The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

Tag: Writing

  • Notes on “The Summer Book” by Tove Jansson

    A fortis summery read in the midst of this wintry Tabor must which by now has turned fall’s ferment to frozen despoliation – a plundering weather high tide tumbling the tall fir trees, humbling the local residents. So for comfort a read of Tove Jansson’s “The Summer Book” (1972, NYRB 2008). It’s summer, and grandmother and six year old Sophia and her father row to an island off Finland where their habit is to live through the warm months in a small cabin. But don’t listen to the NYRB Classics Introduction. I don’t understand why they bother with those Intros, though each is different, and some more valuable than others. But if something must be said other than what’s in the book, put it in an Afterword. Too often Intros spoil the plot or try to bring attention to extraneous background info or just plain get things wrong. For example, it’s not as easy as saying it’s one summer and the child is six. If it’s only one summer, how does the chapter titled “Of Angleworms and Others” begin with: “One summer, Sophia was…” (136)? And the chapter “Sophia’s Storm” begins, “There was one summer that was never referred to by year, but only as the summer of the great storm” (145). Maybe it’s a petty complaint, but summer is the season of life. And in winter my reading may be off-kilter. In bed reading, feeling like an ice pop stick.

    Gallery of Pics:
    Winter Feb 2024 on Mt Tabor

    I was reminded, reading Tove Jansson’s “The Summer Book,” cold nights in bed before winter sleep, of Refugio, the summer vacation weeks we spent there, dropped off by Dad who stayed the weekend then rowed back to Los Angeles to the work week, leaving us kids to camp out, hike, swim, sit around a campfire, carve tikis in the soft wood of fallen palm fronds. At low tide, you can walk around Refugio Point and hike north below the cliffs around other points, the cliff faces sheer and steep, sometimes with caves at the bottom that fill with water at high tide, but at low tide you can walk into a cave and sit and watch the waves through the opening. And if you’re with a girl, you might snuggle up in the damp and hug and kiss, while up above the trains rumble across the clifftop.

    Gallery of Pics: Cliffs near Refugio, 1970s

    One year, a bunch of us kids hiked around the point at low tide and walked off below the cliffs, exploring caves, skiffing stones, beach combing. We were camping with our neighbors from town. We were all at the time under 12 years old, so late 1950’s. Uncle Hugh had been an early days Los Angeles County Lifeguard. One day, he drove us to an obscure beach where we parked and hiked down to an awesome surfing cove where he took us one by one out into the big waves paddling on a canvas surf mat. It seemed we were a mile out, and we caught huge rolling waves that carried us all the way to shore. But that day we were hiking, we were kids out on our own, and we did not notice the tide coming in, and were soon stranded between points, the tide too high to walk back around, the rocks too dangerous now mostly covered by an incessant surf. The incoming tide would soon pin us against the cliff. We had no choice but to climb up. One by one we climbed, toes and fingers in cracks, zigzagging, following the leader. At the top of the cliff the rock gave way to a dirt and bush cap, and we found a crevice to climb through and up to the top, pulling on roots and placing our feet on a providential clump of soil held together by some kind of small bush. We grabbed hold of the hand above us and pulled to the top. The oldest neighbor boy was the last, and he froze. The clump of soil was too loose now, he complained, it would not hold and he’d fall back down the cliff. We were miles from the campground. Would someone run back and get help, get a rope? Some of the parents were stern disciplinarians. Help would come at a cost. The squad of kids held together and with cajoling and twisting of arms we fandangle-rescued the last kid to the top of the cliff. We found the train tracks, not far off, and walked back to the campground, our stranded beneath the cliff at high tide story, our death defying climb up the sheer rock face, growing increasingly mythic with every step back.

    I’m further now from that Refugio Beach memory than Jansson was from her summer island memory when she wrote her “The Summer Book.” Grandmother’s friend Verner has stolen a boat to come visit her on her island:

    “It isn’t my boat,” he said.
    “I didn’t think it was. It has a hogged keel, too. Did you borrow it?”
    “I just took it,” Verner said. “I took it and drove off. It’s very unpleasant to have them worry about you all the time.”
    “But you’re only seventy-five,” said Grandmother in astonishment. “Surely you can do what you like.”
    “It’s not that easy,” Verner replied. “You have to be considerate. They do have a certain responsibility for you, after all. And when you get right down to it, you are mostly just in the way.

    133

    The story, the book, “The Summer Book,” belongs mostly to Grandmother and Sophia. They argue, go for walks and hikes, hang out, philosophize and think out loud, share information and knowledge, climb into the most pernicious of situations, worry together and talk and play out and act out together. At times one is the adult, the other the child, and then they switch sides. And the summer passes.

    “Every year, the bright Scandinavian summer nights fade away without anyone’s noticing…Not right away, but little by little and incidentally, things begin to shift position…”

    164

    And that’s how the tides change too, and you can get lost in between the ebb and flow. There are visitors, human and otherwise, and they come and go. The weather is always everywhere all at once and always in the offing promising change:

    “Dear God, let something happen,” Sophia prayed. “God, if You love me. I’m bored to death. Amen.”

    148

    But of course you have to be careful what you pray for. But in any case, it’s likely not one summer of memories but a single memory of many summers mingled together and how relationships change over time like the weather always the same but at the same time always different and always full of promises and disappointments leaving one at the bottom of a wave here and another high and dry there. Memory is a run-on sentence.

  • Endgame

    For some time now, I’ve been playing chess using Lichess, an open source app that is free, sans ads, and full of chess activities, including live games, coaching, analysis, and community. I’ve limited my involvement to the chess puzzles and “play with the computer” games, where I select a game timed at 10 minutes, and where I usually win only about 1 in 10 games – playing standard variant, Stockfish level 3 (of 8). I usually play using the app on my cell phone, while waiting for an appointment, the pasta to finish boiling, in between chores. But I’m quitting chess.

