The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

Tag: Writing

  • Gold in these pines

    “We look before and after,” Shelley told his quiet skylark, “and pine for what is not.” Shakespeare would have enjoyed Percy’s pun, knowing naught comes from knot, “like quills upon the fretful porcupine,” this from the ghost of Hamlet’s father, and of Hamlet’s replies, “a happiness that often madness hits on,” follows from the bumbling fool of wise quotes, Polonius. Hamlet suffers the curse of anxiety, and one imagines the prince of plotters distracted by his Facebooking and Twittering, there staging his feigned feelings, for his mood is not hopeful.

    And to what do we owe this staged post? To Jill Lepore’s “Dickens in Eden: Summer vacation with ‘Great Expectations.’” But just this, Jill quoting from one Andrew Miller, academic from Indiana, who, Jill says, “…argued that the novel [Great Expectations] is defined by ‘the optative mode of self-understanding,’ an experience of modern life, in which everything is what it is but could have been something else” (New Yorker, 29 Aug. 56). Ah, where’s a physicist when you need one? For how does one understand oneself when one’s creation is a matter of chance? But the mood of chance may be ever hopeful for a changed ending, a substitute ending, a revised ending.

    And this is McTeague country, Naturalism, where Trina wins a lottery, an experience of modern life, for she might have lost, as everyone else does, and is not winning the equivalent to losing? And we were still considering the Greenblatt  (New Yorker, 8 Aug.), wondering if Rerum Natura might still come at a bargain, “By chance…By chance…By chance…” (29). But if everything happens by chance, why bother introducing any event as having happened by chance? Anyway, the chance of naught creates part of Hamlet’s anxiety, certainly, but even if he takes a Lucretius pill he still has his bad dreams – thus the not of the nutshell and infinite space.

    In the pine, Shelley’s bird sings of jobs, of the disappearance of guilds, for what is not, and of winter in summer and the irony of discontent. This is the anxiety of our time, that it didn’t have to be this way; it “could have been something else.” Yet the physicist tells us that not only could it have been something else, it was something else; in fact, it was what it is and everything else. This is why we tell stories – like one of Leonard Cohen’s “lonesome and very quarrelsome heroes,” who would “like to tell my story before I turn into gold,” where gold is an antidote to anxiety.

  • On The New Yorker On Twitter; or, Drink, Memory

    This week, The New Yorker, on Twitter, is sponsoring a tweet-fest, calling on followers to tweet their all-time favorite New Yorker piece. My first response was a tongue-in-cheek, “The Cartoons”!

    I’ve been reading the New Yorker, a weekly, for over 40 years, but these days when I intone the magic words, “Speak, Memory,” I often receive in reply a feeble tweet, even falling short of the 140 character limit. Anyway, it takes more than a tweet to recall a full piece, at least for this twitterer. I do recall one of my favorite all time cartoons, from the mid-80’s. I taped it to my at-work monitor, until my boss at the time told me he didn’t get the joke. I brought it home and taped it to the icebox. Just so, most of the articles I remember are those I tried to encourage others to read, too. I remember the William Finnegan piece on surfing off San Francisco (August 24, 1992); I mailed it to an old surfing buddy.

    Ian Frazier, in “Hungry Minds: Tales from a Chelsea Soup Kitchen” (May 26, 2008), wrote what has become one of my all time favorites. In “Hungry Minds,” Frazier explores at least three kinds of hunger: physical (the soup kitchen), intellectual (the writers’ workshop), and spiritual (the church). Must every hunger be fed? One might hunger for anything (war or peace; duty or love; work or play; music or silence; risk or safety; celebrity or privacy; memory or amnesia; nirvana or grace), and the human appetite seems insatiable. Then there are the thirsts, which Frazier’s article also touches on (to belong; for community; for recognition; to tell one’s tale; and a thirst to feed the hungry). Human thirst seems unquenchable. What else can explain Twitter?

  • Blues Bus at Berfrois

    Berfrois waves down the Toads’ Blues Bus.

  • Hypercorrect

    Category: Linguistic Etiquette. Answer: Hypercorrect. Question: What is so right, it’s wrong?

