The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

Tag: Writing

  • A Literary Thanksgiving Feast

    "Hard Times for These Times," Charles Dickens (1854). Drawing: "Mr. Harthouse Dining at the Bounderbys'."

    On a big platter in the middle of the full table sits the fat novel, its dust jacket a cracking bronze, peeling at the edges, its pages sliced and curling, its story stuffed with, well, stuffing: characters mixed with plot in a warm, moist setting, everyone talking at once, voices waxing, then waning, then waxing again, still louder.

    A bowl of essays is passed around the table; there’s plenty for everyone. There’s a new dish, something called “creative non-fiction.” I try some, but find it’s not so new, after all, for isn’t all writing creative? And anyway why would we want to read writing that is not creative?

    “Pass the poems, please,” someone at the other end of the table says. Poems are like olives. Some have pits, putting your teeth at risk; others are pitted, hollow. Some poems are saltier than others, and may be filled with white almonds or cherry red pimento peppers. If you squeeze a poem you get cooking oil.  And like olive oil, the oil from poems might be extra-virgin, refined, or not potable.

    A gravy bowl of APA-style sauce spills across the tablecloth and an argument ensues as to who is at fault, an argument of causation. “Why is that nasty stuff even on the table?” someone asks. A short scene flashes into a drama that quickly subsides with a denouement of dessert: The Emperor of Ice Cream appears with chocolate covered couplets.

    But that’s not all, for then Sestina rolls in a six-layered, short story torte. It’s a literary feast, and in these hard times, we are thankful, at least, for literature.

    Addendum: My sister Barb’s comment reminded me that I neglected to include beverages in the literary feast post, and I suggested she pick up a six pack of Ballads and maybe a couple of bottles of Memoir. Limericks might be served for pre-meal cocktails, unfermented satire for those who like less bite, but large jugs of stream of consciousness should be kept full and within reach, for readers will surely be thirsty.

    Update, Nov. 24: Thanks to Berfrois for joining us at the table!

  • Happy 50th, CSUDH

    My alma mater, California State University at Dominguez Hills, this past year celebrated its 50th anniversary, 1960-2010; they celebrated through commencement 2011, and had invited on their website alumni to share memories. The invitation limited submissions to 200 words, a detail I initially missed (ever the perspicacious student). But while I did eventually whittle my college memoir to the requisite 200 words, I was a little late with it, so I thought I might as well post the whole hog here.

    What do I remember about Cal State Dominguez Hills? I was a student there in the 1970’s, first for a Bachelor’s in English, having transferred from El Camino, then, after teaching for a couple of years, for a Master’s in English. It’s been a wonderful world, as Satchmo sang, but those years as a student were the best.

    Many days I rode my bicycle to school from my folks’ place in El Segundo, winding my way through the small towns, finding new routes to avoid traffic, no helmet, no bike lanes – I know, sounds like the clichéd story of how Grandma walked five miles through five feet of snow to get to the school bus stop, then rode the rickety old school bus another seven miles to the one room schoolhouse.

    Actually, CSUDH in the 1970’s had a program something like a one room schoolhouse, called “The Small College.” Students in the Small College created their own, interdisciplinary curriculum. The program was experimental and well suited to the student population at the time. We were a small school yet, no football team; we won the national badminton championship one year when I was there.

    The campus in those days, the rise from the west particularly noticeable if you happened to be approaching the school on a bicycle, was a peaceful, quiet, lovely place, full of open spaces and views of the surrounding South Bay areas. The campus never felt crowded. In the courtyards below the library, one could sit under trees and listen to the music students practice their instruments, the silences filling with breeze. Many of the books in the library were still marked “Cal State Palos Verdes,” the first planned site, before reconsideration following the Watts riots called for a campus nearer the south central inner cities.

    Raleigh Super Course I rode to campus and 9' 2" Hobie – hanging from joists in basement.

    I still have that bike; it’s hanging in my basement, an old Raleigh Super Course, with decals from Redondo, Hermosa, and El Segundo. Between the Bachelor’s and the Master’s, I rode it occasionally (when my VW was down) from El Segundo to Venice, where I taught junior high grades. It’s not been on the road in awhile (the 9’ 2” Hobie surfboard also hanging from the joists hasn’t been in the water in awhile, either).

    CSCDH Catalog, 1977-78, next to stack of books I read for classes.