    The games can be relaxing, but they also can create a bit of unwanted tension, particularly when the game is timed. Chess reference is full of analysis of personality types of players, pros and cons of involvement, history of chess and chess players. Not too long ago, I read “Eve’s Hollywood,” by Eve Babitz (1972, NYRB Classics 2015), the entertaining stories of a Hollywood High girl coming of age in the 60’s. Anyone with an interest in Hollywood, Los Angeles, the 60’s, will enjoy Eve’s accounting. Eve wound up being famous, or infamous, depending on your coastal view, for a number of what today might be called gone-viral moments, including posing nude while playing chess with Marcel Duchamp. But she was a good writer. She could be defensive about her Hollywood: “I think Nathanael West was a creep. Assuring his friends back at Dartmouth that even though he’d gone to Hollywood, he had not gone Hollywood” (189). “Eve’s Hollywood” is a kind of “Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies” (1971, UC Press 2009), where we might substitute Cultures for Ecologies.

    Anyway, I’m quitting chess. Not because it’s the Lenten Season. And it’s not the 9 out of 10 losses, since really it’s impossible to beat the computer (I can’t explain how I win one when I do). The online version is, like most activities app-related, addictive. There are of course addictions that are recommended as being good for you, though one should always consider who’s doing the recommending, and what they’re suggesting in place of. And chess proves, at least the 10 minute timed version might prove, it is possible to live in the moment. And it’s probably better than maladaptive daydreaming or even the lesser automaticity when what our purpose really calls for is paying attention. In any case, I just think I’d rather spend my time on music than on chess. In fact, music is chess, though chess is not music.

  • Relaxing Reads

    Barbara Pym’s novels are relaxing reads. I found her while reading and following Penelope Fitzgerald, Elizabeth Taylor, Elizabeth Bowen – other 20th-century British female writers I’ve been reading and have grown to appreciate and like and want to share. I finished the Hermione Lee biography of Penelope some time ago. Writers, like the rest of us, don’t always lead exceptional or excellent lives. And a biographer needs tools and supplies to work with. I recently read Susan Cheever’s biography of e. e. cummings – much material for a biographer to work with there: Harvard and its takes and mistakes; both World Wars and post-war worlds; the Great Depression; the eccentric poet at work and play; the effects of criticism and changing popular and academic tastes on a writer’s occasions for work; notes and diaries; interviews; and correspondence. But readers interested in 20th Century British history and literature will find good reference and enjoyable works among these women writers: Bowen was born in 1899, Taylor in 1912, Pym in 1913, and Fitzgerald in 1916. They are not modernists in the sense of James Joyce or Samuel Beckett or Virginia Woolf or Gertrude Stein, even if they constitute a newer generation. Their novels are characterized by realistic prose and dialog, and as for history, the settings are often domestic, about family and relationships, work, church as social community place (think jumble sale, what here we call rummage sale), not so much about historical events as about the effects of the great tides on individuals in society, but of the person in an outlier sense. Consider Nenna in “Offshore,” living on the barge Grace on Battersea Reach on the Thames with her two young girls, estranged from her strange husband who in a final desperate argument-ending-blow, yells at her, “You’re not a woman!”

    I ordered a copy of Paula Byrne’s Pym biography, “The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym” (2021, William Collins, London). I’m on page 179 of the close to 700 page tome. I started out reading the inside cover blurb on the author, Paula Byrne, which mentions, “She is founder and lead practitioner of ReLit, the charity for literature and mental health.” Having never heard of ReLit, I looked it up and found a site illustrating a small organization’s devotion to using literature to assist those struggling to handle the slings and arrows of daily life, whether king, knight, or knave. From ReLit’s About page:

    “ReLit is the Foundation for bibliotherapy: the complementary treatment of stress, anxiety and other conditions through slow reading of great literature, especially poetry. We believe in the power of words to restore and relight the human mind.”

    Apt words have power to assuage / The tumors of a troubled mind / And are as balm to festered wounds (John Milton, Samson Agonistes)

    ReLit: reading for wellbeing, retrieved 7 Feb 24

    I discovered on the ReLit site, and ordered from Alibris a used copy, a book titled “Stressed, Unstressed: classic poems to ease the mind” (2016, William Collins, London). The poems are indeed for the most part classic, the youngest poet included born in 1952, Linton Kwesi Johnson. The book is divided into 12 chapters devoted to themes related to dealing with stress, for example, “meditating,” “feeling alone,” “living with uncertainty,” “positive thinking.” (Stressed, unstressed also of course about the forms of poetic syllabication and lines.) Each chapter is introduced by a short explanatory essay on the given theme. The book is not an escape portal, though. The poems may or may not help the afflicted in a time of need. But as Jonathan Bate says in his introduction: “If words can do the work of drugs, what is to lose by putting them in our mental health first aid kit? There is nothing to lose and everything to gain.” Of course there are many different kinds of poetry and poetic definitions. The book “Stressed, Unstressed” uses the Wordsworth definitions: “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” or “emotion recollected in tranquility.” Further into the book, we find mindfulness strategies discussed, and I was reminded of the Thich Nhat Hanh “how to books” (e.g. “How to Relax”), which focus on calm breathing and attentiveness to the moment.

    I think I might prefer, to the poetry as a means toward relaxation, the novels of Barbara Pym as well as Penelope Fitzgerald, Elizabeth Taylor, and Elizabeth Bowen. Too often, for me, poetry, like the classic country western song, often plays upon the emotions in the way of pathos, stirring the emotions rather than calming them. In any case, all of the subject of this post has me wondering if readers here at The Coming of the Toads find for the most part relaxing reads or stuff that gets the dander up. My hope is for the former, the relaxed, the three breaths you take while waiting for the page to change.

  • How I Spent My Artificial Vacation!

