Dr. Metablog

Three Advantages to Old Age

1.  No longer possible to die tragically young, with promise unfulfilled. Well, actually, promise can still be unfulfilled, but not because of early death.

2.  No longer any need to fuss with contraceptives.

3.  Read an entire magazine article while urinating. 

Life: Boon or Thorn?

The most widely-known as well as the most notorious poem of the second half of the twentieth century is Philip Larkin's "This Be the Verse."  For those of you who don't know the poem by heart, here it is in its brief and startling entirety.

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

  They may not mean to, but they do.

They fill you with the faults they had

  And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in the turn

  By fools in old style hats and coats,

Who half the time were soppy-stern,

  And half at one another's throats.

Man adds on misery to man.

  It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,

  And don't have any kids yourself.

Pessimistic?  Jaded?  Angry?  Yes, I think it's fair to call it so. And let's also add, unsubtle with a vengeance.

Larkin is hyperbolically illogical. It can't be true that every generation is more deranged than the one that preceded it. When were the good times? A few generations ago? In the Dark Ages? In antiquity?  No, in Larkin's view, it's been all downhill, all the time. No doubt those early primates were already fucking up their kids when they came down from the trees and started to walk upright on the savannah. "There's only one piece of roasted rhinoceros left. You take it. I don't mind being hungry."

Despite its dyspepsia and illogicality, "This Be the Verse" is a curiously lovable poem.  Whenever I've heard it read or recited, audiences react not with horror but with amusement. The poem's misanthropy is so absolute and its language so blunt that it can't help but provoke tittering.

The laughter arises because the poem doesn't earn its pessimism. It's too fluent and too easy -- unlike, say, King Lear, where the sublunary world is rank with incest, betrayal, and murder. After three thousand lines and five full horrific acts, Shakespeare earns the standing to conclude that life is miserable and that "humanity must perforce/ Prey on itself, like monsters of the deep." So it is in  Oedipus, where the events lend credibility to the difficult apercu that it's best not to be born at all, next best to die very young.

While Shakespeare and Sophocles are philosophically serious, Larkin is merely flip. There's a monumental disproportion between his gloom and the light-verse vessel in which his gloom is contained. And so arises the off-kilter comedy.

It's a whiny poem. "Poor poor pitiful me.  I had a difficult mommy." 

If "This Be the Verse" is in fact the most popular poem of the last fifty years, it supersedes Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." What a remarkable devolution!  While Frost endures, Larkin abhors.

I doubt whether Larkin had "Stopping by Woods" in mind, but he certainly glosses Robert Louis Stevenson's "Requiem" -- the poem from which he drew his title. Stevenson's performance is charming, gentle, self-effacing, and modest. 

Under the wide and starry sky,

Dig the grave and let me lie.

Glad did I live and gladly die.

And laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:

Here he lies where he longed to be.

Home is the sailor, home from the sea,

And the hunter home from the hill.

Stevenson praises the adventurous life lived well and brought to completion. Death may end it all but it also closes the circle. There is no completion, no circles in Larkin, where natural processes are crudely truncated: "don't have any kids yourself."

"This Be the Verse" is a hilarious and wonderful piece of joking, but it's victimology is unsettling. It's tempting to claim that it satirizes its own pessimism, but, I'm sorry to say, it does not. Larkin loves to wallow in his own gloom.

Here's another Victorian variation on the thema Larkiniana.

Is life a thorn?

Then count it not a whit.

Man is well done with it.

As soon as he's born,

He should all means assay

To put the plague away.

Pessimistic, yes. But Colonel Fairfax, even-handed, also entertains the possibility that life might be a boon (which, as we all know, is true at least some of the time). 

Starfish Metamorphosis

I've been reading about the peculiar metamorphosis of the starfish, Luidia sarsi, which eats shellfish and dwells in the muddy sediment of seashores from Norway to the Mediterranean. The diaphanous larva is bilaterally symmetrical; the adult form, with its five arms, is radially symmetrical, a most irregular circumstance. Moreover, the adult emerges from the larva in a different way than the butterfly from the caterpillar, where the structure dissolves and reforms.  The starfish develops from a cluster of cells lining the internal cavity of the larva.""Here it grows and matures, an alien existence independent of the larval body structures, axis, bilateral symmetry, and form, imbued with a complete disregard for every embodiment of its larval stage."  Eventually, the starfish emerges, and, most oddly, the larva continues on its way "swimming the pelagic waters and grazing on its vegetarian diet of algae". Essentially, the starfish develops from what might be called stem cells that are carried within the larva. It's all very alien, or perhaps even Alien.

The theory presented in Frank Ryan's The Mysteries of Metamorphosis (White River Junction, 2011) is that at one time the larva and the starfish were two different creatures (from two different phyla). Somewhere in the dark backward and abyss of time, sperm from the one creature encountered an egg of the other (both creatures eject enormous amounts of reproductive material into the sea) and cross-phyletic cross- fertilization occurred and the resultant chimera prospered. 

Biologists resist the hypothesis because of the challenge it poses to the standard view ofthe evolutionary branching of life. I'm in no position to judge the theory's truth or falsity, but I'm attracted to the idea because it makes life forms so much more complex and unpredictable, and because it overturns conventional thinking.

A Tumbrilism Revival

When rich people betray that they don't have the least clue how ordinary people live, they might coin a  "tumbrilism." The perfect tumbrilism is callous, contemptuous, supercilious, insulting, and grotesquely ignorant.

The word "tumbrilism" seems to derive from tumbril, the cart that carried victims to the guillotine during the French Revolution. The mother of all tumbrilisms is Queen Marie Antoinette, who when told that the peasants had no bread, is supposed to have replied, "qu'ils mangent de la brioche," usually translated as  "let them eat cake." This classic trumbrilism derives from Rousseau and was not assigned to Marie until a couple of generations after she took her tumble. .

Here are two good Congressional tumbrilisms: a) Fred Heinemann (R-North Carolina): "When I see someone who is making anywhere from $300,000 to $750,000 a year, that's middle class." b) Congressman John Fleming (R, Louisiana): "The amount that I have to reinvest in my business and feed my family is more like $600,000 ... and so by the time I feed my family, I have maybe $400,000 left over."  And a gubernatorial tumbrilism: Paul LePage (R, Maine): "Maine's welfare program is cannibalizing the rest of state government. To all you able-bodied people out there: "Get off the couch and get yourself a job.'"

Here's a classic tumbrilism from the world of sports, courtesy of Jose Canseco, who once had a ball bounce of his shoulder and into the stands for a home run: "You know my life, this financial thing, is a very complicated issue. Obviously, when you make all that money, people think, 'OK, let's assume it is $35 million.' People have to understand that $35 million, you're paying the government 41 percent. That leaves you with about $17 or $18 million, not even. Then you're taking care of your whole family."

But the modern master of the tumbrilism is Mitt Romney, who, when asked about his worth, replied, "It’s between $150 and about $200 some-odd million dollars, I think that’s what the estimates are.”

Other priceless Romney tumbrilisms:

“I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there."

"This feels good, being back in Michigan. You know, the trees are the right height. The streets are just right. I like the fact that most of the cars I see are Detroit-made automobiles. I drive a Mustang and a Chevy pick-up truck. Ann drives a couple of Cadillacs, actually."

"I like being able to fire people who provide services to me."

