The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

  • Punctuation (Sunday Cartoon)

    A hand-drawn cartoon featuring a red stick-figure exclamation point with blue eyes facing off against a question mark. Both characters have arms and legs and are balanced atop small balls. The question mark’s curve forms a large, open mouth, appearing to speak or shout back at the exclamation point.

    “Why do you ask so many questions!”
    “Why are you always yelling?”

    Adorno’s Features of Punctuation1

    We may have been taught in Grammar School to see the comma as a pause and the period as a stop, the comma a quarter note and the period a whole note. The semicolon a half note? The hyphen a rest. The dash a recess, the open parenthesis time to go home.

    Adorno, in his essay titled “Punctuation Marks,” stops to consider a comparison to traffic signs:

    “All of them are traffic signals; in the last analysis, traffic signals were modeled on them. Exclamation points are red, colons green, dashes call a halt.”

    But Adorno quickly moves on to a consideration of punctuation as a kind of musical notation, but what then, he questions, becomes of that comparison when modern music begins to ignore tonality.

    Of the exclamation point, Adorno gets historical, calling its use an example of expressionism:

    “…a desperate written gesture that yearns in vain to transcend language.”

    As for the dash – well, it no longer comes as a surprise:

    “All the dash claims to do now is to prepare us in a foolish way for surprises that by that very token are no longer surprising.”

    Why Adorno limits quotation marks to words being quoted suggests a fondness for rules that will always “call out” to be broken.

    “The blind verdict of the ironic quotation marks is its graphic gesture.”

    The loss of the semicolon Adorno attributes to market surveillance, not that anyone was looking anyway, but the use of the semicolon is perhaps the most difficult punctuation mark to establish conformity; the semicolon is the most personal of punctuation marks. It’s gone the way of the tie.

    For Adorno, the test of a writer’s punctuation proficiency can be found or proven in how one handles parenthetical material; interruptions to the lineal flow of thought, which of course isn’t lineal at all, which is why we need punctuation. He uses Proust as an example of a writer’s need for parenthetical expression, where simple commas won’t do, because we are running on but actually stopping, without coming to a full stop, to check our shoelaces.

    Interesting, even surprising, maybe, is that Adorno does not compare punctuation marks to editing in a film. Adorno disapproved of movies, jazz, and advertising, the sleep inducing drugs of what he called the cultural industry. Advertising makes enormous use of the exclamation mark, yelling and fist banging, even in ads without words – it’s the threat that numbs.

    How does Adorno conclude in such a way that might be helpful to a writer either concerned over “correct” use of punctuation (incorrect, Adorno would say, that use of ironic quote marks; but it highlights – calls out – the irony of the rules as a kind of code, not code as in writing computer code, but as in work completed and awaiting inspection), or of wanting to use the tools available effectively, precisely, but at the same time creatively, interestingly?

    It might come as some degree of solace to the punctuation befuddled writer (although some might feel worse) to know that Adorno considered all writing subject to an unsolvable “punctuation predicament”:

    “For the requirements of the rules of punctuation and those of the subjective need for logic and expression are not compatible.”

    1. Adorno’s essay “Punctuation Marks” is included in “Notes to Literature: Theodor W. Adorno,” Columbia University Press, 2019. ↩︎

  • Electric Waterfall Guitar

    An abstract long-exposure photograph of light streaks cascading vertically like water. Blurred, luminous white, orange, and blue lines flow against a dark background, created through intentional camera movement.

    35 mm slide taken with my Exakta 500 in 1969: An abstract, long-exposure photograph of lights vertically flowing in the foreground with squirrely lines of blue and orange streaks in the background created through intentional camera movement.

    The Jimi Hendrix “Are You Experienced” album (1967) included a song, “May This be Love”:

    “My worries seem so very small
    With my waterfall
    I can see my rainbow calling me…”

    Turn the photo horizontal and we see an electric guitar effect.

    An abstract long-exposure photograph of light streaks horizontally creating a guitar strings effect over blurry, luminous white blue and gold lines flowing against a dark background, created through intentional camera movement.

