Dr. Metablog

The Love Song of Gov. Mark Sanford (in his own 'eamailed' [sic] words).

                                                                           -I-

 

You were basking

in what seems a great spot.

 

I am most jealous

of  your salad

under the palm trees.

 

I do not want to raise expectations

about feelings

and things.

 

You are special

and unique

and fabulous

in a whole host of ways.

 

I will write you a longer note

with a few more profound thoughts

tomorrow

or

Wednesday.

 

It won't be worthy of bedside placement.

 

                                                           -II-

 

I went out and ran the excavator with lights until the sun came up.

There is something wonderful

about listening to country music playing in the cab,

the air conditioner running,

the hum of a huge diesel engine in the background

the tranquility that comes with being in a virtual wilderness

of trees and marsh,

the day breaking

and vibrant pink becoming alive in the morning clouds.

And getting to build something with each scoop

of dirt.

 

It is admittedly weird.

 

                                                                    -III-

 

Do you really comprehend

how beautiful your smile is?

Have you been told lately

how warm your eyes, and how they softly glow

with the special nature of your soul?

 

The rarest of all commodities in this world is love.

You already had

a full tank of love

in the emotional bank account.

 

Since our first meeting there in  the wind-swept

somewhat open air

dance spot in Punta del Este,

I felt that you had that same rare attribute.

 

You have a level of sophistication that is so

fitting

with your beauty.

 

You have the ability to give magnificently gentle kisses.

I love the curves of your hips.

I love your tan lines.

 

You have a particular grace and calm that I adore.

In the faded glow of night's light

that we spoke of

at the steakhouse.

 

                                             -IV-

This soul-mate feel

I alluded to

is real.

 

How this lightning strike snuck up on us

I am still not sure.

 

My heart wants to get on a plane tonight to be in your loving arms.

My head says how do we put the genius back in the bottle

 

The bottom line is two fold.

----------------------------------------------------

(Words by Mark Sanford with the assistance of Maria Belen Chapur;   poetastical typography by Vivian de St. Vrain.) 

Latest News from Nightmareville.

I had to dispose of the corpse.  My choice was either to take it to the dump, piece by piece, weekly, or bury it on the property.  Whose body?  Don't know.  How did it get into the freezer?  I put it there, in a black plastic bag, after I killed him.  I gave careful consideration to the pros and cons of each method.  If I took it to the dump, there might be fingerprints or perhaps pieces of paper with my name on them.  And it might take weeks to complete the process.  If I buried it on the land, it would always be here.  Who knows what excavations there might be in the future.  I started to bury it, but just as I put a shovel in the earth, a small, yappy dog started pestering me.  

Time to wake up.  Hey, good deal.  I didn't murder anyone.  I'm clean.  

Les Tits

We drove from DC to Bradford, Vermont.  Not wanting to hazard the I-95 corridor, we veered far to the west, almost to Scranton.  It was a mostly pleasant ride.  Travelers, remember the Taconic State Parkway --  it's underused, neatly landscaped, truck-free.  Along the way, a road sign which said, Lititz, Pennsylvania. 

Lititz.  I know that name.  How?  Have I been there?  No.  Did I have a friend from Lititz?  I searched my mind.  Some famous person come from Lititz?  No.  It bothered me.  Something in my mind connected with Lititz but I can't recall it.  Is it LIT-its?  Luh-TITS?

We arrived here in Bradford, Lititz still puzzling me.  What kind of word is Lititz? Time to fire up the wikipedia.  OK, here it is.  "Lititz was founded my members of the Moravian Church in 1756, and was named after a castle in Bohemia named Litice....  For a century, only Moravians were permitted to live in Lititz, and until the middle 1800s only members of the congregation could own houses.  The lease system was abolished in 1855."  Nice little exclusivist Pennsylvania Dutch town, but still the question lingers  -- how do I know it?

"Lititz is also home to Linden Hall School, the oldest all-girls boarding school in the United States, founded by the Moravians in 1746."  That's an interesting piece of news.  Did I know someone who attended Linden Hall?  No, I don't think so.

I went to sleep, puzzled.  Why is Lititz, PA so familiar to me? 

Next day, we started spring-cleaning the house and ran into distinct signs of recent mouse habitation.  I got out some mousetraps, the kind with the spring that I've been baiting with peanut butter at various catless times these last 50 years.  They're Victor mousetraps.  Printed on each one, in small letters:  "Woodstream Corporation, Lititz, Pennsylvania." 

Mystery solved.  Next time through, perhaps we'll stop at Lititz, check out the church, the school, and the mouse-trap factory. 

 

0h no, not again!

Here's my latest 'personal best.'  It's now seven consecutive airplane trips in which the person next to me has been an obese hulk. The kind of person who spreads his (or her) legs, drips his (or her suet) onto and over my armrest and claims and colonizes territory that I have purchased and which should be inviolate.  

As usual, we've arrived early.  We have the aisle and the middle, and we're hoping that the window will be unoccupied, but we know that to wish so is probably hopeless.  I watch the doorway.  Any number of slim - size 2, size 4 -- young ladies appear, progress down the aisle, glance at my row, and continue on their way.  Small nine-year-old boys whom I would joyously welcome emerge from the doorway.  They too pass by.  Elderly grandmothers, too frail and slight to threaten my space, totter to the rear. Then, finally, here he is, my destiny.  Just my luck once again!  An enormous whale, big enough to block the sun, swims and jiggles me-ward.  Clouds of thick tobacco smoke rise like mist from his clothes.  He pauses. "May I?" he says, unapologetically, shamelessly.  We stand, exit the row, and wait in the aisle while he slowly maneuvers his massive bulk into place, sighs, and crushes his seat. He loosens the seatbelt to maximum girth. By the time I return, he's already claimed the armrest  and his keachy elbow has broken the imaginary plane.  Now he spreads his heroic sumo thighs.  In all fairness, there's no way he could get both legs under his seat, nor any way that his flabby arms could be confined to the space that he has paid for. I huddle to one side, forced to list to the left.  I am majorly pissed but too polite (or inhibited) to utter the vindictive words that form themselves in my brain:  "Hey, buster, next time buy yourself two seats. Or a whole row."  

In my near future:  four-and-a-half hours of undeserved compression. Backache. Headache.

Why little old me?

  

De Pecunia

I've never understood money.  It doesn't do you any good until you spend it, and once you spend it, you don't have it anymore. 

I never understood income, either.  I was employed for most of my life at a frugal, let's call it, state university.  I earned much less money than friends in the "private sector" or the trades, but it didn't seem to matter much.  I never missed a meal, I sent my kids to good colleges, and I enjoyed the security of knowing that I wouldn't be laid off.  Meanwhile, I spent a good hunk of my life reading books and talking about literature with young people.  On the whole, it seemed like a good deal.

I did have some resentments, however, one of which was the disparity in salary between faculty and adminstrators.  If we were all working in the same place, why should the guy who ran the student union, or who managed "public relations," or who lobbied the legislature, or who was in charge of campus parking or admissions, or who coached the linebackers, or who was second assistant vice chancellor for this-or-that receive a salary twice or three times as large as mine?  I never grasped the reason.

But then I discovered that the real money in the University system wasn't in these areas.  It was in managing the University's portfolio.  A few years ago, Harvard Magazine reported that the managers of its endowment were receiving annual salaries of $8,000,000 to $10,000,000 -- or about 100 times what I was pulling down.  

But, it was reported, they earned these phenomenal salaries because they were such financial geniuses -- and their genius could be judged by the enormous growth of the endowment. 

I have to say that I was sceptical.  I remembered one of my father's maxims:  "when the stock market is going up, everybody's a genius."

Then I received a letter from Harvard's President, reporting on the steep decline in the value of the endowment.

In a fit of pique, I wrote to President Faust (her real name).

Dear President Faust:  when the stock market was flying, the managers of Harvard's endowment were geniuses and were paid astonishingly high salaries.  Now that the endowment has lost 30% of its value, do you plan to a) lower the salaries of endowment managers to realistic levels, and b) ask them to recompense the university for their absurd past overcompensation ?    Yours, Vivian de St. Vrain  (Ph.D. 1966) 

I didn't expect answer, but after several months, I received the following letter, which, truth to tell, I regard as rather cold and perfunctory.

