The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

Tag: Writing

  • Crain, Denby, Dylan and the Avatar of Health Care

    “Now there’s nothing wrong with technology per se, and there’s nothing wrong with fantasy, either,” Caleb Crain offers at the end of his Avatar movie review (posted both on his blog and at n+1). And there’s nothing wrong with corporations, per se, either, he might have added, for, in any case, are not many of the “smug anti-corporate” critics, plotted or plotless, plugged in via their 401K’s, or their public employee pension funds? Caleb more than disliked Avatar; it gave him a migraine, attributed to “the movie’s moral corruptness.”

    While Caleb was nursing his headache, over at the New Yorker David Denby must have seen a different Avatar. For Denby, “James Cameron’s ‘Avatar’ is the most beautiful film I’ve seen in years.”

    It’s a classic case of compare and contrast.

    Crain: “The audacity of Cameron’s movie is to make believe that the artificial world of computer-generated graphics offers a truer realm of nature than our own. The compromised, damaged world we live in—the one with wars, wounds, and price-benefit calculations—can and should be abandoned. All you need is a big heart, like Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), the movie’s war-veteran hero, and the luck of being given a chance to fall in love.”

    Sounds like vintage Hollywood.

    Denby: “Amid the hoopla over the new power of 3-D as a narrative form, and the excitement about the complicated mix of digital animation and live action that made the movie possible, no one should ignore how lovely ‘Avatar’ looks, how luscious yet freewheeling, bounteous yet strange.”

    Sounds like vintage Hollywood.

    Avatar cost, according to Denby, “nearly two hundred and fifty million dollars to produce,” but he advises that “there’s not much point in lingering over the irony,” for “the movie is striking enough to make [claims of alternative values] irrelevant.”

    Movie making has become like health care: hypercosts, waste, unnecessary tricks, and expensive tickets – but no one’s any healthier, but one’s health is irrelevant; the show must go on.

    Crain: “Once you upload yourself, you don’t really have to worry about crashing your hard drive. Your soul is safe in Google Docs. In a climactic scene, rings of natives chant and sway, ecstatically connected, while the protagonists in the center plug into the glowing tree, and I muttered silently to myself, The church of Facebook. You too can be reborn there.”

    Last night we were watching “Inglorious Bastards” at home on DVD and there was a brief power outage. A power outage is when the city suffers a stroke. We’ve made doctors and directors our new gods, but like the old gods, they make mistakes. Nothing like a power outage to remind us that, as Bob Dylan said, “You shouldn’t let other people get your kicks for you” (“Like A Rolling Stone,” Highway 61 Revisited, 1965).

  • Where Richard Rodriguez meets Bartleby, the Scrivener; or, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

    “I’d prefer not,” Bartleby tells his boss. Bartleby, a scrivener, has given up, no longer reads the newspaper, has no home and lives in the law offices of his employer, staring at the wall. A scrivener was a human copy machine, a viable trade before typewriters and carbon paper and then copy machines. What explains Bartleby’s behavior? Perhaps he saw the writing on the wall, as have Richard Rodriquez and other commenters on the disappearance of newspapers.

    In the November, 2009 Harpers, we find Richard Rodriguez bemoaning the demise of newspapers, a haunt frequented by journalists these days: “We no longer imagine the newspaper as a city or the city as a newspaper…I do not believe the decline of newspapers has been the result solely of computer technology or of the Internet.” But critics who can’t wait to get the newspapers off their front porch ask not the reasons for its disappearance, but “so what?,” to which Rodriguez responds, “So what is lost? Only bricks and mortar. (The contemptuous reply.) Cities are bricks and mortar. Cities are bricks and mortar and bodies.” For Rodriguez, the loss of the newspaper is the loss of our city, of our very flesh and blood. “We will not read about newlyweds,” Rodriguez says: “We will not read about the death of salesmen. We will not read about prize Holsteins or new novels. We are a nation dismantling the structures of intellectual property and all critical apparatus. We are without professional book reviewers and art critics and essays about what it might mean that our local newspaper has died. We are a nation of Amazon reader responses (Moby Dick is ‘not a really good piece of fiction’— Feb. 14, 2009, by Donald J. Bingle, Saint Charles, Ill.—two stars out of five). ”