    On Jeopardy last night, Alex Trebek, the natty host of the popular game show in which three contestants vie for cash by buzzing first then questioning correctly to a given answer, pronounced Don Juan, “Don Joo-on,” quickly clarifying (no doubt so the phone didn’t ring off the hook) that the Joo-on pronunciation was correct in the context of the answer, which referred to the poem “Don Juan” by the English poet Lord Byron. Wikipedia provides the following detailed support for Alex’s argument: “In Castilian Spanish, Don Juan is pronounced [doŋˈxwan]. The usual English pronunciation is /ˌdɒnˈwɑːn/, with two syllables and a silent ‘J’. However, in Byron’s epic poem it rhymes with ruin and true one, indicating that it was intended to have the trisyllabic spelling pronunciation /ˌdɒnˈdʒuːən/. This would have been characteristic of his English literary predecessors who often deliberately imposed partisan English pronunciations on Spanish names, such as Don Quixote /ˌdɒnˈkwɪksət/.”

    Wikipedia defines hypercorrection: “In linguistics or usage, hypercorrection is a non-standard usage that results from the over-application of a perceived rule of grammar or a usage prescription. A speaker or writer who produces a hypercorrection generally believes that the form is correct through misunderstanding of these rules, often combined with a desire to seem formal or educated.”

    Byron also rhymed “want” with “cant,” and “tounge” with “wrong” and “song.” Anyway, must rhyme always be perfect? Jeopardy, the game show, which I do enjoy, is often mistaken for a game of education, of smartness, but it’s not, at least not in the sense that smart involves critical thinking skills. In any case, my ear, hyperwrong as it often is, doesn’t hear “ruin” and “true one” as a perfect rhyme. And even if we accept Alex’s pronunciation, I don’t hear “Joo-on” as rhyming perfectly with “true one.” But rhyme need not be perfect to be musical. Then again, from Canto XVII, Verse V, of Byron’s “Don Juan”:

    There is a common-place book argument,
    Which glibly glides from every tongue;
    When any dare a new light to present,
    “If you are right, then everybody’s wrong”!
    Suppose the converse of this precedent
    So often urged, so loudly and so long;
    “If you are wrong, then everybody’s right”!
    Was ever everybody yet so quite?

  • Recommended On-line Reading: “Chick Blogs”

    Chick Lit Books is more than a blog. It’s a site devoted to literature aimed at a market segment, an audience that can be socio-economic-demographically defined. Do we read to be so pigeonholed? The “Chick Flick” is a film men should not walk away from and even happily review – if they want another date. But now there’s something we might call Chick Blogs? Novelicious is a Chick Lit Blog, but the pure Chick Blog is something else. The mother of all Chick Blog’s is Susan’s favorite: The Pioneer Woman. Initially the diary of the dislocated urbanite Ree Drummond, who moves from the city to rural Oklahoma, the blog has grown into an industry. It’s been hot locally this summer, and readers of the blog can currently follow Ree’s tracking of a global warming cell that has settled uncomfortably over her entire state. But if that’s too hot for you, consider my latest find and recommended blog browsing, a new blog type, if not quite a new on-line genre, well represented by A Beach Cottage. Often, it seems, these blogs are started and maintained by women who, like Ree, have recently relocated and started something fresh in their lives. Sarah, the author of A Beach Cottage, moved from England to Australia, and lives with her family in a beach house, and industriously blogs about the house and beach environs, and her blog is a cool, restful place. Subtitled “life by the sea,” it’s one of my favorites, even if, as Sarah says, it’s “written with girls in mind.” Thus we might learn something about markets, for something written with a particular audience in mind might very well attract its opposite. From Sarah’s blog, on the beach in Australia, I recently travelled to My Sweet Savannah, where we are informed, “It’s OK to be a follower,” as its nearly 5,000 members attest. For who can resist “finding life’s inspirations” in a “flea market find”? After browsing around Savannah and considering a few arts and crafts projects I might try out with ZZ next week, I travelled to French Larkspur (also suggested over at A Beach Cottage), where I found a photo of what I think is a wooden butter dish; I picked one up at a garage sale a couple of years ago, thinking I might use it as a palette knife. I recommend these blogs for their clear and concise purpose, cleanly and upliftingly presented, with a structure and strategy that’s both enterprisingly winning and honestly conveyed.