  • Q & A

    giant red quote bubble drawn face-like with frown, tail toward speaker at podium in front of empty chairs, Q & A handwritten at top.

    why ask? ill said
    naught he? nowhere

    that said? what said
    just this? this whose

    unthrilled? feel so
    said I’ll? be later

    even so? what now
    then again? nil wind

    adversative? when to whom
    conversative? with to which

    adjourning? now here
    heretofore? to where

    in room? ill lit
    elbow? move over

    “Ill Seen Ill Said,” a novella piece by Samuel Beckett, appeared in the October 5, 1981 issue of The New Yorker magazine, first published by Les Éditions de Minuit in Paris, earlier in ’81. My poem above, “Q & A,” is a bit of a riff on Beckett’s themes.

    On page 41 of The New Yorker, where the story begins, is a cartoon by Charles Barsotti. The cartoon shows a duck sitting at a desk. The duck wears glasses, is writing with a short pen or pencil on a piece of paper, a phone on a front corner of the desk, a stack of three pieces of paper on the other corner, the duck looking up, as if thinking of what to write next. Above the duck, still in the cartoon frame, the words: “Quack! Quack! Quack! Quack!” And above the cartoon box, a handwritten caption reads: “THE CALL OF THE WILD.”

    There are 77 question marks in Beckett’s novella, including: “What the wrong word?” Just before, “Imagination at wit’s end spreads its sad wings.”

    Why sad? Why wit? Rye whit. Why wry. Wary. Worry. Weak wreck.

    Near 8,000 words to the novella. I counted only 3 commas in the entire piece. Short, staccato sentences.

    We hardly see anything of reality’s totality (“Ill seen”), but that is our syllabus, and even that may seem overwhelming, and suppose we could see it all, could we describe it (“Ill said”), let alone explain it, and with only 0.000375% commas! All that said, we sometimes seem to come close, or someone does, and shares, and that’s a pleasure. Not an argument, not a theory, not a grammar, just a pleasure, like at a circus.

    Beckett’s piece ends with, “Know happiness.” No end of playing with words.

    “Which say? Ill say. Both. All three. Question answered,” says Beckett, in “Ill Seen Ill Said.”

  • 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.

  • Guitars (Sunday Cartoons & Marginalia)

    Click anywhere in the gallery for scroll and captions.

    Red guitar outline with text tooth pick and guitar pick.
    yellow outline of guitar on blue field
    squiggly black pen outline of guitarist
    distorted guitar angled with text b3 5 b-7 and 9
    Smiling guitarist wearing blue bowtie and holding blue guitar
    Frowning guitarist wearing a polka-dotted bowtie holding blue guitar.
    Yellow figure next to five strings, the sixth string he's wearing as a tie
    outline of guitar on light blue field
    Notebook page of six string banjo with two surreal characters on page and text reading "Mr Guitar plays banjo"
    Guitar in front of house porch with woman and man in foreground.

    “they brush         
    The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush         
    With richness”1

    “And that’s life, then: things as they are,
    This buzzing of the blue guitar.”2

    “What slight essential things she had to say
    Before they started, he and she, to play.”3

    “Useless
    to silence it.
    Impossible
    to silence it.”4

    “I opened its lid and saw Joe
    written twice in its dust, in a child’s hand,
    then a squiggled seagull or two.”5

    1. “Spring” Gerard Manley Hopkins. ↩︎
    2. “The Man with the Blue Guitar” Wallace Stevens. ↩︎
    3. “The Guitarist Tunes Up” Francis Cornford ↩︎
    4. “The Guitar” Federico Garcia Lorca ↩︎
    5. “The Black Guitar” Paul Henry ↩︎

  • Fore!

    >Sploof!

    backspinning
      
    ●
      
    high and straight

    but short and

    Kerplunk!

    . . . . .

    Green in center with ladders and clubs and golfers around in a confused design of squiggles.
    Man wearing shorts holding blue golf club on putting green with green flag, the word Golf handwritten at bottom.
    Palm tree, yellow sun in blue sky, green fairway, two golfers, one blue, the other yellow.
    Blue horizon line like ocean with palm tree in center of orange circle.