    Dear Ai! Quick! Quick! Quick! Lickety-split! I need about a 500-word paragraph on how I spent my last summer vacation! I totally spaced this stupid assignment! If I don’t get it in by today the teacher, Mrs. Millgillicutty, not that her name matters much, won’t accept any more late papers! Something about we’re almost to next summer vacation. Anyway, I remember when we first got this assignment, and I was like, I didn’t do anything on my last summer vacation but lay on the beach at El Porto listening to a transistor radio! What’s to write about that! And I watched the surfers come and go and the waves blow all froth like the bottoms of cutoff jeans and the jets from LAX taking off over the bay looking way too fat to fly like the Dodo and the oil freighters off El Segundo and a few sailboats in the offing a word that was on our last vocabulary quiz by the way. Anyway, one day, one of the hottest, ever, you couldn’t even walk barefoot down to the water the sand was so blistering hot and I dropped my towel and jumped on it every few steps to keep my feet from turning toast until I got to the wet sand near the water and all was cool. I don’t like to take a bunch of stuff to the beach. Just my towel and my bag. In my bag I stuff an extra suit, a pair of shorts and an extra tshirt, my transistor radio, a bottle of water, an apple or an orange, suntan lotion, a comb, a Nancy Drew book (I had a summer goal to read 12 Nacy Drew books, and I actually ended up reading 17), a pair of binoculars, a foldup sand chair, a small umbrella, a pair of flipflops, and my purse. Oh, yeah, but I was going to talk about that one day, the hottest on record. I usually get to the beach around noon, after I’ve finished my chores, make breakfast, take out the trash, straighten up, empty the ashtrays. I live up on Gull in El Porto so all I have to do is walk out of the apartment and down to the beach and usually I’m the first down but soon there are the others my friends all strangling down like they had a bad night or something but the reality is the worst they might have done is stay up late watching movies on the all night movie channel. Of course there are parents, or parent, and they can be unsettling, what with their bickering and worrying and criticizing and stopping off at bars on the way home until you have to get your own dinner but not everyone’s home is like that in fact each home is quiet different even if the parents seem the same. Anyway, back to how I spent my summer vacation and the one hottest day I remember it’s like branded on my behind. Jocko the beach’s best surfer ever stops where I’m sitting and asks can he leave his board with me while he goes in for a dip the blackball flag is up and all boards have to be out of the water. I’m stupified. He’s never even noticed me before. But I’m totally chill and like if you want whatever and that kind of stupid self conscious response and off he goes into the water where he stays like three hours! I’m like HELLO! how long am I supposed to watch your stupid surfboard and it was that day I decided how I would spend the rest of my summer vacation and it wasn’t watching some stupid minihunk’s surfboard while he dolls his afternoon away in the waves. I’m not some sort of artificial doll, you know. I’m real. With something real to talk about. About 500 words is all I need! Thanks!

    Sincerely, Beach Bum Betty

    Dear Betty, Here you go:

    I didn’t do anything on my last summer vacation but lay on the beach at El Porto listening to a transistor radio! What’s to write about that! And I watched the surfers come and go and the waves blow all froth like the bottoms of cutoff jeans and the jets from LAX taking off over the bay looking way too fat to fly like the Dodo and the oil freighters off El Segundo and a few sailboats in the offing a word that was on our last vocabulary quiz by the way. Anyway, one day, one of the hottest, you couldn’t even walk barefoot down to the water the sand was so blistering hot and I dropped my towel and jumped on it every few steps to keep my feet from toasting until I got to the wet sand near the water and all was cool. I don’t like to take a bunch of stuff to the beach. Just my towel and my bag. In my bag I stuff an extra suit, a pair of shorts and an extra tshirt, my transistor radio, a bottle of water, an apple or an orange, suntan lotion, a comb, my cell phone, a Nancy Drew book (I had a summer goal to read 12 Nacy Drew books, and I actually ended up reading 17), a pair of binoculars, a foldup sand chair, a small umbrella, a pair of flipflops, and my purse. Oh, yeah, but I was going to talk about that one day, the hottest on record. I usually get to the beach around noon, after I’ve finished my chores. I live up on 44th in El Porto so all I have to do is walk out of the apartment and down to the beach and usually I’m the first down but soon there’s the others my friends all strangling down like they had a bad night or something but the reality is the worst they might have done is stay up late watching movies on the all night movie channel. Of course there’s parents, and they can be unsettling, what with their bickering and worrying and criticizing and stopping off at bars on the way home until you have to get your own dinner but not everyone’s home is like that in fact each home is quiet different even if the parents are the same. Anyway, back to how I spent my summer vacation and the one hottest day I remember it’s like branded on my behind. Jocko the beach’s best surfer ever stops where I’m sitting and asks can he leave his board with me while he goes in for a dip the blackball flag is up and all boards have to be out of the water. I’m stupified. He’s never even noticed me before. But I’m totally chill and like if you want whatever and that kind of stupid response and off he goes into the water where he stays like three hours! I’m like hello how long am I supposed to watch your stupid surfboard and it was that day I decided how I would spend the rest of my summer vacation and it wasn’t watching some stupid hunk’s surfboard while he dolls his afternoon away in the waves. I’m not some sort of artificial doll, you know. I’m real! With something real to talk about!

    Good luck, Ai

  • It ain’t we

    when he says we 
    if he means me 
    time to bend a bow
    redo your I do’s

    hey it’s me 
    what now sweetie 
    why you go awry
    to take a powder 

    we are two
    juxtaposed
    pieces locked in
    a jigsaw puzzle

    by we he means
    all 1,000 of us
    see how we may be
    broke up and set free 

    i’m the piece nearby
    your cutup smile
    sipping coffee
    from a cracked cup

    talk radio tune
    static and tin
    the road out
    the intersection

    of rack and ruin
    of walk and rain
    of rock and song
    of whence and where

    when he says
    always
    it ain’t me
    babe he means we

  • Where East Meets West

    For the past week, we’ve been living in a deep wintry freeze, cold north air winds from the east out of the Gorge mixing with rain from the warmer ocean west to form local ice – sticking to the tree branches, the power lines, the streets and sidewalks, your nose if you stick it out. The weather here, in the confluence of two river valleys, the Gorge, and the hilly city pockets, is hard to predict, and the weather folks you turn to when you’re not sure which way the wind blows got it all wrong day after day throughout the week. The great thaw from the west never came. Where east meets west, we lost power, the temperature in the house dropped to 30F, and we lit out for the next county, navigating the icy roads like surfers lost in a snowy desert.

    Our power was miraculously restored in just over 48 hours, a miracle considering the number of trees down and the winds continuing to blow out of the Gorge, bringing in more freezing air. The linemen can’t go up in their buckets if the wind is blowing in the 20mph range, so the lines dangled dangerously about our heads. I wrote about the ice storm on location here. So this post is just a bit of an update to show a few pics of the ice. And to give the hot and cold poetry talk on the blog a rest. It’s still cold, 33F outside as I type this, 66F in the house. We should be able to get out to the store for provisions later today, if any remain – we heard yesterday the delivery trucks have been unable to get anywhere close-in. Winterlude. What was it Dylan sang?

