The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

Tag: W. Somerset Maugham

  • A Googol of Rain

    Rain. Inside still reading “Traveling Sprinkler” while outside rain falls, sprinkles, showers. Yesterday briefly it rained hard, but mostly (and the forecast is now calling for ten more days of this) a light, light to moderate rain, periods of partial clouds amid dashes of partial sun. But it’s beautiful, the multi-blue-grey cruisers and destroyers, heavy-hefty frigates idling by, littoral patrol boats, submarines up in the sky. Loose Cs strolling by. Anyway, I reached page 160 in Nicholson Baker’s “Traveling Sprinkler,” beginning the day at page 92, so close to 70 pages for the rainy day. When I left you yesterday, I might have sounded a bit worked up about his getting the Best Buy guitar. And later, I even looked it up, and sure enough, there it was, for $40, at Best Buy, a Gibson acoustic, but out of stock.

    Back at the first paragraph of Chapter Four, Paul Chowder, the first person narrator of “Traveling Sprinkler,” opens with:

    “I’m out in the garden, Maud, and the very fine clouds have, without my noticing, moved across the moon and collected around it like the soft gray dust in the dryer. I want to scoop the gray clouds away and see the moon naked like a white hole in the sky again, but it isn’t going to happen” (29).

    Why does he call it dust, the dryer lint? Because dust sounds better than lint coming just before dryer, and the st gives off the flavor of the stuff.

    I took numerous breaks from “Traveling Sprinker” yesterday, one to play The New York Times “Spelling Bee” game with Susan. We’ve been playing it together nearly every day. We sit next to one another on the love seat and prop my tablet against a pillow between us and use our stylus pens to enter words, making mistakes as we go, talking about the words. Coco, for example, which we’ve seen before, not acceptable (“not in word list”), not to be confused with cacao or cocoa, both acceptable. Sometimes the rules seem a bit illogical. Yesterday, the middle letter was O, and the other six letters were G, L, A, I, C, and Z, the other letters arranged in a circle around the O, and I saw emerging like a photograph being developed, zoological, and so we started with the day’s only pangram.

    But we ended up getting stuck a few words away from a Queen Bee finish, found a couple more, but then couldn’t find our last word, a 6 letter GO word. We took a break to stretch and cut an apple into slices and came back to the couch lightheartedly determined to reach Queen Bee for the day, only one word away. In 179 Spelling Bee game-puzzles, we’ve reached Queen Bee only 19 times. I decided to ask AI (Artificial Intelligence) for some help, explaining to Susan the difference between cheating and getting some help. I asked Gemini, and this is the answer I got:

    “Let’s see… using only the letters G, O, L, Z, A, I, and C, and starting with GO, a six-letter word we can make is GOLGI.”

    Do you see the problem with that answer? So much for getting some help.

    I was reminded of a recent post over at Ashen’s blog, “Course of Mirrors.” The post is titled …Thoughts on AI and ChatGPT …, and in it, Ashen creatively questions the implications of Artificial Intelligence. She quotes a 70s poem by Wislawa Szymborska – here are a couple of lines: “The Tree of Understanding, dazzling straight and simple,/ sprouts by the spring called Now I Get It.” And I am reminded of the Richard Brautigan poem, “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.” Machines, who, like all parents, it would seem to be developing, make mistakes.

    I woke up this morning thinking of rain and W. Somerset Maugham’s short story titled “Rain.” The story is about restraint and strain and torrential tropical rain. But what I was thinking about was what we mean when we say, “It’s raining.” What’s the it? I wasn’t fully awake yet when I thought later I’d ask Gemini to explain. I just now asked, and here is Gemini’s answer:

    “Ah, that’s a fun little linguistic puzzle! The “it” in the sentence “It is raining” is what we call a dummy pronoun or an expletive pronoun.

    Think of it this way: the “it” doesn’t actually refer to any specific thing. It’s a grammatical placeholder that we use because English sentence structure generally requires a subject. In this case, there isn’t a real subject doing the raining. Rain is a weather phenomenon, not an action performed by a particular entity.

