The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

  • A Common Reader

    One wishes for a less dichotomous ending for the staid Queen. Egads! Bad enough when her new reading habits throw spanners into the works of the equerries, a sudden cat among the pigeons. But now she must choose between duty to her country, a pawn of officialdom, or duty to an awakened, autonomous self, able to absorb and think and feel what others think and feel.

    How did this happen?

    “The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature. Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth…Books did not defer. All readers were equal…[Reading] was anonymous; it was shared; it was common. And she who had led a life apart now found that she craved it. Here in the pages and between these covers she could get unrecognized.” (30-31)

    And then what? What to do with this new found empathic capability?

    “Books have enriched my life in a way that one could never have expected. But books can only take one so far and now I think it is time that from being a reader I become, or try to become, a writer.” (111)

    And the equerries would be no help. On the contrary, she must escape them:

    “No one was going to tell her, she thought. Writing, like reading, was something she was going to have to do on her own.” (105)

    She would become, in short, a commoner, a common reader, a common writer, too, no doubt. Perhaps she would start a blog.

    “The Uncommon Reader,” by Alan Bennett, Picador, 2007.

  • Plumbing Memory

    All the nails ever hammered bent
    every wrench twist bowed the hand
    against its reverse threads
    ledgered for in this obscure
    spreadsheet covered ground

    they rise to the surface
    with lead bars and steel pots
    the oil can still dripping
    on the galvanized pipe
    clamped in the ratchet

    threading machine world
    word weary dreary blue
    jeans tool belts worn boots
    to make both ends meet
    while in the distance past

    the dunes green waves lapped
    over the children swimming
    whose calls did not reach him
    while the warmth of his silence
    still echoes through the dunes

  • The Ascent of Man

    I was sitting in the waiting room at the doctor’s office yesterday sketching cartoons in my pocket-notebook. I had in mind the famous “Road to Homo Sapiens,” later called “The March of Progress” (Rudolph Zallinger, 1965). It wasn’t a road, and it wasn’t a march, and it still is not a road or a march.

    That Ascent, or Descent, depending on your point of view, is more like a swim, in a murky storm surf full of riptides and undercurrents, reefs and bars, smashed shells crashing onto the beach.

    “The Ascent of Man” was a 1973 BBC documentary and best-selling book by Jacob Bronowski, in which ideas from the Humanities were wedded to ideas from Science and Technology, focusing on the climb out of the murk, as compared or contrasted to the Descent biologically speaking. The Ascent is marked by the invention of tools produced by the imagination. It came between Kenneth Clark’s 1969 “Civilisation” and Carl Sagan’s 1980 “Cosmos.”

    Is there a place for the Humanities in the Natural Sciences? Or is the age of the TV Odyssey now part of the Descent?

  • In the Soup Age

    We were sitting out on a late hot afternoon talking about how we sometimes look at something and see something else. There was, for example, in the shadow of the umbrella on the patio, the face of a spy with a pointed chin wearing a classic felt fedora and double breasted trench coat.

    I said, “That’s the way poetry works. You find something and describe it as something else, but the reader might not be able to see it that way. It’s sometimes clever, the double image, but it can be a curse, because it can lead to such confusion. It’s called metaphor.”

    Quotes sometimes work like that too. You see something that reminds you of something else, expressed in your quote. For example, improvisational guitarists, Gypsy jazz style, blues, and jazz, often quote in their playing, riffs, styles, runs, taken from other players. That’s how a genre is built. So in the James Bond guitar riffs you hear a surf guitar.

    It may not take long for the new to become old because it’s made from the old to begin with.

    We were now reading aloud in the evenings Graham Greene’s 1969 “Travels with my Aunt.” And we had come to this passage:

    Middle aged, retired banker Henry is talking to young Tooley, he’s met on the “Orient Express,” no longer the class act it was in its heyday, in Greene’s 1932 “Stamboul Train,” for example. For one thing, there is no dining car in the late 1960s run. Tooley is explaining an art project her boyfriend is planning, “a series of enourmous pictures of Heinz soups in fabulous colours.”

    “The memory of something I had seen in a Sunday supplement came back to me. I said, ‘Surely somebody once did paint a Heinz soup tin?’”