    Winterlude, Winterlude, oh darlin’
    Winterlude by the road tonight
    Tonight there will be no quarrelin’
    Ev’rything is gonna be all right
    Oh, I see by the angel beside me
    That love has a reason to shine
    You’re the one I adore, come over here and give me more
    Then Winterlude, this dude thinks you’re fine

    Bob Dylan, Winterlude, 1970

  • The Poetry Game

    Is poetry a game? A game of solitaire. But inasmuchas one might anticipate an audience, a gnip gnop match. Or on a polo grounds, the sport of kings, but some riders on stallions and others on donkeys. But if poetry is a game, or even if just at times it might be considered a game, in a certain environment or context, so what?

    How does one play poetry? What are the rules of the game? A chase, in pursuit of meaning. Or mere entertainment, in which meaning may or may not play a role. We read that Wittgenstein found game useful in his thoughts on language. From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

    “Language-games are, first, a part of a broader context termed by Wittgenstein a form of life (see below). Secondly, the concept of language-games points at the rule-governed character of language. This does not entail strict and definite systems of rules for each and every language-game, but points to the conventional nature of this sort of human activity. Still, just as we cannot give a final, essential definition of ‘game,’ so we cannot find “what is common to all these activities and what makes them into language or parts of language” (PI 65).”

    Biletzki, Anat and Anat Matar, “Ludwig Wittgenstein”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2023 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2023/entries/wittgenstein/&gt;.

    Is poetry maybe a “language-game”? Looking around for a suitable answer, I found this in the online “Wittgenstein Initiative”: Wittgenstein said,

    “Philosophy should really be written only as one would write poetry.”

    WRITING PHILOSOPHY AS POETRY: LITERARY FORM IN WITTGENSTEIN 7 July 2015 ARTICLES
    by Marjorie Perloff, Stanford

    But reading on, I find this not all that helpful to our opening question (Is poetry a game?). And it didn’t take long to be subsumed online by articles relating to Wittgenstein and our use of words, in poetry or otherwise. But another maybe significantly different translation, by the way, shows Wittgenstein saying,

    “Philosophy ought really to be written only as a form of poetic composition.”

    Ioana Jucan. Date: XML TEI markup by WAB (Rune J. Falch, Heinz W. Krüger, Alois Pichler, Deirdre C.P. Smith) 2011-13. Last change 18.12.2013.
    This page is made available under the Creative Commons General Public License “Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share-Alike”, version 3.0 (CCPL BY-NC-SA)

    Will come back to form, but for now, so I backed out of search mode and returned to my own thoughts, if I can be said to own a thought, which of course is absurd. But to move on.

    But even if we are to satisfactorily say what a game is, it would still be left us to consider a definition for poetry. A search for a definition of poetry of course brings into view a petri dish full of ideas. Then this, again from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

    “Hegel considered a mode of understanding fundamental nature to be more advanced the more that it abstracts from concrete sensuous presentation and the more that it can turn contemplation back onto itself. There is a scale within types of art in this respect; visual art is less advanced than music, which is itself less advanced than poetry (1807 [1979]). While self-conscious Romantic poetry allows us to see our rational self-determining nature as minded beings, it nonetheless remains imperfect as a mode of knowledge of spirit. Philosophy, in its endless capacity for self-conscious reflection, “is a higher mode of presentment” (in Cahn and Meskin 2007, p. 181) and can ultimately supplant art as a mode of knowing the world’s essential structure.”

    Peacocke, Antonia, “Aesthetic Experience”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2023 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2023/entries/aesthetic-experience/&gt;.

    I include form as a rule of poetry. Poetry is first a game of forms. Form still may not be enough to make poetry a game. But to cut to the chase, poetry I claim shares many of the characteristics of a game: competition (for publication, recognition, awards); rules (of form and content, even if self-made and one-off, but historically many rules of form); players and spectators; a field (the page, a stage). But that is all in the game world of entertainment, one might argue – what of the world of art?

    Well, art is the biggest game of all. But again, so what? I’m not using game there as a pejorative. We take it as a given that games are useful, productive, redeeming forms of human experience and expression. But there might be a pejorative sense in some context of using the word game to describe poetry. One cheats, one competes unfairly, engages in gamesmanship, one joins the politics of academia and writes up yet more rules to ensure one’s seat is not taken or shaken, one cancels another often for reasons the critic can’t find jurisdiction over or legal standing for in terms of the writing itself, one joins a group or school of poets or poetry where surely games are played. One questions purpose, occasion, argument, claims. One finds that a poem is an argument, with its statements and claims clothed in metaphor or other hide-and-go-seek maneuvers. And out of bounds we find the critics who act as line judges.

    But what about poetry as art and art as sacred? Poetry with a capital P that stands for Word – with a capital What? Yes, the screed of the scrawl. Of course, any game can be perverted, which is why amateur games may be preferable to professional games, usually better. To play for financial gain or fame sometimes puts a burden on the player to maintain the integrity of the game. Betting and lotteries bring in another round of running about where most folks lose. The worse for wear is when pretensions creep onto the field, or when one pretends to gain access to the field. And of course one can always be ejected from the game, or kicked off the team, sent back to the minors. The values of poetry change from time to time.

    And the question arises, if poetry is a game, what of the other genres: fiction, memoir, the essay. Just earlier tonight, watching Walter Matthau with Glenda Jackson in the film “Hopscotch” (1980), and Matthau’s character sits down to write a book. His memoirs, he tells Jackson. He says he’s going to tell the truth. Oh, she replies, fiction. Why do we so often equate poetry with truth? Aren’t poets as capable of lying (and pretension) as the rest of us? Of playing games in that pejorative sense? And in the positive sense of game I’ve tried to propose above, borrowing in part from Wittgenstein, the poet who can’t play the game of poetry won’t be a winning poet.

  • Lugubrious Fog

    Lugubrious etymologically descends from the dinosaurs in “Allegro Non Troppo” (1976) when the great reptilian gargantuans gentle and armored alike move south ahead of the ice and melt into tar. In Bach fugue file they march.

    I was sitting in bed four nights ago typing this, under a pile of covers, plus fully clothed, wearing two pairs of pants, three shirts, a sweater, a vest, a wool watch cap, and a pair of wool socks. It was 12 degrees Fahrenheit outside, windchill below zero. The house had lost power eight hours ago, years ago, the vicious east winds having blown down enough trees around town to put mist local folks in a freezer. But I gave up the typing in the cold. It was now 30 degrees inside the house. I pulled my hands inside the covers like a turtle for the long cold night and we decamped the wood igloo the next morning moving happily south to a warm house full of warm children.

