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.) 

Number 44 and Number 42

I'm jubilant that, come January 20, we'll once again have a president whose brain waves are dancing, who can bring an English sentence to completion, and who understands that America consists of much more than the Bushian roster of Fortune 500 executives, evangelicals, know-nothings, high school dropouts, gay-bashers, neocon imperialists, dittoheads, gun nuts, military contractors, upward redistributionists, fetus-worshipers and health insurance profiteers.  The new president will abandon the present system of government (trust the market -- capitalism is always right!) and return us to the world of evidence and reason.  Quite the revolution, isn't it?  And speaking of revolutions, the new president, if you haven't heard, is black (or to be more accurate, black-and-white, which is this country still means, in defiance of all logic, black).  How splendid to bury a long-standing racial taboo. Nothing makes me prouder than that we've elected an African-American, Kenyan-Kansan president.  With a brain. 

The election of Barack Obama brought me back to hometown Brooklyn of sixty-one years ago.  I was eight years old on April 15, 1947, when Jackie Robinson "broke the color barrier."  It was Jackie on first base or Jackie running the bases that alerted me to the idea that I lived in a conflict-riven society.  We (family, friends, neighbors, writers for the Brooklyn Eagle) were enthusiastic about Jackie, but there were those reactionaries and bigots in other cities who were convinced that their world had just come to an end. No question but that the advent of Jackie Robinson was the major formative political experience of my early childhood -- even though it was decades before I could fully appreciate its cosmic significance.   

In my mind, and I think in the minds of others of my generation, there's a direct line from Jack Roosevelt Robinson to Barack Hussein Obama. Two smart, skilled performers; two ferocious but very cool competitors.  Two very courageous gentlemen. Two barriers busted all to smithereens. Two milestones in American history.  Never the latter if hadn't hadn't been for the former.    

Jackie's fabulously athletic body fell apart early and he died young of diabetes.  He was born in 1918, and if he had been blessed with longevity, he would have been ninety years old today.   

Wouldn't that have been a pretty picture -- Jackie Robinson, frail, gray, stooped, leaning on his cane, but still in possession of that marvelous knowing glint in his coal black eyes, sitting right there on the platform in front of the United States Capitol, a tear on his cheek while Barack Obama holds up his hand and swears to protect and defend the constitution of the United States of America.  I see it oh so clearly in my mind's eye.  It gladdens my fond old heart. 

Advice for Writers

One of this blague's more inquisitive readers is a talented young journalist who knows that before Vivian de St. Vrain morphed into Dr. Metablog, he had spent a lifetime either bent unproductively over the ball point or wearily pounding on the word-processor.  The young reader has asked this question:  what have decades of practice taught you, Dr. M., about the craft of writing?  And in response, Dr. M. has peered soulwise and discovered -- not a heck of a lot.

Yet in all fairness, the curious reader's question is flattering and deserves a response. And therefore Dr. M. has pondered and pondered and has now refined the drossy deposits that clog his brainal synapses into as much wisdom as feels qualified to dispense. (Let us be clear -- the advice that follows is not meant to be argumentative or prescriptive or know-it-all.  Different writers do things in different ways.  The precepts that are offered here may not apply to all writing;  they describe only the Way of the Metablog.) 

Let us assume that the seeker of advice brings to the table intelligence and information and a point of view -- but needs a little coaching on tactics. Point one:            

Just as I respect the first tenet of real estate -- location, location, location -- so I subscribe to the most important (but often neglected) rule of writing, which is

A)  plot, plot, plot, plot, plot.  The writer must tell a story.  People relish stories, respond to narrative, and are most engaged when they pursue a plot's twists and turns. Just because it's non-fiction, doesn't mean that it cannot access the story-teller's bag of tricks. Fortunately, every piece of prose from the briefest anecdote to the most convoluted intellectual argument can and should be structured as a narrative. In non-fiction, the first rule of plotting is to "establish the enigma."  The enigma need not be a formal question, but it's indisputable that every essay answers either an explicit or an unspoken question.  Is not every writer free to shape that implicit inquiry to his own purposes?  And in the process of delivering an answer, is he not also free to sprinkle clues (some of them red herrings) along the path?  And also at liberty to let his readers dangle until the moment comes to gratify their curiosity -- and while they dangle, to let them endure suspense; suspense that can be intensified by teasing the reader about what's going to happen next?  And every once in a while, to spring a surprise by veering off on an unanticipated or even misleading tangent?  Nor is there anything wrong with the judicious flashback, the flashforward, or the deceptive digression -- tricks of the trade that have won the laurel since the bronze age, even before the time when "establish the enigma" became the watchword. Remember: "all writing is fiction, especially non-fiction." 