    “‘Not Heinz, Campbell’s,’ Tooley said. ‘That was Andy Warhol. I said the same thing to Julian when he first told me of the project.’ ‘Of course,’ I said, ‘Heinz and Campbell are not a bit the same shape. Heinz is sort of squat and Campbell’s are long like English pillar-boxes.’ I love your pillar-boxes. They are fabulous. But Julian said that wasn’t the point. He said that there are certain subjects which belong to a certain period and culture. Like the Annunciation did. Botticelli wasn’t put off because Piero della Francesca had done the same thing. He wasn’t an imitator. And think of all the Nativities. Well, Julian says, we sort of belong to the soup age – only he didn’t call it that. He said it was the Art of Techno-Structure. In a way, you see, the more people who paint soups the better. It creates a culture. One Nativity wouldn’t have been any use at all. It wouldn’t have been noticed.’” (108)

    It’s been a few years ago now, but here again is my own soup can from the shelf into the mix again. And of course some may see it as a can of paint.

    “Travels with My Aunt,” first published in Great Britain by The Bodley Head in 1969. My edition published by Vintage in 2019. penguin.co.uk/vintage

  • Blue Hydrangea Blues

    The title of this week’s improvised guitar piece borrows from Rilke’s poem “Blaue Hortensie,” or “Hydrangea Blues.” My own modern jazz style translation (of the mood) or adaptation, takes the original into an impressionistic mode:

    Blue Hydrangea Blues
    (after Rilke)

    drab green on a paint palette
    these wry leaves dull and raspy
    under the lower umbrellas
    not wear blue but pretend blue

    teary and weary lost and losing
    like the old blue book essay tests
    yellow highlights over inky violets
    blue ballpoint and gray pencil

    pale and tired a worn toolbelt
    no more stains nothing going on
    one feels the fly by of a small life

    but shocked the blue refreshens
    in the parasol and where it touches
    the green rejoices

    Played on the Telecaster Squier guitar, one of the first out of the new Fender factory in Japan, early 80s, with aftermarket Dean Markley and Seymour Duncan pickups. D’Addario ECG24 XL Chromes Flatwound Electric Guitar Strings – .011-.050 Jazz Light. Amp is a Crate GFX-15 with DSP.

    And a short slideshow:

    So, the weekly vibe has evolved from Metal Monday and Telecaster Tuesday guitars and songs to include poetry and photography. Translating one to the other you get easily lost, fall out of the band’s pocket. But there’s much to discover. For example, while digging into Rilke’s German text of “Blaue Hortensie,” I discovered that blau is also modern slang for being drunk. I was briefly tempted to lean into a jazzy, late-night, pretend pissed translation, lured by the rhyme with raspy, and tests, but Rilke’s melancholy is softer than that. It’s not angry like punk, not a mean drink; it’s just faded like, well, hydrangeas on a hot summer night in August. We’re not quite there yet, so the temptations to keep messing around the fretboard of words continues.

  • Dinosaur

    McLuhan, paraphrasing David Hume, in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, “…there is no principle of causality in a mere sequence. That one thing follows another accounts for nothing. Nothing follows from following, except change. So the greatest of all reversals occurred with electricity, that ended sequence by making things instant” (p. 27).

  • On Photography

    I recently saw that Instagram now boasts around 100 million posts per day, but that reel videos are becoming more popular than single photos, and I was reminded of McLuhan’s mentioning Joyce on photography. From “Understanding Media”:

    “To say that ‘the camera cannot lie’ is merely to underline the multiple deceits that are now practiced in its name. Indeed, the world of the movie that was prepared by the photograph has become synonymous with illusion and fantasy, turning society into what Joyce called an ‘allnights newsery reel,’ that substitutes a ‘reel’ world for reality. Joyce knew more about the effects of the photograph on our senses, our language, and our thought processes than anybody else. His verdict on the ‘automatic writing’ that is photography was the ‘abnihilization of the etym.’ He saw the photo as at least a rival, and perhaps a usurper, of the word, whether written or spoken. But if ‘etym’ (etymology) means the heart and core and moist substance of those beings that we grasp in words, then Joyce may well have meant that the photo was a new creation from nothing (ab-nihil), or even a reduction of creation to a photographic negative. If there is, indeed, a terrible nihilism in the photo and a substitution of shadows for substance, then we are surely not the worse for knowing it. The technology of the photo is an extension of our own being and can be withdrawn from circulation like any other technology if we decide that it is virulent.” (McCluhan, “Understanding Media,” 1964, p. 193)

    Withdrawing from Instagram will today probably have little to do with photography, more to do with anti-virulence.