    I also still have my CSCDH 1977-78 catalog (upright in photo next to a stack of books I read for classes), and perusing it now I realize what I remember and miss most from my days on campus: my instructors. My favorite teachers included Abe Ravitz, whose American lit. exams we wrote in “blue books” (the Huck Finn at the top of the book stack in the photo is the copy I used in one of his American lit. classes – his own worn copy was held together with rubber bands); Marvin Laser, whose bearing as a scholar and a gentle man was unmatched; the lovely and sensitive Violet Jordain – hello Dr. Jordain, if you’re reading this – I still have the big Shakespeare book we used in your class; feisty and energetic Agnes Yamada, who encouraged me to become a teacher; Joyce Johnson, still an assistant in those days, a local prodigy; and my good friend Mike Mahon, whose interests in reading and music, in Cage and McLuhan, Joyce and Beckett, put me on an intellectual path that still interests me today.­­

    With Dr. Mahon in backyard on Mariposa, circa 1978.

    We understood that we were in on the beginning of something, that someday there would be more buildings, more students, that the campus would grow into a cultural center, and there would be different teachers, and new students. What a remarkable time and opportunity, to be among those who helped start and build a college. It was a beautiful place and time, not without conflicts, external and internal, but no regrets; we had a good time, and learned to stay true to literature: Happy 50th, Dominguez Hills!

  • On Shoes: A Barefoot Existentialism

    Another summer unfolded like a dirty sock, stiff and hot. Baseball fell to football, and I kicked off the boat shoes. What to put on? If you’re a ballplayer, you may have uncommon shoe choice, as evidenced by reports of a Fall skirmish, in a bar down in Louisiana, which resulted in the police confiscating 49 pairs of shoes belonging to one of the college athletes allegedly involved in the melee. I’m still a surfer at heart, and a minimalist when it comes to shoes, so I look askance at that number, 49, but one must be a barefoot existentialist to throw the first block.

    The idea of the shoe is really old. In 2008, archeologists found what is thought to be the oldest surviving leather shoe in Eurasia. The shoe, found stuffed with grass, presumably to maintain its shape during the off-season, was radiocarbon dated to the 4th millennium BC (1). Other types of shoes have been found that are even older, shoes made of fibers, sewn or woven, or made from animal skin, and sandals made with different kinds of technology and apparently for different purposes (2, 3). One study suggests that the idea for the shoe may have come from basketry, the shoe conceived as a basket for the foot, the shoe made with basket weaving technique (4).

    An inventory of my own shoes harbors the story out of Louisiana from a sea of hyperbole. Maybe the athlete had never thrown out an old pair – a youthful hoarder of shoes. Still, we might argue that access to more shoes than we need suggests overindulgence, but is this a case of moral relativism? And no doubt athletes are not the only shoe collectors. Besides, in shoes begin responsibilities, to improvise on the Delmore Schwartz theme.

    Perhaps my parents tried to prepare me for athletic success requiring extra closet space by ensuring an early shoeful habit, but it seems unlikely. I’ve two old photos in which I appear to be wearing the same formidable Buster Browns, and if my parents were trying to prepare me for anything, they must have been thinking of circus lion taming. In any case, assuming one new pair of shoes per year, I went from shoeless to ten pairs of shoes by the time I reached Little League.

    The Buster Browns were worn at Churchill Downs; Little League was a mile from the Pacific. I don’t know how many shoes my parents packed, with everything else they owned, into their Plymouth sedan with their four children for the move out west, and no doubt what shoes we had comforted our Westward Ho! feet, but the adventure must have been riskier for our having no spares in the trunk.

    In Little League I preferred sneakers to cleats. I spent three years playing ball for the El Segundo Major League Red Sox. Add another three pairs of shoes, but I’m sure I still owned only one pair at a time, and wore that pair everywhere, to school, church, baseball. I also wore rubber go-aheads, wore them down to the skin of my heels before tossing. Should these be counted as shoes? If so, add a pair every year, from the age of ten, when I started Little League, to 18, when I left home for the Army.

    In boot camp, at Fort Bliss, Texas, we were issued two pairs of Army boots, comfortable and substantial, and we wore them for every purpose save the few, formal occasions when we wore our dress greens with low quarters. Add another three pairs of shoes. I wore those same Army boots for six years, in and out of uniform. In barracks, we displayed our surplus shoes on our footlockers at the end of our bunks. The South Central boys displayed their spit shined cowboy boots along with their G. I. shoes. I put out my Jack Purcells, wiping clean the blue stripe.

