Since quitting a traditional 9 to 5 Monday thru Friday job some time ago, my sense of Saturday has changed. While working through the week, one looked forward to Saturday, sleeping in, hanging out, taking it easy – none of which happened, since one was forced to squeeze into that single day a week’s worth of chores and outside commitments. And it’s almost impossible to sleep very late when you’ve been getting up at 5 every morning all week. And I usually had work to take home. Have laptop, will travel, and work through the weekend.
So I begin this blog post on a Saturday, thinking of those Monday through Friday working readers today sleeping in, sliding into their Saturday, or having walked down to the corner cafe, opening their laptop looking for a brief and casual post that gives Saturday its day off due.
I finished reading Satoshi Yagisawa’s “Days at the Morisaki Bookshop.” By way of review, I remember this passage, from page 90:
Wada picked up the book and showed it to me. I secretly breathed a sigh of relief that we’d moved on from the last topic. “Oh? I don’t know. Is it a good book?” “It’s hard to say, actually. It’s kind of one of those tragic love stories. The author is a guy who had this one book and ended up dying in obscurity. When you read it, the writing can be clumsy, and there are a lot of places where it feels like it’s missing something. But there’s something about it that fascinates me. I’ve read it around five times already.” As he talked, he was staring at the oil painting of a road in the hills on the book jacket. There was something tender in the loving way he looked at the book that ended up making me want to read it. “Really? Five times? Maybe I should check it out.” “I’m not sure I can really recommend it. What are you reading, Takako?”
That’s sort of the way I felt about the book itself, that I was reading (I just finished it last night), “Days at the Morisaki Bookshop.” I mean, the writing did seem clumsy in parts, but the story and the lonely narrator and the neighborhood of bookshops in Tokyo were at the same time, if not fascinating, charming and diverting, inviting repeat visits, though I probably won’t read it again, let alone five times. And I do recommend it, for what that’s worth, to someone awake too early on a Saturday with nothing to do.
I’ve noticed that naming blog posts after a day of the week seems to have found followings, like “Wordless Wednesday,” or doors on a Thursday, or flowers on Friday. So I thought I’d put up an old photo slide on a Saturday, and call it “Sliding into Saturday.” This one’s from December, 1969.
I’ve been enjoying the New York Times game called “Connections,” even if it’s usually as stacked as a one armed bandit in a Western saloon. And I noticed they’ve created a sports version called “Connections: Sports Edition,” which I’ve not tried. I’ve enough sports watching my home team Dodgers falter down the stretch. But it occurred to me to try my hand at a poetry puzzle version.
How to Play: Find the solution that ties all the words in the puzzle table together. Click the footnote number in the bottom right hand corner of each table to view that table’s solution. Or feel free to post your own solution in a comment to the post.
From Disney’s Mary Poppins, here changed to an adverb, a multi-compound word.
A musical term: “As Slow As Possible” (notable example, John Cage’s organ composition ORGAN²/ASLSP).
A person who uses long words, from Latin for a foot and a half long.
Making connections.
Making an essay out of it.
To be unable to move forward for fear of “ifs.”
The correct spelling of irresistably.
1953 Samuel Beckett novel: The Unnameable.
Once considered the longest word in English. Refers to a 19th-century political movement in Britain opposing proposals to disestablish (separate) the Church of England from the state. It’s a turnaround word.
Susan came down to say it’s raining and did I want to bring in the cushions. I hadn’t heard the rain, though I’ve got the doors and windows wide open, but I knew it wouldn’t last long, a trace only had been predicted, but I also knew she’d be disappointed in me if I didn’t hop up and go grab the cushions, and in the moment she waited to see if I was going to go out or continue thinking at my laptop for how I wanted to say something about Benjamin Wood’s novel “Seascraper,” I pictured her dashing out and snatching the cushions herself from the rain in her nightgown and slippers.
I stood at the edge of the porch, cushions safely secured from getting wet, watching and listening to the rain, falling harder now than I had expected. Yesterday morning I was in the yard watering when I felt the drops hitting my hat and hands, but it lasted not even one minute, a trace, and I continued with the yard work, and the sun melted another day. But today as I stood at the opening of the porch and began to smell the dry ground oils stirred by the new rain I suddenly felt almost like an epiphany the end of summer.
