The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

Tag: Aging

  • Dulce and Metallico

    A fresh but cool dulce breeze bothers the curtains and awakening by your side I get out of bed and off to the kitchen to make coffee draw open the blinds and step out the front door onto the porch to feel the metallico morning sun on the face of things.

    I walk out to the street and look up and down, walk a ways up and a ways back down and further on down to the corner, the houses across reflecting sunlight while our faces are still in shadow.

    It’s trash day and up the block rattles the metallico glass truck the driver hopping out at each full yellow bucket swishing it up and tossing its contents jangling into the bed pile of broken glass: a purple wine bottle, a pasta sauce jar, a big brown growler from some local pub, a catsup bottle. He pulls a redeemable pop bottle from one of the glass buckets and sticks it in his pocket.

    I sit out under the maple weed tree and sip a cup of black coffee, check the blogs I follow, my Kenneth Koch book, “Thank You and Other Poems” (1962), nearby for after fishing the blogs. A few reliable bloggers post their new photographs, and I read a blog poem, and a couple of book reviews, and view art from Germany, flowers from Cornwall, a black and white photo from a California desert, a flower from Switzerland, streets in Nuremberg and Portugal, bus routes in London, what’s happening in Cuba, gardens in France, Sweden, and Slovakia.

    “His eye is sailing,” Kenneth Koch says in his poem “Summery Weather”:
    “I don’t care what happens
    Now,” she says,
    “After all those winters in Florida!”

    Two cats visiting lately, Dulce and Metallico, I name them, out on their morning peregrination, pause and grin up at me, emit a tiny metallico meow, wanting a treat, in no hurry to move on.

    The second of four scheduled waste trucks rumbles up the street, this one scooping up the trash bins. He stops at ours and I watch the battered bin squeezed and lifted in the power forks and thrown upsidedown dumping our debris which falls into the collective unconsciousness of the community’s garbage.

    How to decide what to keep and why and what to throw out and where? And for the memoirist, why ever acquired in the first place? A green bin for the kitchen compost and yard debris, a blue bin for the recycling, a yellow bin for glass, a grey bin for trash, returnable bottles and cans in green plastic bags to the local Bottle Drop. I think of Zizek in “Examined Life”: “The problem is that trash doesn’t disappear. Coming to terms with trash is our problem today.”

    I walk to the curb and retrieve the now empty green compost bin and roll it out back where I pick up and dump a smaller trash can full of yard debris into the green mother bin, which had been too full for all the yard debris last night.

    I’m distracted by a couple of squirrels squirreling about in jitters when a raw caw like the accidental feedback from a gargantuan stage amplifier springs metallico ringing in my ears. Squawks from two crows sitting on the fence over the bin stage. Crows know their business. These two are mates for life and visit our place daily, falling out of the murder in the morning and rejoining it at dusk. The one with the brass grate looks like a Gibson Thunderbird Bass guitar.

    Time now to rouse Susan with a cup of Joe. She wants to know is the sky blue. “Blue skies, smilin’ at me, nothin’ but blue skies, do I see.”

    It being Tuesday, trash day, I now turn my attention to the Telecaster for the weekly video to post to my YouTube channel, Telecaster Tuesday, which follows CB’s Metal Monday. Metal is all metallico, while getting a dulce sound from the Telecaster is ever problematic. I try to keep the videos mercifully short, not that anyone has to view till the end, and few do, but I persist, as here on the blog, for reasons that remain obscure even to me. I suppose it might have something to do with all the stuff, what to keep and what to toss. Coming to terms with writing is our problem today.

    “What we re-quire is silence; but what silence requires is that I go on talking” (John Cage, “Lecture on Nothing,” 1962).

    Thoreau in “Walden” says he walked 8 miles a day. These days we don’t count miles but steps. After our morning ablutions we walk our daily route down to the corner, across the street, by the tiny house that was 80 years ago a barbershop, across the street and around the table corral, past the dogs with their owners waiting a coffee from the cafe, past the parking lot and the century old four-square four-plex, pause at the book box next to the Line 15 bus stop, around the corner and back up the hill, pause again at Dulce and Metallico’s house to pet the cats.