    I left my low quarters in my usher’s locker at the Paradise Theatre one Saturday morning, soon after my military discharge. I had reflected too long on my chore of the day: chipping the gum off the bottoms of all the theatre seats. I couldn’t recall a detail as absurd from my Army experience. I snuck out of the dark theatre into a solid gold South Bay weekend, not my first existential decision, nor my last, wearing my Purcells, leaving my low quarters to an unknown successor, heedless of the shoe choices in my future.

    In college and in my early teaching assignments, I wore sneakers or the old Army boots, still wearing well. Few judgments, in those days, seemed shoe-based. It wasn’t until I abandoned teaching for the corporate world that I purchased a pair of wingtips, ignoring Thoreau’s advice to “beware of all enterprises that require new clothes” (5). I wore the wingtips stiffly into the office on my first day, spit shined; I was the only guy in the office wearing wingtips.

    Twenty-five years in a carpeted corporate world doesn’t wear out many shoes. Add another six or seven pairs. The story of my corporate career might be told in cordovan loafers, some with tassels, or boat shoes. Add a few golf shoes, slippers under the tree most years, then suddenly some cranky Dr. Martens, shoes I wore in the yard, on walks, and to work; and perhaps it was the insidious Martens that put me on the track to an Indie early-retiree lifestyle. I began to wear, like Eliot’s Prufrock, “the bottoms of my trousers rolled,” but with little regret (6).

    So I have owned more than 49 pairs of shoes, but never that many at once. I recently purchased some new Dr. Martens, made in China; my original pair, which I finally wore out, was made in England. One can’t fully appreciate new shoes until one has worn out old ones. For an athlete in sneakers, the shoe precedes the foot, and wearing the shoe out is not the essence of the game. Whatever legal tackles our contemporary athletes end up breaking, no shoes will be worn out, and any thoughts about going existential must wait for the off-season.

    Shakespeare’s bumbling Polonius might have offered another aphorism for Laertes’s consideration, though probably not putting the Western world on a new footing: treat each new pair of shoes as your last; perhaps then they might be worn more wisely, and one may more fully realize one’s barefoot potential, for the more shoes we have, the more schemed and distracted our purposes, but the closer we go to barefoot, the more deliberate and sure-footed our steps.

    Footnotes:

    1. Pinhasi R, Gasparian B, Areshian G, Zardaryan D, Smith A, et al. (2010). First Direct Evidence of Chalcolithic Footwear from the Near Eastern Highlands. PLoS ONE 5(6): e10984. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0010984
    2. Ravilious, Kate. (June 9, 2010). World’s Oldest Leather Shoe Found—Stunningly Preserved: “Astonishingly modern” shoe preserved by sheep dung and dryness. National Geographic News: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/06/100609-worlds-oldest-leather-shoe-armenia-science/
    3. Connolly, T. & Cannon, W. (1999). Comments on “America’s Oldest Basketry.” Radiocarbon, Vol 41, Nr 3, 1999, pp. 309-313.
    4. Berger, R., Bendat, M., & Parker, A. (AMERICA’S OLDEST BASKETRY: RAINER BERGER, MILLIE BENDAT and ANDREA PARKER) Isotope and Archaeometry Laboratory, Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics. University of California, Los Angeles, California 90095-1567 USA. ABSTRACT: We have determined the earliest calibrated dates on three types of basketry from the Great Basin & Proceedings of the 16th International 14C Conference, edited by W. G. Mook and J. van der Plicht RADIOCARBON, Vol. 40, No. 2, 1998, P. 615-620. This is publication number 5084 of the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, UCLA.
    5. Henry David Thoreau, Walden, (New York: New American Library, 1960), chap. 1.
    6. T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” poem.

  • The Way We Don’t Age Now: Unhappiness and Hunger in the Land of Plenty

    Hunger is a condition of life: no hunger, no life. The spider spins her web, hungry for the busy bee dancing by hungry for blues. The cactus patiently awaits the coming of a distant, dithering cloud. The salmon swims against the current, hungry to finish its ritual. A homeless man wanders into a soup kitchen, hungry for food, and stays for the writers’ workshop, hungry to tell his story (Frazier). When we are hungry for something, are we happy or unhappy? Yet when our every hunger is satisfied, we are dead. Do we grow less hungry with age?