"Even if you have a child 2 years of age, you need to go to work. And people said, 'Well that's heartless.' And I said, 'No, no, I'm willing to spend more giving day care to allow those parents to go back to work. It'll cost the state more providing that daycare, but I want the individuals to have the dignity of work.'"

Unlike the dubious provenance of "let them eat cake," these tumbrilisms, though astonishingly naive and self-satisfied, are pure and geniune. Their Mittness is well-witnessed.   

Amnesia on Film: Cowboys & Aliens (2011)

I imagine that the writers of Cowboys and Aliens had a grand old time inserting  into their screenplay as many as possible of both Westerns and sci-fi/horror cliches. They did very well: there's a loner cowboy with cigarillo and fists of steel, a domineering cattleman and his feckless son, a timid barkeep, a posse on horseback tracking abducted relatives a la The Searchers, a band of Chiricuara Apaches fighting for their own survival, innocent distressed maidens, etc., etc., and at the end, a hero riding off into the sunset. On the other side of the ledger, computer graphic aliens resembling the velociraptors in Jurassic Park (except for the slimy green blood) attacking us poor mortals, multiple abductions, and o my gosh even a little boy hiding from a creepy creature in a crevice in the rock, and then our intrepid James Bond-y macho hero sneaking into the spaceship to free the captives and dynamite the mother ship, my o my what a bounty.

And to these cliches, the unsatisfied writers added a bonus -- a dollop of movie amnesia. Why not? Jake Lonergan awakes in the desert not knowing who he is, why he is wounded, and without a clue as to why he has a futuristic bracelet soldered to his wrist. Like most movie amnesiacs, he remains fully functional and unimpaired. He's not the least bit agitated by his loss of memory. But then comes a truly embarrassing, semi-racist moment. The Indians, who as everyone knows are noble and in touch with the human soul in a way that we products of western civilization can never be, treat his amnesia with a frothy brew (perhaps mescaline, but who can tell?). Memory spontaneously returns; Jake remembers that he escaped from the mother ship, knows where it has been parked, and also knows about the secret entrance. And so to work.

Later on, the released abductees are all amnesiac, but they're cured instantly (the movie is long enough) without Apache influence.

So now we can add alien abduction to the long list of precipitants of movie amnesia.

This film could have been a gas except that its makers forgot about the comedy that's inherent in the title and in the conception. Too bad. As it stands, it's a solemn, noisy, elaborate, expensive, flimsy chimera. 

At one point in the quest, the posse comes across an enormous structure that looks like a paddle-wheeler right there in the middle of the desert. "There's no river within five hundred miles that can handle that thing." But they continue along, the boat is never mentioned again and plays no part in the story -- thereby proving that even screenwriters can suffer disabling bouts of amnesia.

Vegetable Love

As a rule, I'm as fickle as the legendary varying flag, but just now I have made a firm unwavering commitment. My absolutely most favorite line of poetry -- are you ready now, readers -- is (drumroll)l: "If you really want my peaches, gotta shake my tree."

Is that poetry or what?  It's teasingly inexplicit yet at the same time very, very suggestive.

I first encountered the line in a mid-1950s doo-wopper by The Clovers (later famous for "Love Potion Number Nine") called "Lovey Dovey."

Well, you're the cutest thing that I did ever see
I really love your peaches, want to shake your tree.
Lovey dovey, lovey dovey all the time
Lovey dovey, I can't get you out of my mind.

The line's subversive sexuality penetrated our twin-bed, Eisenhower-era, Ozzie-and-Harriet world.

Peaches/trees has a complicated history. Wikipedia tracks it to an song composed by Irving Berlin in May 1914: “If you don't want my peaches/ You'd better stop shaking my tree,” but I'd be willing to bet the orchard that Irving did not invent but borrowed it, probably from something bluesy. Berlin's peaches warn us off, but Bessie Smith's 1923 peaches are both active and abundant: "If you don't like my peaches then let my orchard be." Bessie was the kind of gal whose peaches would be given away by the basketful. Blind Lemon Jefferson's 1929 peaches, on the other hand, are proprietary: ("you swore nobody’d pick your fruit but me/ I found three kid men shaking down your peaches free"). Ah yes, we must all be faithful to just a single source of fruit.

I'd wager that the peaches have appeared in fifty or a hundred songs in the last century.

The line floats from song to song, but wherever it settles, it's always suggestive of sexual desires and needs. Even when peaches are forbidden fruit, they're also ripe and luscious oozers of juice. Shake that tree properly and they fall into right into your mouth. 

Andrew Marvell would have loved "If you really want my peaches, gotta shake my tree."  Here's his witty mid-seventeenth century version of the trope. It's in a stanza from his best poem, "The Garden."

What wondrous life is this I lead!
Ripe apples drop about my head;
The luscious clusters of the vine
Upon my mouth do crush their wine;
The nectarine and curious peach
Into my hands themselves do reach;
Stumbling on melons as I pass,
Insnared with flowers, I fall on grass.

Marvell's garden is not for strolling and smelling. It's a garden in which the fruits attack the "speaker" in an active, science-fictiony way. No nibbling here. Instead, "The luscious clusters of the vine,/Upon my mouth do crush their wine." "Luscious clusters... crush" is one sensous mouth-filling phrase. And those fine fruits, "the nectarine and curious (curious =s unusual, not investigative) peach" require no shaking whatsoever. These fruits are animatropic.

Marvell's "Garden" is as good a version of pomological love as Irving Berlin's  --  without even taking into account the brilliant and accomplished couplets in iambic tetrameter.

Lord of the Flies; a 1950s Allegory

In my daughter's basement I found a dried-up, stained, pages-hanging-out 1959 paperback edition of William Golding's Lord of the Flies.On the cover: "Copyright 1954." "Over 4,450,000 copies in print." "Sixty-second impression." "Now Available For Students And Teachers: the Casebook Edition  containing the full text of the novel, critical essays, notes, and bibliography." Lord of the Flies leaped into public prominence in the mid-1950s and quickly became a classroom staple. A quick googling found half a dozen websites designed to help high school students generate reports on the novel's "symbolism," etc.

I didn't like Lord of the Flies when I read it back then and it's become less likable-- and less worthy of respect-- over the last half-century. It's a variation on Robinson Crusoe, except that this time a score of boys land (how?  and not a one of them injured!!) on a uninhabited island in the Pacific. They very quickly degenerate into savages, murder two of their own number, and are hunting down the last boy who possesses a modicum of civility when a naval officer (nauta ex machina?) arrives to take command. Lord of the Flies is a dyspeptic, dystopian novel; it's also, according to the websites, a story of the contest between civilization and barbarism and,-- guess what?-- it's barbarism by a country mile.       

Robinson Crusoe himself was no perfect model of psychological health, but Defoe's story has been admired for centuries (it's the most reprinted novel in history) at least in part because it asserts that a resourceful human being can triumph over a bad situation. Crusoe reads his Bible, keeps a calendar and a diary, domesticates sheep, develops a working agricultural system, learns pottery, carpentry and other crafts, and builds himself both a summer and a winter domicile. Lord of the Flies, on the contrary, is entirely pessimistic about human capabilities: its flat, book-less, unskilled characters devolve rapidly into war-painted, violent tribesmen. Robinson Crusoe embodied Age of Reason optimism; Lord of the Flies is a post-Nazi novel in which there is no culture, government is nothing more than incipient dictatorship, and religion equals cruel scapegoating.         