Yesterday I harvested the grapes from the pergola I built 35 years ago, the oil of the cedar boards dry and the wood crackling and splitting and fraying like an old T-shirt. I’ve been thinking for a few years of taking it down. By August the grapes are heavy. Scuttling the pergola will be a hard task. Meantime, the dwarf apple tree has overgrown the grape trunk and the Blaze Climbing Rose has reached the stratosphere, entangling its barbed links through the grape vines and the apple branches, a beastly hairdo that winds its way through the aged cedar board barrettes.
As I had predicted the rain stopped after a minute or two, my epiphany manifesting the end of summer yet another illusion of insight, a pseudo-epiphany, as too often happens. The rain was but a trace. And while I’ve got my copy of “Seascraper” sitting here by my side waiting for me to say something about it, I’ve lost the gumption. I’m going back out to take another look at the pergola; might even have a go at the Blaze.
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)
Buckminster Fuller was the most optimistic of scientists. He believed synergy solves the problem of entropy. Synergy, simply put, is working together to achieve more. Synergy is sometimes defined as a whole unpredictable from the sum of its parts (1+1 = 3). And Fuller thought there is enough to go around:
“Once man comprehended that any tree would serve as a lever his intellectual advantages accelerated. Man freed of special-case superstition by intellect has had his survival potentials multiplied millions fold. By virtue of the leverage principles in gears, pulleys, transistors, and so forth, it is literally possible to do more with less in a multitude of physio-chemical ways. Possibly it was this intellectual augmentation of humanity’s survival and success through the metaphysical perception of generalized principles which may be objectively employed that Christ was trying to teach in the obscurely told story of the loaves and the fishes.1
Dostoevsky said the same thing in his “Notes from Underground” (1864):
“I admit that two times two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, two times two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too.”
Though Orwell in “1984” (1949) suggested we be careful with arithmetic and keep an eye on who’s controlling the data. William Blake also reasoned reason could be a tyranny (“The Book of Urizen,” 1794).
For my own alone little part of the network, I’ve been wondering about the popularity of Doors, Wordless Wednesdays, and other prompts, and have opted to contribute a little poem on the subject of synergy and entropy:
Loves and Fishes
Planets like cauliflower heads can’t go it alone; entropy a flat bald universe, produces no combs.
Love like the neutrino difficult to detect, plentiful and invisible, with no electrical net.
“Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth,” R. Buckminster Fuller. First published 1969, new edition 2008/2011, edited by Jaime Snyder. Lars Muller Publishers. ↩︎
Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1969) and Intuition (1972) – books by Buckminster Fuller
There’s a full moon this week, the daytime temps near 100, so we’ve been out walking late, out for some cooler air, the house so hot. A while back I made a playlist of songs with the word moon in the title:
It’s Only a Paper Moon, Moonlight in Vermont, Moon River, Fly Me to the Moon, Moonglow, Paper Moon, Moondance, Moonlight in Vermont, Havanna Moon, Blue Moon of Kentucky, Blue Moon, Polka Dots and Moonbeams, The Moon Song, By the Light of the Silvery Moon, Moonlight Serendade, Moonlight Becomes You, No Moon at All, Oh You Crazy Moon, Shame on the Moon, Walking on the Moon, How High the Moon, When My Moon Turns to Gold Again, Au Clair de la lune, The Stars the Night the Moon, Shine on Harvest Moon, Harvest Moon, Moonlight (Claro de Luna).
When we got back from our walk I played a few of the moon songs on the acoustic guitar. Still later, still unable to sleep, I got out of bed and from the open window took a photo of the moon. There’s nothing special about that photo, taken with my cell phone, of the moon over the fir trees over the old they say extinct volcano in the city.
“Ah, they’ll never ever reach the moon, at least not the one we’re after,” sang Leonard Cohen, in “Sing Another Song, Boys” (1971), which doesn’t have the word moon in its title, so it didn’t make the playlist.
Things appear different at night, are different. There are so many distractions during the day, chores, reels, but it’s different at night.
“It’s easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing,” says Hemingway’s Jake Barnes, in “The Sun Also Rises,” from 1926.