  • Learning Code

    I’ve been working on the coderoad
    Just to pass the time away
    Someone’s in the kitchen with AI
    Bowing on the old cello

    Soprano alto tenor bass
    The four each know their place
    One has a deja vu
    Looking back at you

    Oats peas beans and barley grow
    Timeline full of doodly squat
    Do you or I or anyone know
    How code from AI grows 

    Rounding off we come to end
    Our four part harmony
    She prompts you and you bump him
    Tomorrow we’ll meet again

    Four square play-court sections, each with round face: top left, brick gold A 4 star; top right, salt air C 2; bottom left, sand silver D 1; bottom right, pier water 3 B.

  • Writing and Other Categories

    What is writing? I’ve been pulling maintenance on the blog. Too many categories clutter the recipe. Is blogging writing? Not if the blog is photographs only. Then again, notice “graph” in the word photograph. In a photo, we are doodling with light. Is turning wrenches blogging?

    What is coding? I was also working on trying to code. Options may work differently depending on blog template, but clicking on the three vertical ellipsis dots next to the Publish button in the upper right corner of my post draft reveals a drop-down menu that includes, under EDITOR, both Visual and Code editor options. Coding is editing that results in how what you say looks.

    I experimented enough to resolve not to mess with coding. For one thing, results are seldom what you saw is what you got. Format often changes depending on user device but also depending on WordPress built-in preferences – in the Reader alone there are several view options, and they often seem to apply the code differently. Sometimes the magic works; sometimes it doesn’t.

    I was interested in making letters joggle and words dance, slip and slide up and down the page, dressed in wild and varied colors, and of varying size and shapes. Not gonna happen. There are wheels within wheels, codes within codes, and editors, supervisors, and principals insisting on consistent behavior.

    I abandoned my brief foray into coding and set to work on the maintenance of categories and tags. Did you know WordPress limits attention per post the total of Tags plus Categories to 15? If you go over 15, the post won’t appear in tag searches. That I did not know. And major service maintenance required if you want to find those posts over 15 and whittle them down under the limbo bar. Not absolutely necessary to know or act on, but the mechanic in me wants to know how things work and how to handle the tools.

    Or is it all a distraction from writing? What category to assign this? How to tag it? I’m often not sure. Meantime, under the heading of pulling maintenance on the blog, I added a Tag Cloud and a Category drop down menu to the bottom footer. And I added back the subtitle to the blog: A Literary Notebook – Since 2007. How had it come unattached? Probably my mettlesome mechanic meandering.

    Writing is distraction. From what?

    “Must we wring the neck of a certain system in order to stuff it into a contemporary pigeon-hole, or modify the dimensions of that pigeon-hole for the satisfaction of the analogymongers? Literary criticism is not book-keeping.”1

    As for jiggling letters and dancing words, we shouldn’t rely on code:

    “When the sense is sleep, the words go to sleep. (See the end of ‘Anna Livia‘) When the sense is dancing, the words dance.”2

    A three dimensional three story building in the shape of the letter E, windows on the right side of each floor, the letters P, Oe, m reading vertically down the front facing side.
    1. Samuel Beckett, “James Joyce / Finnegans Wake,” first published in 1929 by Shakespeare and Company, Paris, 1939 by New Directions, and as New Directions Paper book 331 in 1972 (pages 3-4). ↩︎
    2. Same as above (page 14). ↩︎

  • Cafes (Sunday Cartoons & Marginalia)

    Sketches from the edges of notebooks, nine images under a thematic title.

    This week’s theme, cafes, is taken from Hemingway’s short story titled “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” in which two waiters, one younger and complaining, the other older and empathetic, wait to go home while a lone customer, an old man, lingers on, drinking.

    Click anywhere in the gallery for scroll and captions.