    We live on a relatively busy street, sometimes dulce, sometimes metallico. There are often respites of quiet in the mornings and evenings, but there are usually passersby walking, strolling kids and pulling dogs, bicycling, skateboarding, scootering, and driving, cars and trucks, even the occasional 18-wheeler lost in the woods looking for a freeway on-ramp.

    We used to see more wildlife, raccoons and possums, pheasants bats and owls, but lately it’s urban coyotes crows and squirrels. And all the birds that let loose: hummingbirds, chickadees, scrub-jays, juncos robins finches, flickers, bushtits, and high up in the sky, a hawk, probably a red-tail. And orange and blue dragonflies, and orange swallowtail and cabbage white butterflies. And ants: pavement ants and odorous house ants. Ants ants ants.

    I have chores to perform, for all work is latent performance, art forms, folk tradition leads the way, often astray, into soaps, for example. I prefer to be busy, but I am not an artist.

    “I am an artist. I am a woman. I am a wife. I am a mother. (Random order). I do a hell of a lot of washing, cleaning, cooking, renewing, supporting, preserving, etc. Also, (up to now separately) I ‘do’ Art. Now I will simply do these everyday things, and flush them up to consciousness, exhibit them, as Art.” (Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Manifesto for Maintenance Art, 1969).

    I should probably go to the grocery store. We need coffee and milk. I dislike shopping, for like most media, what we call the news, for example, it’s difficult to know what to buy, or where to buy it, or why. Shopping is an art.

    Back home from shopping I split an apple into slices and we sit out and share the apple, a SugarBee, with a few dollops of peanut butter. The block is quiet now, nothing seems to be moving, not even an ant, when suddenly a pair of white cabbage butterflies flutter like two dulce flutes about us.

    I like to cook, but I’m not a chef. I used to cook outdoors on an outdoor grill, all year round, less in winter, but I’ve not opened it now since last summer. We enjoy pasta (cooked dulce) with sauce, and while I’m cooking I put on a Gypsy jazz playlist. Also burritos or tacos (metallico spicy), Leo Brouwer playlist. Eggs are good for dinner (dulce), Chet Baker. Tuna or salmon, Joe Pass. Peanut butter and jam sandwiches, Beatles. Macaroni and cheese, Rolling Stones. Salads. Burgers, hamburger steaks, with baked beans and corn on the cob (metallico). Chicken with rice (dulce). Five bean salad. Leftovers. Pizza. We don’t eat out anymore, maybe if visitors are in town or for a birthday.

    But between apple and dinner we close the shades and go down for a nap, like toddlers following a busy morning.

    I’m continuing to read nightly aloud to Susan, for the both of us, a practice we started during the Pandemic. We recently finished most of the Peter Mayle books, ending with “A Year in Provence,” his first. I prefer Mayle’s fiction, the capers. I’ve a stack of old Penguin paperback Wodehouse books we’ve been through, spiffing for reading aloud.

    We started a new book but it proved unsatisfactory for reading aloud, then another, and the same problem. I made a list of some of the more successful of our read aloud books, thinking I might create my own algorithm for selecting our next book: “The Nutmeg Tree,” by Margery Sharp (Peter Mayle must have read it); “White Eagles over Serbia,” a surprise Lawrence Durrell entertainment; “Death and Croissants,” by Ian Moore; “To Catch a Thief,” a book by David Dodge – yes, that was made into a movie by Hitchcock; “A Month in the Country,” by J. L. Carr, an all-time favorite; “Hotel du Lac” and “A Start in Life,” by Anita Brookner; “The Enchanted April,” by Elizabeth von Arnim; “Eva Trout,” by Elizabeth Bowen; “Nine Stories,” by J. D. Salinger, easy to read aloud, smooth as milk; “The Moon-Spinners,” by Mary Stewart (yes, made into the Disney film); “The Summer Book,” by Tove Jansson, with drawings; “A Room with a View,” by E. M. Forster, and halfway through it we paused to watch the film – both are beautiful; and the book we just finished “An Uncommon Reader,” a satire novella by Alan Bennett.

    We’ve now decided to reread Barbara Pym’s “Excellent Women.”

