Reporter's Notebook

If you search the web, you’ll find endless threads from the tongue-in-cheek clown to the overzealous armchair chemist, all attempting to answer (or to mock) this metaphysical question. Sites leaning more toward geekery embrace scientific answers, while others use toast as an object lesson in the universe’s ultimate mystery.

Is bread toast only insofar as a human toaster perceives it to be “done?” Is bread toast when it reaches some specific level of nonenzymatic browning?

If the former, toast seems more like a performative speech act—“I dub thee toast!” than it is a physical configuration of bread and heat. Toast was first produced with a hand-iron over an open flame, after all, rather than an enclosure called a toaster that enshrouds the process in unnecessary and pregnant secrecy.

If the latter, the epistemological question doesn’t go away, as no toaster I know of can measure and evaluate all the varied configurations of amino acids, sugars, water, and heat. (Please, do not attempt a Kickstarter for such a device.) There are even some who might prefer their toast more on the caramelized or even charred side. Who’s to say that those rare (if not rarified) tastes should preclude the label “toast?”

Perhaps it’s such a welcome and common question because “when does bread become toast” demands that you engage in a fairly complex metaphysical debate on relatively ordinary terms. This isn’t God or nature we’re talking about, but browned bread. And yet, all the frothy urgency and spectacle of more serious matters still pervades such an ordinary substance. This is the ultimate payload of the puzzle: not to find an answer, but to admire that the question can spread so much complexity on to such a modest surface.

A good book is read only to be reread (sooner or later), or better, circulated in short time among friends or family members—read by many people, maybe even discussed at the dinner table or in a book group. Sometimes such circulation occurs until a book’s pages are falling out of the binding, its cover long lost.

One of the minor joys of my job is seeing the old tattered copies of books that students bring to class when we are discussing literary works such as Frankenstein or Lolita. Whether these books get transferred by campus bookstores for a modicum of profit, or among friends in bursts of passion or frustration, they are doing their job—giving, and giving again.  

After finishing a book recently, I didn’t know what to make of it. It kept me up at night—I wondered whether it was this or that kind of book. Why did it make certain stylistic moves? Who was its intended audience? There’s something simple and generous about these nagging questions: the book has given them to me to ponder. Books give even after they are given. A new idea; unresolved feelings about something (or someone); a glimpse of a new place through descriptive prose…these are just some of the gifts waiting inside the wrapped covers of a book.

As our attention increasingly is directed toward new media modes of reading and consuming text, especially in the frenzy of holiday shopping, it is worth pausing to consider the older form of the bound book, a special kind of gift—a gift that gives in special ways.

Among those who dwell under oak canopies, the experienced will learn to sweep, rake, or blow the leaves and acorns off of porous surfaces quickly. But even the vigilant can’t keep up with nature. When dropping leaves are accompanied by rains (and the winds that help them fall), immediate cleanup becomes impossible.

Worse, the rain helps seep more tannins out of the leaves and especially the acorns, creating strips of stained pavement where water flows down a grade. So many shades of rust, from ruddy to alloy to burnt to russet to umber. The tannins in red wine are what make its stains so hard to get out; acorns are the cabernets of autumn.

There are solutions, none perfect. Everyone should have a pressure washer—but that’s an object lesson for another day, and plain water probably won’t help anyway. Some try to bleach their drives, but the runoff risks harming plants and probably creates even more unsightly blotches anyway. Rust removers like oxalic acid or CLR might work, but applying these chemicals to large areas is impractical. A 20 percent solution of hydrochloric acid is another option, but it’s corrosive and highly poisonous. Anyone with kids or pets might think twice, and that’s probably most everyone with oaks to worry about.  

There’s another choice. Sunlight will fade the stains over time, and other stains of other sorts will even and deepen the patina of the pavement. The oaks, decades or centuries old, rise high above your silly little house with its leaf blower whining in vain. They are here to remind you that nature is bigger than you, and your driveway, and your pride.

2000s — Comic Sans

The font everyone loves to hate. It was designed by Microsoft for Windows 95. Soon Comic Sans became profoundly overused, perhaps because it offered an option that was legible but more “fun” than Arial or Times. Then it became the subject of widespread scorn and even protest—and even protest of its use in protest. Errol Morris would eventually demonstrate that setting text in Comic Sans made it less trustworthy.

Runner-up: Verdana. This wide sans-serif with its high x-height was also created by Microsoft in the ‘90s, designed for readability at all sizes. By the mid-2000s it had become a symbol of typographical homogeneity. A furor erupted in the late aughts when IKEA switched from the classic geometric sans Futura to Verdana, supposedly to normalize its online and in-store materials.

1990s — Democratica

There were many grunge fonts in the 1990s, all characterized by a torn or otherwise disheveled appearance that paid homage to its namesake music genre. Then there was Democratica, a grunge-adjacent quasi-steampunk industrial specimen that seemed to be everywhere by the mid ‘90s. For a few seconds it seemed cool. Soon enough, you just wanted to stomp on it with your Doc Martens.

