The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

Tag: Venice

The New Yorker Turns 100

The New Yorker is celebrating this month its 100th anniversary. I discovered the magazine in its mid-40’s, visiting Susan’s aunt Joan at her beach studio-pad a door from the boardwalk in Venice in 1969. She gave me her discards. I started with the cartoons, of course, then read the short stories, always one or two, which back then followed the Talk of the Town section. I read all the small print stuff about the goings-on in New York, where I’d never been, never wanted to go. I thought short stories more interesting writing, but I soon grew to enjoy the short pieces in the Talk of the Town section. And I started reading the non-fiction pieces, the articles in those days on average longer than today’s, sometimes much longer, spanning two or three issues.

The February 1, 1969 issue included a story by Linda Grace Hoyer, the mother of the prolific writer frequently found in The New Yorker over the years, John Updike. The February 21, 1970 anniversary issue included a short story in epistolary form by the editor and baseball writer Roger Angell, and a poem by Roger’s stepfather, E. B. White, titled “In Charlie’s Bar,” about a woman who was refused service at a bar in England because what she was wearing that visit happened to reveal her belly button. There’s also a story by Donald Barthelme, tilted “Brain Damage.” That I can’t really say that I now remember any of those pieces precisely probably says more about my brain than the keeping power of the writing.

This year I came close to letting my subscription lapse. Maybe it’s my lapsing attitude, another sign of too many winters in a row of discontent, living away from the ocean. I’ve always liked The New Yorker because it is a general interest magazine, witty but sincere and without specialty or academic brouhaha. But as Jill Lepore puts it in her article titled “War of Words” in the 100th anniversary issue:

“The stock criticism of Brown [Tina Brown, former editor from 1992 who shortened articles, among other at the time some thought controversial changes. David Remnick took over as editor in 1998] is that she made everything about celebrity; the stock criticism of Remnick is that he made everything about politics. The same could be said of America itself, across those years.”

That everything is about any one thing brings an emphasis that goes against the grain of general interest. And what will happen to the editorial stance now that celebrity and politics have merged into one? That’s what I’m not sure I want to see. But while there have been a few ownership and editorial changes over the years, changes in form and content have not been deep. What’s changed is out on the street. But maybe that’s not so new either. Let’s take a look.

From the Notes and Comment section of the February 28, 1970 issue (and if I hadn’t just told you it’s from 1970, you might have thought this was today):

“The government’s campaign against the press, which has proceeded swiftly from threats of action to action, in the form of subpoenas of reporters’ notes and tapes and films, has already heavily damaged the press’s access to the news.”

Surely someone would say something. After all, it was still almost the 60’s. But in the same piece we get this:

“The Democrats complete silence on those issues throughout the program [a Democrat television special titled State of the Union: a Democratic view – a response to Nixon’s State of the Union address] struck us as an extreme instance of the more general avoidance of controversial issues which has been noticeable among politicians and on the networks and in the press.”

Certainly not much seems to have changed from Andy Logan’s comment in the Around City Hall section of the same issue. Writing about the state’s budget hearings, he says:

“According to one theory of public life, the winning politician is not the man who spends his time gathering civic credits to himself but the operator who can most often persuade the public that whatever went wrong was somebody else’s fault.”

A valuable benefit of subscription is access to The New Yorker archive. I found myself, in solo celebration of its 100th Anniversary, browsing through past issues from the years I first started reading the magazine. In that February 28, 1970 issue, for example, I perused the Nightlife section, wondering where I might have gone had I been in New York at the time. I could have sat in at The Bitter End, where “Folks, both long- and short-haired, sit on wooden benches and sip coffee.” I could have eaten, copiously, no less, at Bradley’s, “a wood-paneled bar and rest where people come, and frequently return, to sit and talk and copiously dine.” Not only that, but I could have listened to Bobby Timmons play electric piano until three in the morning. And if that wasn’t enough music, I could have at three headed over to the Red Onion and heard “Two banjos and a piano until four.” And that went on every night. Did people never sleep in New York? There was a lot to choose from: “music, bar, dinner, dancing, discos, cabarets.” At the movies (still called Motion Pictures in one section of the magazine), I could have seen, drawing now from the alphabetical listing: Belle de Jour, The Bible, Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, or Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

I seldom read The New Yorker fiction anymore, and some of the poems I don’t make it out of the first stanza or two. I’ve grown prosaic maybe in my dotage. And if you think the point of a cartoon is to make you laugh, you might be in for a disappointment.