    Sometimes, we are hungry to forget. Senility may satisfy that hunger, but the hunger to interfere with memory can occur at any age – consider the days spent on our many varieties of smack, dementias of the soul. Our culture inconsistently values certain kinds of hunger while frowning on other kinds of hunger: healthy hungers might include hunger for money, attention, or success in a chosen field; unhealthy hungers might include greed, fame, or the trappings of success. The poet is hungry for a new word, the salesman for an easy client, the surfer for an empty wave, the injured for revenge, the soldier for peace; we can be hungry for anything. Maslow suggested a hierarchy of hungers, but that seems too easy, for hungers can strike with surprise, while we often don’t recognize the source of our hunger, and self-actualization can lead to complacency, smugness in one’s work, for example.

    One thing we don’t seem to be too hungry for is old age.  Maybe that’s because, as Atul Gawande has said, “We are, in a way, freaks living well beyond our appointed time. So when we study aging what we are trying to understand is not so much a natural process as an unnatural one.” One consequence of the newness of aging longer, Gawande suggests, is that “we give virtually no thought to how we will live out our later years alone.” And not only are we unprepared to stop our fall, “most of us in medicine,” Gawande says, “don’t know how to think about decline.” A geriatrician could help, if we could find and afford one, but doctors don’t like working with old people, so there’s a woeful shortage of geriatricians, while what we need when moving into old age isn’t medicine and a rest home but a purpose for living, a hunger.

    But we value youth; wrinkles are a bummer. A recent article in Forbes (Barlow) indicated men in increasing numbers are undergoing cosmetic surgery because business prefers good looks, in spite of studies that show beauty used as a gauge for skill lacks credibility. We value youth, good looks, and money; where does this leave old folks? “You wonder too much for a Sandman,” Logan 5’s partner, Francis, tells him. “When you question, it slows you down” (Logan’s Run). No one is hungry in Logan’s plastic city, a truncated Shangri-La. But that’s not quite right, for the Runners are hungry, hungry for Sanctuary, though they are not quite sure where or what that is, and no one finds out, since no one lives past the age of 30. Life has become a limited Internet access contract. “Adults regress toward adolescence; and adolescents – seeing that – have no desire to become adults” (Bly viii).

    Why are Americans not happier? At the Becker-Posner blog, Becker, the Nobel Prize winning economist, confesses, “I admit I do not know why average degree of happiness has not risen in recent decades in the US as incomes rose.” But happiness, in the economist’s world, seems to having something to do with having something to do: “…perhaps utility has in fact not improved over time, or perhaps more likely happiness statistics are deviating from unmeasured increases in utility.” Posner, the Federal Judge, trying to explain why, while income has risen in recent decades in the US, happiness has fallen, reminds us that “Adam Smith argued in The Wealth of Nations that people fooled themselves in thinking they would be happier with more money. Maybe so; but as long as people do have this strong preference, economics can explain a great deal of human behavior.” Yet one thing may be certain, as evidenced by the results of psychoanalysis: explanations alone don’t make us happy.

    Recent studies on happiness agree that money does not buy happiness: “…a half century of escalating consumption has not brought Americans increased satisfaction” (Kolbert). As we buy and throw away, and buy and throw away again, the problem seems to be that we do not know what will make us happy. In the absence of hunger, the only thing left to do seems to be to take a nap. But we awake, hopefully, from our naps. In Sylvia Plath’s poem “The Mirror,” old age is the face of a “terrible fish” that rises daily from a dark lake of sleep and gradually molts with the face of one’s memory. Yet in Logan’s Run, when the young people discover the first old person they’ve ever seen, they are fascinated by the wrinkles in his face, marvel that he not only knew his parents but also was raised by them, wonder what the words “beloved wife husband” on the tombstones mean. “That must be the look of being old,” Jessica says, touching the “cracks” in the old man’s face. Meanwhile, Francis, Logan’s ex-partner, catches up with the Runners, and says in anger to Jessica, “He was a Sandman; he was happy.” The Sandman does not hunger to question, and Logan’s answer that there is no Sanctuary, no opposing viewpoint, “does not program” on the inside.

