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Text of the page (random words):
o allay the heat an ode to the electric cool nest but i m too hot to try what am i doing anyway recalling these poems of summer paeans to heat i should be writing something with shade dappled shade of the chinese elm a song with an iced tea within reach when in winter write of heat when in summer write of snow but quick before the snow melts but soon the apple will fall and you ll be complaining of the cold and damp chill again would you rather be hot or cold susan asks either way there s a bill to pay i say ode to the electric bill but for now this late afternoon super high heat the portable air conditioner strains lukewarm across the room a steady aging hum a monotonous drone the mellow soft metal of the cello a wish of river air over a churched organ pedals bellows pumping wind blows a dry air august 6 2026 the coming of the toads manual of style each with a different focus the various manuals of style have the same purpose to dictate how form and content of writing will be organized typed punctuated capitalized cited etc for practitioners working in the style guide s specialist arena most journalists will use ap style a fiction writer will use chicago a social scientist will use apa what stylebook should a blogger use if any there are a few traditional manuals updated periodically with new editions that often bring on a bit of brouhaha most notably the chicago manual of style modern language association s mla style and american psychological association s apa style others include associated press s ap stylebook now in its 58th edition and the new york times manual of style and usage do we need five no but we re unlikely to see any mergers anytime soon for the guides have established over time identity control and branding of institutional specialties they carry weight within the industries represented if not power and they create a voice that s really the meaning of style here editorial voice and institutions want their voice to be recognizable and recognized but unless you re a student or a writer submitting to one of the voices few care or even notice part of the control that promotes a particular style is driven by academic interest picture an english teacher red penned and red faced striking out your commas pushing in your indents messing with your running head these days you can try a i to format and correct your citations and references but you might get back a hallucinated bibliography or page numbers that were there yesterday but gone today one would prefer not to be found puttin on the agony puttin on the style the key is to understand why you re doing something work becomes if not easier more tolerable that way but understanding some of the niceties might catch one in a pickle when apa changed its spacing following a period from one to two to one again in successive editions for example hard to know why at that point some writers of course don t care why just give them the rule and they ll follow it maybe easier to understand where a rule is designed to create clarity or save time or effort or space why place a comma where one is not needed save ink and ribbon and i m reminded of a friend who blogs with what i consider an iconoclastic and idiosyncratic period spacing at the end of each sentence he finishes the sentence adds a space places the period adds another space then begins the next sentence he s done this for years with i assume no one getting out their red pen the period caught in a pickle or the blogger s prerogative what style do i practice here at the coming of the toads over time i ve used something from all mentioned which is contrary to the reason they exist which is to establish uniformity and consistency with emphasis on what their readers and writers value most that s the idea anyway if that doesn t work in real time it may not be the fault of the manual what happened was i was working on a post the other day in which i wanted to type the name of two periodicals i usually place the titles in italics but the ap does not require italics nor quote marks so why should i i had been using quote marks when feeling somewhat out of breath at the keyboard why doesn t ap require italics for the name of a newspaper not necessary and saves time it s a hassle and breaks the flow of writing having to highlight and reach up and click the italics tool yada yada yada and what about that the so called comma in a series often called the harvard or oxford comma would you type yada yada yada or yada yada and yada or yada yada and yada or not wanting to get it wrong you might try yada yada yada most bloggers no doubt don t fret too much over a style using something anything they learned or picked up somewhere anywhere ignoring updates unless they are stuck in a project requiring strict adherence to one style or another or easily moving from one style to another as their purpose might direct if a reader has expectations regarding rules they might get distracted if you color outside the lines if what you value is consistency and reliability it might behoove you to adopt a style and stick to it readers might not consciously care about violations to any given stylebook s rules but a lot can go on subconsciously in a reader s handling of your writing and what appears amiss may prompt turn offs clicking on the offramp imagine you are dictating a piece over the phone in a call from paris to new york would you waste time and risk confusion with a myriad of detailed formatting instructions no the words with a few periods here and there would work and you could quickly hang up and join the coterie in the local cafe for coffee or absinthe and conversation if what you value is a clean page a minimalist style writing that flows with the least distractions a highway with no billboards you will eschew the unnecessary and time consuming the fillers the use of parentheses as if they are earrings on the other hand maybe you like to dress things up with all the punctuation hanging in the closet or maybe you re being unclear for good reason but can you expect anyone to figure out that reason or do you expect readers to rise to your occasion and then again there are wheels within wheels when blogging for one might forget one s template acts like a stylebook moreover when posts are sent via email all your hard work conforming to a style could be stripped out by a simplification engine you could design workarounds but do you want to write or code form should follow function to borrow an idea from the architects though the blog is hardly a skyscraper and sometimes a mere shed purpose and structure can still work together even if changing from post to post and there you find style but don t trip over it august 5 2026 puzzling