Dear Dr. St. Vrain.

Although I cannot comment on matters of employee compensation, I understand and appreciate your concern for Harvard’s wellbeing.  Please be assured that the endowment management remains entirely focused on supporting the University’s most fundamental education and research priorities.

Regards,

Drew Faust
 
Whoa.  Back o' the hand to poor Vivian.

OK, that's it.  In retaliation, I'm striking Harvard out of my will. President Faust will have to find someone else to endow that new administration building.

Medicarese

We're still dealing with the bureaucratic fallout from Grandma's death in January.  One consequence is that we receive impenetrable, inexplicable documents from Medicare every few days.  Here's an opaque paragraph from the latest missive.  Try to judge at what level -- your choices are sixth grade through twelfth grade remedial -- this entirely irrelevant and gratuitous advice is written.   

"Medicare may pay for services that you get while on board a ship within the territorial waters of the United States. In rare cases, Medicare may pay for inpatient hospital, doctor, or ambulance services you get if you are traveling through the territorial waters of Canada without unreasonable delay by the mos (sic) direct route between Alaska and another state when a medical emergency occurs and the Canadian hospital is closer than the nearest American hospital that can treat the emergency.  Medicare won't pay for this service since you didn't meet these requirements." 

It's the transition between the that long snake of a penultimate sentence and the final injunctive sentence that throws me.  I made no request, so why the prohibition:  "you didn't meet these requirements?"  I never claimed to meet them;  in fact, I've never (nor did Grandma) traveled from Alaska to the lower forty-eight by waterway.  What the heck isl Medicare talking about?  Yikes! Double yikes!

And what's with the idiom "get services."  Isn't it "receive services?"  Or better yet, "receive care?"

There is no word more overused in American English than "get, got, gotten." Can we agree to ban all forms of the word "get" from our vocabulary for a year.  Get it out of our collective systems.  Except, of course,  in classic exchanges such as, "Get it?"  "Got it."  "Good."

Is it possible that there are insurance-company moles in the Medicare system?  They've inflltrated the bureaucracy and they cleverly undermine the drive for socialized medicine by generating cascades of dark, bilious, fearful prose.

Told You So, Said I Did

A while back, I complained about Allen Iverson.  Here's what I said:  "he can do everything on the basketball court except win....  When the Nuggets come down the floor, whether Iverson eventually shoots or not, he clings to the ball and dribbles around while the rest of the team stand and watch.  Iverson turns his teammates into spectators....  He isn't going to become a team player;  he's 31 years old and he's averaged 23 shots a game with a .422 shooting percentage for an entire career."  "The Answer," I said, was not the answer.  Not even close.

But things have changed for the Nuggets.  They finally unloaded Iverson -- which would have been blessing enough.  Detroit put him on the shelf -- didn't even play him at the end of the season.  But in exchange the Nuggs received Chauncey Billups, who is everything Iverson is not:  a skilled point guard, an intelligent man, a team player.  A leader, a defender.  It's marvelous how one player can change the complexion of a team.  The Nuggets are now a serious contender.  I like their chances against the Lakers.

Was it a brilliant move by the team owners and management?   I'm not privy to the details, but I'd say, not brilliance -- just plain dumb luck.  I don't think they knew either how bad Iverson was or how good Billups could be.

Bad planning, in any case.  If management could have guessed that the Nuggets would make it to the western conference final, would they have let Marcus Camby and Eduardo Najera slip through their cheapskate fingers a year ago?  No -- they would have made the investment that one makes when a championship is a possibility. The Lakers can put three seven-footers (Bynum, Gasol, Odom) on the floor at the same time -- wouldn't we love it if we could bring in Camby (an all-league defensive player) to help Nene?  And who's going to guard Bryant?  Dahntay Jones will take a crack at it, but wouldn't it be helpful if Najera could have given us some minutes as well -- if not to stop Bryant, at least to bang him around a bit?

And hey, does anyone remember that we gave up not only Andre Miller but two first-round draft picks for 'The Answer'?  We might have had a dynasty in the making if we had played our cards right -- and been willing to pay the freight.  Two first-round picks, I repeat.

So the Nuggs have a chance -- but not the chance they might have had if they'd been a little smarter, a little more imaginative, a little less tightfisted..

P.S 217 Prosopography

After the passage of oh-so-many years, I've become shamelessly curious to know what happened to the friends and classmates who graduated from P. S. 217 in June of 1952. There were about 175 of these golden lads and lasses, and you can see their pictures here.

I know just enough to pique my curiousity. Lester Silberman became a gynecologist, Stephen Lewin an editor, Herman Bressel was career navy, George Coven an entrepreneur, Fred Litto a professor in Brazil, Buddy Sogluizzo a librarian, Melvin Polay a CPA.  Allen Guday emigrated to Israel and Stuart Blickstein to South Carolina.  Nicky Antonucci died in Korea.  But I have no information on 90% of the boys and 100% of the girls.  Hey, guys and gals, check out the pictures and help me track down those missing members of the class of 1952.  Where the heck are you?  What have you been doing since 1952? 

We're all 70 years old;  It's now or never.    

Am I the only one who's curious? 

Etymological Panic

I can't remember what I was dreaming, but I woke up in a state of pure etymological panic -- over the revelation that I didn't know the derivation or meaning of the "welter" part of "welterweight."  How could this be?  Context was not the least help:  lightweight, welterweight, middleweight, light-heavyweight, heavyweight.  Why not the more logical, more consistent "light-middleweight?"

What does "welter" mean?  I was barely awake, but I skimmed my mental resources.  German "welt" -- world.  "Worldweight." Nonsense.  "Welt" as in a wound on the skin caused by a punch.  Possible, but, all boxers raise welts -- that's what boxers do -- not just welterweights.  A possible past tense of "weld."  No, that won't do. Boxers don't weld, or repair, anything. It was now time for a quick check of the mental Shakespeare concordance.  Whoops, a blank.  Mental Milton:  hold on, now, here's something:  the phrase "welter to the parching wind" in Lycidas.  But that particular "welter" means, I had always assumed "roll." In what sense would a welterweight "roll" more than any other size of boxer?  Another dead end.  OK, it's now time to get out of bed, fire up the computer, and check the on-line etymological dictionary. "Welterweight    1832, "heavyweight horseman," later "boxer or wrestler of a certain weight" (1896), from earlier welter "heavyweight horseman or boxer" (1804), possibly from welt (v.) "beat severely" (c.1400)." Now I'm starting to relax;  the panic is beginning to fade.  Nothing more calming than to discover that the internet doesn't have a better answer than I do.

But what the internet knows is intriguing. "Welterweight" used to mean "heavyweight" and then somehow devolved into something less than middleweight (147 pounds, to be exact, in American boxing)?  By what etymological process?  It all sounds arbitrary and inexplicable to me.  What is the root of "welter" in the sense of "heavy?"  To what words is it related.  And when and why did it come to be demoted?  Well, there are, as a well-known epistemologist liked to say, "known unknowns and unknown unknowns."  The history of "welter" is unknown to a power.

On the other hand, the word "welter" standing all by itself is very much known: "to roll or twist," c.1300, from M.Du. or M.L.G. welteren "to roll," from P.Gmc. *waltijanan (cf. O.E. wieltan, O.N. velta, O.H.G. walzan "to turn, revolve," Ger. wälzen "to roll," Goth. waltjan "to roll"), from PIE base *wel- "to turn, revolve")."

But hold on here.  The noun meaning "confused mass" is first recorded 1851.  That's the "welter" in, say, "his mind was a welter of confused etymological ideas."  Could the welterweight welter and the confused mass welter be related -- in the sense that a "welterweight" is neither light nor heavy?  Well, it's a theory, but frankly, not a very good one. 

Besides, it's still the middle of the night, and it's time to return to bed.  The etymology of "welter" remains a mystery, but at least the symptoms of etymological stress have faded. Will sleep come  -- or will I welter in a welter of confused thoughts?    

Modern Radio

For the new downtown apartment, we've purchased a Sonos ZonePlayer. What does this oddly-named machine do?  It simply allows me to capture the signal of radio statios all over the world (through the internet connection), pipe them through the amplifier, and broadcast them on our old but functional speakers.