    Perhaps one source of our current unhappiness is similar to that of the Cumaean Sibyl’s, whose immortality, like a new washing machine sold without a warranty, did not come with eternal youth. She aged and aged, increasingly unhappy, until nothing was left but her voice, and after a thousand years of withering life, her last wish was to die. If we could live without pain or stress, all of our needs provided for, as in Logan’s Run, able to buy a new face or even a complete body any time we tired of the old, the only catch though that we could not live beyond a certain age, what age would we select? The source of our unhappiness may be our unwillingness to grow old, the inability of our youth obsessed culture to value the wrinkles of old age as beautiful, desirable. In a culture so hungry for youth, people die earlier and earlier. We need to develop a hunger for old age.

    Works Cited

    Barlow, Tom. “Loving that Face in the Mirror.” Forbes 27 October 2011.
    Becker, Gary. “Happiness and Wellbeing.” Becker-Posner Blog 10 January 2010.
    Bly, Robert. The Sibling Society. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1996.
    Frazier, Ian. “Hungry Minds.” The New Yorker 26 May 2008.
    Gawande, Atul. “The Way We Age Now.”  The New Yorker 30 April 2007.
    Kolbert, Elizabeth. “Everybody Have Fun.” The New Yorker 22 March 2010.
    Logan’s Run. Dir. Michael Anderson. 1976. Film.
    Plath, Sylvia. “The Mirror.” Performed by Natalie Clark, Radio Theatre Group, August 2011.
    Posner, Richard. “Why Aren’t Americans Happier?” Becker-Posner Blog 10 January 2010.

    also note: “Pastures of Plenty,” a song by Woody Guthrie; “Land of Plenty,” a film (2004) by Wim Wenders; and the song “The Land of Plenty,” by Leonard Cohen (2001).

  • James Joyce Occupies Wall Street

    Par for the course has changed, and Finnegans today must hit from tees so far away they can’t see the green, let alone the flag. They move to the park, where the fruit rusts, but the green is real. In Finnegans Wake (1939), Joyce juxtaposes Wall Street with Phoenix Park, foreshadowing Occupy Wall Street:

    “The fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonner
    ronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!) of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later on life down through all christian minstrelsy. The great fall of the offwall entailed at such short notice the pftjschute of Finnegan, erse solid man, that the humptyhillhead of humself prumptly sends an unquiring one well to the west in quest of his tumptytumtoes: and their upturnpikepointandplace is at the knock out in the park where oranges have been laid to rust upon the green since devlinsfirst loved livvy.” (para. 3)

    Off the wall, Wall Street, in Finnegan’s retail-priced nighttime view, fall the archetypal financial partners, the “oldparr,” finding themselves now in dire straits, closed streets. The short notice is the layoff, the cancelled contract, down the shoot, out to the park. The fat egg Humpty Dumpty is enjoying a baseball game when he gets the news. A ball is knocked out of the park, and Humpty, once a solid egg, looks to the West for an answer, but is hit in the head and knocked out. The rest is a dream.

  • Ere Words Were

    Woe were we when once we wooed
    wowed with words we would vow
    to wed where naught
    taught to tie the knot
    a language log in front of us saw
    how it was on a woeful wordful sea.

    To whoo in the waves of a spelling sea
    to whit her way through a sea wrack wood
    while I too hooed to walk saw
    you to a vowel moon owling
    out of a wood worded knot
    a sentence fraught with naught.

    Yet we should not
    set sail on too prim a prescriptive sea
    wear not too tight the knot we tied for the knot
    does not mean our days of wooing
    must turn to stone washed vowels
    that we might say how we saved how we sawed.

    Woe the night full of guttural saws
    silver dreams of wordscaped naught
    woah the mirror that burns not its own vow
    merely reflects what it hears
    in a dark forest a bearingless wood
    of articulated knot.

    Woe to valor that ties a knot
    for one side up the other not this seesaw
    giddyup and stop of hooah and woah
    she loves me she loves me naught
    how it was on the woo worn sea
    ere we enjoined the corseted vowels.

    Whoa the abode that constantly vows
    to daily renew a woeful knot
    or be chastised to sea
    for what we were for what we saw
    for what we heard and what we could not
    before we verbally wooed.

    Now down to the sea words borne of vows
    set sail to keel whit to hoo but not
    with a saw set wode with naught.

  • Ah, Bartleby! Ah, Humanities!

    For more Liberations and Humanities in Crisis Revolution, see “Strangers on a Train: A chance encounter provides a lesson in complicity and the never-ending crisis in the humanities,” at Academe Online, by Cathy N. Davidson.