    Bingle responded in a letter Harpers printed in their January issue, just arrived, and it is of particular interest regarding the dialog lacking in newspapers which encourages some critics to prefer their on-line evolution. Unfortunately, while Bingle does establish some ethos as a published writer (and we suspect he must have mentioned his Chicago law degree, but Harpers may have edited his letter for space?), his letter reinforces Rodriguez’s point, if that point was to explain that the Amazon reviewers are generally writing opinion, not criticism, what they want in a book, not what they find, if anything, in a book. We do need professional critics, but if Rodriguez’s point is that the Amazon reviewers are in part the cause of the disappearance of newspapers, we fail to see how an army of Amazon reviewers, of amateur readers, is a bad thing. Nick Hornby has also famously attacked the Amazon reviewers. While we agree that Bingle’s review of Moby Dick is not helpful, we don’t see amateur reading and writing as a philistine front eating away at the borders of our print culture.

    Meanwhile, Paul Starr, writing in The New Republic (March 4, 2009), also recognizes the demise of the newspaper as we’ve known it is inevitable, but Starr also points out that what we’ve known did have its flaws (monopolies, excessive operating profits not always reinvested in the public good, and declining readership beginning probably with the advent of television – the history of the Los Angeles Times is revealing on monopoly and biased reporting, and its story as a reincarnated, functional newspaper, is remarkable. Still, its history may reinforce Starr’s point that newspapers perform a public good, but not by definition; they perform a public good only if they are good newspapers. Hendrik Hertzberg, in an April 23, 2001 New Yorker review, remarks that “for eighty of its hundred and twenty years…the LA Times was venal, vicious, stupid, and dull”). Starr’s piece is less impressionistic than Rodriguez’s, and his hope has to do with the public good that newspapers provide, for “As imperfect as they have been, newspapers have been the leading institutions sustaining the values of professional journalism. A financially compromised press is more likely to be ethically compromised. And while the new digital environment is more open to ‘citizen journalism’ and the free expression of opinions, it is also more open to bias, and to journalism for hire. Online there are few clear markers to distinguish blogs and other sites that are being financed to promote a viewpoint from news sites operated independently on the basis of professional rules of reporting. So the danger is not just more corruption of government and business – it is also more corruption of journalism itself.”

    At that point, of course, it’s no longer journalism, but propaganda, the reporter someone’s mouthpiece. Whatever might be said of the amateur reader and writer, presumably his ears and mouth are at least his own, and while he might listen to the weatherman, he prefers not to base his opinions solely on the predictions of professionals, for he knows the outdoors, and knows other things as well, knows that all the writing, good and bad, ends up in the recycle bin, most of it unread. But we’ll give Melville the last word here, from the end of “Bartleby”:

    “Bartleby had been [prior to his scrivener job] a subordinate clerk in the Dead Letter Office…Dead letters! does it not sound like dead men? Conceive a man by nature and misfortune prone to a pallid hopelessness, can any business seem more fitted to heighten it than that of continually handling these dead letters and assorting them for the flames? For by the cart-load they are annually burned. Sometimes from out the folded paper the pale clerk takes a ring:—the finger it was meant for, perhaps, moulders in the grave; a bank-note sent in swiftest charity:—he whom it would relieve, nor eats nor hungers any more; pardon for those who died despairing; hope for those who died unhoping; good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved calamities. On errands of life, these letters speed to death.

    Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!”

    Note: “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows” is from Bob Dylan’s song “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” from the Bringing It All Back Home album, 1965.