    Frost’s promises to keep keep us sustained, moving, to keep warm. Yes, “The woods are lovely, dark and deep,” but what melancholy invites us in? Our horse still questions why we might stop here. The museums are also lovely, though well lit, still dark and deep, security guards meandering the lost empty halls, the paintings wired, the statues as still and as cold as ice sculptures, and they don’t allow horses in. Anyway, we prefer trees wandering in the wind full of birds and squirrels and lost kites and balls and flying saucers and climbing kids.

    Earlier that afternoon, I was in the backyard, preparing a place for Zoe, when I heard a rushing sound, a falling dinosaur come to roost, and heard the voice of the tall Sauroposeidon, a wind and wood splintering crash and crush, and looked north to my neighbor’s backyard to see the 100 foot 100-year-old east Pine limbs still shaking off the ice and snow where it had come to rest breaking through the ridge beam, the tree’s upper girth shattering off and coming to rest in the front yard.

    The frightfully freezing cold day moves slowly lugubriously on and we learn that pine tree but one of hundreds of trees falling all about town in the east wind in soaked soils across power lines, cars, streets, houses, parks and lots.

    Back home now, five days on, power restored, but morning after ice storm moving across last night, but still now, windless, half inch of ice coating tree limbs, cars, street, wires, the downed dinosaur leaning across the roof next door. Fog. The dickens of a cold fog. But should we lose power again the air is at least warmed up some, to just below freezing outside.

    A lugubrious fog has settled in, sifting down through the firs, down the street, over the houses and yards dotting the rotting old volcano.

  • Notes on Christian Wiman’s “Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair”

    Wiman’s title comes from an Emily Dickinson poem, about a snake, “A narrow Fellow in the Grass” (1096). Diabolic, symbolic, and fearful (particularly for those with no fear of spiders), snakes glide through the grasses of Wiman’s prose. Self-deprecating, Wiman attempts to hide his ego in the grass of selected poems (his own and by others), copious quotes, anecdotes and memoir, and essays. He begins with a dedication based on “a whole new naivete,” that one might profess to know more having eaten the fruit of the tree of poetry. (“Zero at the Bone” is also, unfortunately, the title of a true thriller. I’ve not read that one, but it also sounds like it deals in despair.) The Zero in Wiman’s title suggests the silence of God. Shame figures throughout, beginning with an epigraph, a quote from Wordsworth: “…to my shame I speak.” The book begins and ends on Zero, the snake swallowing its tail, having shed skin over the fifty entries. “I have no idea what this book will be,” Wiman says in the opening entry, titled “Zero.” Various themes will interweave throughout the book. It is a quilt being sewn, a mosaic, or menagerie. It would have made an interesting blog. The prose does growl along though, as he warns us in the opening “Zero”: “And what, pray tell, is the source of this slowly rousing growl?” That we will discover.

    For readers looking to assuage their own despair, this is probably not the book. It’s not a self-help book. It’s not a bromide. It provides few closed answers and not much good news. Wiman doesn’t appear to believe in Happiness. In this, of course, he’s not alone. Still, to say “One doesn’t follow God in hope of happiness,” hardly seems to go on the offensive against despair. And why shouldn’t one hope for happiness? Why should we not be happy? The opposite of despair is not happiness, but awe, Wiman suggests. There is no panacea. Depression is here to stay. But we can still be awed.

    In entry 1, Wiman mentions a night when his daughter could not sleep. Every time she closed her eyes she had unwanted thoughts. Wiman suggests “she pray to God.” Seriously? The idea of something “erases what it asserts” appears again and again, like “comfort and anguish.” One begets the other: we all need comfort who are anguished, and if we are not tormented, we feel not comfort. There’s this constant dichotomy at work. No permanence save good and evil, the parents of despair. Build it up to take it apart. The kids go to a daycare, “so my wife and I could write.” Maybe writers should not have kids, if that’s how it is. But why can’t a good writer write with the kids around? Joyce did. No art equals no god, no perfection. But if god is so perfect, why the mess? The question of religion, but is faith an answer? This is what comes of taking poetry too seriously.

    In entry 2, we find Wallace Stevens, “Domination of Black,” a poem about, I thought, camping out? Wiman says he doesn’t know what it means, but then goes on to say what it means, erasing what it asserts in so doing, and says it’s about death. Still, with Stevens in the campsite, this is a good entry: “Unreal things have a reality of their own, in poetry as elsewhere.” That is Stevens explaining the human imagination. How to live free from God, not just free from strictures.

    Entry 3 is a single poem, ending “unraptured back to man.”

    In Entry 4 we find Kandinsky again, mentioned with his wife in Entry 2. More quotes, out of context like threads, making the quilt, or is it a jigsaw puzzle, these pieces, not visions. Fragments. What’s the point, if you want to talk about points, of quotes out of context? Wiman’s audience may in large part be made up of divinity students whose lot it will presumably be to balance out angst and joy.

    Dostoyevski fans might remember his line, “Suffering is the sole origin of consciousness.” I kept waiting for Wiman to quote it. But why not of joy? Why can’t joy be an origin of consciousness? Remember, we’re making a quilt here. “One grows so tired, in American public life, of the certitudes and platitudes, the megaphone mouths and stadium praise, influencers and effluencers and the whole tsunami of slop that comes pouring into our lives like toxic sludge.” No kidding, and we’re only on page 30. Then there’s the dinner party honoring Lucille Clifton. Poetry never had it so good. But why does Wiman have to criticize e. e. cummings in his effort to praise Clifton, comparing their use of small case i instead of I? idk. And why take it out on the faces of the waiters? What might be interesting is how the waiters might have described the faces of the poets. For that, we’d need Samuel Beckett, but he’s been dismissed as a trap for minor writers. And there it is, the hierarchy of the cannon, with Dodo and Didi at the bottom of the heap, self-published but nevertheless awaiting instructions from the top.

    And Nietsche? Why not Kirkegaard, Augustine, or Buckminster Fuller – whose treatment of the Our Father prayer is instructive and entertaining and most certainly against despair. But Nietsche is imminently quotable, and Wiman is given to quotes. The quilt makes for a hefty syllabus.