    A Clean, Well-Lighted Place

    Hand-drawn cafe interior couple at a table and waiters in background, yellow traffic lights, bold black border.
    Orange brick sidewalk cafe, couple at table, each with a red wine glass.
    Lone person with drink at a table talking to a cell phone that fills the chair opposite.
    Waiter taking order at a table for two.
    Couple at a table in a cafe, the word Coffee in high window over door, letters backward, the word Noir on the floor in foreground.
    Stick figure couple at a table, one drinking wine, the other a beer. Quote bubbles say, "Check the legs on this wine" and "This beer is very hoppy."
    A cup of coffee looks like a face, eyes drawn over the cup, the handle an ear, a mouth, and a shirt collar saucer. Cursive text reads "Coffee au lait."
    A cup of coffee with a scribbled face emerging from the foam like latte art; the word 'Barista' is broken into vertical syllables: Bar, is, and ta.
    A dark cafe at night with couples at the bar and tables. Three red pendant lamps with yellow stylized light rays hang over the bar. Two waiters stand behind the counter at opposite ends.

  • Doodles

    I carried a three ring canvas binder between classes first year of high school that rubbed against my shirt and pants, stained indelibly a light purple from my doodle drawings on the binder covers front and back in red and blue ink pen. I wasn’t “The Illustrated Man,” but I sure had a tattooed notebook. Alas, there was no time-travelling girl helping me draw. Four years later when I started spending time in Venice, Ray Bradbury was long gone, but I was still doodling.

    I wrote in books, marginalia and notes, and doodled in notebooks. I couldn’t sit through a class without doodling. I was never that into comic books, which are more artistic than the common doodle. The beauty of the doodle is that it is not art, and it’s useless criticizing something for not being what it was not intended to be. And I took copious, effective notes in lecture classes; when neighboring students missed a class, they wanted my notes. Bonus the cartoons. There seems to be a relationship connecting the doodling brain to notetaking.

    A doodle isn’t automatically a cartoon. Doodling might be likened to automatic writing, where the subconscious develops surreal on a cafe napkin. The doodle may or may not have a model or subject, though often one emerges. The doodle is disposable, like the napkin it’s drawn on.

    Job changes, and then involved in business meetings, I continued to doodle, unable to pay attention otherwise. I suppose I doodled like others smoked cigarettes. On the five minute phone call, I could fill a ream. Sometimes, in a meeting, over my arm, someone would notice a doodle and comment. My notes and doodles were mosaic, non-linear.

    At some point I started looking at my doodles a bit differently. They went from a means to get through a class or meeting or phone call to a hobby of drawing and sketching, which meant trying to doodle outside the captive occasion and saving them, and turning them into cartoons. But it’s not so easy to draw when it isn’t improvised or made from a distraction, the mind mostly still focused on something else, and captions complicate the process, an attempt to explain a dream.

    Maybe doodling is a way of handling experience outside the rules of what children see as the adult world. The doodle is usually not an attempt at representational art, and so the doodler is free from linear perspective requirements. That’s one difference between the doodle and the sketch. At the same time, a true artist like Picasso might have drawn like a child because he had the skill to do so. It’s hard for an adult to doodle like a kid.

    Below are some doodled fragments. Click anywhere in the gallery to scroll and view single pics with captions.

    Ten square doodles like a block of houses, five on each side.
    Bedroom and frowning bed at being awoken and told in caption, "Time to get up."
    Outline of house as face with outline of hat for mouth.
    Page of book with marginalia blue ink face with exaggerated features on thin extended neck, wild hairdo.
    Four characters with text: double date
    Figure in dress.
    Pocket notebook page of scribbles, an audience at a concert, viewed from stage.
    Instructions for heat wave.
    Three stick figures.
    Smiling woman glancing down at man with wavy hair frowing looking out of corner of eyes up at woman. Satirical drawing of the famous painting titled "American Gothic."
    Three faces with circular heads, similar but each with different eyes and mouths.
    Doodle figure carrying bag labeled H2O and text that reads Who What (Predicament) Why Where (Setting) and Why (Argument) and How (Style).

  • The Frog and the Pond

    (after Basho)

     Staid pond 
         Frog springs 
    Skein uncoils

    Serious
    pond


    frivolous

    frog

    F lip   pant


    SPLASH

    . . . . . 

    Frog de sides 
       opacity
    Leaps 
       to its own line 
    Escapes 
       eternal pond poem