  • Leslie Fiedler and the Either/Or Fallacy of Poetic Criticism

    Perhaps there are only two kinds of poetry, still only two kinds of poems. Dichotomy makes for easy argument by eliminating all other possible alternatives. We often hear there are two schools of thought, and any ambiguity is quickly brushed away. The one poetry might be represented by T. S. Eliot, and is characterized by recondite allusion, objects removed to libraries for safe keeping, the other poetry represented by William Carlos Williams, and characterized by everyday objects close at hand, the red wheelbarrow, the icebox. How quickly though this argument ignores the actual words, as we forget Eliot’s elusive but simple, figurative cat hidden in the fog of Prufrock’s meandering thoughts, and we forget too Williams’s “The Yachts,” a poem that discourages an easy swim.

    Leslie Fiedler, in his essay for Liberations (1971), “The Children’s Hour: or, The Return of the Vanishing Longfellow: Some Reflections of the Future of Poetry,” argues that there are two kinds of poetry, or poetics, identified by the poems we sing and get by heart, and the poems we must read and read again to recall, for the latter can exist only on a page, poems that Fiedler says are “…dictated by typography…; for it is a truly post-Gutenberg poetry, a kind of verse not merely reproduced but in some sense produced by movable type” (150). These poems are contrasted with popular song lyrics, automatically memorized, that simply don’t work when typed on a page. To illustrate, one goes to a poetry reading, where the poet himself appears not to have his poems by heart, since he must read them from pages; or one goes to a Bob Dylan concert, where the wandering minstrel still has all the words by heart. But Dylan Thomas, reciting from memory, singing unaccompanied, disposes the either/or fallacy of the poetry reading/pop-concert argument.

    Speaking of either/or, last night’s snow, still a surprise this morning, has us thinking of our south Santa Monica Bay home again, where we were surprised and nostalgically saddened on a visit to Hermosa some time ago to find the old Either/Or bookstore closed. But then again, not surprised, for the either/or fallacy often leaves too much unresolved, fails to reach the heart of any poem, fails to hear the coming of the end of one song, and the beginning of another. The bookstore was now a clothing store; apparently someone fell into the old either/or fallacy of either books or clothes, but not both.

  • Theodore Dreiser and Flannery O’Connor were Neuroscientists, too

    Over at The Frontal Cortex, Jonah Lehrer has posted his Wall Street Journal article in which he takes the pow out of will power, arguing the busy brain is to blame for human frailties. It’s a classic defense of the human condition (Dreiser used it in An American Tragedy), and a blow to the motivational-speaker market.

    The reduction of will power also suggests the neuroscientists may be close to removing the free from free will. No wonder a good man is hard to find. There might be some will left, but not enough to satisfy being saved as a one-shot deal. Flannery O’Connor explains in her short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find”: The Misfit, having provided the grandmother with her final jolt of grace, says, “She would have been a good woman, if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.” This is Flannery’s depiction of the Catholic view of will and grace, and it explains the Catholic necessity of being saved every moment of one’s life, of the necessity of being reborn daily, not just once, for one could live, in the Catholic tradition, a good life for 80 years, but a single hanging curve ball that goes against the signs and you’re yanked and sent down the tunnel, for in Catholicism, as in baseball, it’s not about what you did for me yesterday; it’s what you can do for me today that counts.

    Motivation depends on the quote, a bite of sugar; motivation is entertainment – motivetainment, ads directed at the brittle brain. Quotes are empty calories. If losing weight is a resolution for 2010, skip the motivation; instead, read Theodore Dreiser, go for long walks, and eat bananas. Bananas are funny and literary – you’ll need both after reading Dreiser.

  • Christmas Platterful

    Dickens’s A Christmas Carol has been filmed again and again, but one must read it to savor the chef’s cloves of exclamation points that spice the prose of the platterful Cratchit Christmas table: 

    “Hallo! A great deal of steam! The pudding was out of the copper. A smell like a washing day! That was the cloth. A smell like an eating-house and a pastrycook’s next door to each other, with a laundress’s next door to that! That was the pudding! In half a minute Mrs. Cratchit entered – flushed, but smiling proudly – with the pudding, like a speckled cannon-ball, so hard and firm, blazing in half of half-a-quartern of ignited brandy, and bedight with Christmas holly stuck into the top.” 