But a full moon can take the edge off of things at night, soften the heat. Draws you up. And besides, unlike Hemingway’s Jake, lately I’ve been looking forward to the night, a book waiting on the nightstand, moonlight streaming through the open window, lucky to have Susan by my side, not having Jake’s problem, my playlist of songs with moon in the title streaming in the kitchen earlier while I put together something cold for dinner, playing in my memory. Memories of the Moon. Moon Momentoes.
And you don’t want to go getting too literal about it, so-called science of the thing, the light of the silvery moon, how it’s dead, and it doesn’t really have its own light, but is simply reflecting the sun. The mechanics of the thing. There you go again. See, you’ve ruined another night. The moon is a cartoon.
I first picked up a guitar when I was around 12 years old. A late blooming prodigy? No, simply one of hundreds of thousands of kids directly or indirectly influenced by the rise of popular music through the 1950s and 60s. To pick up the guitar was an essentially existential post WWII experience. Guitar know-how had traditionally been handed down informally and orally, self-taught or augmented by mixing one way with another, a folk working class pastime, played for small get together often sit-out entertainment, and that’s how I began, with a guitar gifted to me by one of the neighbor boys, who had gone off to a minor seminary where he’d joined a band with some dormmates. He came home for the summer with an electric guitar and passed on his old acoustic to me. He taught me to play “Washington Square” and “The Green Leaves of Summer.” A year later, after my girlfriend at the time landed on the guitar jumping off the top bunk, I purchased another acoustic used from an ad in the South Bay Daily Breeze.
A guitar wasn’t always a cheap instrument. The industrial revolution and mass production changed the guitar from a hand crafted parlor instrument to, some might still argue, an adulterated version, easily purchased, or scrap apple made. If living in a rural area in the late 19th or early 20th century, you could buy a guitar through mail order, via a Sears or Montgomery Ward mail catalog. Today you can buy a playable guitar (one that holds its tuning and is easy on the fingers) for around $200.00. That’s roughly the same price (proportionately) a similar guitar would have cost in the 1960’s or the 1920’s or in 1900. A good example today is the Gretsch Jim Dandy model, available via mail order from Sweetwater for $189.00, more for an electric or solid top version, but that 189’ll work fine.
The Gretsch Streamliner I played in the previous post I bought via mail order from Sweetwater during the pandemic for $500.00. The Fender amp was another $120.00. My Yamaha Red Label FG180 is the first new guitar I bought, for $100 in 1970, when I got home from active duty. That Yamaha was a Martin dreadnought knockoff. It looked, and arguably sounded like, a custom made and more expensive Martin guitar. My Yamaha still does, after years of sitting quietly set aside while I played other guitars, the Yamaha resting long after the abuse it suffered as a member of the 140th Engineers motor pool. But unlike the Martin I might have purchased in 1970, the Yamaha FG180’s value has not increased much. It’s probably still worth around $100, there’s a hairline crack in the headstock, otherwise, maybe $300; doesn’t matter, it’s not for sale, nor is it likely to go on loan to a museum.
There is some evidence and certainly rumor of music groups playing Yamaha guitars while on tour in the 1970s – to protect and save their more expensive Martins and other collectibles from potential damage or theft given the rough travel they had to experience while on the road. In the 90’s, Martin created a practical line, called “Road Series,” guitars made for touring, made tough and cheaper than their custom lines. Can anybody hear the difference? Aficionados or snobbish critics may argue so, and maybe you can in a recording sound booth with machine listening aid, but in an auditorium or outdoor venue, at a stadium concert, through the hum and hee-haw of a crowd? Doubtful. Back in the 70’s, Yamaha had developed a more expensive line than the FG’s, which stood for Folk Guitar, called the L Series, where the L signalled Luxury.
Is the brouhaha over vintage instruments warranted – where the provenance (who played it and where) is worth more than the materials, the labor, or the sound of the actual guitar? Some guitars are better than others, but how much better? Ornate decorative designs don’t make a guitar sound better. Some features will attract one player but not another. How a guitar fits, how it feels in the hands or on the lap, its weight, its fretboard width and length, are all arguably more important than the guitar’s aesthetic appeals.