Quite a step up in standard of living, especially since over-the-air reception in our mountain town is severely compromised by the bumpy terrain

With this new device, I can listen to classical music stations in all the capitols of Europe -- all over the planet, in fact.  I can choose from among 5 or 6 crystal-clear stations dedicated entirely to opera, as well as a few that specialize in the baroque period, or in chamber music, or piano. There are also five Beatles stations, one of them from Moscow!  Several "big band" stations.  An all Grateful Dead specialist beaming directly to me from Connecticut.  An all Bruce, all the time.

I love the "Paris Chanson" station, twenty-four hours a day of Edith Piaf and friends, from Tokyo.

But so far my favorite is the all doo-wop station out of Winter Haven, Florida, which, on demand, has the power to return me to my teen-age years. Just now I heard the Jacks' plaintive, "Why Don't You Write Me," a song which functioned, earlier in my life, as a personal anthem of self-flagellation.  And just at this moment, a glorious version (and one that I didn''t know) of the much-recorded "The Glory of Love."  Aural bliss!  

What's missing?  A good American roots (1920s and 1930s) station.   A station specializing in 1940s and 1950s black gospel -- definitely not "contemporary gospel" -- which, according to AH, the world's expert, is called contemporary because it is both a "con" and "temporary."  An all Gilbert and Sullivan station -- but perhaps that would be a gift too precious to imagine?

But if  there can be eight all-Elvis stations, shouldn't there be at least one that is all-Haydn, all the time?

And yet I've only begun to search.  Who knows what other pleasures are out there in modern radioland?

Some Euphemisms

"Physical pressure" is entirely too vague  -- goodness gracious,  it could refer to something no more serious than a firm handshake --and as a result it's impossible even to guess what's being euphemized.  "Abuse" is similarly hazy. Verbal abuse?  Spousal abuse?  Gosh, it's hard to say. "Harsh methods" and "harsh tactics" offer more of a clue, except that nowadays the word "harsh" can be used semi-comically, as in the teen-age "oh, that's harsh."  You don't want inadvertant comedy when you're inventing prize-winning euphemisms.  But "harsh" has more heft when used in combination with other adjectives, as for example "harsh interrogation methods" and "harsh interrogation techniques." The three-word phrases sound as though they've been translated from the original German, always a plus when language is being corrupted.  "Rough treatment" is not very imaginative. I definitely prefer "abusive treatment," and "abusive techniques." "Coercive interrogation" has a nice ring -- and it leaves a lot of room for the imagination. "Brutal treatment" and "brutal methods of interrogation" -- well, what's the point?.  Once you start using words like "brutal", you might just as well just abandon euphemism altogether and say "torture," for goodness sake.  "Enhanced interrogations" and  "enhanced interrogation techniques" effectively combine euphemism and bureaucratese.  It's a stroke of genius to take the word "enhanced," which ordinarily denotes improvement, and transfer it to the world of thumbscrew and rack. "Enhanced" is much more effective than its alternative "extreme," as in the widely used but colorless "extreme interrogation methods."  My personal favorite is "advanced interrogation techniques," in which the word "advanced," customarily employed to describe progress in civilization, has been thoroughly perverted to refer to primitive, barbaric practices.  "Advanced interrogation techniques."  Now that's what I call a world-class euphemism!   Credit another success to our government and to our journalists.    

Our Glorious Past

William Dean Howells, editor of the Atlantic Monthly and one of the great, insightful novelists of Victorian America, visited the great Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876.  He toured the pavilion in which native American crafts were displayed.  Howells' judgment:  "the red man, as he appears in effigy and in photograph in this collection, is a hideous demon, whose malign traits cannot inspire any emotion softer than abhorrence." 

Am I naive that I continue to be shocked by the barbarities of the past? 

The "Singing Man of Windsor"

In The Second Part of King Henry the Fourth, it is reported that Falstaff once boldly compared the King to a "singing man of Windsor" -- and was punished for doing so.  Who is this "singing man." 

Here we have another unsolved Shakespeare mystery.  The throwaway reference to a "singing man of Windsor" must have tickled Globe audiences, but later playgoers (and scholars) can't guess why. 

The singer owes his shadowy existence to Mistress Quickly, who inserts him into a one of her rambling narratives, the point of which is to claim that Falstaff has promised to marry her.  "Didst thou not swear to me... when the Prince broke thy head for liking his father to a singing man of Windsor...."

Presumptuous indeed for Falstaff to compare his King to any ordinary mortal -- but what, we may ask, was so offensive about the "singing man" that his mere mention provoked the prince to violence?  Misshapen, ugly, drunken, foolish?  There must have been more jeer in the "singing man" than is now obvious. 

The phrase "singing man" was a techical term that described not popular balladeers but professional choristers, usually priests, who were associated with a church or college. It's known that there was a priest of Windsor named Maudelen who resembled Richard II and was deployed as a figurehead in a plot to overthrow the king. Is it possible that Falstaff''s "singing man" referred to Maudelen and therefore challenged the legitimacy of Henry's kingship.  Shakespeare knew this story (it appears in Holinshed's Chronicles), but Maudelen is not known to have been a singer, and so the theory, weak as it is, seems to founder badly. 

More likely is that there was a real, notorious Windsor singer, offensive in some unknown way, who enjoyed local celebrity in the 1590s.  Would Shakespeare insert a real person into the history play?  Well, yes, he does such things. This sequence of Henry plays, nominally set in the early decades of the fifteenth century, is given to anachronism and occasionally introduces one of Shakespeare's contemporaries into the story, perhaps as some sort of private joke.  A "William Visor of Woncote" who was very likely a member of the Visor or Vizard family of Woodmancote in Gloucestershire is mentioned by Shallow's factotum Davy.  And then there's "Clement Perkes a' th' Hill," who as been traced to the Purchas or Perkis family who dwelled on Stinchcombe Hill.  And also the "re-nosed innkeeper of Daventry" (Daventry is a village on the London-Coventry road that Shakspeare no doubt frequented.)  These imagined beings are indulgences on Shakespeare's part that might have amused the knowledgeable but can only puzzle us. The "singing man of Windsor" would be another such bafflement. 

Nick and the Candlestick

Sylvia Plath's "Nick and the Candlestick," a scalpel of a poem, is exasperating in details but crystal clear in "plot" and feeling.  Here it is in its entirety.  Read it through;  don't be alarmed if it seems impenetrable or opaque;  it's not.  Or not entirely so.

I am a miner. The light burns blue.
Waxy stalactites
Drip and thicken, tears

The earthen womb
Exudes from its dead boredom.
Black bat airs

Wrap me, raggy shawls,
Cold homicides.
They weld to me like plums.

Old cave of calcium
Icicles, old echoer.
Even the newts are white,

Those holy Joes.
And the fish, the fish----
Christ! They are panes of ice,

A vice of knives,
A piranha
Religion, drinking

Its first communion out of my live toes.
The candle
Gulps and recovers its small altitude,

Its yellows hearten.
O love, how did you get here?
O embryo

Remembering, even in sleep,
Your crossed position.
The blood blooms clean

In you, ruby.
The pain
You wake to is not yours.

Love, love,
I have hung our cave with roses.
With soft rugs----

The last of Victoriana.
Let the stars
Plummet to their dark address,

Let the mercuric
Atoms that cripple drip
Into the terrible well,

You are the one
Solid the spaces lean on, envious.
You are the baby in the barn.

The story in simple outline: the candlestick-bearing poet enters a dark bedroom in which she finds rugs on the wall, an aquarium, and her sleeping infant -- the "Nick" of  the title.  The poem's import: simply that the world may be dangerous and hostile, but is redeemed by the child.  It's a simple tale in a traditional form ("dramatic monologue") but its language and imagery are startling, intense, even revolutionary.  The poem's governing idea is not unusual, but it is conveyed with magnificent, electric imagery and emotion.    

Some lines are clear, others entirely mysterious. A line-by-line commentary follows.

"I am a miner."  For the purposes of the fiction, the poet bluntly transforms herself into a miner and explorer.  The space into which she enters is a bedroom, which in terms of the metaphor, is cast both as a mine and a cave. What minerals will the miner extractr?  Both the rich and rare (a ruby) and the poisonous (mercury).  