One measure of good writing is whether or not it can be read comfortably and naturally aloud. This week, I’ve been reading aloud to Susan from J. D. Salinger’s Nine Stories. In Salinger’s story titled For Esme – with Love and Squalor (from the April 8, 1950 issue, not April 9 as Wiki has it) about a US soldier in WWII, the narrator meets a young English girl in a Devon tearoom:

“May I inquire how you were employed before entering the Army?” Esme asked me.
I said I hadn’t been employed at all, that I’d only been out of college a year but that I liked to think of myself as a professional short-story writer.
She nodded politely. “Published?” she asked.
It was a familiar but always touchy question, and one that I didn’t answer just one, two, three. I started to explain how most editors in America were a bunch –
“My father wrote beautifully,” Esme interrupted. “I’m saving a number of his letters for posterity.”

This post being about The New Yorker, and The New Yorker being known for its cartoons, I thought I’d end with a cartoon:

February 19, 2025
Cut and Run

By the time we finished packing and loading up the car with goods for the girls and Tilde it was too late to start out for the long drive to Frisco, so it was decided we would stay the night at Tilde’s parents on the canal in Venice and get an early start up Highway 1 come morning. Tilde insisted I install car restraint seats for the girls, the full rig for Harriet, who was under 8, and a booster seat for Nancy – thus we’d be legal and safe. But it took some time for me to modify the seat belts for proper fit, and I had to make a trip in her father’s pickup to a local auto parts store. Meantime, the girls were helpful in packing and loading up their own gear: dolls and teddy bear; blankets and pillows; notebooks, crayons, and pencils and pens; magnifying glasses; a violin and a Martin Backpacker guitar; books; sunhats; backpacks with clothes, water bottles, cell phones and chargers (this last forcing another errand to the auto parts store for an adaptor that would allow for charging devices using the dashboard cigarette lighter); dog food and dish and water bowl. With Tilde’s father’s help I attached a surfboard rack to the roof of the car and tied off the girls’ two bicycles. Tilde packed into the trunk a 5 man camping tent, a camp stove and lantern, and a bigger cooler stuffed with food, ice, and drinks. Tilde’s father, the girls called him Papa Papa, wasn’t a bad guy, and we got to talking about life in Venice living on the canals, but as an alleged close friend of Wormy, I got the cold shoulder from her mother, and was consigned to the front porch on the canal for sleeping quarters for the night. Tilde slept with the girls in their room, her mom stowed away in the master upstairs for the night, and Papa Papa and I sat out on the porch watching the water and drinking beers and when the beer was all gone turned to a bottle of Scotch Whiskey. We talked into the wee hours, and I awoke late in the morning, the house closed up and quiet, a note taped conspicuously to the porch door: Dear Glaucus, I am perfectly capable of driving myself and the girls to San Francisco, but thanks for your help. Good luck, Tilde. Out back, I saw that Wormy’s ’56 Chevy Two-ten packed to the gills was gone. Tilde had left my cowboy roll on the porch for me, and I hooked up and headed off in the direction of the Venice beach and boardwalk, first letting loose with a vociferous hobo piss in the empty alley, footloose.

“Cut and Run” is episode 54 of Inventories, a Novel in Progress in Serial Format at The Coming of the Toads.