    Roland Barthes questions photo selection: “This fatality (no photograph without something or someone) involves Photography in the vast disorder of objects – of all the objects in the world: why choose (why photograph) this object, this moment, rather than some other?…Whatever it grants to vision and whatever its manner, a photograph is always invisible: it is not it that we see.” (“Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography,” 1980, p. 6).

    Nor it that we take, not the someone or something, but some other. But we take a photo of someone, or something. Or we might take a photo of a photo.

    This impulse to take a photo of someone or something every one or thing that we see, for surely impulse it must be for as I type this at least another 100,000 pics are being uploaded to Instagram, must come from somewhere, but where, to what end or purpose, what human ailment or surprise to annotate to put on display explains it?

    And as I walk around the pad this morning, coffee cup in hand, raising a blind here, opening a window there, passing paintings and bookshelves, I pause to notice that we’ve not many photographs on display, framed and on the wall or sitting on a shelf somewhere. We’ve old photo books tucked away (I’m afraid to open, for fear the pages might be all stuck together). And the impulse comes, to take a pic, and I succumb:

    Dancing in a Field
    McLuhan tells a joke about the friend who compliments the mother of a cute kid, “What a cute kid!” “Oh, that’s nothing,” the mother replies; “you should see her photograph.” The teapots in the frame have faded.
    At the beach at El Porto (not Hermosa – in this one it’s the frame that lies), oil tanker in distance, the frame nostalgic.
    Finished with photo post, I can now go outside and sit with my laptop and browse through the Reader, looking for Wordless Wednesday photographs?

  • Moon Path Melody

    The title of this week’s guitar piece, posted to my YouTube channel, Vers Libre Guitar, is “Moon Path Melody.” Last Fall, I posted another piece with moon in the title, “Out in the Moonlight.” A couple of years ago, On Youtube Music, I started a playlist called “Songs with Moon in the Title.” There are now 65 tracks, close to four hours. I update it sporadically, when I discover a new moon titled piece I like, which I did recently, adding “When the Moon was Yellow (And the Night was Young),” from 1963, performed by Ethel Ennis.

    The title “Moon Path Melody” connects to the Wallace Stevens poem, “Lunar Paraphrase” (1918). “The moon is the mother of pathos and pity,” Stevens says.

    But my guitar piece didn’t sound, as I fumbled with a few takes to get it on the phone video, full of either pathos or pity, maybe touches, but more like a moonbeam shining and flickering off a steel railroad track with a runaway train approaching across a rickety trestle. I had wanted something slow and sustained with just a few notes spaced like stars in a twilight sky next to a slight moon (which I saw a few weeks ago, Jupiter and Venus in the offing, Mercury too, a thin crescent moon sliding in the sky to the north of the planets). But my piece sounded too slow and halting and I could picture listeners not going past a few seconds.

    So while “Moon Path Melody” can go different directions, for the video I ended up making it quicker and messier than I first intended. Notes in the basic melody include: d e g, c d a, g a c d, b c d a g. Basic chords used include: G, Am, and Dm6. In the video I’m playing the Telecaster Squier guitar, one of the first out of the new Fender factory in Japan, early 80s, with aftermarket Dean Markley and Seymour Duncan pickups, and with D’Addario ECG24 XL Chromes Flatwound Electric Guitar Strings – .011-.050 Jazz Light. The amp is a Crate GFX-15 with DSP.

    The video is short, 1 minute 31 seconds, in keeping with the channel’s style.

  • Post Forth

    Yesterday the annual gathering of neighbors filling the street with tables and chairs and umbrellas for a block potluck affair the air almost eerily quiet as the fireworks friendlies have finally after the last few years diminishing now gone silent until the sanctioned ones near the rivers and parks in the distance erupted at nautical dusk. We did however break out the guitars for some driveway punk blues but that went mostly unnoticed as folks by then had mostly gone forth to nap off the noon meal.

    Now the morning after and me up at does the block still asleep and “what’s the matter with me,” as Dylan sang in his “Watching the River Flow.” And indeed I have stopped to read a book, and a few blogs, one of my favorites in fact, “Course of Mirrors,” this morning I opened to find a lovely piece on the spaces we might find for the downtime necessary for listening, in turn necessary for conversation, with the fox or the morning crow, those I can relate to, but an art form I fear I am losing, the chit chat and banter the ping pong talent necessary to navigate the daily slings and arrows cushions and shields of small talk. “What’s the matter with me; I don’t have much to say,” Dylan sang, but and continued to sing, it not seeming to matter whether one has something to say or not to continue saying it. So I post forth.