    Yet this is nothing compared to Joyce’s engorging in “The Dead,” the last story in Dubliners. Here he sets the stage for a food fight good and large: 

    “A fat brown goose lay at one end of the table and at the other end, on a bed of creased paper strewn with sprigs of parsley, lay a great ham, stripped of its outer skin and peppered over with crust crumbs, a neat paper frill round its shin and beside this was a round of spiced beef. Between these rival ends ran parallel lines of side-dishes: two little minsters of jelly, red and yellow; a shallow dish full of blocks of blancmange and red jam, a large green leaf-shaped dish with a stalk-shaped handle, on which lay bunches of purple raisins and peeled almonds, a companion dish on which lay a solid rectangle of Smyrna figs, a dish of custard topped with grated nutmeg, a small bowl full of chocolates and sweets wrapped in gold and silver papers and a glass vase in which stood some tall celery stalks. In the centre of the table there stood, as sentries to a fruit-stand which upheld a pyramid of oranges and American apples, two squat old-fashioned decanters of cut glass, one containing port and the other dark sherry. On the closed square piano a pudding in a huge yellow dish lay in waiting and behind it were three squads of bottles of stout and ale and minerals, drawn up according to the colours of their uniforms, the first two black, with brown and red labels, the third and smallest squad white, with transverse green sashes.” 

    Hemingway, reporting from Switzerland for The Toronto Star Weekly, in a piece entitled “Christmas on the Roof of the World” (December 22, 1923), tells how, after a day of skiing, they 

    “…hiked up the hill towards the lights of the chalet. The lights looked very cheerful against the dark pines of the hill, and inside was a big Christmas tree and a real Christmas turkey dinner, the table shiny with silver, the glasses tall and thin stemmed, the bottles narrow-necked, the turkey large and brown and beautiful, the side dishes all present, and Ida serving in a new crisp apron. It was the kind of a Christmas you can only get on top of the world.” 

    Meantime, at the bottom of the world, Faulkner’s people eat a Christmas dinner of “possum with yams, more gray ash cake, the dead and tasteless liquid in the coffee pot; a dozen bananas and jagged shards of cocoanut, the children crawling about his [Bayard Sartoris’s] feet like animals, scenting the food.” 

    We are neither at the top nor the bottom of the world this Christmas eve morning, but we are where we have chosen to be, with the smell of a fresh cut tree mixing with coffee and the sound of jazz and family filling the air – our platter is full.

  • Ivan Illich, Education, and The Good Life

    Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society (1972) exposes our assumptions that a degree is an education, that medicine is health care, that security is safety, that institutionalization of jobs in corporations, schools, and government creates our freedom. We’ve come to confuse degrees, medicine, jobs, and security for the good life.

    When what we value, what we want, becomes institutionalized, our values grow frustrated, and what we want turns against us: “…the institutionalization of values leads inevitably to physical pollution, social polarization, and psychological impotence: three dimensions in a process of global degradation and modernized misery…this process of degradation is accelerated when nonmaterial needs are transformed into demands for commodities; when health, education, personal mobility, welfare, or psychological healing are defined as the result of services or ‘treatments.’”

    It’s not a question of spending more money on education, but of a lack of respect (value) for alternative forms to institutionalized education: “Rich and poor alike depend on schools and hospitals which guide their lives, form their world view, and define for them what is legitimate and what is not. Both view doctoring oneself as irresponsible, learning on one’s own as unreliable, and community organization, when not paid for by those in authority, as a form of aggression or subversion.”

    Modern segregation of family, church, job, and school leads to specializations of each, which in turn results in our feeling confined in each, able to do only one thing at a time. In “the medieval town…traditional society was more like a set of concentric circles of meaningful structures, while modern man must learn how to find meaning in many structures to which he is only marginally related. In the village, language and architecture and work and religion and family customs were consistent with one another, mutually explanatory and reinforcing. Education did not compete for time with either work or leisure. Almost all education was complex, lifelong, and unplanned.”