September 18, 2020
Sophisticated Gentleman’s Upright Urban Bicycle

Ryan finished his rebuild of my circa-1970 steel frame Raleigh bicycle. It is to Ryan (to wit, a wit) I’m indebted for the title of this post. He knows I think myself neither sophisticated nor gentlemanly – nor much of a bicyclist. There was a time indeed when the Raleigh did duty for an auto, but that was of necessity, hardly hobby or Edwardian privileged choice, and while there is evidence of bicycle chivalry in my bio, as evidenced by the call-in, for example, to the Bill Ballance radio show “Feminine Forum,” circa the old Raleigh days, the topic of the day “Is Chivalry Dead?,” the young lady caller apparently the same girl I had saved from a group of wine-drunk ruffians after an outdoor blues concert one evening on Venice Beach – and she never got a chance to thank me, she told Bill, as she rode south on her bike while I ran north up the boardwalk, chased by the ruffians, dashed east on Windward, cut through the vacant lot next to what is now Danny’s Deli, across the alley and through the apartment corridor to Susan’s aunt’s place, peeking around the corner of the building to see the hooligans searching for me around the parked cars on Windward, it’s purely anecdotal. The rude dude had made the girl cry, pulling at her handlebars and pestering her to come join his coterie sitting under a palm drinking wine. I had stepped up and grabbed the other side of her handlebars, surprising and startling the cad, yanking them out of his grip, and pretending to be her brother, I had said, “Come on, we gotta go, Dad’s waiting for us.” At which point we walked quickly off, and I asked her if she was ok, and I glanced back to see the bad guy stirring his buddies to action, pointing at me. The chase was on. In the picture right, taken by Susan, I am walking along the Venice Boardwalk in the early 70s. The two ladies I am with were capable of handling their own chivalric needs. And I still think of a bike ride as a paragraph lacking a unified topic. As in writing, you discover where you’re going in the process of getting there. The risk is that some readers may find this kind of bicycling writing annoying, just as some motorists would rather not share the road with parenthetical interruptions.

The characteristics of an upright, urban bicycle include casual step pedals and upright handlebars. A brass bell mounted to the bars gives the bicycle a voice to its otherwise smooth sail-boat-quiet glide. The photo above shows the Raleigh in minimalist set-up: no saddlebags, bar basket, lights, or racks. The kickstand adds a sense of responsible behavior expectation. The cork grips suggest the sophisticated gentleman knows his way around country streams and beaches as well as back roads to far away places within the city. In one of his ten blog-posts it took Ryan to complete the rebuild, or maybe it was in an email he sent me, as we went back and forth discussing parts and style, I remember him referring to the vision for the restored bike as an “upright gentleman’s urban bike,” and I remember thinking I was in trouble now. But etiquette of the road is not to be sneered at. And if I could not be grand, I at least would not have to be a spinet.

One of those far away places, though not too far to bike to, the destination, as it turned out (an urban bike ride usually revealing a flexible plan), of our maiden voyage on the rebuilt and reconfigured Raleigh, with Ryan riding co-pilot on his Handsome bike (a make, not necessarily an adjective), was Nick’s Coney Island, in the Hawthorne District. In the pic right, you can see Frank’s portrait framed, the original Nick, before he sold the place and the new owners built Nick’s into a somewhat sophisticated gentleman’s Coney Island, wearing a Nick’s shirt with a Coney Island Dog on it, above Ryan and me sitting at a refurbished booth with pints drawn to celebrate the renewed bike. Frank was a stout and diehard Yankee fan. I don’t know what Frank thought of bicycles or even if he was ever on one, but I knew him as a kind of blue-collar gentleman when he was doing duty tending bar and waiting tables at Nick’s, his royal red Cadillac parked at the curb outside the door.

Bicycle and urban are easily defined. Urbanity might get a little muffled in the noise of orbs and urbs (the city is surely a verb), but what of sophisticated and gentleman? Now we are in deep waters. And what is a bicycle as political semiotic as signified by Roland Barthes? The bicycle is a Beckett motif, his characters hardly sophisticated or gentlemen and often located well beyond orb or urb. What on a bike is a sophist, or a fallen gentleman? Benjamin Franklin walked, so did Thoreau. Franklin might have invented the bicycle but wasn’t in enough of a hurry, while Thoreau might have associated the bicycle as a product of the same forces that built the railroad, the unforgiving lineal track that prevented one from wandering.

The further one wanders often the riskier the route. Southeast Belmont Street does not for most of its distance provide for safe bicycle riding space. The Salmon and Taylor Street designated east-west shared roadway encourages a sauntering ride, which is a ride in which one takes the time to muse and wonder, even to wander, and there is no shame in dismounting and walking the bicycle. That is what it might mean in Southeast Portland to ride a bike, to write your own story, not necessarily against the commute, but on the margins of the commute. The sophisticated gentleman urban bicyclist is a marginal man, a reader around a town of text. His destination is never clear. His purpose is opposed to argument. His narrative does not follow conventional route expectations.