Then there are the Picasso guitars, 1912 to 1914, on display on-line at MoMA. Hard to think of anyone actually playing any of those designs, according to the MoMA introduction notes, “Cobbled together from cardboard, paper, string, and wire, materials that he cut, folded, threaded, and glued.”
Back in May, Nick Paumgarten, in The New Yorker, wrote about a huge but unknown collection of vintage guitars that was about to become an unprecedented Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibit. The previously eschewed low class industrial made and played guitar was about to go live, or dead, depending on your point of view. As Dylan sang in “Visions of Johanna”: “Inside the museums, infinity goes up on trial.” In any case, there does seem to be some strange kind of commodification happening when the value of an object is magnified by who touches it, and some might feel a guitar being inside the museum ironically betrays the guitar’s meaning. Paumgarten quotes The Met curator:
“Except the guitars exhibit a higher art and artistry themselves—first, as objects. There’s high-quality craftsmanship, but it’s different. The guitar is the object of the people. We always talk about it as ‘the people’s instrument.’ American music is bottom-up. So many art forms are top-down. It’s different from the rest of our instruments collection, which is often for the élite.”
“You shouldn’t let other people get your kicks for you,” Bob Dylan sang in “Like a Rolling Stone.” Nor should you spend more than necessary for a guitar if you want to sound like Bob Dylan. Or the Stones, or Metallica. And if you want to sound like The Ramones, well, Johnny Ramone bought his Mosrite guitar used in 1974 for around $50. It might be worth a bit more than that today, about a million dollars more, but its value today has nothing to do with the sound it might make.
Gear changes (swapping out pickups, for example) players or their techs make to factory models, and modifications made to recordings in the studio by sound techs, make a guitar difficult or impossible to reconstruct or imitate, no matter how much you pay for the guitar. Amplifiers, pedals, and other sound changing devices further complicate guitar provenance if what you’re looking for is an original sound not your own. `A player needs to make things their own. There’s little point in trying to sound exactly like your guitar hero, whether it’s Segovia or Django. Guitar value is enhanced by the provenance of its player and the venues and recordings where it was played, but players need to create their own space. A guitar needs to sit out, always accessible, or it won’t get played. The more you pay for a guitar, the less likely it will be allowed to sit out. And sitting out is what it’s all about, if you want to be essentially existentially experienced.
Looking over readings related to The Met exhibit, I’m reminded of the scene in Antonioni’s film “Blow Up” (1966), where the main character, Thomas, played by David Hemmings, wrestles for the guitar neck thrown into the crowd by Yardbird player Jeff Beck, only to toss it onto the sidewalk upon running out of the venue. That’s the same Jeff Beck who donated equipment to The Met and provided a congratulatory statement used in their press release upon the opening of their guitar exhibit. And Antonioni doubled down on the irony at the end of what is now referred to as The Yardbird Scene when a curious passerby picks up the guitar neck, looks it over, and tosses it back down onto the sidewalk. It was just a prop; it’s not in The Met exhibit.
“The Met Receives Landmark Gift of More than 500 of the Finest Guitars from the Golden Age of American Guitar Making,” May 19, 2025, The Met Press Release, retrieved 10 Aug 2025.
Is blogging an art form? We might talk about art and craft and trade. Crafts and trades are necessities as cultures move from survival mode to commercialization and commodification and eventually to increasingly artificial realms; art is not necessary, and its very lack of necessity is what gives it integrity. Art is innate and therefore authentic. It can be faked; when it is, it becomes precious. You might reply that art is necessary for the soul, but you won’t find the soul in a museum. Visitors to the Louvre spend about 15 seconds viewing da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa,” during which time their attention is diverted as they snap a few pics. But I’m actually not all that driven by such pronouncements as Art is whatever. Or whatever is art, or not. Art is a verb, as in the Buckminster Fuller sense, when he said, “I seem to be a verb.” A to be verb. If blogging is an art form, surely it must be part of the to be genre.
All bloggers confront the same form, the template or layout, and one can spend forever and a day figuring it out, while one’s content sits waiting for something to happen. For the writer, the question arises, do you want to write or become a programmer? The photograph on a blog is not a photograph, in the same sense that Magritte’s pipe is not a pipe. For the poet who thinks poetry is about sound as much as sense, the phrase “mouth watering” might not wet a reader’s lips. Likewise, pics of food don’t always do much for the appetite. As for argument, the use of ALL CAPS quickly tires the eyes.