Why was it imagined that Lord of the Flies had something of value to say about about human nature?  It's a sure thing that if Golding had written a novel in which an isolated group of people behave like reborn Crusoes and work cooperatively to tame the forest and create a communal utopia, he would have been derided as a simpleton. No room in the Cold War inn or on the best-seller lists or in high school curricula for optimism! 

Golding arranges it so that the descent into barbarism appears to be not circumstantial but inevitable.  He banishes from his island women and therefore any need for reciprocity in social institutions.  (Violence without heterosexual sex--just what's needed in the high school classroom!) Moreover, the boys who land on the island are not a representative set of human beings: they're English public school children who've already internalized poisonous notions of hierarchy, hazing, power and class. When, at the outset, they choose a chief, they're really selecting a head boy for whom lesser creatures will "fag." Of the island's inhabitants, the only one with more brain than earwax is the physically repulsive Piggy, while the only boy whose instincts are democratic is slow, tongue-tied, and indecisive. Meanwhile, Jack, to whom Golding grants leadership abilities, is a slick soulless demagogue. The author may appear to be impartial, but in fact he's stacked the deck so that the emergence of a proto-fascism appears "natural." Golding, both a student and a teacher in English public schools, seems to think that adolescents of his own circle somehow represent common humanity. His analysis of culture is therefore as shallow as a parking-lot puddle. And because it's so shallow, the novel is a treasure-trove for the kind of teaching where the identification of "symbols" substitutes for genuine thought, or emotion, or aesthetic revelation. It's a convenient opportunity -- a casebook -- for the kind of bad reading that has damaged generations of students. 

Golding's island abounds not in intelligence but in absurdities.  Is it credible that three or four pre-adolescent boys armed only with sharpened sticks could a) confront a wild boar and b) actually bring down a mature sow, and that the sow would lie still, or allow herself to be held to the ground while one of the boys repeatedly stabs and eventually kills the animal with a penknife, and c) that the same boys, using no other tools than the single penknife, could quickly skin, butcher and behead the sow, and then d) cut and drive into the ground a post stout enough on which to mount that head?  Or e) that a few boys could dislodge and push a rock that is "as big as a tank." Or that f) there could exist an uninhabited Pacific atoll so small that a group of boys could systematically search every inch of it like beaters on a hunt, but yet so large that, without experiencing much in the way of rain, it could have streams and pools of fresh water and, in addition, g) an inexhaustible supply of wild pigs (indigenous? feral?) If Lord of the Flies is an allegory, then perhaps such howlers don't matter. Yet even an allegory should not cause a reader to guffaw at inappropriate moments.

Reposted: The Sculpin, Slimy or Mottled?

Knowing little of the finny tribe, I borrowed the Bradford Public Library's copy of Langdon's introductory Fishes of Vermont (2006). It's an excellent, informative, helpful guide. With Langdon's help, I can now declare that it's undeniably the brown bullhead, a species of catfish, that has been multiplying in our pond,  The bullhead, a villainous omnivore, is one of the causes of the steep decline of our population of frogs.  The big, plug-ugly, bebarbelled brute gobbles frog-egg globules.   

Readers of this blague will not be astonished to learn that Dr. M .has fallen deeply in love with fish names.  Take the brown bullhead, for example. It's also known by such evocative and lunatic denominations as the horned pout, the mudcat, and the minister. Minister?  To whom, or under what circumstances, would a brown bullhead minister?

My favorite Vermont fish, nomenclature-wise, is the slimy sculpin, also performing under such titles as the blob, the chucklehead, the rock cusk, the stargazer, and the cockatouch. The slimy sculpin should not be confused with its near cousin, the mottled sculpin -- which can also be addressed as the slowfish or gudgeon.

 

Many of the common Vermont fishes have lost their colorful historic names. The bowfin was once called the John A. Gindle, the stonecat was the doogler, the lake trout was the togue or longue, the burbot was variously ling or lawyer (lawyer? minister?  why not accountant? or dentist?), the quillback was the buffalo, and the gar was the needlenose. On the other hand, the blandly-named pond perch of olden days is trending in the reverse direction: it's now called the pumpkinseed -- a name which seems curiously vegetarian for a predatory denizen of the deep.   

If I had known that there was a fish called the cisco (known on jolly days as the tollibee and on prosaic days as the sand herring), I would long ago have promoted Galen Cisco to my all-time-great Baseball-Fish Team, adding him to such piscine luminaries as Catfish Hunter, Dizzy Trout, Chico Salmon, Sid Bream, Bobby Sturgeon, Art "Red" Herring, and Shad Roe.

No Sculpins in MLB that I can recall, but In a more poetic universe, "Slimy" Sculpin would have been a spitball pitcher, or perhaps even a team owner.

Senior Bowl

I was talking on the tlelephone with a fan of the Washington Nationals and for some reason neither of us could recall the name of the lanky, scraggly-bearded shaggy-haired high-salaried power-hitting right fielder who once played for the Phillies and had a hard time last season but seemed to be starting out well this year, and whose grandfather played shortstop for the Pirates fifty year or so years ago.

Inasmuch as I once had near-perfect recall of such trivia, I was frustrated by the failure of memory. But I decided that this time I wasn't going to google the Nationals' roster but instead was going to force myself to cough up that name, no matter how many polysaccharides had accumulated around my aged synaptic pathways. I set my search memory program on full blast, and after about 45 minutes, while I was cleaning the kitchen, out popped the moniker. I called the Washington fan and whispered into the telephone, triumphantly, three syllables: Jay Son Werth. 

How does the human brain do that? You can't bring up a word or phrase, and then, an hour or a day later, there it is! Tiny chemical processes or electrical impulses chase from synapse to synapse until they just happen to happen upon the neuron or neurons where "Jayson Werth" is stored?  Really?  Hard to fathom.  Whatever the method, it's superbly miraculous.

But o-so-slow compared to my golden olden days.

So now I have this idea for a TV game show, modeled after College Quiz Bowl, but called Senior Bowl. The format: when a question is asked, competitors start the clock, which can run for, let's say, a couple of days. And also start the videotape machine. Competitors go about their business and the first person with the correct answer wins the round. When the tape is carefully and dramatically edited, it's perfect reality TV for oldsters.

Announcer: "Congratulations to Vivian de St. Vrain, who was able to correctly identify the singer of "Duke of Earl" in only 17 hours, 12 minutes, and 43 seconds!"

A major breakthrough in golden-years tv.

And by the way, I am now ready to proclaim to all the world that the name of Jayson Werth's grandfather is -- "Ducky" Schofield.

A Suppressed Event

I've been reading about the early colonization of New York city, a subject that I've not approached since my days in elementary school in the 1950s, where, in retrospect, it seemed that we went over the ground quite regularly -- Henry Hudson, the purchase of Manhattan Island, New Amsterdam, Peter Stuyvesant, and the English acquisition of the Dutch colonies. As we learned it, it was a sunny story, untroubled and inevitable -- a path leading from pleasant but primitive beginnings to its inevitable culmination in the Greatest City in the Greatest Country on earth. There were large helpings of nationalism and triumphalism -- attitudes that I've come to loathe -- along with the insistence that America was chosen among all the nations for peace and tolerance. 