He might make a mistake. I wanted to show Ryan Tabor Space, the coffee house in the old Presbyterian church on the northwest corner of Belmont and 55th. But when we got there, the coffee space was closed. But having already secured the bikes (pic left), we went into the church and sat for a spell where it was cool and restful.

The sophisticated gentleman upright urban bicyclist may take liberties with his trip narrative. That doesn’t mean he ignores rules of the road, at least those that are not ambiguous. On the contrary, he rides clearly and concisely, if not precisely, and never speeds or travels too fast for conditions. He is, in short, in no hurry and not in search of a hassle. We caught up with Susan and had British fish and chips and bangers and beer at Horse Brass Pub while discussing bikes and comedians and films. Susan suggested we walk down to Movie Madness and rent a comedy to watch when we got back home. These are hard times around the country. For some, the time seems permanent. Platitudinous postings, retweets of bad attitudes, prayers without reflection, pandering of politicians to atavistic fears and wants, happiness confused with satisfaction – that’s all part of the difficulty; still, this sign in a business window on Belmont is a viable posting. Here, it seems to be a response to the Orlando shooting specifically. The sign it replaced said LOVE in bold red off balance letters, letters in love. Before the LOVE sign, there was a gold lettered GLORIA with stars in a Christmas display. The window display has become a kind of public service announcement. It exudes a good vibe. I’ve passed it in my car, on the bus, walking, and now on my bicycle. Were I in a Beckett book, I might crawl to a sign of love with that hopeless hope that motivates his characters. You can’t make love to a sign, though it sometimes seems all we have is signs for things, and not the thing itself. I have a bicycle helmet, but I can’t forget Thoreau’s dictum to avoid enterprises which require a new suit of clothes, so I’ll be eschewing the purchase of bicycle apparel.

On to Movie Madness, where we rented a Christmas comedy to watch back home, “Mixed Nuts.” So we’re watching a Christmas movie in July. “Mixed Nuts” was filmed in Venice, the Venice boardwalk a prop, along the same blocks in the Venice pic at the top of this post, with Steve Martin playing manager and owner of a suicide prevention non-profit hotline. Madeline Kahn is wonderful as Mrs. Munchnik.

Movie Madness is more than just a video rental store. It’s a film museum, displaying a collection of movie making artifacts such as the knife used in the shower scene in Hitchcock’s “Psycho.” “Psycho” is on my reverse bucket list, which includes films I’ve seen that I never want to see again. One film I never tire of watching is the original “The Time Machine.” Movie Madness has on display the miniature table-top time machine used in the film, the one the time traveler sends into the future and so it disappears from the table. Presumably, it’s still time traveling. I also enjoyed the PSYCHOTRONICS sign to the thriller room. “More!”? What more could there be? I didn’t go in.

I wanted to visit with Ryan Cheese Bar at the bottom of the Belmont hill. We enjoyed a board of mixed soft and hard cheeses with a glass of wine before “Mixed Nuts.” We watched the film and the next morning we walked down to Coquine for a scone and coffee. Ryan took off and later I went for a ride up in the park.

In chapter two of “Penina’s Letters,” Salty is sitting at a cafe table outside Blubber’s on the Strand when Puck Malone rides up on a bicycle:

“I drank a tall glass of water and was nursing a beer, watching the walkers and the waves, when along came Puck riding up the Strand, grinning, playfully pedaling his royal blue bicycle, holding a surfboard under one arm, wiggling to and fro. He was barefoot and shirtless, wearing some baggy trunks. He was watching the waves, closed out, booming bass lines now in the spring high tide. He saw me and parked his bike and leaned his board against the wall.

Puck Malone’s neck was as thick as a telephone pole. His face was full and fat, with marble brown eyes spinning between freckled cheeks and straight, sandy-red hair, bowl cut with bangs down to his eyes. His tornado torso funneled down to two skinny legs. He had big surfer knots on his knees and feet from paddling in the kneeling position.”

I’ll leave it to readers to decide if there are any gentlemen in “Penina’s Letters,” but it’s a question of fact that there is at least a bicycle, and it gets ridden – a surfer on a Strand cruiser.

July 14, 2016