    It’s evening and we come in from sitting out watching the strollers sail along and talking to some of the passersby. We watch the Dodger game, baseball so like poetry. After the game, I play guitar. I sing for you, but I am not a singer, and I have posted no apology notes to the icebox, like William Carlos Williams’s “this is just to say….”

    You are dulce; I am metallico. We make a good pair.

    I read for an hour or so aloud for us in bed, and around midnight, you whisper in my ear. The clock strikes metallico 12 times and a metallico moon appears on cue and passes by the window but it’s hours before the air cools from its hot metallico summer night high and a fresh but cool dulce breeze bothers the curtains and awakening by your side I get out of bed and off to the kitchen to make coffee draw open the blinds and step out the front door onto the porch to feel the metallico morning sun on the face of things.

  • Swash and Backwash

    Measuring pier to pier we talked walking
    in the slush sand the foreshore the swash
    and backwash pull at your legs and feet
    the sinking feeling as the swash washes
    over them and you have to tug one out
    sucking and you lose a go-ahead floating
    down the beach face bobbing out to sea
    dog running a few umbrellas and towels
    kids sand castles and bored lifeguards
    towered noses painted white zinc paste.

    It was not a nude beach we lived near
    but still no place to hide in the open
    the surfers made an art of standing
    in flight coming out of the water
    dripping wet and salty their big boards
    pointing up at the strand where waited
    the vans handmade beds dashes cupped
    wrinkled four-track tapes and waxmelt
    in back if lucky camping gear and tools
    meant jobs he was good with his hands.

    And you said, “How far are we going?”
    now already under the pier the waves
    spill around the barnacled pilings and
    up to the abutment where we can sit
    ducked out of sight in shade a distant
    transistor tin songs and then a giant jet
    drowns out the spin the talk the surf
    bopping silently and you’ve just learned
    surrealism and poems that don’t rhyme
    and a slow beach life makes most sense.

    You didn’t care too much for poetry
    or big waves or talk of big waves and
    you avoided the crowded beach spots
    and wore a modest swimsuit placing
    your towel parallel to the tower at the
    berm crest atop the slope down to the
    water your go-ahead now out of sight
    and all around little islands of bathers
    couples families volleyballers boats
    offshore back and forth up and down.

    You didn’t pack much down to the beach
    open blouse or billowed tee shirt carried
    a bag with a book an apple and bottle
    of water a magazine a radio tube
    of suntan lotion sandals beach towel
    bar of surfboard wax for the itinerant
    inattentive surfer who packed even less
    of “I do this I do that” only cared about
    one thing his thing gathering waves
    no thought of sun time a-flying away.

    That age is best which is best minded
    getting up ahead of someone to surf
    letting them sleep in and later down
    to the beach they come and down
    to the water where coy pipers play
    merry and the beachgoers all tarry
    practically bare and hairy in their
    heyday before the beach be tamed
    and the noon Angelus calls to yes the
    evening jobs of waiting and hopping.

    Notes:

    The phrase “I do this I do that” is from Frank O’Hara’s poem “Getting Up Ahead of Someone (Sun).” He says, “…and commence to write one of my ‘I do this I do that’ poems in a sketch pad” (page 163, “The Selected Poems of Frank O’Hara,” edited by Donald Allen, Vintage Books Edition January 1974).

    Robert Herrick in his poem “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time,” says: “Gather ye rose-buds while ye may, Old Time is still a-flying…That age is best which is the first….” From 1648, it’s an old argument of persuasion, one that is to the contrary often sustained into old age; likewise, its peer poem “To His Coy Mistress,” by Andrew Marvel, an argument of persuasion of the Seize the Day (Carpe Diem) mode that never grows old.

    In Act 3, scene 4 of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” Hamlet tells his mother: “You cannot call it love, for at your age
    The heyday in the blood is tame, it’s humble
    And waits upon the judgment; and what judgment
    Would step from this to this?”
    But what does Hamlet know about it, “your age”?