It appears, however, that there are events recounted in Russell Shorto's The Island at the Center of the World (New York, 2004) that, if they had been mentioned, might have diluted our tadpole triumphalism. Keift's War, for example, was never discussed.

Willem Kieft was one of the Dutch governors of the new colony, and he was a pioneer in genocidal racism. A small group of indians had camped at Corlaer's Hook (now the Lower East Side) and a larger group had settled near what is now Jersey City in New Jersey. The Indians (Wickquassgeck and Tappan) sought sanctuary from the Dutch against the Mohawks, to whom they had fallen behind in their tribute payments. Kieft, for reasons of his own, launched an unprovoked attack. According to a contemporary chronicler, "infants were torn from their mother's breasts, and hacked to pieces in the presence of their parents, and the pieces thrown into the fire and in the water, and other sucklings, being bound to small boards, were cut, stuck,and pierced and miserably massacred in a manner to move a heart of stone. Some were thrown into the river, and when the fathers and mothers endeavored to save them, the soldiers would not let them come on land but made both parents and children drown.... Some came to our people in the country with their hands, some with their legs cut off, and some holding their entrails in their arms....  After this exploit, the soldiers were were rewarded for their service, and Director Kieft thanked them."

Such atrocities (there were many others) were omitted from the P. S. 217 curriculum. 

When I read these stories, I feel as though I was tricked. I'm indignant and angry.

It's all part of a grand deception in which every child is indoctrinated with the idea that his own group is wiser, kinder, and better than the others.

If our great country were truly superior, we would have shown it by telling the truth, the whole truth, not a purged and sanitized half-truth.  

Book Report: "Some Hours" by Edward St. Aubyn

I've now read the first three of the quintet of the much-praised Patrick Melrose novels by Edward St. Aubyn, and that's all I'm going to read. It's been a long time since I've encountered anything so nasty.  Is there a word for a place in which every single individual is evil, snobbish, vindictive, petty, and cruel. Kakatopia, perhaps. In St. Aubyn's world, Iago would have been an innocent. True enough that he was jealous, obsessed, manipulative and murderous, but I doubt that even Iago would have anally penetrated his five-year-old son.

And moreover: if I were a handsome, rich young woman (or a plain poor one) and my date asked me to get down on all fours and eat some squashed figs off the patio floor without benefit of fork or knife, I would run away screaming, slam the door, and let a few years lapse before resuming social activity. So, I hope, would everywoman. In the world of St. Aubyn's fiction, reader, she marries him, and the couple live miserably ever after.

The dilemma that's posed by these novels is that in addition to being richly kakatopic, they're also amusing, clever, and arch, with dialogue that might have been written by a jaded Oscar Wilde. So I laughed -- but whenever I laughed I felt dirty and complicit.

So no more St. Aubyn for me. These novels transcend satire and transmute into ugly spewing. Not for me, thanks.

Bringing Ourselves Up to Date on the Subject of Abkhazian Consonants

Abkhazian has fifty-eight consonants. By contrast, English, a language which is not consonant-poor, has twenty-three: the ones for which there are the alphabetic letters such as b, d, f, etc. plus sh, ch, dz, ng, the occasional trilled r, and the two sounds that are indicated by th (voiced in 'soothe' and unvoiced in 'sooth'). Twenty-three consonants can make an infinite number of words; fifty-eight consonants are more than a mouthful. How can the human speech apparatus produce so many distinguishable sounds?  "By utilizing all points of articulation from the lips back to the larynx," says an Abhakazian linguist, and "by associating with plain consonants such secondary features as labialization, palatalisation, and pharyngalisation." More simply, everywhere that tongue, lips, teeth, palate, or throat can either stop the flow of air or allow air to pass through must be put into play. Moreover, If I understand correctly, a sound made by vibrating, for instance, the area of the uvular might occur in both labialized (i.e. rounded lips) and unlabialized variants.

I'm guessing that Abkhazian would be formidably difficult to understand, especially for those who are acquainted only with Indo-European languages. 

Abkhazian is one of the indigenous North West Caucasian languages, distantly related to Circassian and the now extinct Ubykh. It may be descended from Hattic, which may have been spoken in the empire of the Hittites. There are something like a million Abkhazian speakers, half in Abkhazia itself, a country that borders the Black Sea to the northwest of Georgia, and half in Turkey and other locations in the Abkhazian diaspora. Written language came only in the mid-nineteenth century to the wild Caucasus. Abkhazians have been described as 20% Muslim, 80% Christian, and 100% pagan, their religion "a peculiar mosaic of fragments of religious beliefs" in which "Christian ceremonies, Muslim rites, and pagan observances are so closely interwoven that it seems impossible to separate them."

Though the Abkhazian consonant system is daunting, it's a relief to learn that the language uses only one vowel - ah - and also that both the extinct Ubykh and a still existing dialect of Abkhazian named Bzyp (pronunciation??) employed "a minimum of eighty consonants." Is eighty the record?

Amnesia on Film: Clean Slate (1994)

I imagine that the "pitch" went something like this:

"Ok, we have the star, Dana Carvey, who's hot right now. He's a funny man. He's going to play a detective who watches The Maltese Falcon on the tv and thinks he's Humphrey Bogart. And there's a coin that's worth seven million dollars and a bunch of guys are after it. But here's the gimmick. Carvey has amnesia and he doesn't know that he has the coin. And then the real kicker -- not only does he have amnesia, but he has a kind of amnesia that starts over every time he goes to sleep, so he doesn't even know what he did yesterday.. Ain't that terrific?"

Well, it must have been terrific, because someone decided to put some money into the film, and someone managed to persuade James Earl Jones and Michael Gambon to take supporting roles in this bird-brained turkey.

Did anyone say, "Does amnesia work that way? Is there a kind of amnesia that begins again every morning."

If they did, I know what the answer would have been. "Who cares? This is not real amnesia, it's movie amnesia"  --which is, once again, the most malleable of maladies.

So here's a new genre, the amnesiac-gumshoe farce. A small, unpromising genre.

It's an unfunny movie that hovers between D (for dumb) minus and F (phony). I doubt anyone's ever heard of it, except for hardcore amnesia fans. And even they were disappointed. 

La Traviata "Updated"

I prefer to hear rather than to see grand opera. The cd and the radio are my preferred media. Stay at home, sit in a comfortable chair, listen carefully, be ravished.

When you go to the opera, you re-discover that the plot is all silliness, the characters incomprehensible, and the intermissions interminable. 

Nevertheless, there I was, yesterday, at the Met's HD screening of Verdi's La Traviata, the most melodic and romantic of operas. The orchestra and the singing were, as expected, glorious. But the staging was all strained novelty and misguided cleverness.

Can there be an opera less in need of cross-dressing and a gay subtext that La Traviata?  Why would anyone want to clothe both the male and female choristers in severe, gray, men's business suits?  If the story is all about boy-girl romance and sexual intensity and sexual pleasure, why not encourage the men and gaily-dressed women to dance and flirt and try to get together after the downright way of generation?

Opera, when I take the trouble to see it, should be as pleasing to my eye as it is rewarding to my ear. 

But this time, officers of the Metropolitan Opera, I was forced to shut my eyes, and just listen. It was just like staying at home, except that the chair was less comfortable. 