    So, the “it” is just there to make the sentence grammatically correct. We use similar dummy pronouns in other impersonal constructions, like:

    • “It is cold outside.”
    • “It seems like a good idea.”
    • “It‘s important to be on time.”

    In these sentences, the “it” doesn’t point to anything concrete; it simply fills the subject slot.

    Isn’t language fascinating? We have these little grammatical tools that help our sentences flow even when there isn’t a literal subject performing an action.”

    Not a bad answer. I wasn’t expecting that bit of editorializing at the end. And now I’m thinking back to the short story “Rain”:

    “If he remonstrated or sought to put his meaning into an intelligible phrase, Walker would fly into a passion and cry: ‘What the hell do I care about grammar? That’s what I want to say and that’s how I want to say it.’”

    But back to yesterday. While I was chatting it up on my phone with Gemini, Susan said, “Look at the [tablet] screen.” And there it was, the page that appears when you’ve reached Queen Bee! Susan had come up with the missing word: Googol.

  • Maugham on Marketing

    From a different time, W. Somerset Maugham recently appeared in the neighborhood free library box on the Belmont and 68th Avenue corner, near the Line 15 stop, in an old Penguin paperback of Cakes and Ale (1930). Here, he’s speaking of one’s own marketing of one’s own writing:

    “When he stood on the platform, in evening dress admirably worn, or in a loose, much used, but perfectly cut lounge suit if better fitted for the occasion, and faced his audience seriously, frankly, but with an engaging diffidence, you could not but realize that he was giving himself up to his task with complete earnestness. Though now and then he pretended to be at a loss for a word, it was only to make it more effective when he uttered it.

    18, Cakes and Ale, W. Somerset Maugham, Doubleday 1930. My found Library Box edition published in Penguin Books (U.S.A) 1993.

    Maugham’s narrator is talking about the antagonist Alroy Kear, who “could use a man very shabbily without afterward bearing him the slightest ill-will,” and about which one critic actually said, “he [Kear] was a snob…he was a humbug.” (17).

    Yet for Kear, we quickly learn:

    “No club was so small, no society for the self-improvement of its members so insignificant, that Roy disdained to give it an hour of his time.”

    19.

    Indeed, so magnanimous does Roy appear to be, that for the continued benefit of the younger writers he often mentions, he

    “Now and then revised his lectures and issued them in neat little books. Most people who are interested in these things have at least looked through the works entitled Modern Novelists, Russian Fiction, and Some Writers; and few can deny that they exhibit a real feeling for literature and a charming personality.”

    19.

    The problem, of course, is that there are far far too few “people who are interested in these things.” Thus the need to self-market, even if one has managed to appear in print by a gatekeeping trad publisher. Revisiting his book for a preface for a later edition, Maugham writes:

    “When I wanted to draw the portrait of a writer who used every means of advertisement possible to assist the diffusion of his works I had no need to fix my attention on any particular person. The practice is too common for that. Nor can one help feeling sympathy for it. Every year hundreds of books, many of considerable merit, pass unnoticed.”

    7.

    One wonders what Maugham might have thought or said of today’s social media outlets, the blogs and author’s pages, readings, panels, yesterday’s cheers and tomorrow’s cancellations, not to mention today’s rises and falls that occur indeed between any given sunrise and sunset:

    “He must make himself a public figure. He must keep in the public eye. He must give interviews and get his photograph in the papers. He must write letters to The Times, address meetings, and occupy himself with social questions; he must make after-dinner speeches; he must recommend books in the publishers’ advertisements; and he must be seen without fail at the proper times. He must never let himself to be forgotten.

    8. Bold font added.

    And Maugham concludes his preface lamenting that at the time he wrote Cakes and Ale, the “cocktail party that is given to launch a book…did not flourish at the time.” Too bad, he suggests, “It would have given me the material for a lively chapter” (8). Could such a chapter be written today following an on-line Twitter or Zoom or blog book launch?

    Meantime, we interrupt this post for a commercial break.