Of course there are all kinds of blogs, evidenced in ongoing varieties of designs and templates and categories and tags. And almost any pursuit can be used as a unifying topic: photography or painting, travel and sightseeing, nature and gardening, music or poetry, fiction and memoir, literature or linguistics, criticism and notes and comments, politics and religion, comics and cartoons, news and history, advice and cooking, do it yourself and repair work, sports and leisure. Opinion and argument. The makers behind most blogs probably are not concerned with whether or not they are engaged in some sort of art form. But if a blogger is serious at all about being taken seriously, even if their theme is satire or sarcasm or humor, they will want to set up their blog as efficiently and effectively as possible to ensure an appropriate welcome to their target audience. If they have a target; that’s not a requirement for a successful blog. What is a successful blog?
Without further Ado, I give you my Top 10 list of the characteristics of a successful blog, a site I can appreciate and that I’ll come back to. In other words, here is a list, limited to ten items, of some attributes of a blog that might warrant repeated visits:
Original Content: I prefer original content rather than seeing copying and pasting from some third party source. I’d rather see an original photo of any quality, an original poem, an original sketch. I suppose there is an art to curating, selecting and collecting together pieces for a show, but too often these shows are too long or overwhelming or redundant to what one’s already experienced elsewhere. There are also issues of copyright, the use of Artificial Intelligence, and other forms of spam, quackery, or hoaxes which corrupt one’s reading.
Identified Source: I tend not to read a blog the author of which is completely anonymous. There are no doubt valid reasons any individual blogger may have for remaining anonymous, privacy concerns or insecurity; those same concerns in turn make me want to know enough about sources to guarantee both originality and reliability.
No Ads. This is a tough one, since to remove ads usually requires a subscription or premium of some kind, which some bloggers can’t afford. But ads are intrusive and distracting, often way off target, and sometimes aesthetically ugly, designed to raise a welt. Of course there’s also opportunity for bloggers to earn money from ads. I recently read that Substack is experimenting with ads, and of course there is one kind of blog that is an ad, promotional material, a link to elsewhere.
Frequent Posting: I prefer blogs that post frequently, but not too often. Frequently could mean daily, weekly, or bi-weekly, depending on the length and complexity of the post, while too often might mean multiple postings per hour or day.
Most of the blogs I read, I view via the WordPress “Reader.” There are advantages and disadvantages to the Reader. One disadvantage is you don’t see the blogger’s actual site, with all its bells and whistles, and formats appear differently depending on what device you’re using (which is one reason I keep moving more toward a minimalist format at the Toads). If there’s a way to view the whole blog in a reader, I’ve not discovered it. Some bloggers simply use excerpts in the Reader, and you must go to the full site to view the whole post, which can be rewarding because you get the full meal deal, not the à la carte entry. I don’t know what the answer is to using or not a reader. To subscribe via email, to a newsletter or alert, is an opening of a floodgate. Were I better organized and satisfied with having found ten or so of the best blogs in the world, blogs that answered every aesthetic and practical need, I would simply bookmark them and check them manually daily. Fickleness appears on both sides of the viewing platform. And by the way, the Reader does not contain ads, even if ads do appear on the actual blog.
I prefer writing that is quirky, that ignores style guides, that is not fashionable, but presents a good fit for its subject. At the same time, I often enjoy the rants of the rule bound, the arguments over what tie goes with what shirt, even when, or especially when, it’s obvious no one wears ties anymore except for costume, uniform, or kitsch. “At no time,” Jeeves tells Bertie, “are ties unimportant.” But where’s Jeeves when you need one?
Some blogs venture toward becoming full-blown sites, multiple pages and interactive tools, like the old TV variety shows. But the bed of the blog is the individual post, a diary entry, about experience rooted and grounded outside the blog. But the mirror blog is also interesting. It’s not about itself, but about you, its reader, without being intrusive; it’s subtle, seductive. A post starts off being about jam and ends up a preserve.