Addendum:  today I read an interview in the April 26 NYRB with the tenor Jonas Kaufmann. Here's an excerpt:

"You see, the conductor believes that the audience is only coming to hear the orchestra and is not interested in the story, the sets, the singers. The director believes it's an all visual thing. So there is this constant fight over what each person believes is the most  important part. I've seen semi-staged or concert performances of operas that were more thrilling than staged ones. Why? Because it's better to have nothing than to have something so disturbing that it distracts you from enjoying the music and that doesn't allow the music to create its magic."

Exactly my point.

 

Where Sonia Slept

In 1904, at the age of 20, my grandmother Sonia Chafetz Uzilewski (later Green) disembarked at Ellis Island. Because of her age, and because she lived within an immigrant community, she never acquired much English, and as a result out conversations were strictly utilitarian. I was curious about the old country (White Russia, now Belarus) but she spoke little about it and what she did say was difficult for me to construe. Two pieces of information about her childhood have stayed with me: first, that in the old country, they brought the cow into the house in the winter "to keep warm" and secondly, that, as a girl, she "slept over the fireplace."

I was puzzled. All I could imagine was a house like my own pleasant childhood home, but with a cow on the carpet and a young lady perched precariously on the narrow mantle over the fireplace (if we had had a fireplace, which we didn't). Frankly, I couldn't make much sense out of her story. 

It wasn't until I happened to find myself in benighted Lithuania in 2003 that I figured out the cow-in-the-living-room puzzle. I visited one of those large open-air museums which are not uncommon in eastern Europe, in which traditional peasant dwellings, along with churches, mills, foundries, etc. have been  rescued and sprinkled around a landscape. A very common form of low-end dwelling consists of a barn or animal shelter on the dirt ground floor, with a wooden second floor for human habitation erected just above. I believe that when grandma said that they brought the cow into the house, she meant that they stabled the cow down below, and that some of the heat from the animal disseminated into the living quarters -- as would, incidentally, some of its pungent effluvia.

So one problem was solved, but the mantle-sleeping remained a mystery. However, just this past week the New Yorker featured an essay on traditional Russian cooking in which there was a paragraph on a long-ago-and-far-away kind of stove. Here's the pertinent section.

"A traditional Russian kitchen starts with a pech, a huge brick oven with many winding vents designed to retain the heat from a wood fire. A pech was once the centerpiece of traditional peasant homes; it took up about a quarter of the available living space. It heated and ventilated the house, it dried food; children and the elderly slept on ledges built into it."

"Children and the elderly slept on ledges built into it." Mystery solved!

Sonia told me that she slept over the fire, which I interpreted as a fireplace. But I was wrong. She slept over the stove. For all I know, she might even have used the world pech, which I couldn't possibly have translated or understood.

Now I know, that like other children at the very bottom of the nineteenth-century Russian social ladder, she slept on a ledge built into a pech, with the cow lowing just a few feet below her. 

Need I mention once again how glad I am that she decided to pull up stakes and head for new world.

More on Sonia Green: here.

What Lola Remembered from Last Summer

It was a long, luxurious summer, with gardens and apple cider and swimming and berry-picking and walks in the woods and cousins and all sorts of games.

All much enjoyed by Lola, who is now approaching two and a half years old.

"So, Lola, what do your remember about last summer in Vermont?"

Lola, after a pensive moment: "Sheep and horses poop on the grass."

Amnesia on Film: Somewhere in the Night (1946)

Somewhere in the Night is an early Joseph Mankiewicz film noir with amnesia at its center. George Taylor, an injured ex-Marine played monochromatically by John Hodiak, returns from the South Pacific not knowing who he is are what he was --  except that he has a clue that he was on the shady side of the law. There's an involuted, convoluted and confusing plot that pushes all the noirish buttons: a chanteuse with a heart of gold and also a dame who's nothing but trouble, a missing briefcase stuffed with 2 million bucks, a funny farm where a witness to murder is imprisoned, a cynical police lieutenant, and even a polysyllabic European gangster who derives from both Sidney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre. Everything is recycled, and so is the amnesia. George Taylor might  just as well have been a returning veteran with a perfect memory, or been a gumshoe, or a shamus and the film would have been just as good (or just as bad). It's surprising that when the money is recovered and the villains are punished, George gets the girl but, contrary to precedent, doesn't recover his memory. The film simply forgets his affliction and leaves him hanging. Perhaps it's romantic -- after all, if you win the love of the lady, what does memory matter?  Or perhaps the amnesia is so trivial, so perfunctory, so much a gimmick, that it can be shunted aside. 

Although not a good flim, it's partially redeemed by Richard Conte's turn as a smarmy nightclub owner, Sheldon Leonard's two minutes as a dumb cuckold, and Harry Morgan's thirty seconds as a bath attendant. Those guys are genuine pros.

More on movie amnesia: Spellbound, Random Harvest, Shattered, Blind Horizon The Bourne Identity The Crooked Way

Book Report: Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding

I'm sure that I once before read a book called The Art of Fielding, perhaps in the 1960s, but it wasn't a baseball novel; it was a old-fashioned critical monograph about Henry Fielding, the author of Shamela, Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones, Amelia, and Jonathan Wild. (For what it's worth, Chad Harbach, who contributed this year's The Art of Fielding, though a skillful plotter, doesn't have the range or the release or the depth to play in Henry F's league.)

I generally stay away from big-selling first novels. I prefer to let them marinate for a decade or two, check out their staying power, before I make an eight-hour commitment (not counting naps) to a 400-pager. It's an economy of my own: there are too many great old things that I haven't gotten around to yet. But I must say that Harbach's Fielding, highly recommended by friends, kept me engaged right down to the last sentence. Plot, plot, plot, is the formula, and there were enough surprises and twists in the story to keep even a skeptic like myself turning pages enthusiastically. It's a hybrid novel, a genre-crosser, with baseball books and academic novels (and a touch of Death in Venice) in its bloodline. 

What's best, beside the surprises in the plotting? The characters, most of whom defy or challenge stereotypes, what a blessing. What's worst? The style: not a memorable sentence or turn of phrase in the entire bland (ninth-grade vocabulary, straight-ahead syntax) book. Most disappointing: the killing off of an important character just when his situation becomes interesting and troubling. Harbach, in my opinion, punts just  when he should have pulled the goalie and swung for the fences.  

Why are Dog Owners Such Scofflaws?

Why are dog owners such horrid scofflaws?  According to our local police-lady, there are fifty-three signs distributed around the downtown mall that either say, in clear language, No Pets, or else picture a dog bisected with a diagonal line. But it's impossible to take a walk without encountering two or three or half a dozen people obliviously or defiantly parading Rover or Spot.

I think it's reasonable to assume that the owners can read, or if "No Pets" is too difficult to construe, that they could interpret the icons. It's possible that they're just unobservant, and don't notice the signs, but I suspect not. The signs are hard to miss.

I suspect that the dog people just assume that they're above the law. They love their pooch, love its barking, love its scat, love the way it playfully lunges at small children, and they can't imagine that anyone in the world would take exception to their prerogative.  

It's the same on the mountain trails. Just because the sign says, All Dogs Must Be On Leash, doesn't mean that the law applies to Me.