    Photo to left is cover of Liberations: New Essays on the Humanities in Revolution, edited by Ihab Hassan. Wesleyan University Press, 1971.
    See Richard Wasson review of Liberations in boundary 2, Duke University Press: Vol. 1, No. 1 (Autumn, 1972), pp. 242-244. Duke University Press or JSTOR Stable URL

  • Happiness and the Humanities

    Chris Beha’s investigative report (Harpers, Oct. 2011) on the for-profit higher education experiment is an impressionistic view of the inequities of degree access and funding. Not quite Maigret goes to [night] school, but this is US culture, the land of opportunity, and of second opportunity. Is the for-profit model hopeless? Cut to England, where the LRB Blog reports equity firms are about to seize a market opportunity: the purchasing of Universities by private hands. The degree is the product by which we’ll catch the conscience of the customer. Yet Beha suggests an important question: Is college making us happy?

    Maybe college isn’t necessary or desirable for everyone. But has innovation and reform in higher education been hampered by the same self-serving forces that Joel Klein has argued explain the failure of American high schools?

    It’s been a rough month for the Humanities. In Florida, there’s talk of limiting degrees offered to those that are “practical.” One wonders what those might be in the current job market. We need a new word: merittechocracy. But isn’t the market already moving in Florida’s direction? Humanities enrollment and attrition rate at UCLA suggest Westwood is no longer the bohemian capital of LA. The UCLA 2010 annual report offers more insight: “At the same time, we conducted a thorough review of our academic programs with the goal of streamlining majors, reducing unnecessary units and courses, and helping students graduate in a timely manner. We also pursued initiatives that will produce new revenue streams, including an enhanced emphasis on translational research, which will deliver more of our faculty’s inventions into the marketplace and potentially lead to licensing and royalty revenues for UCLA.” The product is big business.

    But there’s a reading crisis spreading perniciously throughout the land. And reading is important. In a November, 2007, report from the National Endowment for the Arts, “To Read or Not to Read,” Chairman Dana Gioia had this to say about reading: “All of the data suggest how powerfully reading transforms the lives of individuals—whatever their social circumstances. Regular reading not only boosts the likelihood of an individual’s academic and economic success—facts that are not especially surprising—but it also seems to awaken a person’s social and civic sense. Reading correlates with almost every measurement of positive personal and social behavior surveyed. It is reassuring, though hardly amazing, that readers attend more concerts and theater than non-readers, but it is surprising that they exercise more and play more sports—no matter what their educational level. The cold statistics confirm something that most readers know but have mostly been reluctant to declare as fact— books change lives for the better.”

    The first front on which to begin combating poverty and inequality is reading. And who’s got the books, if not the Humanities? But if the Humanities, now on the Endangered Animals list, become extinct, who will ask the question, “Are you happy now”?

  • The Happy Humanists of Main Street (a Fragment)

    The Happy Humanists of Main Street (a Fragment): College Humanities now post their letters from Desolation Row. Yet on Main Street, the happy humanists go about their business. Lawrence, the locksmith, time on his hands, having just come back from unlocking Mrs. Tenderness’s pick-up truck, for the third time this week, so she wouldn’t be late with the doughnuts for the firehouse, returns to his Kant. Fritz, the insurance salesman, reliably opening at ten after a hearty breakfast of green eggs and ham before dropping the kids off at school, fills the office with Bach. Next door, at Cindy’s “Ye Olde Beauties’ Parlour,” filled with Dylan’s sailors, the book club holds its weekly gathering. This month, they are reading an Oprah recommendation: Where the Heart Is, by Billie Letts. But this afternoon, the shops will all close early, for Dylan’s circus is in town, and everyone wants to see the daring young man on the flying trapeze, who kicks off the show at three.

    Meanwhile, on the other side of the tracks, the Humanities department is meeting to discuss the sale of Founders’ Field, twenty acres of unused parking lot, but there’s concern the developer wants it for a Walmart. “Shouldn’t we involve the Business Association in this?” Dr. Pfleger asks. “He wants to build a golf course,” Dr. Compson says, not a Walmart. “It’s not big enough for a golf course.” “Nor a Walmart.” “Not a real golf course, one of those miniature woop woops,” Mr. Other said.

  • Culturomics and Google’s Ngram Viewer: More Noise?