"The light burns blue."  The candle that she carries is nearly extinguished (or, alternatively, there is a gas heater in the room).

"Waxy stalactites drip and thicken."  Candle drippings, in the poet's imagination, become stalactites;  we are in a cave. But she holds a candle as it would be employed in worship.  It is through the agency of the candle that religion (specifically Roman Catholicism) enters the poem. 

"Tears/ The earthen womb/ Exudes from its dead boredom." The room, the mine, the cave, is now figured as a womb.  Tears/womb extends and transforms candle/cave.  The series of terms  ("room" (implied)  "mine," "cave," "womb")  is the metaphorical center of the poem -- the "spaces" that will be evoked in the poem's next to last sentence.  The womb is the previous home of "Nick," who is also the babe of larger meaning in the climax of the poem.  

The phrase "from its dead boredom" is not clear, at least to me.  It's tempting to say that the poet transfers her own emotion onto the wax/stalactite/tear -- so that "the womb is crying just as I am" -- but nevertheless the phrase "dead boredom" is too personal and vague to communicate perspicuously.  The room/cave/womb, at this point in the poem, seems to be infertile ("dead") and unengaging.  But that will change.  .     

"Black bat airs/ Wrap me, raggy shawls,/ Cold homicides."  I understand why the poet encounters bats in her cave, and it makes sense that she defines her own clothes  as a tattered shawl.  It is also clear that the room into which she has entered is dangerous and inhospitable.  The syntax of the sentence is less than clear. Does the phrase "cold homicides" stand in apposition to "airs?"  Who are these "cold homicides?"  A "homicide" can be a murderer or a victim of murder or even an abstraction.  In what sense can a poet be "wrapped" in "cold homicides?" 

"They weld to me like plums."  The least explicable line in the poem.  "They" seems to refer to "black bat airs" but how airs can "weld like plums" is beyond me. In the same way way that plums weld to me?  What way is that?

"Old cave of calcium/ Icicles, old echoer."  Calcium icicles are clearly the stalactites and a cave is certainly a place of echoes.  But "old?  Once again, tired, unproductive, never fertile, but possibly also "old" in the sense of familiar, as in "old friend."

"Even the newts are white,/ Those holy Joes."  The stalactite-dominated cave with its calcium icicles is drained of color.  So too are the newts, or salamanders, which ought to be red. Newts are traditionally associated with fire, but not here. In Christian symbolism, they stand for faith, because, in the legends, they survive the fiery passions of disbelief.  Why are they "holy Joes?"  The only meaning of "holy Joe" with which I am familiar is "military chaplain," which isn't pertinent. But "Joe" is significant, because Joe or Joseph is the absent father of the baby in the barn. But why is there a salamander in the room, unless it lives in some sort of aquarium or terrarium.

"And the fish, the fish---/Christ! They are panes of ice,/ A vice of knives,/A piranha religion, drinking/ Its first communion out of my live toes."  Not just a newt in this room/cave/womb, but fish as well.  Fish, of course, the pre-eminent symbol of Christianity -- the Greek word ixthos, fish, signifying Jesus Christ theos ouk soter (god and saviour).  But these fish, like the salamander, are anything but redemptive.  On the contrary, they stand for a "piranha religion" and a sacrament not of communion but consumption -- with the poet herself, or perhaps only her toes, the sacrifice.

These lines bring to conclusion the first part of the poem, which does not offer any good news.  But then begins the second movement of the poem, which is of a different character.

"The candle/ Gulps and recovers its small altitude,/ Its yellows hearten."  Well, that's encouraging.  The candle was almost extinguished, and with its return comes a bit of color, at last. And perhaps some cheer. 

"O love, how did you get here?/  O embryo/ Remembering, even in sleep,/Your crossed position."  How, my child, did you find yourself in such a cold and inhospitable universe.  The baby is newly arrived, his legs still crossed as they were in the womb -- "crossed," being, of course, an obvious reference to "the cross."

"The blood blooms clean/ In you, ruby."  No original sin in this jewel of a child.

"The pain/ You wake to is not yours."  It is the world's pain to which the innocent child must gradually accommodate -- but not yet, and not in this poem..

"Love, love,/ I have hung our cave with roses./ With soft rugs----/ The last of Victoriana."  The room is  momentarily figured as a better world -- a pre-modern world.  It's comfortable, blooming;  a room in strong contrast to the colorless, cold cave of the first movement of the poem.

"Let the stars/ Plummet to their dark address,/ Let the mercuric/ Atoms that cripple drip
Into the terrible well,"  "Let" has the force of "even if."  Even if the the world ends, even if the earth is polluted and poisoned, the poet exclaims,  

"You are the one/ Solid the spaces lean on, envious." You, Nick, my infant child who makes the world whole, are the "one solid," the only palpable reality, which the spaces (vacuities, caves, rooms, emptinesses of all sort) lean upon.  And finally, at last,

."You are the baby in the barn."  You, my own newborn infant, are the baby in the barn.  Which is to say, you, not Him.  You, not Jesus, are my saviour.  As we've seen, the poem is not traditionally reverent. The baby in the barn is stripped of religious mystery. The poet has already made clear her feeling about Christianity -- it's a "piranha religion."  But the "baby in the barn" -- Jesus in the manger -- that's another thing.  This barn-born baby (barn, not cave) is a universal, trans-religious symbol of rebirth, of hope.  "You are the baby in the barn" invests meaning in Everyinfant.  It repudiates the claim to special importance of any particular child, even the god/man of theology.  The poet rejects Christianity in favor of a universal human and natural relationship (parent-child) that underlies and precedes all religion.   

It's a poem that travels a great distance in a handful of lines.  Brilliant, isn't it?    

Classic Announcerese

NBC NCAA announcer to MSU coach Tom Izzo at the end of last night's game:  "This is one of the great atmospheres I've ever been able to watch."

This Old House

We've left the old place for a slick new condo.

It was a good ol' house.  A 1912 arts and crafts bungalow, probably built right out of the Sears, Roebuck catalog.  When we arrived, in 1973, she had been much abused:  some of her fir woodwork painted, some removed; the stained-glass window and the original prairie-style chandeliers long gone;  the handsome five-paneled living room window (prominent in the old photographs) replaced with an Eisenhower-era "picture window," the original fireplace mantle superseded by a monstrosity in native stone;  the brass registers covered with layers upon layer of paint, all those beautiful, then-fashionable pre-World War I built-in cabinets carted to a dump; the classic oak floors covered with wall-to-wall carpets.  Over the years, little by little, we did what we could for the old lady: insulated her walls and ceilings, replaced the primitive electrical wiring, stripped and refinished the woodwork and the registers, fabricated a "new old" mantle and "new old" bookshelves and cabinets, modernized the heating system, removed the asbestos, and (Boulder is hotter than it was a hundred years) retrofitted it with air-conditioning.  We updated the kitchen -- brought the kitchen into the modern world.  

We left the old dear in far better condition than we found her. Trust me on this. 

And let's not forget the backyard garden.  Where there was once an incoherent jumble of thorny plants, there are now peonies both herbaceous and tree (Including my favorite, the ever-larger Joseph Rocks), irises bearded and Siberian, a variety of multiplying day lilies, climbing roses, a thriving weigela, a Rose of Sharon, an abundance of clematis, and fences draped with thick healthy ivy. I'm sorry to report that I never did get around to replacing the sticky, aggressive bear-berries.

Are we sad to leave?  A little, but only a little.  We did well by the old house, and the house did well by us.  We leave with a good conscience.  But the time has come to move along.  It's only an object, after all;  a machine for living. 

So here we are now, in this bright shiny new apartment.  Floor-to-celing windows.  Fancy new appliances.   A "great room," a "master bedroom."  An elevator.  It took almost a full month to move, but in that month we progressed from the turn of one century to the turn of the next.

And it feels right. It's OK.    

On Aggasiz

Louis Agassiz was, Darwin aside, the nineteenth century's most acclaimed naturalist.  He was the first to speculate about the ice ages and the first to suggest that mastodons and other giant quadrapeds had become extinct as a consequence of the deep freeze in Europe and America.  Agassiz was much celebrated in his lifetime, and at his death, Harvard, where he taught, shut down for a day for his majestic funeral.  James Russell Lowell contributed an eleven-page elegy to the Atlantic. "Seldom, if ever, has the death of a man of science been so deeply felt," reported The Nation.