I once said to a dog owner who was walking his big dogs off-leash, "You know that you're breaking the law." He barked at me: "Get a life." Another time a bulldog attacked me on the street, and I was warding him off with my briefcase when the owner called him back. I said, "Dogs are supposed to be on leash." He said, "What are you, the dog warden?" A friend was knocked off her bicycle by a large, aggressive dog. The owner, who should have knelt on ground glass in apology, said only, "He doesn't like bicycles."

And many other such stories, but you get my point.

"Look at Me."

On our pleasant, prosperous downtown mall, we have entertainers and buskers of many stripes --everyone  from fire-eaters, magicians, and left-behind 50s folkie guitarists to Zip Code Man. Some are excellent (the occasional string quartet or visiting bluegrass band) and some are horrible (the bam-bam-bam drummers and the pathetic didgedoorists.

We also have a contortionist, whom I personally find difficult to watch.

To me, the contortionist is not so much an entertainer as he is an allegory of the human condition. He's what they used to call in earlier centuries an emblem.

While other performers try to attract an audience by subtlety and guile, our contortionist merely shouts, "Look at me. Everybody, look at me" -- which I take as a metaphor or icon or emblem. When he calls out, "Look at me," he's simply doing what the rest of us want to do but don't have the courage to do: call attention to ourselves, ask for praise. We're all saying, "Look at me," but, becaused we're civilized and mannerly beings, we strive to do so by being indirect or ironic or clever.  Not the contortionist. He's honest about himself and about the true, elemental state of mankind. He shouts, "Look at me" -- and then he ties himself into knots.

A Note on the Oxymoron

The oxymoron, a figure of speech in which there is a sharp contradiction between modifier and noun, has become a favorite of humorists: "business ethics," "military intelligence," "pretty ugly," "jumbo shrimp," "Christian Science," "Utah Jazz."  But it's a figure that has a serious side as well.

The oxymoron has an long pedigree. It may go as far back as to a classical trope called the adynaton, or collection of impossibilities. There is a treasure-trove of oxymora in Alain of Lisle's thirteenth-century poem (or, more exactly, prosimetron) De Planctu Naturae in which "amor" is described as "pax odio, fraudique fides, spes juncta timor... mistus cum ratione furor,/ Naufragium dulce, pondus leve (peace in hatred, faith in fraud, hope joined to fear, madness mixed with reason, sweet shipwreck, light heaviness); there is a similar passage, from the same century, in Guillaime de Lorris extremely popular Romaunt of the Rose that begins "Love is a hateful peace and loving hate."

The oxymoron was given new life and vitality by Petrarch, whose sufferings for young Laura famously caused him to freeze in summer and burn in winter. Many sonneteers, continental and English, were indebted to Petrarch, among them Thomas Watson, a poet who flourished in the years of Shakespeare's adolescence. One of Watson's poems, which contained the lines "Love is sour delight, a sugared grief/ A living death, and everdying life" lay behind young Romeo's modish and easily parodied oxymoron-rich rhetoric: "O brawling love, o loving hate,/ O heavy lightness, serious vanity,/ Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms,/ Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health... " Romeo was so besotted by modish poetry that Juliet couldn't resist a joke at his expense: "You kiss by the book."

Shakespeare knew that Romeo indulged too much of a good thing. Half a decade later, in All's Well That Ends Well, Helena imagines her perjured lover Bertram at the French court dancing attendance on the ladies in a series of oxymora:  "his humble ambition, proud humility,/ His jarring concord, and his discord dulcet,/ His faith, his sweet disaster." With these lines, Shakespeare put an end to Petrarchan love-longing.  But he was not done with the oxymoron.

Oxymora function best when they take the reader by surprise:  "Parting is such sweet sorrow/ That I would say goodbye, til it be morrow." Or when they are there, but submerged rather than emphasized, as when, according to Edgar in King Lear, Gloucester is at last released from his suffering: "his flaw'd heart.../ 'Twixt two extremes of passion, joy and grief,/ Burst smilingly." Shakespeare had learned a great deal about poetry in the decade between Romeo and Lear. Where he might once have employed a simple oxymoron such as "grievous joy" or "joyous grief," he could now conceive the far more wonderful formulation, "burst smilingly."

Wrapped in Caul Fat? Don't Tell Me!

Our peaceful town, not long ago provincial and off-the-track, has now become molto trendy. Only a generation ago, we were undistinguished, white-bread; and now we're America's happiest city, America's slimmest city, America's healthiest city, and, just recently, America's foodiest city.

It's embarrassing for me to live where I fall so far below the standard. When I'm melacholy, I feel as though I'm a traitor to the common good. And I confess that never even heard the word "foody" until I read that we were now "foodiest."

I don't usually frequent the expensive new restaurants -- they're too exotic for my mac-and-cheese palate. But I was taken to one of our fanciest new places recently and listened in at a conversation between patrons and waiter at the next table. I transcribe it exactly as I remember it. I swear.

Patron A:  "I think I'll start with the julienned watermelon radish. Is that served with tzitziki?"-

Waiter:  "Just a dollop." 

Patron B:  "I'll have the hedgehog mushrooms with panko crumbs.  Are your bulgogi sliders marinated or grilled?"

Waiter:  "Marinated, then lightly grilled. Then dusted with sudachi zest."

Patron: A:  "I think I'll also have the clear gel of agar and turnip puree with chestnut crumbs. Are your chestnut crumbs domestic or foreign?"

Walter:  "I believe they're Italian."

Patron B:  "I see that you have coconut tofu cream. Do you serve that separately, or with the grapefruit curd marscapone?"

Waiter:  "I believe that the chef likes to combine it with the date marmalade and harissa."

Patron A:  "For a main dish, I'll have the lamb en crepinette. To Patron B (aside whispering):  "Roasted in caul fat."

Patron B (aside, annoyed):  "I know that. (To the waiter):  I think I'll go with the squid ink and hot sesame oil soup."

Waiter:  "Excellent choice, madam."

Patron B:  "And then the braised rabbit with lobster knuckles and pil-pil dill. Is your pil-pil wild or domestic?'

Waiter:  "I'm not sure. Wild, I would guess."

Patron B:  "And along with that, I'd like a side of pickled ramps and fermented garlic, with a poached duck egg."

Patron A: "Waiter, may I change my mind. I think I'd prefer the singed octopus in almond puree. Or maybe the snails with liquified parsley, or just something simple, like sea urchin served over discs of scallop with a hamachi and farro salad."

Patron B: "I think I'll change my order as well. I think I'll go with the espelettes in pistachio yogurt sauce. Or the veal sweetbrads with sheepmilk dumplings. Or the okroshka with quail eggs."

The conversation went on like this for ever and ever, and I began to feel myself out of place, so I left and went up to Marie's in North Boulder and ordered a hamburger en bun with raw oignon and an old favorite of mine, a traditional sauce de tomate called ketchup. It was mighty satisfying.

Seventeen Hours of Downton Abbey

I've now sometimes zoomed but sometimes plodded through seventeen hours of Downton Abbey. The series is lovely to look at but also at various times lugubrious, false, and shamelessly gimmicky -- but apparently I'm easily seduced. Let me confess:  I fell for it, mostly, but always against my better judgment. Let's face it, the primitive parts of my brain simply overwhelmed my higher critical faculties. I laughed and cried, even when I knew that I was being cheated and manipulated. 