    Traditionally the Angelus bells are not a call to work, but a pause from work to consider the prayer. The Angelus bells tolling at dawn, noon, and dusk were a signal to pause from labor for reflection. In “Swash and Backwash” the noon bell works opposite, serving as a clock for the 1960s Santa Monica Bay beachgoers, signaling the end of their morning freedom and the transition to evening jobs like waitressing or bellhopping. Though it’s of course fanciful and pure poetic license to think anyone on the beach could hear the bells from the churches over the dunes and through the ambient noise of the beach cities. It’s a poetic miracle.

  • 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

  • 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.

  • Memory Foam

    She dwells on the foam in El Porto
    on the surf raft yelling HYPERION!
    riding the yellowish mush to shore
    Happy as the sand is hot and tan
    towel hopping across the soft beach
    parentless friends three to a wave
    tousseled and sunbleached freckles
    they fall all wet in the sponge sand
    and who will walk to the Surf Rite
    Inn for a basket of snacks and cold
    drinks for it’s all day at the beach
    the floppy summer kids marine air
    mornings and uncombed hair fresh
    as thin honey and poured delays
    dizzy getting up melting memory
    to stay at the beach all day a walk
    away downhill to strand and blue.

    Beach Towels

  • Do It?

    “A breakfast-room adjoined the drawing-room, I slipped in there. It contained a bookcase: I soon possessed myself of a volume, taking care that it should be one stored with pictures….Each picture told a story; mysterious often to my undeveloped understanding and imperfect feelings, yet ever profoundly interesting” (from “Jane Eyre,” by Charlotte Bronte, 1847).

    Was out wandering the yard today and wondering the worth of yet another camera photo, already over 10,000 in my photos app, and the lyric “Every picture tells a story, don’t it?” came to me.

    Then I remembered Alice, who was “beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do. Once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, ‘and what is the use of a book,’ thought Alice, ‘without pictures or conversations?’” (from “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” by Lewis Caroll, 1865).

    Likewise, we look for photos in blog posts, but a post with only pictures seems incomplete, its blogger in a down and dirty hurry, not much to say, but wanting to say it anyway, and the pics tell that story, but what’s a story without words? But what do I know, aging with a growing sense of “undeveloped understanding and imperfect feelings”?

    Cartoons often tell stories without words, but to simply copy and paste one without reference or comment tells another story, one of sharing boredom. Maybe blogging is another form of graffiti: tags and throw-ups, (master)pieces, stencils – click for permission.

    “And if they have the words I can tell to you
    To help you on the way down the road
    I couldn’t quote you no Dickens, Shelley or Keats
    ‘Cause it’s all been said before
    Make the best out of the bad, just laugh it off, ha
    You didn’t have to come here anyway

    So, remember, every picture tells a story, don’t it?
    Every picture tells a story, don’t it?
    Every picture tells a story, don’t it? Whoo
    Every picture tells a story, don’t it?”
    Etc.

    (Rod Stewart, “Every Picture Tells a Story,” 1972.)

    Here are four photographs that may or may not tell a story: pink hydrangea blossoms backlit by the sun; under an apple tree with a patio and dry patch of yellow beige grass in the near distance; a red pot in the middle of a green muddle of leaves and branches; a pot of lavender next to a dry bird bath.

  • Rhododendron Cynthia

    This Rhododendron Cynthia is over 40 years old. Every year it blooms reliably, faithfully, from late April through late May. It was planted, a frequent mistake, too close to the house, but as several of the photos show, it’s a welcome guest in the living room, and makes for a natural summer shade. When it was smaller, the blooms were deadheaded, but it’s too big now for that kind of fussiness. It shows its age in size and stature, while it shows the gardener’s apparent preference for a romantic cottage exuberance: untamed, overgrown, domestically wild. And a redundancy of photos.

    Do a bit of Googling and you’ll find that Cynthia was originally called by two names, as its British hybrid developers in the mid 1800s split to go their own ways; the other name was Lord Palmerston. We call it the “Raspberry Rhodie,” after its red and pink flavored paints. One can imagine though Lord Palmerston, an ancient camel, stooping to grab a few raspberry blooms to nibble on as he wandered the cinder cones before the Great Missoula Floods, keeping his distance from the dire wolves and saber-toothed cats.