These details are drawn from Barry Werth's Banquet at Delmonico's (2009) an oddly-titled but informative and accessible history of Darwinism in gilded-age America.

Here's a striking and crowded sentence about Aggasiz, also drawn from Werth's book."The son of a strong-willed assistant pastor to the Protestant congregation of a lakeside village in French-speaking Switzerland who married well, he was his parents' fifth child but the first to survive infancy." 

Agassiz was a therefore a "replacement child" with a vengeance. He "replaced" four lost siblings (but whether male or female Werth does not say).  Imagine his parents' pain; imagine how young Louis must have been cherished and protected but also, possibly, afflicted with the 'guilt of the survivor.'  Or how he must have unconsciously competed with his deceased and therefore perfect brothers and sisters.  And then try to imagine both his mother's suffering and also how his aspiring and apparently devout father might have responded to such an appalling succession of family tragedies. 

Agassiz wa.s America's foremost opponent of evolution.  He rejected natural selection because, he claimed, "Darwinism" led inevitably to "atheism" -- which hasn't turned out to be the case, although I personally can't imagine why not.  Agassiz took his own idiosyncratic route and proselytized for the curious and retrograde doctrine of "polygenism" -- the idea that the various races of man were separately -- and hierarchically -- created.  Agassiz imagined eight different kinds of humans, ranked according to their "cranial capacity" -- Caucasian, Arctic, Mongol, American Indian, Negro, Hottentot, Malay, and Australian (thereby running afoul of both "monogenists" like Darwin and bible-worshippers who acknowledged only one creation -- that of Adam and Eve). For Agassiz, each species was "a thought of God."  An odd path for usually observant scientist.  Agassiz was the favorite intellectual of slaveholders and their apologists. 

Agassiz was also a virulent and odious racist. Here's what he wrote to his mother when he stopped at a hotel in which he was served by black waiters.  "It is impossible to repress the feeling that they are not of the same blood as us. Seeing their black faces with their fat lips and their grimacing teeth, the wool on their heads, their bent knees and elongated hands, their large curved fingernails, and above all the livid colors of their palms, I could not turn my eyes from their face in order to tell them to keep their distance, and when they advanced that hideous hand toward my plate to serve me, I wished that I could leave in order to eat my bread apart rather than dine with such service.  What unhappiness for the white race to have tied its existence so closely with that of the Negroes. God protect us."  And so on, and more, and worse.  I can't remember reading a paragraph that more turned the stomach or that more cried out for psychological analysis.       

I cannot help wondering whether there might not be a connection between Agassiz's status as a replacement child and his embrace of polygenism.  It is possible that he unconsciously thought that he was a special and superior person because he, of all his siblings, was chosen for survival?  And that in the same way, white people were chosen and superior among all the "races" of humankind.  His deeply-held resistance to evidence that persuaded almost all of his fellow naturalists is inexplicable -- unless he clung to the doctrine of special creation for reasons that were fundamentally irrational.  Put it this way:  Agassiz's unusual situation required him to believe that he, and people with whom he could identify, were marked for distinction -- and that all others were inferior.  One of five among the siblings, one of eight among the races.  How else could he free himself of the guilt that he lived and thrived while his apparently less deserving siblings had perished?

Broad-brush cheap pop psychologizing, to be sure -- but let's reserve judgment until we find some time to get ourself to the library and learn a little about this brilliant, disgusting man. 

Another Merchant Mystery

In The Merchant of Venice, as it appears in one up-to-date modern edtion, Portia's husband-to-be Bassanio is attended by a pair of friends named Solanio and Salerio.  Yet In another equally authoritative edition of the play, the friends are named Solanio and Salerino -- and moreover, in this edition, a third and apparently separate character named Salerio enters half-way through the play.  What's going on?  Why the inconsistency?

First some onomastic context.  Shakespeare could be quite casual about the naming of his characters.  In The Second Part of King Henry the Fourth, there are two distinct figures, one named Bardolph and the other, for no good reason, Lord Bardolph. Two separate and very different Jacques complicate As You Like It, while in The Taming of the Shrew, easy-to-confuse Gremio and Grumio have needlessly perplexed generations of readers. Even in The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare twice used the name Balthazar: initially for a servant of Portia and then a second time, gratuitously, as the pseudonym that Portia adopts when she poses as a Paduan lawyer. But nowhere is Shakespeare quite so arbitrary as he is with the names of the two (or is it three?) Sallies.

Solanio, Salarino, and Salerio all inhabited Merchant when it first appeared in the 1600 quarto edition known to scholars as Q1, but whether Shakespeare meant there to be two characters or three is a matter of mystery.  It's possible, in fact, that the playwright changed his mind in the course of writing.  And what would be evidence for Shakespeare's indecision? Scholars have now determined that the first Merchant quarto was set in type by compositors who worked from a manuscript in Shakespeare's own handwriting -- an "autograph" -- that preserved evidence of the writer, quill in hand, in the very thick of invention.  Shakespeare himself, it appears, vacillated about the names by which to denote the Sallies and also about how many of them there were to be. His waffling was reproduced by the compositors who dutifully set what they had in front of them -- first thoughts, re-thinkings, revisions, errors, and all.  No wonder that modern editors have been baffled.

Here's a brief outline of a complicated textual tangle.  In the stage direction with which the play begins, Shakespeare introduces two of the characters in question.  "Enter... Salaryno, and Salanio."   In terms of personality, the pair seem to be conceived as twins or doubles -- both are excessively talkative, long on enthusiasm and short on common sense.  It appears that Shakespeare not only cast the two characters from the same psychological mold, but that he also decided to underline their similarity by giving them near-identical names -- and it from this initial decision the the confusions springs. The trouble begins right there in the play's first scene.  If Shakespeare had retained his original names and followed his customary procedure, he would have assigned Salaryno and Salanio the abbreviated speech headings "Sala." and "Sala." for -- clearly a recipe for disaster.  So before he had entered fifty lines into the scene, the playwright traded in one vowel for another and transformed Salanio into "Sola." It's curious that in the first scene of The Merchant of Venice (as it appears in Q1), Salanio enters but Solanio exits. Oddly enough, the pattern repeats itself when Solanio re-appears in the subsequent scene in which the Sallies and Lorenzo plan Jessica's elopement.  Solanio is once again Salanio in the initial stage direction and Solanio or "Sola." in the speech headings.  Was Shakespeare irresolute or simply forgetful?  

And now Salanio/Solanio's companion, Salarino, also begins to mutate.  When Jessica steals from Shylock's house, she is accompanied by a character who bears the name Salerino -- that is, Salarino/Salaryno rechristened with a medial "e."  We're now a third of the way through the play, and readers have already encountered two characters, one of whom is named Salanio/Solanio and the other Salarino/Salarynol/Salerino. At this point things become truly messy.  Jessica elopes with Lorenzo and they and their co-conspirators flee Venice for Belmont.  Gratiano, first to arrive at the country retreat, greets Lorenzo and his bride Jessica and an accompanying friend.  "But who comes here?" he inquires. "Lorenzo and his infidel?/ What, and my old Venetian friend Salerio?"  Who, we may ask, is this Salerio?  Readers who have been paying attention know that Gratiano doesn't have an "old Venetian friend" Salerio. Instead, he has two old Venetian friends -- Solanio and Salarino.  Is Salerio a new character?  Or, given the whimsicality of Q1's spellings, is he simply a orthographical variant of one of the Sallies with whom readers are already acquainted? 

The action then returns immediately to Venice where a new scene begins with the following stage direction:  "Enter the Iew (i.e. Shylock) and Salerio."  But Salerio, if he's anything more than a spelling error, can't be in both Venice and Belmont at the same time (in fact, he's just been commsssioned to carry a message from country to city).  An edtor vents her frustration:  "Q1's Salerio cannot be right, as he is on the way back to Venice."  Apparently Shakespeare himself was totally befuddled about whom he had named what and where he had sent whom. Certainly, the printers themselves were baffled. The three earliest edtions of The Merchant of Venice each assign a different name to the Sally who remained in Venice in the company of Shylock.  In Q1, as we've just noted, it's Salerio;  in the lightly-edited second quarto (dated 1600, but actually a forgery printed in 1619), he is Salarino, and in the 1623 Folio, it's Solanio.

