Word: writes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...liberal arts college, broke or flush, in the day of M.B.A.s and corporate specialization? "Big corporations won't come to small liberal arts colleges to recruit," Ponder laments. "They want engineering students." Nonetheless, he has a plan: "We will call attention to our own, a person who can read, write, spell, think. You can teach him the technique of running your shop...
...subjects" are small, mute structures with no minds of their own--not animals or people but seedpods, spores, pollen, sprouts, twigs, pupae, the embryonic scribblings of cellular life learning to write its name. One painting, Insecta, 1985, is full of chrysalises, cockchafers and stag beetles, with a red cicada clinging to a scrubby patch of blue ground. Another, Pitch Lake, 1985, has an array of spore clusters creeping, with phallic intent, across a sticky-looking field of bitumen. Some of the images are quite recognizable (there are clams, for instance, and bean sprouts), while others have the sketchy look...
...Toad ever put pen to paper, it was reluctantly, to scribble in the margin of a college textbook ("Hmmmmm" or "Sez who?" or "Ha!"), or to write a check. Over the years, Toad's handwriting atrophied, until it was almost illegible. Who cared? Sonatas of language, symphonies, flowed from the Smith-Corona...
...There is no going back in pleasure. "Bother!" said Toad. He picked up a No. 1 Eberhard Faber pencil. He eyed it with the despair of a suddenly toothless gourmand confronting a life of strained carrots and peas. He found a schoolboy's lined notebook and started to write...
Words come differently this way, thought Toad. To write a word is to make a thought an object. A thought flying around like electrons in the atmosphere of the brain suddenly coalesces into an object on the page (or computer screen). But when written in longhand, the word is a differently and more personally styled object than when it is arrayed in linear file, each R like every other R. It is not an art form, God knows, in Toad script, not Japanese calligraphy. Printed (typed) words march in uniform, standardized, cloned shapes done by assembly line. But now, thought...