Best of the Toads

Notes on Experience, Story, and Voice

“The idea that everyone has a story to tell (which underlies the notion that anyone can write since all a writer needs is a story) is strictly correct,” Jenny Diski said, writing in the London Review of Books (7 Mar 21) about Marco Roth’s memoir, “The Scientists: A Family Romance.” Well, Henry James thought so, anyway. Continued Diski, echoing James, “If you were born, you’re in there with a story.” (Posted 22 Mar 2013) Read More.

James Joyce on Writing: “write dangerously”

“The important thing is not what we write,” Joyce tells Arthur Power in Conversations with James Joyce, “but how we write, and in my opinion the modern writer must be an adventurer above all, willing to take every risk, and be prepared to founder in his effort if need be. In other words we must write dangerously” (95). (Posted 20 Aug 2012) Read More.

What we will miss when newspapers disappear

Watching “Irma La Douce” last night, after reading “Out of Print,” Eric Alterman’s New Yorker piece, on newspapers dying, we realized that Eric omitted what we will miss when discarded newspaper can no longer be found lying around the house. (Posted 5 Apr 2008) Read More.

Trilling’s “The Meaning of a Literary Idea”; or, the Essay as Argument: Why The Research Paper Should be Abolished

The more we fragment the further we get from the emergent whole, a picture that is satisfying for its very wholeness – in a way that an examination of any one pixel or isolated group of pixels can not be satisfying. A study of a part of something can never be as interesting as a study of the whole to which the part belongs. Yet the Humanities has fragmented into so many divergent and divested parts that an emergent, whole picture is now easy to miss. And this is true not just in the continuing bifurcations of disciplines, but in the splitting apart of self-contained disciplines. Consider, for example, the English department. (Posted 24 Oct 2010) Read More.

James Joyce’s Guitar Chord in the 1915 Ottocaro Weiss Photo

What guitar chord is James Joyce playing in this photo?

The original photo, taken by Ottocaro Weiss, in 1915, is housed in Cornell’s James Joyce collection, in an exhibit in a glass closet titled “Poetry and Music.” I first saw the photo of Joyce playing the guitar years ago in the Ellmann biography, and I cut it out and pinned it over my desk somewhere, but I’ve since lost that copy. (Posted 28 Aug 2012) Read More.

On Prayer and Poetry

What is prayer? When I was a kid, I learned the Catholic prayers, and believed Sister Mary Annette, who liked to quote Shakespeare, when she said, “Words without thought never to heaven go.” King Claudius is trying to pray, looks like he is praying, to Hamlet, anyway, and so Hamlet decides to put off killing him, for fear that if the king is killed while praying, he’ll go to heaven, while Hamlet wants full revenge, not to send his uncle to an unjust reward. What Hamlet doesn’t realize is that while Claudius’s “words fly up, [his] thoughts remain below.” Annette waxed literary, incomparable to none. (Posted 2 Mar 2013) Read More.

Losing Forrester Behind the Window

What does one say about the movie critic disappointed that “Jaws” was a terrible romantic comedy? A good movie is a movie that achieves its goals; that the critic may not value those goals doesn’t seem relevant. Writing about “Finding Forrester” (2000) in the New York Times, for example, Stephen Holden hated it for its Hollywood formulas and false depictions of life, but since when has Hollywood valued real life? (Posted 28 May 2010) Read More.

Nicholson Baker, Nicholas Carr, and Googling Clothespins

Nicholas Carr might argue I got stupider this week, and I admit that I did spend more time than usual on Google. Carr’s influential Atlantic article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” (July, 2008), has been picked up by the English teaching gaggle to promote reading. I’m going to save that argument for another time and place. One of the first to use Carr’s article, I did not use it to promote reading, but to discuss the elements of argument; for now, I want to explain why I spent more time than usual on Google this week, and show what I found. The first is easy to explain; I discovered Google Patents. The second is easy to show – clothespins. Here’s what happened. (Posted 30 Jan 2010) Read More.

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. (Posted 3 Nov 2011) Read More.