    Aging of course will do that to you, try one’s patience, clud one’s ears, preclude conversation and closet one’s thoughts. All of which are necessary (patience, clean ears, open door thought policy) to traverse the block picnic without sounding like a clod. A blockhead? Clod once suggested though an earth body, not necessarily opposed to soul, but a carrier. In any case, being outdoors, one is able to slide away from the potential awkward more easily than in the confines of the pizza parlor table:

    Was just now thinking, this writing live, what pic or pics I might post when I’m ready to post this post masterpiece. With over 10,000 pics in my Google photo app I’ve a lot to choose from. I enter the word flag into the search bar, looking for a pic I have in mind, but of course Google can’t read my mind, much as it would like to. For that you need a real conversation, which you can’t have with an A.I. engine. Then again, how many conversations have I had recently with real people that began to feel like I was talking to an A.I.? Or sound like an A.I. on my end of it? You can’t listen to an ordinary conversation on the street, Beckett said, without noting the inherent chaos. Something like that. He had just climbed into, or out of, a London cab, on the dashboard of which a call for help from some distant world tragedy. I forget the details, and that’s one of my problems with small talk these days, I forget what I’m talking about mid sentence, the flag of my tongue only half unfurled.

    And I picture myself hanging on a wall, not literally of course, maybe one of my paintings given away or sold at a garage sale that then found it’s way into a thrift store, the flag of my indisposition hanging irrelevantly, and in the foreground of my mind a statue of Mother Mary, who once came to me in times of trouble, or allowed me to come to her.

    In the still still still of the morning, I lift a heavy voice. Still, still with thee, and if not thee, certainly with Susan.

  • and not only that but

    and and and and and not only that but
    another one and more where that one came
    from but anything but that but last but
    not least and close but you know no ifs ands
    or buts about it merely but that and
    but you were told and a long time ago
    but old now no how to go not only
    that but this outside of but for you and

  • A Bite of Bop

    During the Pandemic when goblin mode started to set in, we hosted shows live on Instagram, almost every evening, guitar hour, my brothers and I, with special guests appearing every so often, a few of my sisters, and a few friends. We each took one evening of the week, developed a theme, and played and sang songs, told stories, chatted with the audience, fielding comments, watching dialog between audience members slide down the screen. We dialed in remotely. Also in the audience tuned in friends and friends of friends, and a few Instagram strangers who happened in from time to time. We called the show “Live at Five.”

    The Pandemic dissolved and with it our show, though episodes were saved in archives. Instagram now disallows live capability for users with less than 1,000 followers, which, according to reports, close to 75% of Instagram users have. I never came close. In any case, how does an individual follow 1,000 accounts? Videos take up a lot of space, and the emperor wears no clothes. In a moody fit of Instagramitis, I deleted my account, and with it around three years of once a week hourly shows.

    And then I moved to a YouTube channel where I’ve been posting original guitar piece videos about weekly. My brother CB was already there, posting metal pieces. He’d been bummed at my jettisoning Instagram. As Instagram moved more and more toward reels, ignoring amateurs and their close knit coteries, trying to compete with TikTok and its platform for “creators,” YouTube too has recently entered the fray with its “Shorts,” not the kind you wear. There are also issues of server costs, spam, and forcing professionalization. The four walls are now the wall to wall television screens Ray Bradbury predicted in “Fahrenheit 451.”

    None of this bothers me much. We don’t even know what consciousness is. Our minds are full of ghost following. Be that as it may, I’ve been enjoying YouTube. I use it mainly for music, following a few guitar masters, professional and amateur, posting my original work defined by an algorithm early on definitely not a planet, not even a Pluto. Pretzel music. Guitar is usually taught using some “method” or other. A method is a developmental approach, step by step, first a few notes on one string, then adding a few more notes on a second string, the instructor promoting repetition of right moves. But the guitar remains a folk instrument, by which I mean one that defies algorithms. If my playing follows a method or rule, it’s never play the same thing the same way twice. A rule often broken.

    Thinking up a name for my channel I settled on Vers Libre Guitar, trying to signal a break from traditional constraints, and being naturally unable to play in the pocket anyway, a musical term that means keeping in time with others. I don’t use a metronome or backing tracks. But I suppose we all use some sort of blueprints. In today’s post I tried to make up a bop piece, bebop being a kind of vers libre in the jazz scene of the early 40’s, though of course in the process building its own rules and expectations, one of which was ignoring the audience. “A Bite of Bop” is 53 seconds long, but it’s posted as a video, not a short, notes and chords in the description.