  • Prufrock’s Cat

    In the failing fog the Prufrocked cat froms and froes,
    lurking catatonically,
    catcher of mice and men,
    leaving not a trace of trance or dance
    with which we were once familiar,
    catabolic feline with contractible claws.

    A hiss as from a match declares this driven cat with drawn claws.
    This hideous hipstress wears no frown.
    Nevermind, nevermore, familiar
    tuna must suffice; in fact,
    I’m opening the can as fast as I can.
    Fiend, your mane is mean!

    Man knows not your true menace,
    the deceitful pale rose of your delicate claws
    clinking ice to a theremin dance,
    an idle locomotive meowing to and fro,
    the moves of this domestic cat’s
    imagery eerily familiar.

    In what lonely lair was sired this queen of liars?
    Did He who made thee amid mice make men?
    How came you back from the cataclysm?
    Did I hear you in the catacombs caterwauling?
    Yet now you come in dress frolicsome,
    singing, “Do you wanna dance….”

    Though the salty leap gives rise to a contra dance,
    the caryatid looks familiar,
    a choreography of calligraphy, dancing to and fro,
    a sweating menagerie.
    Mind those mendacious claws.
    This mendicant needs no frilly silly cat

    messmate out to act
    some tunahall cancan.
    I too should have been a pair of claws,
    a crawling cat on the lam,
    whose unreadable bedlam mien
    strikes mayhem then saunters off to and fro.

    One more clause regarding this catachresis:
    Whether to or fro on this floor dancing,
    Prufrock’s cat is the cat of a family man.

  • On Downgrades and Grades; or, Dude, Score Thyself

    Yesterday, in a post on her New Yorker blog, Close Read, titled “Rioting Markets,” Amy Davidson, commenting on a surreal week in our markets and cities, a week when one wondered, like Yeats wondered, if the center can hold, said, “We lost our credit rating, after all, in large part because of a riot by ostensible grownups in Congress.” What Amy is saying is that the reason for the downgrade was S&P’s feeling that Congress was unable to lower debt by increasing revenue (i.e. raising taxes), and based on what S&P’s David Beers said following, that the Bush tax-cuts should be repealed, we agree with Amy’s comment, but, and while Yeats could not afford to quibble, the gyre widening as he wrote, quibble we must with Amy’s saying “we lost our credit rating,” for we did not lose our credit rating. We were “downgraded” from AAA to AA+. And even to call this change a downgrade, while accurate, misses an opportunity to talk about the incredible and arcane chicanery of the rating system. It’s like school grades, only worse.

    Here are the possible ratings that Standard & Poor’s might assign to an organization: AAA, AA+, AA, AA-, A+, AA-, BBB+, BBB, BBB-, BB+, BB, BB-, B+, B, B-, CCC to C. Was there ever a school report card this complicated?

    In the recent S&P downgrade, the US was rescored from a grade of AAA to a grade of AA+. For comparison, think of student grades, think A-. Still a good score, excellent, in fact, right? But the general reaction to the S&P downgrade bears some similarity to the grade inflation in US schools, for an A-, as Louis Menand has pointed out, means failure where “American colleges notoriously inflate grades, but they can never inflate them enough, because education in the United States has become hypercompetitive and every little difference matters.” Thus, students who receive a grade of A- may react as if they’ve just been given an F.

    But what does AA+ mean in S&P’s widening gyre? Basically, the score is a stress test. The scores indicate what economic stress level an organization ought to be able to bear and still withstand default. So what is economic stress, and how is that measured? S&P’s explanation for a score of AA includes the ability to withstand a 70% decline in the stock market. That’s like saying you ought to be able to chugalug a 5th of Southern Comfort and still sing the alphabet song backwards.

