on TV.
“I whistle as I look up, ecstatic at her lack of headscarf. My mother is a movie star” (82).
Then again, maybe the Timeline and the non-linear dates that serve as section titles are not all that necessary for the reader reading the book without a craving for – to know the real from the imagined. The “Jumpers,” for example. It took me awhile to realize this was the “Myth” referred to in the subtitle to the book, “Three Letters & a Myth.” At first I thought the jumpers were real, but I couldn’t remember anything from the news about them.
“The Dissenters” blends political, family, religious, friendship, marriage circumstances for individuals with whatever everyday life they are bound up in or might for a host of reasons become unbound with something new always appearing just around the corner, and then the walk back, where one can neither don nor shed a hat without being accused of meaning something:
“In the seventies the headscarf wasn’t as ubiquitous as it was to become, nor were we as attuned to immodesty” (28).
The book might be somewhat confusing if one tries to read it solely as a history, particularly if looking for a linear timeline. And the book can make for somewhat daunting reading, like an overdose of nightly bad news. I was reminded in parts of Burroughs and “Naked Lunch,” of Poe’s stories, anecdotal dreamlike visions that reek of fantasy inspired by stress. You see or hear people laughing, but you either don’t get the humor or really it’s threadbare.
At the same time, the writing is clear and concise, casual, the individual chapters often short, propelling, lots of white space, until you get to “A Vision of Lena” (107), two and a half pages of solid prose – and is it a letter too? No. And what of the chapters titled “White,” “Green,” “Red,” and their subtitles of individual names? More on the Jumpers, the “Myth,” where a few of the chapters are brief paragraphs. The reading is both easy and difficult.
Nour is a journalist. Words are his trade:
“None of this would be happening if words didn’t take up with her again. I can tell. Her life’s nomenclature changing anew” (86).
Nour’s letters are to his sister, Shimo, expatted to California (but we never hear back from her), and are about their mother, Mouna, as Nour describes a history of her body and its changes, her attempts at control over herself, which parallel or compliment a history of the country. Mouna has tried antidepressants, or that was Amin, or both? (220). They have undone so many. No help.
“Mouna had had plenty of opportunity to think about sanity and happiness, especially the connection between the two” (219).
She loses weight, gains strength, and joins the marches. Nour is objective, a reporter, an observer:
“Mubarak was bad and the revolution brought down Mubarak, but does it follow that the revolution is good?…
Mass protest has restored Mouna to a fuller, feistier self and that’s a major achievement right there. But if things end up being the same or worse, soon or later Mouna too will feel bamboozled – her preeminent project predoomed – then who knows where she’ll go” (99).
I was a bit confused by the Nour/Nimo partnership, relationship. (Shem and Shaun?) They are both journalists. But Mouna is also called Nimo. Maybe some of the letters might be read as reporter filed dispatches, field reports. We even get a sample of a story (101): “On July 28, 1963….” That chapter, by the way, contains a particularly satiric, ironic sex scene (105), if it can even be called that, in which we find another example of the picture one character has of another character is never the same picture that character has of themselves.
Standing as one does, say waiting for a bus or sitting in a cafe, does the memory work sequentially? No, never. It jumps around, one thought to another, with no regard for links, yet something causes one thought to lead to another. Or no, just random. But it’s a novel, so one assumes some cause or reason for the back and forth. To be literary? To distinguish itself, the novel, from the history book? Then you get something like this:
“It is midnight in Mohandessin by the time I settle into a kind of berth fashioned of the curvature at one end of the space. Frank Sinatra is warbling in the background…” (32).
Alas, that’s it for Frank. And I wonder, yes, Sinatra, but what was he “warbling?” Were this a movie, we would know. Live at the Pyramids, 1979? “Someone to Watch Over Me.” And that curved booth – red naugahyde? The waitress in uniform? Shimo in California? This sounds like California:
“Amin has invested the few hundred guineas’ inheritance his elder brother forked over in a house off Road 9 in Maadi – a whitewashed cube with a crescent-shaped veranda that looks like a beach chalet except taller. Like a signpost on the road to Helwan, it is the only residence within several kilometers’ radius. Who would’ve thought, looking at the spottily paved desert all around, that within ten years it will be first among equals and, within twenty, one of a handful remaining David’s resisting the goliath of apartment blocks replacing the villas and bungalows of Maadi’s original treed avenues?” (55).
What we think about something when it happens changes over time, and in that sense, our current situation helps explain what we were like before we got here. That’s a bit tricky. If we reread a book today it’s likely not the same book we read yesterday.
But it’s not a movie, and this is not a book review, just a few notes. “If anyone can understand this, honestly” (59). And of the house: “The truth is I’ve already put the house up for sale” (275). So it goes. “For a few weeks she was famous on the web” (213). “Mouna feels more and more dismayed and uncertain” (217). The reader may share the feeling. And of the writer?
“As I draw close to the end of her story – the point at which you know as much as I do anyway – I’m convinced of my own irrelevance. A man smuggling one woman’s life into another’s, in words. Without really being part of either. Once the procedure is over, I am no more” (230).
What could be worse, that of the book reviewer on a blog? Yet there is none more relevant than the reader.
~~~
Youssef Rakha, “The Dissenters,” 2025, Graywolf Press.
Andre Aciman, “Roman Year,” 2024, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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. ↩︎
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.
The Coming of the Toads 