  • Night and Day

    Sunday mornings, I fill our little blue watering can at the kitchen sink and walk around like a waiter at a cocktail party, offering drinks to the houseplants. In our first place together, we sprouted plants from avocado seeds. One spread from a ceramic pot on the ledge above the sink, the window never closed, where the cat Freely came and went. Oak Street.

    One day, each of us carrying a bag of groceries, walking home down Main Street, we paused at the Realtor’s window at the end of the commercial strip to look at the photos of houses for sale in town. We lived in one of four small white stucco houses, one in each corner of a courtyard, a wooden barn-like garage out back with four open stalls. Our rent was $95 a month, the beach a mile away.

    Standing at the window of the Realtor’s, I was surprised to see a photo of our place. The four house lot was for sale. We didn’t have a telephone, so I went over to my folks-iz home and called our landlord, who confirmed our house was for sale, sold, actually, and he just had not had the heart to tell us, but the eviction notice would soon be in the mail.

    That summer, the four small houses were torn down and a large apartment complex with no yard space erected, but this little story is not about inflation. It’s about night and day, dancing the night away, surfing in the morning.

    An inscrutable yawning moon rolls her eyes up over two stick figures dancing over the ocean waves at night.
    A frowning sun looks down on two stick figures dancing over green ocean waves, under a blue sky.

  • Sliding Into Saturday

    Since quitting a traditional 9 to 5 Monday thru Friday job some time ago, my sense of Saturday has changed. While working through the week, one looked forward to Saturday, sleeping in, hanging out, taking it easy – none of which happened, since one was forced to squeeze into that single day a week’s worth of chores and outside commitments. And it’s almost impossible to sleep very late when you’ve been getting up at 5 every morning all week. And I usually had work to take home. Have laptop, will travel, and work through the weekend.

    So I begin this blog post on a Saturday, thinking of those Monday through Friday working readers today sleeping in, sliding into their Saturday, or having walked down to the corner cafe, opening their laptop looking for a brief and casual post that gives Saturday its day off due.

    I finished reading Satoshi Yagisawa’s “Days at the Morisaki Bookshop.” By way of review, I remember this passage, from page 90:

    Wada picked up the book and showed it to me. I secretly breathed a sigh of relief that we’d moved on from the last topic.
    “Oh? I don’t know. Is it a good book?”
    “It’s hard to say, actually. It’s kind of one of those tragic love stories. The author is a guy who had this one book and ended up dying in obscurity. When you read it, the writing can be clumsy, and there are a lot of places where it feels like it’s missing something. But there’s something about it that fascinates me. I’ve read it around five times already.”
    As he talked, he was staring at the oil painting of a road in the hills on the book jacket. There was something tender in the loving way he looked at the book that ended up making me want to read it.
    “Really? Five times? Maybe I should check it out.”
    “I’m not sure I can really recommend it. What are you reading, Takako?”

    That’s sort of the way I felt about the book itself, that I was reading (I just finished it last night), “Days at the Morisaki Bookshop.” I mean, the writing did seem clumsy in parts, but the story and the lonely narrator and the neighborhood of bookshops in Tokyo were at the same time, if not fascinating, charming and diverting, inviting repeat visits, though I probably won’t read it again, let alone five times. And I do recommend it, for what that’s worth, to someone awake too early on a Saturday with nothing to do.

    I’ve noticed that naming blog posts after a day of the week seems to have found followings, like “Wordless Wednesday,” or doors on a Thursday, or flowers on Friday. So I thought I’d put up an old photo slide on a Saturday, and call it “Sliding into Saturday.” This one’s from December, 1969.

  • Convenience Store Woman and Other Books Briefly Noted

    Last night around midnight I finished my nightstand book “All the Lovers in the Night,” the second of three Japanese fiction books I recently picked up. I read it after “Convenience Store Woman.” Next I’ll read “Days at the Morisaki Bookshop.” Meantime coincidentally I heard about “The Second Chance Convenience Store,” by the Korean writer Kim Ho-Yeon, so I added it to the stack on the nightstand.