    Switch to an imagined conversation between Bill and Ted. “What’d you get on the big math test, Dude?” “BB, Dude.” “Most excellent, Dude! Rock on!” An S&P score of BB indicates the ability to withstand a 25% drop in the stock market. Dude, score thyself.

  • Back to “The One to One Future”: Permission Marketing and the 2011 S&P Market Coup

    Peppers and Rogers (1993), in The One to One Future: Building Relationships One Customer at a Time, argued that some customers were more valuable than others, and that all customers should be individually marketed to, and that share of wallet was more important than market share. This meant differentiating customers, not products, and selling multiple products to the same customer over the customer’s life. Their argument was based, in part, on media-tech changes that would alter the work and advertising consumption habits of customers. Seth Godin (1999), in Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers into Friends, and Friends into Customers, followed suit, recognizing that the old ad platform, television, had now multiplied like mosquitoes on a humid summer night in Minnesota, for the Web had created “[millions of] TV networks instead of ten” (p. 145). It might seem counter-intuitive at first, marketing to the new hatch 1:1, but getting their attention, Godin argued, means first getting their permission, and permissions are only granted one at a time.

    One of the changes Peppers and Rogers imagined was a work-from-home, flex-hour (over a 7×24 work-week), consumer whose purchasing habits would be revealed and predicted over time via Web host systems. This is why the individual information Facebook most covets is a real name and a real date of birth. What Peppers and Rogers did not predict in the heady start to the Roaring 90’s was a stay-at-home work force at home because it was unemployed (see September, 2011 The Atlantic magazine’s “Can The Middle Class Be Saved?”, taken from Don Peck’s new book PINCHED: How the Great Recession Has Narrowed Our Futures and What We Can Do About It, to be published tomorrow).

    Peck sees what Congress apparently cannot, that control of the future is about getting permission today, and that permission requires a one to one lifetime marketing commitment. This is why S&P’s David Beers in a video interview this morning with Reuters strongly suggests that a necessary step toward solving the US debt crisis is ending the Bush tax-cuts for upper income citizens. And to accomplish that task, Congress should start contacting their most valuable customers one to one and getting their permission (and we might point out what should be obvious but apparently is not to Congress, that their most important customers are not members of the so-called Tea Party, whose behavior mimes characters in Alice’s Wonderland).

    The coup d’état is not a military coup, but a market coup. The market, led by S&P’s downgrade, has usurped Congress in taking action to solve the debt crisis and save the middle class. As Beers says in his interview “…get some buy in” to spending and revenue decisions. In spite of the anti-S&P sentiment, largely the result of misunderstanding of the rating agency’s scoring system, the S&P decision (and in spite of their lack of credibility resulting from their pre-crash decisions), should lead to repeal of the Bush tax-cuts, and that’s good news for the middle class, which in turn should be good news for the market.

  • The Coming of the Toads at Berfrois

    Just caught up with a Toad post selected for repost on June 6 at berfrois: Intellectual Jousting in the Republic of Letters. Check out the post at berfrois, and have a look around their interesting magazine-site.

  • Is the Internet Making Journalism Better?

    The polls have closed over at The Economist debate. At issue was the following motion: “This house believes that the internet is making journalism better, not worse.” And Nicholas Carr, of “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” fame, instead of a concession speech, provides readers with a post on his Rough Notes blog containing a list of links to sources he used to help prepare his strategy. I’ve not finished perusing all of Carr’s references yet, but his post is obviously a valuable resource for students of the “stupid” and beyond debate. Read Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” article in The Atlantic. Follow the debate at The Economist. Sift through Carr’s sources. Carr supports his claim that the effects of externalizing our central nervous system (as McLuhan put it) include negative neurological changes with what is considered by some (Jonah Lehrer) to be soft evidence.

  • Is Privacy the New Plastic?

    In February, I posted on the film “Examined Life.” One of the featured philosophers in the film, Peter Singer, has an interesting article on ethics, privacy, and social networking and technology in this month’s (August) Harpers: “Visible man: Ethics in a world without secrets.” Is privacy the new plastic? (Use library if no Harper’s subscription.)