    For Illich, the problem is that “members of modern society believe that the good life consists in having institutions which define the values that both they and their society believe they need.” A wise man, Aristotle argues in Nicomachean Ethics, is one who knows what is good for himself and for everyone else. What will happen to Education? Given our current confusion of wants, as Frank Sinatra sang, we may have to “just wake up,” and “kiss that good life goodbye.” And learning to live without our good life as we have come to know it just might be something we should want.

  • The Eutobiography of Benjamin Franklin

    CP377 Signet Classic 60 cents c 1961

    What would Benjamin Franklin, electrical experimenter and founder of our first public library, have thought of today’s electronic readers? 

    Of his first attempt at building a public library, he says, “…reading became fashionable; and our people, having no public amusements to divert their attention from study, became better acquainted with books…” (90), and he claims strangers noted the effects. 

    Having successfully completed the kite experiment, he invents the lightning rod (234-236), but he doesn’t seem to know when he’s having a good time: “Reading was the only amusement I allowed myself. I spent no time in taverns, games, or frolics of any kind” (91). Apparently, flying a kite in a lightning storm with one’s son is not frolicsome. 

    Early he had been turned into a practical person: “I now took a fancy to poetry and made some little pieces…They were wretched stuff, in street ballad style…,” but “the first sold prodigiously”; nevertheless, “my father discouraged me by ridiculing my performances and telling me verse-makers were generally beggars” (27). 

    The first library consisted of collective contributions – electronic books could not have been so shared. Nor printed, nor borrowed: “This bookish inclination at length determined my father to make me a printer…Often I sat up in my room reading the greatest part of the night, when the book was borrowed in the evening and to be returned early in the morning, lest it should be found missing or wanted” (26-27). 

    Franklin thought men most satisfied when employed, and best employed when able to handle their work independently from start to finish. He wrote of cleanliness, but lived, as we always do, in a time of muddiness. EBooks can’t be loaned or borrowed or returned. No foxing of the pages, no crimping, no dog-eared dirty garage sale wet basement copies. EBooks can’t be gifted, dedicated to someone we love, later to be second-handed at the local book sale, the dedication a fiction within a fiction. EBooks are to print books as cars are to walking, as the transistor radio is to live music, as a televised game is to the loose frapping of the ballpark. 

    We’re not sure what Franklin the scientist and printer would have preferred: book or electronic reader. “A book, indeed, sometimes debauched me from my work” (79). But for such debauchery, acoustic or electric should work.

  • Where readers eSurface but authors lose control

    One advantage of the eBook is lightness. And library books “just disappear” from the little light box on the due date – so no overdue notices, an article in this week’s Christian Science Monitor (print edition) illustrates (we’ve noticed our print books disappearing occasionally, reminding us of bumbling Polonius’s advice, “Neither a borrower nor a lender be”).

    We read a gloomy hope, for at least reading is in the headlines: gloomy in that “deep reading” is failing; hopeful in that readers appear to be surfacing. Some consider that’s a problem. The CSM article references Marianne Wolf, whom we first glimpsed in Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” still concerned about the loss of “deep reading.” But “deep reading” may simply be floating, detachment: “The alphabet and print technology fostered and encouraged a fragmenting process, a process of specialism and of detachment,” McLuhan said.

    Carr, Wolf, and others are concerned that electronic reading is changing brain circuitry. Of course it is: “All media are extensions of some human faculty – psychic or physical…Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perceptions. The extension of any one sense alters the way we think and act – the way we perceive the world. When these ratios change, men change,” McLuhan argues: “Electronic circuitry is an extension of the central nervous system.” If that’s so, then what? The end of books?

    The eBook returns us to the middle ages, before copyright, before individual authors, before fixed points of view. The problem for some is now authorship and ownership: “Medieval scholars were indifferent to the precise identity of the ‘books’ they studied. In turn, they rarely signed even what was clearly their own…Many small texts were transmitted into volumes of miscellaneous content, very much like ‘jottings’ in a scrapbook, and, in this transmission, authorship was often lost” (McLuhan). Sounds like blogging.