    I had been about to begin reading again Penelope Fitzgerald or Barbara Pym or Elizabeth Taylor, after “Seascraper” and “In the Cafe of Lost Youth,” both of which followed “The Dissenters.” The last Elizabeth Bowen I read was “Eva Trout.” My reading of course is a tale neither here nor there nor anywhere, but I try not to write book reviews, ever since Jessica commented, “It’s not a book review,” about something I’d written about one of her books, a simple reflection, drawing unexpected connections. But I was happy with that, with her comment. Too many book reviews seem template formatted and start to sound too similar. But blurbs, blurbs are the worst, exaggerated cartoons of reviews. Before “Eva Trout” I’d read “Spring Garden” and “Forbidden Notebook.” I also read, back in May, a book of short stories one of my brothers wrote, titled “Roxy, Reincarnated.”

    But the last book I read, just before deciding on the Japanese trio, was “The Invention of Morel,” by Adolfo Bioy Casares, influential Borges friend and collaborator. I found the Casares book interesting but not suitable for midnight reading, though some may find it precisely written for the middle of the night. Still, I find it’s still with me, its strangeness. And it too is a kind of cartoon, exaggerated, comic book matter. It deals with metaphysics and light and predicts television and movie popularity. Think of the characters as all movie stars, among which you walk, but they don’t see or hear you. Indeed, one should approach such books with a keen reliance on circumspection:

    “The case of the inventor who is duped by his own invention emphasizes our need for circumspection. But I may be generalizing about the peculiarities of one man, moralizing about a characteristic that applies only to Morel” (80).

    Yet here I am duped by my own book reviews, if you can call them that, and Jessica said you cannot call them that, and she is right. Earlier this year I read “All Our Yesterdays” by Natalia Ginzburg, thick blocks of prose, this one, as if she were trying to save paper. And I read Hemingway’s “Across the River and Into the Trees,” which is not as bad as everyone has ever said, but there seems to be fewer sympathetic readers of Hemingway these days, but which I enjoyed nevertheless. Adam Gopnik had revisited back in a February New Yorker the controversial 1950 takedown profile of Hemingway in The New Yorker by Lillian Ross. Gopnik’s article was a piling on. He claims to have uncovered in recently revealed letters the true nature of the Ross and Hemingway relationship and why Hemingway postured he was not offended by the offensive profile. Something like that. Anyway. Gopnik quotes from Ross the section where Hemingway is buying a belt. Really? I first read the Ross piece in the book format that followed the article. It’s a classic, on that I agree with Gopnik, but for different reasons, but I won’t continue to bore you with Gopnik on Hemingway via Ross any further.

    Nick Hornby used to write a short column for the monthly “Believer” magazine called “Stuff I’ve Been Reading.” I subscribed in its early days and saved all the issues, like deluxe paperbacks, the thick paper, the cartoon-like covers, until I’d had enough, after a few years, and carted them down to the corner book box where they went like Pokemon cards at a garage sale. Hornby’s articles contained two sets of books for the month: books he had bought, and books he had read, seldom exactly the same lists. Two books on my night shelf I’ve not read and they’ve shifted to the bottom: “The Colony” and “Ten Thousand Miles of Clouds and Moons.” “The Heart in Winter” was a gift, but I couldn’t get into it. I’m waiting for the heart in spring to come out. Eileen Chang’s “Written on Water” I’m still reading, slowly, slowly. And “The Uncollected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick,” also slowly, on page 76, the next essay titled “Things,” following short, magazine like pieces on Faye Dunaway, Susan Sontag, and Katherine Anne Porter. Slowly, of necessity. I might have mentioned in some previous post I read Salinger’s “Nine Stories” aloud to Susan, except I skipped “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.”

    But I started off here wanting to say something about “Convenience Store Woman.” It’s one of the more original books I’ve read this year. But its form is a novella length cartoon, but without drawings. It’s anime without comics. It’s not anti-literary, though it might appear so to some. It’s a first person narrative of a protagonist who must have a manual to live by, and the manual she finds suitable to her needs is the manual of the convenience store where she works. “All the Lovers in the Night” is more literary formally, but it also involves a single woman at odds with family, social expectations, being different, and aging. And where and what and how to work and establish and nurture relations, and who and what to trust as one navigates the busy streets of a lonely life looking for light in the middle of night, a night light.