    The poet’s dog. The Holocaust. The bullet we all feel lodged somewhere in the skin muscle of our soul. Christ walks in us. A sermon. Sometimes he walks right through us. Doesn’t stay long.

    It’s a death quilt. Not sorrow. Sorrow is not at zero nor at the bone. Sorrow remains above freezing. Sorrow is a song that doesn’t get sung. Some people can’t sing. A poem says, “Tragedy and Christianity are incommensurable,” in entry 7, then, we get, “The story of Jesus is, in an inescapable sense, a tragedy.” I remember the “Laughing Jesus” image appearing in the church we attended at the time. But Wiman says, “Suffering and death, at some point, will be all that we know.” How does one move against that?

    A poem, “a lullaby of bone,” and “dawn a scald of joy.” Sounds like despair against which nothing can hold back. Where’s the against here?

    Another poem. No comment. Throughout the book, single poems, collections of poems, like posters stapled to a telephone pole advertising little concert events already passed. And comes Ted Hughes, of all poets, singing of joy. Sort of. “Joy! Help!” The Beatles sang it better. Ah, and here’s Kirkegaard: “What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music.” And I’d like to read more of Norman MacCraig, who says: “I am a happy man…and nearly all the poems I write are in fact praising things.” Entries of quotes and poems. Remember, we’re making a quilt.

    So he disses Samuel Beckett. But Beckett was a happy man. A humanistic writer, a kind man. But who are the “minor talents” Wiman refers to in his diss of Beckett? Bloggers? “This is a toy despair. It’s entertaining, brilliant at times, but it cannot help me.” Wiman explains the meaning of “against” in the title: “By ‘against’ in the subtitle of this book I don’t mean to imply a ‘position.’” A leaning, then. Shoulder against the wheel.

    Yet another poem. No comment.

    Dichotomy. There are two kinds of writers, we’re told. Yes, minor and major. Like guitar chords. Diminished and augmented. Wiman seems unforgiving about Virginia Woolf. Why even mention her if you can’t say something nice? He doesn’t mention her depression, her womanhood, the war raging. For someone who really is suffering from despair, as Virginia obviously was, this book by Wiman won’t be helpful. It might even make matters worse, as his response to Woolf’s suicide makes clear: “A prison gets to be a friend.” Wiman says she “embraced the oblivion that she had spent a lifetime creating out of, and in spite of, and against.” That is a complete misreading of everything. And mean-spirited to boot.

    Wiman says, “Me, I can’t conceive of a god who can’t laugh.” Well, let us hear some laughter, then.

    Another poem. Shooting pool. More despair. Haven’t we enough?

    At the gym. This is a kind of Roland Barthes entry, or a topic Barthes would have used, like his American wrestling piece. “I’ve never been in a gym I didn’t like,” Wiman says. I’ve never been in one I did like. The smell of sweaty socks. Exercise going on but apart from any obvious need, like digging a ditch to lay a sewer line. Honest work. Of course one can be assigned physical therapy, and a gym comes in handy for that. But we should get outside for our exercise, and work for a living. But I can easily see why a writer might need a gym. Get away from the solo desk and into some camaraderie, even if you don’t actually meet or talk to anyone. Maybe even hire a coach, a trainer. But Rocky’s raw eggs? Really? And then we get some humor, finally, or at least some talk about humor. We missed a good chance with the Beckett stuff – well, that was just a footnote, anyway. But now, Wiman showers us after the gym with: “It [humor] can have existential reach and significance, can imply a world in which the comic, not the tragic, is ultimate.” This entry ends, by the way, with a footnote referencing Langston Hughes, a little quote from a letter he wrote. Fine, but Langston should have an entry all his own.

    And now we’re back to snakes again. “Why does one create?” Wiman’s italics, not mine. Some to sound important. And of course the snake anecdote brings us round “commodious vicus” to Adam and Eve, story which with the help of Larkin, Wiman conflates with sex, not knowledge of good and evil. “Then, friend…” First, don’t call me friend. I’m your reader. It’s Eve creates consciousness. Hmm. And then God is the snake. What version is Wiman reading from? And then comes the Weil paradox. Destruction of the I. Hard to understand I guess for a poet, whose sole purpose is the creation of the I. And then it’s sustenance. And what of the others? If I drink it to death? And then comes the snake in the mouth. “There is nowhere to stand and see, nowhere to escape the stink of being human.” One must love that stink as Jesus did. And then this absurd comment: “Poetry is the only sanity.” Really? Then why does so much of it sound so crazy?

    So, an Ars Poetica follows. “If I could let go / If I could know what there is to let go / If I could chance the night’s improvidence / and be the being this hard mercy means.” The work song.

    Hearing music is better than poetry, sans words. Save the sound of a poem’s words.

    More circularity. “The knowledge of love and the knowledge of death are the same, and neither is knowledge.” Is Wiman just trying to sound important here? Like a philosopher might? What indeed is the point? Yes, back on page 3: “To write a book against despair implies an intimate acquaintance with the condition. Otherwise what would be the point?”

    And now more quotes. Bloggishness.

    A six-line poem.

    Loneliness and its solution.

    William Bronk, at the expense of Wallace Stevens. Potato chips. Betcha can’t write one. Aphorisms, like this one from page 118: “Nothing is worth saying, nothing is worth doing except as a foil for the waves of silence to break against.” Yes, and “our ears are now in perfect condition,” John Cage said in his manifesto for music. As for Bronk, metaphor is everything and nothing, since it can point to what is, or what might be, but can never actually be that person, place, or thing. Buckminster Fuller: “I seem to be a verb.” That is not found in Wiman. Instead, we get, via Bronk: “I deal with despair because I feel despair. Most people feel despair but they are not prepared to deal with it except pretend that it’s not there. I think it’s there metaphysically, that it is not a matter of an individual predicament. It’s in the nature of reality and not to be denied.” Another sadist who wants people to think for a living. Isn’t it better to work for a living? “…a man lashed to a mast in his own living room,” is Wiman’s final statement on Bronk.

    Barely bearable. Yes, because there is no “ugly” landscape. It’s all tremendous and awe full. That is the nature of Beckett’s landscapes. Only the human remains.

    Pascal – the dedication to Wiman’s book is now explained, “a whole new naivete,” explained or illuminated.

    Another poem.

    Etheridge Knight. What poetry maybe can do is what “Jesus promises.”