If Q1 did, as is supposed, follow Shakespeare's manuscript, then the playwright himself made the muddle, but who can say for certain that the confusion wasn't the fault of one of the various scribes, book holders, compositors, or editors through whose hands the manuscript might have passed.  In any case, the snarl wasn't untangled in Shakespeare's time, and it hasn't been sorted out since.  Some editors give two characters, some three;  some name the characters Solanio and Salarino, and some add a Salerio to the mix.  

Why didn't Shakespeare simply create one all-purpose Sally?  Because the duplication makes dramatic sense.  When one of the Sallies attacks Shylock venemously, his bigotry might be dismissed as personal idiosyncrasy, but when two of them gang up, they speak not as individuals but as a chorus that expresses the nasty side of Venetian society.  

But why didn't Shakespeare himself fix the problem? Did he leave it to his actors to work it out on the stage, or was he a big-picture guy indifferent to such details.  Perhaps he did sort it all out in a scribal or subsequent version of the play to which Elizabethan printers never gained access?

In any case, Shakespeare learned a lesson from his adventure with Salerio, Solanio and Salarino.  When he next came to invent characters who were doubles or twins, he took the precaution to give them names that were impossible to confound:  Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.   

A Merchant Mystery

In the middle of The Merchant of Venice, right out of the blue, without warning, the audience is suddenly told that Launcelot the clown has gotten a "Negro" pregnant.  Who is this 'Negro'?  Why haven't we heard of her before?  Why does Shakespeare introduce her into his play?  And why, having invented her, does he precipitously drop her?  A loose end, to be sure.

The pregnancy seems to be unplanned, both by the characters and the author. It occurs at the point in the play when Shylock's runaway daughter Jessica, newly married and newly converted to Christianity, engages her bridegroom Lorenzo and their clown/servant Launcelot in a bit of superficial banter.  Launcelot puts forward the barren jest that Lorenzo is "no good member of the commonwealth," for "in converting Jews to Christianity, [he] raises the price of pork."  Lorenzo veers from the context to reply sharply. "I shall answer that better to the commonwealth that you can the getting up of the Negro's belly. The Moor is with child by you, Launcelot."  Up until this very moment, there had been no mention of a "Moor" or "Negro" (north Africans and sub-Saharan Africans were not always distinguished in the Elizabethan imagination).  It's a sensational, unanticipated accusation and one that Launcelot does not deny. Instead, he attempts to deflect Lorenzo's indignation with clownish wordplay.  The subject is abandoned as precipitously as it was raised and the pregnant Moor vanishes from the play.  Neither Launcelot nor any other character has alluded to a "Negro" before, nor had there even been the slightest hint that Launcelot has been wooing a lady  A perplexed editor simply shrugs his shoulders: "This passage has not been explained."

But where there is no explanation, there is room for conjecture.

The fleeting and mysterious black woman reminds us that The Merchant of Venice explores questions of exogamy. Jewish Jessica elopes with Christian Lorenzo, while the heiress Portia, a native Venetian, is pursued unsuccessfully by Morocco, a "tawny Moor."  When Morocco fails the test that might have won him Portia for his bride, Portia expresses pleasure in words that were acceptable then but are unpleasant now: "Let all of his complexion (i.e. race) choose me so."  So it would seem that one possible explanation of Launcelot's insemination of the Moor is that Shakespeare started a hare that he didn't bother to pursue;  he was sufficiently intrigued by interracial sexual doings to provide Launcelot with a non-white lover, supplementing comedy with farce -- but he lacked either the inclination or the space to develop the relationship such more fully. (The fertile subject of love between the races was one that Shakespeare had previously engaged in Titus Andronicus -- in which Aaron the Moor fathers a child upon Tamora, the queen of the Goths -- and would become the tragic motif of Othello. 

There's a second possible explanation for the presence of the pregnant Moor.  It's known that as originally perormed, the part of the clown Launcelot was played by the much celebrated comedian Will Kemp, whose part Shakespeare might have wanted to sweeten.  Who now can imagine with what facial expressiona or gestures Kemp, in 1596, responded to Lorenzo's charge.  The visual comedy of the past is unrecoverable.  Even though Launcelot's quibble on the homonym Moor/more ("It is much that the Moor should be more than reason...") lies absolutely limp on the modern page, we can guess that it would have been made much of  (who knows how?) by the great comedian for whom it was composed.

So that while Launcelot's getting the Moor pregnant must remain ultimately mysterious, its odd and curious introduction at this juncture of the play very possibly offered its original audience a moment of humor which later readers and playgoers will never understand or appreciate.

Unsatisfying answers I know.  But we must accept the fact that the past is not always explicable.

The Big Seven-Oh

In the course of the Great Downsizing, a long-buried letter emerged from the "archives."  It's from my long-gone father, and was written in December of 1974 on the occasion of his seventieth birthday.  A most fortuitous discovery -- inasmuch as I am now exactly the age that Pop was on the day that he wrote to me.  In his letter, Pop reports that he is taken aback by the person whom he has become.  Who is this guy with the gray hair and the "little paunch" who "takes a day or two to recover from any physical activity" and who "finds events repeating themselves." 

"In my mind," he says, "there is another me, a real me," who looks upon this present self as a "stranger and an interloper."

It appears as though my father's self-image was lagging behind the reality of things

I hadn't remembered reading the letter -- it sat in a box for thirty-five years -- but I'm not surprised by its content.  My father was a strong, athletic, handsome man who didn't easily accept the inevitable changes that come with septuagenarianism.  I vividly remembering him saying, at eighty, "I hate my body." 

I'm with him, but only a part of the way.  Of course I'm dismayed by the decline.  The gray hair, the thickened figure, yes.  The deterioration of memory, certainly.  But I don't share Pop's sense that my real or better self is somewhere in the past. True that I can't jump as high -- yet, paradoxically, I feel more like myself, more comfortable being me now than ever before.  (I'm also more cheerful, on the whole -- although not at nighttime, when i sleep just as badly as ever my father did).  When I look in the mirror, I don't see a face ravaged by age -- I see a face that now looks like it was always destined to look and finally got there.  I have become more like myself, so to speak, every year.  But how long until the me-ness starts to plummet?  It must happen eventually. Time will tell.

My father used to say, "You're entitled to your biblical three score and ten.  But after seventy, you're in extra innings."  To which I would respond, "In some sports, extra innings is known as sudden death." 

But hey, let's not forget that the extra innings are frequently the most exciting part of the game.   

Aunt Harriet's Story

"I was born in 1920 in Bayonne.  I had four older sisters. When I was eleven, my mother died and my father disappeared.  I was talken in by my sister Jennie and her husband Jack.  She was eighteen, he was nineteen.  They raised me.  I graduated from Bayonne High School in 1938.  For years I worked for an insurance company in New York City.  I started at $5 a week.  I lived with Jack and Jennie in Bergenfield.  I took the bus and then a train and then a subway.  One of my giirlfriends was seeing a guy, I can't remember his name, but he had a friend named Dave.  I married Dave in 1942.  He was sent overseas, I didn't see him for three years.  In Oman, he was coming off a ship, they were shooting at them, he was wounded right here, if it had been an inch this way I wouldn't have any children. Dave's father had a business, Broadway Arcade on Broadway and 53rd Street. Dave took over the business. He was a good mechanic.  We had Madame Esmerelda the fortune teller.  Pinball, skiball.  In the basement were pool tables, we sublet the space.  It was a good business. We were famous for our nuts. We had two boys, Steve and Mark.  Steve ran the Arcade after we moved to Florida, Mark is a food chemist.  It's closed now -- the landlord kept raising the rent.  If we had bought the building I'd be rolling in it. Dave died at 68 in 1987. I play mah-jong once a week. I go bowling once a week.  My team is in first place.  I take my sister Sophie with me but she can't see well enough to bowl.  She's ninety-six. So I've been married, it's sixty-seven years.  Hard to believe."