My favorite parts: Mr. Pamuk and his Nelson Rockefeller departure ("he came, and went)," which took me totally by surprise, as did Anna's and Lady Grantham's resourceful disposal of the corpse. Lady Sybil as a nurse, in part because she was doing useful work for the first time in her pampered life, and in part because she looked so fetching in the uniform. My favorte performers -- Maggie Smith, reprising her role in Gosford Park (a much superior great house fiction), and Mr Carson's eyebrows, perpetually raised in shock at modern shenanigans. 

The series is pure, undiluted soap. It is also, as they used to say in Variety, a "costumer." Query -- would I have spent seventeen hourse watching a television program set in a mansion in Dubuque, Iowa, in 2012 in which a soldier returns paralyzed from the wars and miraculously regains his mobility, where terrible culinary disasters occur because the cook almost goes blind, where granny shows her goodwill by losing a flower show, in which the family is traumatized when a daughter runs off with the chauffeur, or where a presumably innocent servant is sentenced to death for the muder of his wayward wife.  I don't think so. I would have said, "cornball soap opera" and clicked back to the NBA. Or to the advertisements for zirconite jewelry. And yet I went on. And on.  And continued on even after Downton Abbey not only jumped the shark but vaulted the great white whale, Moby Dick himself when it introduced into the plot a bout of supposed amnesia. Amnesia! Is there anything soapier.

Or perhaps my reluctant fascination proves that the traditional formulas retain their power. Here's a formula of comedy: "artificial difficulties overcome." In Downton Abbey, Lady Mary and Matthew are destined for one another, and every viewer knows it, even as artificial difficulties are strewn and heaped in their path. Shakespeare could slice through the impediments in two hours traffic on the stage. But here it's seventeen hours until heir and heiress finally figure it out.  And here's another formula of comedy: end it with a feast and a dance. They did, and, sucker that I am, I was elated. Even though I saw the scam coming a mile down the o-so-picturesque road  

Libraries in My Life

I can't remember a time when I wasn't at home in a library. Although very much a schoolyard urchin, passionate about baseball trading cards and punchball (or any kind of game played with a spaldeen), I rarely failed my weekly trip to the storefront Avenue J branch of the BPL, where there were cases upon half-height cases of juvenile and later "young adult" books. I read like a hungry larva, without direction or discrimination. A few years later, when I reached Erasmus Hall, my after-school employment was to shelve books at 75 cents an hour at the BPL branch at McDonald Avenue (accumulating the $900 which paid my full first-year tuition at Cornell). I not only mastered the Dewey Decimal System but also absorbed everything  that the library had to offer in the 612.6 area of knowledge. At college, I was dazzled by McGraw, my first real library.  In my senior year, I was granted a stack pass, and therefore was able to waste many hours not only in aimless browsing, but sitting in long by-passed and superseded libraries-within-the library. I doubt that those most pleasant out-of-the-way nineteenth-century nooks and corners survived modernization, more's the pity. Later, in Cambridge, it was first Widener (where genuine incunabula sat unprotected on the shelves), then Houghton, my first experience with rare books, which, I discovered, are to to be savored not only with the eyes, but with the fingertips and the nose. Thence to Colorado, where, without the resources of a major library, I dutifully read STC books on microfilm -- which made me queasy, or microfiche, which produced genuine nausea. In 1976-77, I spent one day a week at the British Library, studying sometimes in the old circular reading room, where on downpour days buckets were distributed around the room to deal with the leaks, and at other times in the North Library, where I read a big hunk of the perpetually exciting Thomason Tracts. In the early 80s, I was able to enjoy the Huntington in San Marino, where the highlight of the day was lunchtime among the exotic cacti and succulents. Later, at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, I found not only an unequalled trove of books and mss., but also camaraderie with similarly-obsessed specialist. There was always someone who could answer the obscurest of questions, and there were even a few times when I was able to return the favor.  At a cafeteria lunch, once, I asked (faux-naively) "what do we do with the orts?" and everyone at the table knew exactly what I meant -- orts the word that Shakespeare used in Troilus and Cressida to refer to the uneaten portions of a meal. 

Now I've come full circle and the Boulder Public is my three-times-a-week destination. Not great holdings, but through the miracle of an efficient interlibrary loan system, and supplemented by googlebooks and other electronic resources, I can find enough to satisfy my unsteady and dilettante brain. 

Youth and Age -- Tennyson's Ulysses

It wasn't until I reached college that discovered poetry. My comic-book super-hero and baseball-infused brain was until then, poetry-wise, an almost complete tabula rasa. I say "almost" because at eight or nine eight years old I had memorized two great classics of American literature: "Casey at the Bat" and also the poem by Grantland Rice about Tinkers, Evers, and Chance. In additon, I knew the ubiquitous stercoraceous distich the first line of which is "Here I sit, broken-hearted" and a related gnomic verse that begins, "No matter how much you wiggle and dance." Then in 1956 I left Flatbush for higher education and took a course in English Literature. The rest, as they say, is history. It was sonnets and love poems of any kind, and rich luscious liquid poems by Marlowe and Keats and Hopkins that entranced me. The more intellectual poems were too taxing for my immature head. Lycidas, which I now know to be the best poem in the language, was utterly impenetrable for at least a decade, although I admit that I immediately responded to its music: "With nectar pure his oozy locks he laves." 

One of my teachers sagely observed that certain poets and certain poems were for youth, some for maturity, and some for old age. "You may no longer like then what you like now." Which has come to pass. And as an example of poetry for the latter years, he adduced Tennyson's "Ulysses." "This poem may not mean much to you now, but it will some day, if you live long enough." I remember that I was much taken with the touchstone line "Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy" but I thought that "Ulysses" was far too much about a really old guy trying to cheer himself up and I did not see it holding a place in any future I could envision. 

Well, folks, I've now arrived at the so-called golden years, or, more properly, the endgame, or extra innings (which in some sports is called sudden death) and guess what? "Ulysses" has returned, front and center, exactly as was predicted 50+ years ago. It's right on target. 

Tennyson's Ulysses is Homer's adventurer a generation older, kinging it in Ithaca, but bored, unchallenged, and unstimulated. "It little profits that an idle king,/ By this still hearth, among these barren crags,/ Matched with an aged wife, I mete and dole/ Unequal laws unto a savage race,/ That hoard and sleep, and feed,/ And know not me."

To put it vulgarly, Ulysses plans to bust out of the old folks home. He's been a warrior, a hero, and a roving explorer. He "cannot rest from travel." He needs to search "beyond the utmost bound of human thought." He leaves Penelope, and he leaves the government of Ithaca to his bureaucratically-minded  son Telemachus. The last lines of the poem, the leave-taking, are most stirring:  

                           Come, my friends

"Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Though much is taken, much abides,

And though we are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts 

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Yes, I know -- the diction is a little antiquated and artificial, the urge to get away a trifle too vehement. But nevertheless I'm moved by the resilience, the perserverance. Though tear-inducing, the poem is anything but lachrymose. And it's accepting: "that which we are, we are."

It's lately become the fashion to interpret "Ulysses" as a poem about capitalism and imperialism. In this reading, Ulysses is just another white male, off to conquer and colonialize The Alien Other. Or to see it as a poem about male priviliege: he's a bad husband, abandoning the family. Or to conceive the poem as a structure of ironies, in which Ulysses doesn't realize that he undermines his own suppositions. There's a tad of truth in these arguments, as there always is, because Tennyson was caught up in a Victorian striving that he didn't fully or consciously assimilate. But frankly, I feel sorry for readers who can't hear the verve and excitement in Ulysses's expansive view of things. 