I like learning how to do things, seeing how things are done. So if I see a photograph, some explanation of where and how and with what it was taken adds value to the blog post visit. Not that I only value the professional photo, quite the opposite; the amateur unposed snapshot often captures the most moving light. And of course descriptions take time and effort and might spoil a photo’s effect by focusing too much on technicality. There are times when sources should be revealed, footnotes added, links provided, though these can also ruin a visit with too much pomp and falderal.
I enjoy arts and crafts blogs, particularly when they illustrate and track the process. These bloggers of course would be hard-pressed to post daily. It’s a lot of work, blogging, or can be, and posts are often obviously cut short or abandoned for lack of time or inability to get things right, whatever that might be. Which brings up the question of length. How long should a successful blog post be? I don’t know, but reading back over this one, it’s beginning to look too long, and I wonder what readers will have made it this far.
I’m a general interest reader. I don’t have favorite or niche needs. But I do enjoy blogs dedicated to a particular mode or form. The original blog was called a weblog, a log posted to the web, like a ship’s log or an economic diary, updated frequently. Often a community evolved and comments or discussion ensued. I’m not myself these days given to commenting. It’s enough to do a post. Likewise, the blog or post dedicated to sending me elsewhere in the form of links galore can overdo it. I’m not sure how many bloggers remain that spend all day working on their blogs.
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.
Somewhere along the way we are taught that writing is hard, and we come to believe that writing is hard. Hua Hsu thinks writing is hard, and he’s a professional writer, and teaches writing to boot, so he should know:
“Writing is hard, regardless of whether it’s a five-paragraph essay or a haiku, and it’s natural, especially when you’re a college student, to want to avoid hard work—this is why classes like Melzer’s are compulsory. ‘You can imagine that students really want to be there,’ he joked” (p. 24, “The End of the Essay,” The New Yorker, July 7 & 14, 2025).
Most activities seem hard if you’d rather be doing something else. “It is not irritating to be where one is. It is only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else” John Cage said, in his “Lecture on Nothing.” But what about Hua Hsu’s claim that college students “avoid hard work”? Is that true?
Definitions are hard: what is writing; what is work? Is avoidance not hard work? While it might be easier not to write, does it necessarily follow that writing is hard?
Writing is easy. Most kids by the second or third grade can write. But keeping inside the lines as they are later taught, and writing becomes harder, until finally they quit trying to write and now apparently go to some Artificial Intelligence application where their writing is done via surrogate.
“A.I. has returned us to the question of what the point of higher education is,” Hsu says (22). It might be too late, as the question seems in the process of being answered in the dismantling of institutions, and the answer for some currently sounds like, there is no point. In any case, the question is not new, being asked, and answered, over time, from John Henry Newman’s “The Idea of a University,” to Ivan Illich’s “Deschooling Society.” Illich’s ideas seem ripe for our time:
“Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is thereby ‘schooled’ to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is ‘schooled’ to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work. Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavor are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve these ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the management of hospitals, schools, and other agencies in question” (Ivan Illich, “Deschooling Society,” 1973).
Writing is learned, like learning a musical instrument, developmentally and incrementally; writing is a process of addition, as Francis Christensen taught. His solutions described in his “Notes Toward A New Rhetoric: 9 Essays for Teachers (3rd Ed., 2007) to the teaching and learning of writing are among the best. Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several short sentences about writing(Vintage, April 2013) is also excellent and should be used in today’s English 101 classes (if there still are any) – though neither of these solutions do I put forth as absolute. I’ve met veteran classical musicians who cannot improvise, cannot play their instrument without a piece of sheet music to read from.
Could Hemingway write? And if he could write, or maybe more importantly if you think he could not write, where did Hemingway learn how to write? In the beginning was the essay, English 101. Everyone had to take it, even the math majors. But Hemingway never made it to English 101. He wrote in high school, but it seems he learned to write while writing.
“My name’s Laughton,” the tall one said. “I’m a writer.” “I’m glad to meet you,” Professor MacWalsey said. “Do you write often?” The tall man looked around him. “Let’s get out of here, dear,” he said. “Everybody is either insulting or nuts” (135).1
Ernest Hemingway, “To Have and Have Not,” 1934, Hearst Magazines Inc. Scribner Classics, 1970. 0-684-17952-0. ↩︎
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.
The Coming of the Toads 