What We Should Have Read in the Fifties: Two Years Before the Mast

It's been a long time since I enjoyed a book as much as Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast, which describes events of 1834-36 and was first published in 1840.  It's a great piece of writing.  I've heard about it since I was a child, but just got around to reading it this week. It's a book that alters my understanding of the early nineteenth century. 

Why did I like it so much.  Let me count the ways.

1.  It's a sensitive work.  Dana's a Boston patrician but instead of going to sea as a junior officer, which he could easily have done, he enlists as a common seaman.  He describes life on board the ship from the seaman's point of view.  I don't know another book that's so honest, so real, and so uncomplaining. Dana later put what he learned to work, becoming an advocate for sailors' rights.  His is not a modern sensibility, but on the whole there's far less of the deplorable racist and sexist assumptions that disfigure the earlier literature and make us cringe for our ancestors.

2. I've always loved sea stories.  Wasn't I transfixed, as a child, by the Bounty and Hornblower stories?  But Dana is leagues ahead.  Two Years  is non-fiction that is more compelling reading than most fiction.  I couldn't put it down.  Besides, I had just read Moby-Dick, a thoroughly romanticized version of life on sea. Melville is poetic, Dana is gritty and detailed.  I'm sorry, but I'm almost always happier in the world of the enlightenment than the world of nineteenth-century romanticism.  Something in the mitochondria, perhaps. 

3.  A large hunk of the book takes place in California, when it was still part of Mexico and there was a shack or two where there's now Santa Barbaraor San Diego or Monterey.  It's an invaluable record of California before the gold rush. Picturesque and enlightening 

4.  It has great characters:  ship captains both competent and cruel, sailors brave and cowardly, as well as the occasional onboard eccentric.  A good account of naval camaraderie.

5.  Language. Some of us enjoy specialized vocabulary of any sort.  This book is a treasure trove of words unfamiliar to a landlubber like me.  "It was clew up and haul down, reef and furl, until we had got her down to close-reefed topsails, double-reefed trysail, and reefed forepenser."  "I threw the downhaul over the windlass, and jumped between the knight-heads out upon the bowsprit.  The crew stood abaft the windlass and hauled the jib down, while we got out upon the weather-side of the jib-boom... the great jib boom flying out to leeward and slatting."  "The cook made us a mess of scouse."  "Dessert was duff."  Sometimes Dana lays it on a bit thick, but it's worth it.  What is a martingale anyway?   Well, "it comprises the parts of the standing rigging which strengthen the bowsprit and jib boom against the force of the head stays"  Clears that up.  

Actual Dialogue Captured in the Wild

Telephone conversation with an eighty-two year old cousin. 

"Evreryone down here, all they ever talk about is their pains, their doctors, their diets, their diseases.  Now I have something to talk about.  For years I went to this doctor, maybe forty years, he's almost as old as I am  Every time I go into see him, with a sore knee or pains in the chest or whatever, he'd look at it, and he'd say, 'what can you expect at your age?  You're lucky to be alive.'  I'd go in with a sore throat.  He'd say, 'Can you swallow. So what it hurts. You're too old to worry.'  If I had a headache, he'd say, 'whatever happens, happens.  You're old, enjoy the day.'  Finally he retired.  He took a job as a dance instructor on a cruise ship. I'm not kidding. He leads exercises or something.  So I went to a younger doctor.  He listens to me breathe, pokes around a bit, puts me in the hospital, and now I have three stents." 

Another Crack at Moby Dick

I read this great so-called classic of American literature once in the '50s and twicein the '60s and I just didn't get it.  I've now re-read it and, after forty-something years of seasoning and experience, I'm still a dissenter. Moby Dick is like opera or ballet -- it's so highly stylized that either you buy into it or you don't.  I don't. To me, Melville is a quite ordinary GrubStreet quill-driver whose every sentence screams at the very top of its lungs, "Look at me, I'm Shakespearean."  I resent Melville's attempt to draft using WS as puller..

Ultimately, it's incompatibility of sensibility.  I'm not a big Romantic guy. Baring the soul isn't enough to keep me happy.  Not for the length of so long and dense a novel. Perhaps for a brief lyric. 

I like stories.  Moby Dick must have the thinnest plot in the history of 800-page novels. Man hunts whale, man finds whale, and (last ten pages) whale wins. 

Charles Reade's formula for the long nineteenth-century novel was "Make them laugh, make them cry, make them wait."  Melville neglects the first two of these maxims.  There's nothing amusing or pathetic about Moby Dick but I'm here to tell you that Melville totally mastered the "make them wait" part.  Totally.

Life Lessons from F. P Schubert

Our local chamber players, the Takacs, performed the Schubert Quintet (D.956). It's a glorious work -- one of the finest in the entire chamber repertoire -- and was brilliantly performed.  It's a turbulent, nervous, tense piece of music. With the last notes, the entire audience rose simultaneously to cheer.  There were fist-pumpings, whistles, "bravos," "yesses," and other spontaneous shouts of pleasure from the octogenarian listeners.  It was a rock and roll moment at Grusin Hall. 

I cheered too, but not so much for the Takacs as for Schubert.  It's so often the case that the interpreters are rewarded while the creator is neglected.  Here's Schubert, dead of poverty and syphilis and mercury poisoning at age 31, never having made a nickel out of his many compositions.  In desperate straits, with only two months to live, Schubert sent his new quintet to the Leipzig publisher H. A. Probst. Probst rejected it, asking instead for something "easily understandable."  The world "does not yet sufficiently and generally understand the peculiar, often ingenious, but perhaps now and then somewhat curious precedures of your mind's creations."  The quintet was first performed in 1850, twenty-two years after Schubert breathed his last.

Is there a moral?  Yes, I think there is.  If you're in the composing or painting or novel-writing business, do it your own way -- not the easy way.  If you lose, you lose.  So what?  If you win, you win big.

Oscar Wilde's Siblings

According to Richard Ellman, whose 680-page extremely- detailed Oscar Wilde (1988) I've now read and enjoyed, Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde came out of more colorful family situation than is generally known.  Oscar's father, the famous eye surgeon Sir William Wilde, brought three children to his marriage with Jane Elgee -- apparently by three different mothers, none of whom he bothered to marry.  The first child, a boy named Henry Wilson, was supported by his father and eventually became a partner in his medical practice.  The girls, Emily and Mary, born two years apart, were adopted by Sir William's older brother "as his wards" and were also acknowledged to be part of Oscar's family.  Emily and Mary were not so fortunate as their older half-brother. "In the course of showing off their ball dresses before a party, one went too close to an open fire, caught her crinoline in the flames, and was terribly burned.  So was her sister, who tried frantically to rescue her.  Their gravestone records that they both died on the same day, 10 November, 1871. Sir Williams's grief was intense, and his groans could be heard outside the house."  The girls were twenty-four and twenty-two years old.  Oscar, born in 1854. was just seventeen at their deaths.  Although he wrote voluminously about his own life, Oscar nowhere records this horrific event. But was he affected? Certainly the knowledge that his father lived a second, darker life seems to have made a contribution to the plot of Dorian Gray -- a novel in which Dorian is in love with a woman of questionable birth.  Matters of legitimacy are raised in two of Wilde's best known plays.  Nevertheless, it seems extraordinary that the tragic deaths of two half-sisters should have left no mark either on Wilde's public or private personality. It might be argued that Wilde's lifelong aim was self-destruction and that his sister's deaths served as a template for his own tragedy -- but such an argument would be weak in evidentiary support.  The sisters and the fire is a terrible tale that may signifiy nothing beyond its own horror.    

Sursum Corda; Brain Surgery

Last night I awoke from troubled sleep with a mysterious and  inexplicable Latin phrase drumming on my agitated brain.  As best I can remember the dream, I had taken a razor to an essay I was writing and had cut out the two words -- and I mean "cut out" as in scissored, not merely deleted -- "sursum corda."  And then there I was with a slip of paper on which the two words were inscribed  -- and now comes the nightmare part -- I couldn't translate the damn phrase.  I went so far (still in the dream!) as to hypothesize a past participle "*sursus" of the verb "surgere" (to rise) -- although, as everyone knows, the proper form would be "surrectus" -- but I still couldn't parse the phrase (*"sursum" or "risen", would be a singular, "corda," "hearts," a plural).  I forced myself out of sleep, distressed that I couldn't make sense out of what my dreamatorium was screaming was an important phrase.  So there I was in the middle of the night, checking the Latin dictionary to discover that "sursum corda" is a versicle in the Roman mass generally translated "lift up your hearts," but, inasmuch as "sursum," I can now attest, is not a participle but an adverb, might more properly come into English as something like "upward your hearts."  OK, now I understand the phrase, but why in the living bejeesus was I a) dreaming in Latin, b) dreaming a part of a mass, and c) slicing the phrase out of some papers of my own composition? 