Moreover, it turns out that Tennyson was absolutely correct to proclaim that there is a time in life when "not to yield" is an act of daily heroism. 

Fun with Aspirin

I like to think that I have a sense of humor, but I just don't get this one-liner by Rick Santorum's Daddy Warbucks, Foster Friess. "And this contraceptive thing, my gosh, it's so--it's such--inexpensive, you know, back in my days, they used Bayer Aspirin for contraception. The gals put it between their knees and it wasn't that costly." So what's funny here? If the "gals" keep an aspirin between their knees, they can't have sex and therefore can't get pregnant? Is that it? Is that The Joke?

First of all, let's all chip in to send FF a copy of the Kama Sutra (or even an elementary how to do it manual), where he can find some exotic and some extremely obvious positions in which women can get pregnant and still keep their knees together.

But why aspirin? Why Bayer aspirin? What do I not understand? Why an aspirin between the knees rather than, say, a bible?  Or a book by Newt Gingrich? Or a copy of the The Joy of Sex.

Foster Friess says all this aspirin fun took place "back in my day." I would like to say that FF is a year younger than I, and that I a) never heard the joke (if it's a joke) back then, and b) never heard tell of a single woman who used knee-aspirin as a contraceptive. 

I did some internet research on the aspirin-contraceptive connection and discovered that there's a story going around in high schools that taking three aspirin and drinking a Coke before intercourse will prevent conception. Advice to young people: do not bank on it.

Will the Santorum administration, immediately upon taking office in 2013, ban aspirin?   

Amnesia on Film: Spellbound (1945)

In Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945), man suffers traumatic shock, man loses memory, man relives experience and regains memory. It's garden-variety Hollywood amnesia, hortus hollywoodiensis. The amnesia is neither credible nor possible, but it doesn't matter, because it's the world of film, where the most malleable of mental afflictions takes whatever form is convenient for the writer or director or the presiding mogul.

John Ballantine, played by handsome young Gregory Peck is the amnesiac and the questions the movie poses are, when will he recover his memory, how much help he will require from luscious psychoanalyst Ingrid Bergman, and how many times he can he whine "I can't remember" and still get the girl. Bergman has a more complex problem: how to be a smart and also a real woman (always a problem in Hitchcock's wonderful world of misogyny). She makes use of that old dodge, a pair of glasses; when they're off, she's feminine, but when she dons them, she's intelligent. When did Hollywood decided that eyeglasses were a symbol for brains?

But if she has brains, why is she attracted to a man who doesn't know who he is but is convinced that he might be a murderer. It's as though the film itself doesn't take amnesia seriously and treats it as a plot-device rather than the distressing disorder that it would be to an actual sufferer.    

It's a silly but engaging movie, perhaps too much of an advertisement for psychoanalysis -- which it endorses without a shred of skepticism. I suspect that the psychoanalytic themes, which haven't fared at all well these seventy years, will eventually doom the movie to oblivion.

There are some tense echt-Hitchcock moments when it appears that the amnesiac might be dangerous, but Peck and Bergman are just too pretty to be killer and victim. 

De Sternuente, or, Of Sneezing

I enjoy fighting off a sneeze. It takes practice and concentration. When the sneeze urge emerges, without warning, the battle is joined. On the side of the sneeze -- dust or some other foreign particles passing through the nasal hairs, reaching  the nasal mucosa, releasing a flood of histamines which irritate the nerve cells and signal the brain to stimulate the trigeminal network and activate the pharyngeal and tracheal muscles, producing a noisy, 100-mile-an-hour blast of microbes and snot. On the side of restraint -- nothing but enormous personal discipline and the desire not to surrender to animal nature. There are some, who are less committed to mind-over-body, who employ the fingertips to pinch the end of the nose, or, alternatively, who press a knuckle against the philtrum, the infranasal depression which Shakespeare, curiously, called "the valley" -- but frankly, when it comes to resisting sternutation, digital success is only half a loaf. It's far more rewarding to think one's way to a rare victory in the lifelong sneezomachia. Not to sneeze is a triumph of the will.

Which is not to assert that a good sneeze gives no pleasure, if a person would give oneself over to it. It's simply that the sneeze, especially one of the window-rattling variety, is so entirely anarchic and inartistic, which might be why there is so slight a sneeze literature. Although hard to believe, it's a fact that Puck is the only character in all of Shakespeare's plays who deigns to mention the sneeze, and even he weakens its disruptive force by employing the archaism "neeze." The best-known literary sneeze (or, at least, the only one that comes to my mind) occurs in Pope's Rape of the Lock, when Belinda, ravished by Sir Plume's "glittering forfex," throws snuff in the baron's nose. Immediately "with starting tears each eye o'erflows,/ And the high dome re-echoes to his nose." Snuff artificially stimulates sneezing, which may or may not be be why Michael, Tsar of all the Russians, proposed amputating the noses of snuffers. Michael's contemporary, Pope Urban VIII, merely threatened excommunication. Some say that the practice of saying "God bless you" to sneezers originated with Pope Gregory the Great, and has to do with the superstition that the soul leaves the sneezing body, perhaps nasally.

Why is it that no one every says "God bless you" to farters, who are as much in need of divine intervention  as sneezers. Society demands that farting, though shameful (and belching, though comic), should be controlled; sneezing is, except for the most determined, uncontrollable.  

Remembering

Remembering, in a melancholy mood early this winter morning, some of the friends and relations who left the room far too early: Arthur Oberg, Bernice Kliman, Bob Nero, Bob Pois, Curtis Barnes, David Gaillard, David Novarr, Ed Nolan, Eleanor Gottlieb, Eugene Pearlman, Gary Stahl, George Chodorow, Herb Eldridge, Honi Haber, Howard Smokler, Ila Warner, Jane Comstock, Jonathon "Skip" Chase, Myrna Mikelberg Brown, Nancy Hill, Phyllis Eva Goss Murray, Peter Tasch, Renate Wood, Rob McIntosh, Rubin Rabinovitz, Sarah Obermeier, Shirley Johnston, Stephen Evans, Virgil Grillo. 

Good Old Days

As a boy, I naturally assumed that Riis Park was named for Harold (Peewee). Later, I learned that Jacob Riis was a well-known reformer whose 1890 book, How the Other Half Lives, a chronicle of life in New York's slums, shocked  Gilded Age complacency. Nowadays, Riis is known more for his pioneering photography than for his writing.  Here are three of his images: 

The young lady on the left is known to history simply as "Katie." When Riis asked her what she did, she replied, "I scrubs." She was a laundress. She was nine years old.

I've now read a adulatory life of Jacob Riis by Tom Buk-Swienty. I learned that one of the worst New York slums, Mulberry Bend, had a population density of 2,047 per acre. Fifty per cent of Mulberry Bend's children died before their fifth birthday. Every year, about 100 Manhattan infants were found dead in the streets. In addition, another 500 children were abandoned by their parents. I also learned that in 1883, when Cornelius Vanderbilt moved into his new chateau on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 52nd Street, he threw a housewarming ball for 1200 guests. "$155,730 was spent on costumes alone."