working chess puzzles advised an old friend a few years ago is the best way to improve your game he plays chess like a pool shark we went through a period of constant chess playing for a time in our late teens chess and ping pong i m not that devoted now to chess games maybe because i m not very good but the puzzles are intriguing and good for your brain it s said my poor brain i play chess puzzles or problems on my cell phone using the lichess app an amazing app free open source professional no ads no problems well other than the puzzles and chess itself nabokov played chess poems and problems 1970 and john cage samuel beckett endgame 1957 and marcel duchamp played chess and shoveled art problems are the poetry of chess nabokov said cage did not play chess to win perhaps puzzling until you get to know cage in his introduction to poems and problems nabokov compares chess problems to poetry chess problems demand from the composer the same virtues that characterize all worthwhile art originality invention conciseness harmony complexity and splendid insincerity the composing of those ivory and ebony riddles is a comparatively rare gift and an extravagantly sterile occupation but then all art is inutile and divinely so if compared to a number of more popular human endeavors problems are the poetry of chess 15 where nabokov says that all art is inutile he means that art should not be an argument that art should not persuade that true art is not an argument of persuasion or that its importance should draw on the ethos of the artist and that art is not evaluative art is not aristotelian art is not propaganda art should make no claims john cage says something similar in silence when he says nothing is accomplished by writing hearing playing a piece of music our ears are now in perfect condition xii not only is nothing accomplished but we spend a lot of time not accomplishing it in speak memory nabokov expresses some regret over the time he spent thinking about chess my only quarrel with it today is that the maniacal manipulation of carved figures or of their mental counterparts during my most ebullient and prolific years engulfed so much of the time i could have devoted to verbal adventure 289 maybe that s why i spend so much time playing chess puzzles on my cell phone it s a wordless activity and since it doesn t set out to accomplish anything it never disappoints there is though the idea that your game might improve and my rating has gone up from a 1200 range to a 1500 range but still nothing to brag about lower average novice i m really accomplishing nothing here might as well be writing a poem which for nabokov was much the same idea or i could argue i m using the john cage approach to chess puzzles chess like poetry and baseball relies on rules and one excels who can dispel the rules while still staying in the game where nabokov mentioned chess problems being like poetry he was talking about composing chess problems not merely solving them chess for most even if played simply with puzzles on the app probably does not rival other popular games the new york times games for example spelling bee and wordle and the new yorker has come up with a few similar games for example catalogues where you re asked to put items in order from 1 to 10 and shuffalo where you make a word with four given letters and when you get the word a letter is added until you re trying to make a word with eight letters add those mostly verbal games to some others 1010 for example a version of the old tetris game or any number of versions of mahjong and if you play them all regularly you re in the fast lane to going nowhere accomplishing nothing as the day simmers and some of the games are timed like a timed assessment test hardly fun even solitaire comes in timed versions one advantage to the times and new yorker games is that they are offered but once a day unlike the chess puzzles you finish one and pop up another though there is a chess puzzle of the day and working only that one you can work on your addiction still that s not what nabokov was talking about he was talking about composing the games can be relaxing though the brain loves having problems to solve but what if it can t solve a problem the dopamine drop nevertheless we seem easily hooked ready for a replay in no time i m often frustrated when i make a wrong move in a chess puzzle but when i see the solution there s often a quick epiphany and i m not sure why i didn t see it nabokov constructed writing like he crafted his chess problems and if a chess problem is like poetry shouldn t there be an app to solve poems by but there s not it seems nabokov s approach to writing prose or poetry was similar to his constructing a chess problem with emphasis on manipulating riddles deceptions which is a kind of insincerity like the unreliable narrator or the illusion of plot the text draws the reader in and it proves to be a trap we must work our way out of must every poem be a puzzle a problem to solve nabokov would argue against that idea art should tingle the back of the neck inspire one toward beauty to feel beauty to turn over to what what shall we do what shall we do with all this useless beauty elvis costello sang for the common reader nabokov s writing is accessible unlike joyce in the wake where you might feel you re sitting at a chessboard trying to make a move when you don t know how to play chess at all the same feeling that often comes over us reading poetry but nabokov s poems in poems and problems like the chess puzzles don t require a computer or chess engine they are human examples of how we might spend our time without dissolving into nothingess delighting in engagement and enjoyment of the ecstatic beauty of the cosmos and this despite the puzzles and problems themselves unsolved but one day while disrupting the strata of sense and descending deep down to my wellspring i saw mirrored besides my own self and the world something else something else something else from fame 1942 let s finish this post with a poem puzzle problem the idea is to rearrange the words to revision basho s famous haiku find the solution under the cartoon below startled green satori pond the jumps new scum splash puzzled a filled frog solution s to the poem puzzle problem above the cartoon a green scum filled pond the startled puzzled frog jumps satori splash new or could we find another solution a green frog new splash puzzled satori scum pond jumps filled the startled or another startled satori pond a frog jumps puzzled scum filled the new green splash and another satori filled pond a new frog scum puzzled the green splash startled jump yet another green the scum filled pond a puzzled frog startled jumps splash new satori august 3 2026 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 ...