    The other day, a few minutes of wilfing led us to Technium’s post on Google’s latest project, the Ngram Viewer. Is Google making us stupid again? But this is serious stuff, as evidenced by the Ngram Viewer introduction in last December’s Science. The Ngram Viewer is a corpus allowing users to search keywords in millions of books and to quantitatively plot the results. So what? A TED video helps explain the development and potential uses. Commentary to the Science article, and to the claims made in the TED video, questions the usefulness of the Google project.

    Is the Ngram Viewer an electronic Tower of Babel? We’re not sure; what are its implications, its practical uses? It appears to be an interesting cultural anthropological tool. The corpus contains “over 500 billion words,” and “cannot be read by a human.” But anyone can access it at the Culturomics site. In the Science paper, “Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books,” the authors provide this takeaway: “Cultural change guides the concepts we discuss (such as ‘slavery’). Linguistic change – which, of course, has cultural roots – affects the words we use for those concepts (‘the Great War’ vs. ‘World War I’). In this paper, we will examine both linguistic changes, such as changes in the lexicon and grammar; and cultural phenomena, such as how we remember people and events.”

    Closing the paper is a concise definition of culturomics with a touching comment on its limitations: “Culturomics is the application of high-throughput data collection and analysis to the study of human culture. Books are a beginning, but we must also incorporate newspapers (29), manuscripts (30), maps (31), artwork (32), and a myriad of other human creations (33, 34). Of course, many voices – already lost to time – lie forever beyond our reach.” (Not to mention the trunk of writing, molding in our basement for over twenty years, that we finally threw out – the poems were beginning to crawl out of the trunk, climb up the basement stairs, and haunt our dreams.) The Science paper concludes with examples of how culturomics might be used as “a new type of evidence in the humanities.” Yet some of the paper’s conclusions seem obvious: “People, too, rise to prominence, only to be forgotten.” Surely, that “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh” is not a new concept. But their discussion of the impact of censorship is interesting. In any case, the field of Humanities currently needs all the help it can get.

    We played around a bit with the Ngram Viewer. In one experiment we plotted “silence” against “noise,” and found that noise overtook silence around 1961, even though 1961 is the year Wesleyan first published Silence, by John Cage. Cage would have enjoyed the Ngram Viewer. Our Ngram Viewer chart plotting silence and noise is shown below:

  • Evergreen Review, Volume 1, Number 3, 1957

    At a campus library book sale this week I bought for $1.00 a copy of Volume 1, Number 3, of the Evergreen Review. The price new was $1.00 in 1957. It’s a 5 and ¼ by 8 inch paperback, 160 pages. It’s in good condition. There are four black and white photographs, in the middle of the issue, of Jackson Pollock and his studio. Pollock had died in a car wreck the previous year, 1956, on August 11. The opening essay is by Albert Camus, “Reflections on the Guillotine,” an argument against capital punishment (ironic, considering recent events in our own time). Camus says, “As a writer I have always abhorred a certain eagerness to please, and as a man I believe that the repulsive aspects of our condition, if they are inevitable, must be confronted in silence. But since silence, or the casuistry of speech, is now contributing to the support of an abuse that must be reformed, or of a misery that can be relieved, there is no other solution than to speak out, to expose the obscenity hiding beneath our cloak of words” (7). Camus would die, like Pollock also in a car wreck, three years later.

    The issue contains poems by William Carlos Williams and Gregory Corso, including Corso’s delightful “This Was My Meal,” and also a prose piece by Beckett, whom Evergreen Review and Grove Press editor Barney Rosset introduced to the US.

    I stood at the table of jumbled books at the book sale looking through the issue, wondering what it might have been like to read it new, in 1957 (we didn’t have books in my house yet, and certainly no subscriptions to anything, save the daily newspaper occasionally, and anyway, I was just a kid in 1957, though I might have been on the road, with my parents and sisters, driving to the west coast, around the same time as Kerouac, Corso, and some of the others).

    And I wonder what today approximates the Evergreen Review of 1957. In what publication will we find today’s young Robbe-Grillet, or Frank O’Hara? n+1? The Believer? McSweeny’s? Yet Beckett was born in 1906, Ionesco in 1909. Camus died at 46, O’Hara at 40, Pollock at 44. There’s a letter in the Evergreen Review issue from a young Gary Snyder, who was “…do[ing] Zen” in Kyoto. The letter begins with a quote from Snyder’s friend Will Petersen: “You know, we got nothing to worry about.”