    Poem. “toot” (ish) footed.

    Why is “common reader” in quote marks? Contradictions. Contraindications. Don’t mix this poetry with… Rabbits. Hot rats. “Poetry makes nothing happen.” Yes, precisely. “In the beginning…was the word.” Was. What now? Out of nothing something happened. But why this something? Why not some other happier circumstance? Burning worlds.

    Another poem.

    Out of “this tumbleweed nowhere” now here. And ends in laughter, really is, this entry, “against despair.” This is the autobiographical piece, the memoir, writing worth the price of admission. The memoir piece where Wiman describes his father and sister living like Becket characters trapped in a Southern Gothic play, is the heart of the quilt. Wiman has already tried to dismiss Faulkner’s characters, yet here they are, living a Flannery O’Connor dream. Here Wiman is at his best when it comes to the writing. It’s an American quilt.

    Another poem: hailstorm.

    “I am tired of the word ‘despair,’” Wiman says on page 170. No kidding. Me too. And we three? Remember the speaker is not necessarily the author. We might keep that in mind when we’re hearing voices.

    Another poem. More rats.

    Writing in the sand. Could he write? “Against closure.”

    “Who ever anywhere will read these written words” (Joyce).

    Poem. Hamburger.

    Assumptions and predispositions – toward despair? “Ouroboros.” Our boring into belief. Burrowing? Borrowing from?

    All quotes. “Faith becomes an instrument.” A tool? A piano stool?

    Sermon calling. “Was it your own idea or were you poorly advised?” Funny. Either or. “Who do you say I am?

    25 more quotes. Quip qwop gnip gnop.

    Poem.

    Traces. A play. “What’s the point, then…” Yes, of reading anything at all, never mind writing. What’s the point of worrying over points?

    Entropy. Loss of the big. Who cares about “poise?” At a time like this? At anytime. Well, we’ve got to attend to the niceties. We aren’t in our own living room. And what of the obsessive and the compulsive and the disorders? Will Jesus cure us of those too?

    A poem about pain.

    10 more quotes. What’s the point? Like Melville’s “Moby Dick.” He wanted to write a big book.

    A four-line poem on unbelief?

    A found poem, created by “delineating” a piece of prose. Ok. Mentions Meister Eckhart.

    One’s personal Jesus. Love – what is it? A miracle. Agape. Mouth open. Prayer for, as opposed to prayer against. The universe more strange than we can even ever imagine. In which Wiman reconciles science (physics) with the spirit. Fragments of a big bang. Of course, since it was the only bang, how would one know if it was big or small? Doesn’t matter.

    Wiman makes clear to be against despair is not necessarily to be for joy. His book is not a 7 habits of highly joyful people. But why can’t joy create consciousness as easily as despair? Is humanity an experiment in anhedonia?

    “…want want.” Not, not. Knotty. “Woman With Tomato,” poem.

    Poem. Family. “buoys”

    Cancer and television. “Why must my mind…” I get that. “I’m not chipper…” And the children of war? Children and cancer in the war zones. Wiman teaches a class called “Suffering.” He’s had an overdose of it. But is there another class he might teach called “Joy”? But Wiman says suffering and joy are alike. It’s the same class, turns out. The cancer chair. And Eli Whitney. Job (The Book of) and poetry. Values. Joy over despair. “Of course, of course, of course.” This renders a lot of comments – put your hands down. “One considers the meaning of…” (I’m on page 277 if you want to follow along – in Entry 49.) Not quite true, otherwise placid, readers of this book may attest.

    Comes to a sum, page 278. “…feeds in blood” (281).

    And a final poem: Bewitched, bothered, and bewildered.

    Coda: Zero again. Nothing, nothing.

    Not a book for someone trying to stare down despair. There’s the personal, individual kind of suffering, the stuff of sitting in the cancer chair. There’s the universal, general kind of suffering – “the sole (soul) origin of consciousness.” And there’s the week work and war and worry that wears most of us weary.

  • Out of Time

    What will we do with Live at 5 in the new year? The shows began at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic and at their peak featured a different host player going live most nights of the week, sharing guitar, songs, stories, and readings (live via the Instagram video venue) to an audience of similarly homebound family and friends of family. The shows ran evenings for about an hour starting at 5. The hosts included, on a rotating schedule, myself, my brothers, a nephew, and over time a few guest hosts and visitors – more family and friends. Shows were home-staged from Portland, Salem, Healdsburg, Ione, Drytown, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia. The format was loose and forgiving. Audience clicked on, paused, maybe stayed for the whole show, as people do passing buskers on a sidewalk, and through the Instagram feed anyone tuned in could place comments for the performer and the rest of the audience to read, and many an audience-controlled conversation took off. (Unfortunately, Instagram does not save those conversations – the comments disappear even if the host saves the video to their Instagram feed.) The Live at 5 shows diminished through 2022, timing out as the voluntary pandemic isolations began to lift.

    I played guitar in a neighborhood jazz band for the last couple of years. It was fun, I met some new folks, and learned more about music and the guitar – particularly about playing “in the pocket,” a term that means playing in time, in sync with the other musicians, a skill I’ve never satisfactorily mastered. You might think jazz would be more forgiving, but no. I left the band to concentrate on gypsy jazz guitar, renewing my subscription to Robin Nolan’s “Gypsy Jazz Club,” which includes players from all around the world. One of the features of the club is a “Sunday Club Zoom Hangout” – 8 in the morning my time, but I manage to wake up in time most Sundays, for a Gypsy djass reveille. For the most part, the Hangout hour is devoted to live, short performances by club members.

    “Step in time, step in time
    Step in time, step in time
    Never need a reason, never need a rhyme
    Step in time, we step in time”

    from the song “Step in Time,” lyrics by The Sherman Brothers, in “Mary Poppins,” 1964.

    Time waits for nothing, to begin, “to boldy go where no man [which is to say, everyone] has gone before,” pen in hand, splitting infinitives out of time, rubato, robber of time:

    “For three years, out of key with his time,
    He strove to resuscitate the dead art
    Of poetry; to maintain ‘the sublime’
    In the old sense. Wrong from the start—”

    from “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” [Part I], Ezra Pound, 1920.