Runner-up: Mistral, the Papyrus of the 1990s. It graced Corel Draw compositions and Word ‘97 how-to guides everywhere.

1980s — San Francisco

The 1984 Macintosh made visually distinct, proportional (non fixed-width) typefaces widely available. Susan Kare designed most of the 12 that shipped with the original Mac, including this one. San Francisco was made to look like ransom note lettering, and it became popular on flyers and other newly-printable novelties.

Runner-up: Davida, from The Print Shop, a flyer and brochure-making program popular in the ‘80s. The font was actually called “Party” in Print Shop. If you attended school or church functions before the fall of the Berlin Wall, you probably partied with Party.

And by that, I don’t mean generalized notions of “beauty” or “grace under pressure.” The enjoyment I find in a poem is in the words, sounds, and structures that repeat, connect, or hang together in specific ways—its patterns—and especially in those moments that deviate and surprise—its variations. For me, football is most beautiful in the interplay of such pattern and variation.

Take the back-shoulder throw that many quarterbacks have now mastered. The quarterback throws the ball to the receiver’s “back” or “outside” shoulder—usually before the receiver (and the defender) has turned around to see it. It’s a modification of the in-stride, over-the-shoulder pass, and it’s extremely difficult to defend. The poetry of this play is found in its timing variation, not in its elegance. In its innovation on an established pattern.

On any given Sunday, you will hear commentators allude to variation. The quarterback “reads” the defense, sets up in the “read-option,” or recognizes a “hot read.” These “reads” are all about identifying formations (patterns) and using options (variations) to defeat the defense’s expectation. Likewise, defenses show different “looks” and make modifications often at the last second before the ball is snapped.

One hallmark of a great quarterback is his ability to audible: to modify verbally the set-play at the line. Conventional thinking says that an audible is beautiful when the variation results in a successful play. But even if the play fails, I often find beauty in the language of the audible. In Peyton Manning’s “Omaha, Omaha, Omaha” or “Bags Montana Fat Man,” where the “poetry” lies in strange variation where one doesn’t expect it.

So back to Beckham Jr. The beauty of the play comes from its high degree of variation: to catch a 43-yard pass at the goalline, after being fouled, bent over backwards, with only two fingers and a thumb. It’s unexpected and stunning. And then: it’s a new pattern in your mind, for watching the next game.

Look around next time you travel, and observe the drab drapings of these high-tech shirts as they make contact with plastic seats and press against plate glass windows. And then consider how these shirts are robustly described by their purveyors:

The Columbia PFG (Performance Fishing Gear) “Tamiami II,” perhaps the most ubiquitous and eerily identifiable fishing shirt, offers a “Modern Classic fit” and is “designed for cool comfort and functionality over the long haul.” The “cool” does double duty here, assuring us that we will look fashionable while also evincing the functional venting technology of this shirt. No wonder it is called a “performance button up,” as it must skate an awkward path between the noble pursuits of modernity and the banal realities of endless office work.

Patagonia’s “Island Hopper II” promises “a superlight long-sleeved shirt in an easy-care, organic cotton, recycled polyester blend.” Consider here the tension between “easy-care” and the implied responsibilities of organic cotton and recycling: environmental consciousness dances on a razor’s edge between calm and crisis.

Meanwhile, ExOfficio’s “Air StripTM Shirt” is marketed as “the ultimate in technical apparel.” At the same time, it assures a “comfortable yet modern silhouette”—by now a familiar formula, this vow to balance utility with elegance.

And isn’t this what is so attractive—and so galling—about the fishing shirt? It pledges to spirit us through the world with foresight, durability, and protection; but it also nestles blandly into the consumerscape numbly taking place all around. It beckons at trout unlimited and adventures untold; and it seamlessly facilitates herds of shuffling travelers and routine labor.

It’s everything about modernity we’d wanted—packaged in all sizes and colors, and made for every occasion. Why teach anyone to fish, when everyone can just wear a fishing shirt?

You can tell from this approach that I pay more attention to refrigerator magnets than to whatever they happen to be holding up. The kinds of magnets you get at art museums are so striking that it seems a shame to relegate them to the corners of anything else that you might want to display. The Andy Warhol magnet currently supporting a recipe for roasted red pepper spread on the side of my refrigerator is much prettier than the paper upon which that recipe is printed.

What refrigerator magnets do best is to make a boring, mass-produced appliance seem more individualized than it otherwise would be. They give us a chance to fill the largest blank space in our houses other than our walls with whatever we decide defines us at any particular moment. And should we ever find better magnets to fill that space, we don’t have to deal with tape marks or holes in the wall in order to update our status.

(Jonathan Rees’s Object Lessons book Refrigerator was just published by Bloomsbury.)