    “We’re not going to change the code,” Reid Lyon says. No, we’re not, but perhaps readers will, or non-readers – perhaps the code is changing (under our very ears), for, as McLuhan argues, it’s impossible to be illiterate in a non-literate culture. We may be coming close to “the end of the line.”

    McLuhan, M. (1967). The Medium is the Massage. Bantam Books.

  • Me epistle on “Moopetsi meepotsi”

    Whenever challenged with words unknown we go first to the OED then to Finnegans Wake. We did so this morning looking for meep, following yet another Language Log thread. We found meep in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, on page 276, in footnote number 4:

    “Parley vows the Askinwhose? I do, Ida. And how to call the cattle black. Moopetsi meepotsi.”

    A meep, then, is a calf, and a moop, the calf’s mom.

    The moral of me epistle can be found in today’s Boston Globe, where the principal barning the word learns who abuses meep, steps in moop, for the pot (principal), trying to silence the kettles (students) back, starts them whistling, creating a word stampede:

    “That was the first joke of Willingdone, tic for tac. Hee, hee, hee! This is me Belchum in his twelvemile cowchooks, weet, tweet and stampforth foremost, footing the camp for the jinnies. Drink a sip, drankasup, for he’s as sooner buy a guinness than he’d stale store stout” (p. 9).

    Let the peeps meep, for as Robert Frost said, “…there must something wrong / In wanting to silence any song” (“A Minor Bird”).

  • Where Sarah Palin Meets Andy Warhol

    Andy Warhol is everywhere. That sentence is everywhere. Andy’s fame has lasted longer than his predicted 15 minutes of world-wide fame for all of us. But one place he’s currently not to be found is on the New York Times bestseller list, which is full of Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue, already topping the million mark, according to the CSM’s tomatoes and books review.

    What is fame? These days fame appears to be some light travelling in a motor home coach across the malls of America. The ubiquitous mall is where we might all go to “look for America,” as Simon and Garfunkel sang.

    But a book purchased is not always a book read, as a review of our own bookcase shows. There sits Nabokov’s Ada, added to the stack decades ago and still not cracked, and McEwan’s Atonement, a paperback picked up at a garage sale last summer, the first few pages read a few times. Still, most do show signs of reading’s wear and tear. Our 1966 Love’s Body is falling apart – we’ll need to replace it soon.

    We would like to think that the teens with their moms in lines at the malls to get Sarah’s book autographed will actually read it, but as Flannery O’Connor said: “I would be most happy if you had already read it, happier still if you knew it well, but since experience has taught me to keep my expectations along these lines modest, I’ll tell you that this is the story of a family of six which, on its way driving to Florida, gets wiped out by…” some misfit’s ill-tossed tomato. For “Words can be overlooked,” P. G. Wodehouse said; “But tomatoes cannot.”

    The word value, often abused, as in “family values,” or “good, old fashioned ‘Good Country People’ values,” means nothing but what we desire, what we want. And what we want, as individuals and as communities, isn’t always what’s good for us.

    Reading is good for us, but we doubt that many of the millions who have purchased Sarah’s book want reading. It takes longer than 15 minutes to read a book. Still, we hope they do read the book. We wish the book well, for in the midst of the Reading Crisis, it’s a rose in winter. We don’t want to read Sarah’s book; but we hope that the millions of shoppers who did buy it do read it – such is our faith in reading; such was Andy Warhol’s faith in art.

  • Written after a visit to Language Log

    We look forward to our daily dose of Language Log. Language has undone so many. This morning there’s a post on the mateless orange, for she can’t be rhymed, yet she’s not alone. 

              The Mateless Orange

    The shelves are bare of rhymes for orange.

    Not only that, but my dish is empty of porridge.

    You’ve heard that girl before, right?

    Orange is popular, purple not,

    not even for Steven Earle.

    For it’s rindlessness that’s comic.

    But let me ask you something:

    What the heck is this all about?

    If you stop and think about it,

    your head is jam-packed

    with oranges,

    with the curious result

    that there are those who will find this an insult:

    a banana is not yellow,

    and the mateless orange rinds,

    for she can’t be rhymed,

    yet she’s not alone.