    Anyway, the question I’m entertaining now is whether or not to try to resuscitate an ongoing Live at 5 show. The need for homebound, not to mention amateur, entertainment may have passed for the time being. Still, there developed a core group of loyal listeners, not enough to fill Shea Stadium, or the Ash Grove, for that matter, of course, but would even those few return for a new season? It’s dinner hour, kids are back in school, the work-at-home movement is weakening, and pizza parlors, pubs, and wine bars have reopened, many featuring live entertainment. And the movies are back up and running. But some of us have emerged from the pandemic isolation years eschewing the old forms. We don’t go out anymore. We are aging. We are stepping out of time. We could fill a living room.

    Most of the Live at 5 shows were improvisational, maybe the host wrote down a few notes before going live with some intro comments, checking in with the audience, a few songs, some outro comments. Audience requests were popular. The videos remain on their host’s Instagram, where saved, complete with mistakes and random rambles, unedited. I don’t want to overstate, but I think the shows in the various locales were looked forward to and enjoyed. Where they were not joined live, Instagram followers caught up later.

    My brother Charles, at the height of the show’s exceptional ratings, had some shirts made:

    By the way, none of this post is to espouse Instagram as a preferred tool. But that’s a topic for another post altogether.

    I’m now picturing a Live at 5 Never Ending Tour, maybe with a reading list for the audience to keep in tune:

    John Cage’s “Silence”
    Bob Dylan: “The Philosophy of Modern Song”
    Dunstan Prial: “The Producer – John Hammond and the Soul of American Music”
    Michael Dregni: “Django – The Life and Music of a Gypsy Legend”
    Greil Marcus: “Mystery Train”
    “The Real Frank Zappa Book”: Frank Zappa with Peter Occhiogrosso
    Alex Ross: “The Rest is Noise”
    Robin D. G. Kelley: “Thelonious Monk – The Life and Times of An American Original”

    But you see how easy it is to get carried away.

    Closing this post with a quote from John Cage, “written in response to a request for a manifesto on music, 1952”:

    instantaneous       and unpredictable

    nothing is accomplished by writing a piece of music
       "  "    "    " hearing "  "  "  "
       "  "    "    " playing "  "  "  "

    our ears are now in excellent condition
    xii/Silence, John Cage, Wesleyan University Press, 1961 (paperback 1973), reformatted somewhat here to fit block.

    Note: This is a Happy Birthday! post for Matt Mullenweg.

  • Another Year from Monday

    Sometimes it seems a step backward is the way to go, but I’m not sure painting over yesterday’s canvas is movement forward or reverse. But why think in these lineal terms to begin with? In spite of tidal waves of news pouring in from every mode, it seems keeping informed about what’s going on is ongoingly increasingly difficult. At the same time, as John Cage said in his essay on Jasper Johns, “Why does the information that someone has done something affect the judgment of another? Why cannot someone who is looking at something do his own work of looking?”

    Today, later this evening, to be more precise, is the solstice. If all goes as planned, the days will begin to grow longer again. There’s no keeping still, even if forward and backward amount to the same thing. In fact, I read just last night, the sun has already been going down later in the day in these environs, but the sun has still been coming up a bit later each day, and will continue to do so for some time yet, despite the solstice. So the moment, the epiphanic slice, the exact time of the solstice, when you feel the bump at the top of the amusement ride just before the reverse tilt comes true, you probably won’t feel.

    Nevertheless, we celebrate the solstice, for reasons old and new, and take the opportunity to consider what new lectures and writings, poems and songs, essays and cartoons we might make up between now and the coming spring equinox, which is planned for Tuesday, March 19th (Saint Joseph’s Day, if you’re keeping track of that too). New ways of measuring time are always being considered. But if you adopt a new calendar, you’ll have to then come up with a proleptic view. So we might anticipate objections before they’re even brought up. Remarks.

    The proportion of ideas might be considered important. If an idea is too big, or too small. To warrant further development. I thought I might try some reconnections, might even write a few letters, though my initial attempts at this, very much no doubt excited by the solstice, have met with instant failures to communicate. The art of the steel sculpture. Then again, I’ve never been much of a letter writer, not like the folks in the old days who might spend half the day reading mail and the other half answering mail. Pastime. Mail which had taken days or even weeks to arrive during which time rendered moot much of its news, feelings, ideas.

    Speaking of letter mail, the kind written on paper and requiring a postage stamp, we get very little here these days. Even junk mail seems to have diminished. We’ve received two Christmas cards, both kept on prominent display. Of course, one must send mail to receive mail; not always, but usually. As for blog exchange, comments are problematic. They aren’t really letters in reply, and often say more about the commenter than what’s being commented on. The art of the quip, the comeback, the rejoinder, retort, riposte. But that’s the cynic in me coming out. Get back! Get back! The blog, “The Coming of the Toads,” turns 16 this month. I’m not even sure what a blog is anymore.

    The most effective blogs (or whatever they might be called) seem those dedicated to a single purpose: photography (and photos about something specific – e.g. birds, architecture, surfing), politics, poetry, how to, music, art, opinion, travel. But the personal essay seems the most resilient form of writing (personal essay as illustrated, for example, in Philip Lopate’s anthology “The Art of the Personal Essay.”) I’m not sure where the idea of a pic necessary to accompany every piece of blog post writing ever came from. The Header, I guess. In case you’ve not noticed, The Toads has for some time now sported a minimalist attitude illustrated by a mostly blank white page dotted with black text – might be one way to describe the setup. This allows for the least distraction for both reader and writer. Indeed, blog posts past, I spent more time coming up with an appropriate pic than I did on the writing. Back when the blog began, most readers read on a computer screen. The display of any post is now changed by format depending on what kind of device the reader’s using: phone, tablet, computer – so what you see is not always what the reader gets or what the writer might have intended (a problem which of course is not new to any kind of writing).

    Anyway, I’d like to take this opportunity to restate a few of the underlying interests of the writing here. It’s original, without recourse, it must now apparently be officially stated, to any borrowing from an Artificial Intelligence (AI). That includes all the essays and pics, cartoons and poems, songs, unless of course specifically quoted and cited yada yada yada. That’s not to say influences won’t be discerned: John Cage, Marshall McLuhan, Buckminster Fuller, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, the Beats, Guitar and Music in all its forms but increasingly Gypsy Jazz guitar – to name a few.

    But back to the solstice! Happy Solstice to all of you writers and readers. Please feel free to leave a comment if you still have time.