Enough of that.  Back to bed, back to sleep and then, holy moly, another weird dream.  No more Latin, at least, but now I'm being held responsible for the low rate of pollination of apple trees.  Whose apple trees?  I can't say.  And what is the remedy. Brain surgery -- and on my brain.  The surgeon announces to me (somehow we're in a very official looking operating room) that "we're going to remove the smallest bone in the human body, which is in the hinge to the top of your head."  He takes his scalpel, cuts through my hinge, and flips opens my skull.  Inside the dome (somehow I can observe the interior) right where my brain should be, is a heap of glowing stuff that looks like orange Jell-o.

OK, that's enough.  Time to wake up once again. 

Unanswered questions.  a) why am I responsible for the fruiting of apples?  Blame the lazy bees, for goodness sake.  b) Who says the smallest bone in the body is this imaginary hinge?  The smallest bone is in the inner ear -- the stirpes, I think.  c)  what's with the Jell-o?  Just because I couldn't translate "sursum corda," it therefore follows that my brain is gelatinous?  Some of your most intelligent Wall Street investors and bank presidents couldn't translate sursum corda, and they must be the most accomplished people we have, at least to judge by their annual bonuses.

On the whole, I think that both of these dreams put me in somewhat of a bad light.   Nevertheless, I'm impressed that my unconscious is so gosh-darned creative.  Let's face it - it's a ton more imaginative than my daytime self, which doesn't much concern itself with either the Latin mass or the pollination rates of mali domesticae.  

What the Heck is an Elfskin?

In one modern edition of Shakespeare's The First Part of King Henry the Fourth, Falstaff, in a fit of exuberant swearing, describes Hal as an "eel-skin."  But in another edition, the word is "elfskin."  What's going on?  Only one of these curious words can be "correct."  

Paunchy Falstaff attacks Prince Hal with a string of half-comic, half-offensive epithets:  "you starveling, you elfskin (or eel-skin), you dried neat's tongue, you bulls-pizzle, you stockfish...."  A "starveling" is a person emaciated by hunger, "stockfish" is desiccated cod, and a "bull's pizzle," which an Elizabethan might dry to use as a whip, is self-explanatory.  But "elfskin" or "eelskin?"  "Elfskin" is the original reading, although in actual fact the earliest quarto prints not "elfskin" but "elsskin" where the first "s" is the old-fashioned "long s."  "Elsskin" was as incomprehensible then as now and someone who participated in the making of the 1623 Folio changed the word to "elfskin" on the grounds, it is easy to imagine, that that the "long s" properly signified an "f."  If "elfskin" is a word, then it's a Shakespearean coinage -- the word being otherwise unknown and the skin of elves not a subject of speculation even in an era that took such imaginary beings more seriously than does ours. Is it possible that, considering the context, "elfskin" could carry the meaning "as thin as fairy skin" -- even though elves were generally described as small and stunted rather than diaphonous? 

The alternative, "eel-skin" is the inspiration of Sir Thomas Hanmer, whose edition of Shakespeare's works appeared in 1744.  "Eel-skin" jibes with "stockfish" and "neat's tongue" as an example of Falstaff's fixation on edibles, although it was the eel itself rather than its skin that was the delicacy.  As Hanmer well knew, Shakespeare had used the word "eel-skin" in a not dissimilar context in King John, when Philip the Bastard described his feeble half-brother's skinny arms as "two eel-skins stuffed."

"Elfskin" is therefore the earlier reading, closer by 150 years to William S. himself, but "eel-skin," though it dates only to the mid-eighteenth century, is much more colorful and apposite. It's therefore entirely possible that Hanmer restored Shakespeare's original intention.  Possible, but not proven.    

A Pitiful Reminiscence of Academia

In an earlier life, Dr. M. served as chair of a large academic department at a state university out here in the American west.  On the whole, the teachers that Dr. M. nominally supervised did their work very well.  They were responsible, self-motivated, liked their teaching and reading and writing, and fortunately, did not expect to be lavishly rewarded either in salary or appreciation or assistance.  But there were a few employees who were difficult.  There always are.  Ten per cent of the people take 90% of your time, no matter what the enterprise.

We had very little secretarial staff -- not even enough people to take and relay telephone messages, So (this was before the advent of sophisticated electronic communication), innovative chair that I was, I took some scarce departmental funds and purchased inexpensive, tape-driven answering machines and attached one to each professorial telephone.  The theory was simple:  most of the faculty weren't in their office many hours a week (nor were they paid to be), but the new technology would allow them to come to work, listen to yesterday's telephone calls, and return messages rapidly and efficiently.  Ninety-five per cent of the faculty was happy with the new system.  But a few of them rebelled.  One particularly recalictrant member of the faculty -- let us call him RR -- categorically refused to touch his new machine.  His reasoning:  pushing the button and playing back the tape was not a "professorial responsibilty";  it was mere secretarial work, and in his view  the new system asked that a professor lower himself to the level of staff.  It would be "unprofessional" for him to listen to recorded telephone call, asserted RR..

I should mention that RR was the least distinguished member of our faculty.  He was a poor teacher and his contributions to scholarship lay somewhere between non-existent and negligible, depending on the decade.  You might think that his sense of nobility derived from a ducal or regal grandfather, but not so --he came from a working-class Kansas background, if I remember correctly.

"Professional" is a word about which I have ambivalent feelings. In its best incarnation, when it denotes adherence to an internalized set of responsible and shared values, it's a damn good word and an uplifting concept. But there are many occasions when "professional" is used to camouflage willfulness, laziness, and privilege, and then it is a word of which I am ashamed.  I take the case of RR to be an example of "professional" used in order to justify indolence.  For the rest of my faculty, it was "professional" to make ourselves available to the students whom they state paid us to educate and assist; not for RR.

I think that RR had a peculiar, retrogressive understanding of university life.  He didn't like students or scholarship, but he did enjoy ceremony.  He was the parliamentarian at meetings of the university's governing board.  And every year, at commencement, he was the person who led the procession, bearing the university's mace (or whatever the heck that strange object was).  Not a born teacher, he was a born presider at rituals.  A large, ponderous fellow, he was a terrific mace-bearer -- and a truly crappy colleague. 

I never did find a way to make him use his answering machine.  If I owned the company, I would have fired him in a flash.  But the university likes to separate responsibility from authority, so all I could do was cajole and beseech and shame -- a procedure that proved in his case to be totally without effect.  You can't shame the shameless.     

Inauguration Highs and Lows

I couldn't bear Rick Warren.  I have no tolerance for the unctuosity of preachers, and Rick busted all standing records for unctuosity.  I thought he was entirely too Christian -- if there is one event that should be absolutely ecumenical, it's an inauguration.  Also embarrassing was Elizabeth Alexander's poem -- poetry by the yard, absolutely prosy, undistinguished, predictable, and read in such a pretentious I-am-a-poet-all-hail-poetry-and-me voice that I had to leave the room.  The Perlman-Yo-yo Ma thingy left me cold.  Why not play some proven piece of celebratory music, especially since Aaron Copland had already made a major work out of "simple gifts."  Three cultural low points, as far as I am concerned, but all of them redeemed by Aretha Franklin's hat. Praise to Luke Song, its designer, and all hail the queen of soul, the queen of hats, and also the absolute and utter triumph of undiluted, unparalleled African-American churchladyness. The hat made the whole day worthwhile. 

I also liked Obama's speech and Bush's helicoptering the hell out of there.   And wheel-chair bound Dick, who hurt his back trying to smuggle out boxes of top-secret stuff that he should have left behind.  

Hey, Barack, do you want my advice for 2012?  In a nutshell: less religion, more hats.