Connoisseurs of storytelling know that the most indispensable element in any narrative is climax.  Because climax is so essential, it must be exploited to the full, not just on the universal level but also on the particular, and therefore      

B)  every sentence should achieve climax.  As a general rule, the climax should come in the sentence's last phrase, or better still, in its final climactic word.  The crucial, contributing part of every sentence, the idea which it strives to convey, the very target of its forward motion, should, whenever artistically feasible, come dead last.  When this precept is honored, each sentence becomes an arrow aimed at its own natural target. And it follows as night the day, that every paragraph should also come to climax -- and that the climax of the paragraph should be its own last sentence.  So designed, sentences and paragraphs carry within them both the exciting pressure of forward motion and also coherence of argument. There's a ancillary benefit: when a sentence comes to a climax as it terminates, transitions become less awkward, because the intellectual content (or logic) of sentence B begins just where sentence A left off, and the logic of sentence C starts where B concludes.  Sentences and logic coalesce and become as one.  This maxim, true for sentences, is even more true for paragraphs.  And therefore it follows that a practiced writer, making deft use of climax, can easily 

C)  avoid ungainly mechanical transitions, such as "nevertheless," "moreover, "on the other hand," and even that offensive bit of pop neojargonianism, "having said that"  --  for these are words that constrict the thoroughfare of thought.  Of course there will be times when such connectives usefully signal a switch in direction, but for the most part, transitions between sentences and paragraphs should not be mechanical, i.e. by the use of conjunctive phrases and adverbs, but logical.  Logical transitions need not rely on distracting howevers, however easy and tempting it might be to employ them. The best transitions are transparent or, even better, invisible.  If a writer studies his sentences and is compelled to admit that they are only linked by banausic connectives, then he must judge whether the argument he offers is truly coherent or whether its logical weaknesses have been plastered over with rhetorical flamflammery.  Any writer who wants his prose to be persuasive will profit by examining his connectives.  And while the writer is engaged in such scrutiny, he should also check to see that he has

D)  transferred important concepts from nouns and adjectives into verbs.  And by verbs, I mean verbs of vigor -- not copulatives, passives, or colorless neutral words like seem, appear, make, or do. I mean verbs with punch, or better still, verbs that punch.  In revising a sentence, it's a good idea to determine whether it's the nouns and their modifiers that bear the brunt of the argument.  If they are doing more than their fair share of the labor, then it is mandatory to reconfigure the sentence so that the verbs strain and lift and carry.  A paragraph rich in colorful verbs is active and infectious and engaging;  a paragraph loaded with nouns and modifiers can be clotted and static.  Strong verbs keep things moving. They keep the plot in gear. They add grit and heft.  And so does the related process whereby

E)  generalizations and abstractions are replaced by instances and examples.  Let me provide an example.  A friend, a large man who has always enjoyed his sauce Bearnaise, wrote this sentence to me:  "My doctor--an Asian woman who weighs about fifteen pounds -- has been hectoring me about my reluctance to subsist on twigs and grasses."  What an excellent sentence -- not just because of the colorful verbs ("hector," "subsist"), the ironic faux-hyperbole ("about fifteen pounds") or the fact that the sentence rises to a splendid climax, but because of the specificity of "twigs and grasses."  A lesser writer might have, instead of "subsist on twigs and grasses," employed a bland formula such as "go on a diet" or "become a vegetarian."  But by using the concrete "twigs and grasses" for the abstract "diet" or "vegetarian," my correspondent has not only caught our attention and amused us, but he has created a metaphor.  "Twigs and branches" is specific and visual and memorable.  While these nouns stand for "diet" and "vegetarian," they also stand for whatever penumbra of meaning my friend's readers bring to the interpretation of these words.  In my own case, it's a irresistible vision of a big guy metamorphosed into a large twitchy-nostrilled rabbit nibbling the bark of willows. Such is the paradox of the metaphor: the more specific the word, the more spacious the liberty of interpretation.  Poets know this instinctively; that's why they're poets.  But remember, writers: metaphor is only one of a bucketload of figures of speech.  The astute writer does not limit himself to metaphor alone, but remembers to    

F)  use figures of speech of all kinds: pun, simile, alliteration, oxymoron, parataxis, hyperbole, understatement or litotes, irony, metonymy (where an individual stands for a class), synecdoche (where a part signifies the whole), aposiopesis -- I could go on and on!   It's the figure of speech that keeps things lively, that makes prose sparkle and that make readers, already enthralled with plot and dazzled by recurrent exciting climaxes, fully engage with the written word.  After all, writing has no value unless it attracts and holds the reader.  And so it follows that a writer must, finally, 

G)  know and respect his readership.  You must provide all the information that a reader needs to follow the argument.  Yet at the same time, there's no call to be over-explicit.  Let your readers do some of the work.  Let them make the connections that you only imply.  It will keep them on their toes, make them feel intelligent, and retain their interest.  And while they're so engaged, you can remind yourself of another precept, which is to try to

H)  make syntax and logic work together.  Get them on the same track.  Put the main idea in the main clause, put subordinate ideas in subordinate clauses.  Put the parenthetical idea in a parenthetical clause.  Put parallel ideas in parallel clauses, but when ideas are not parallel, emphasize their incompatibility by using contrasting syntactic structure. Syntax is a tool  Sentences in which logic is chugging onward and syntax is all over the map can be confusing and even impenetrable. Alexander Pope said about poetry, "The sound should be an echo to the sense."  In prose, the syntax should be an echo to the sense; or rather, the sense should be an echo to the syntax; or even better, the syntax and the sense should take each other's hand and dance the same dance.  And finally (and this time the "finally" is not meant to be misleading),

I)  scrutinize every word and see if it is necessary or whether it can either be omitted or made more precise. When in doubt, throw it out.  Or amend it.  It should be a maxim that in good writing, no one ever "walks down the street."  And by "walks down the street," I certainly do not mean "walk down the street."  "Walks down the street" is a metaphor for a colorless expression.  Why should someone walk down the street, when he can totter, or saunter, or sashay, or hurtle, or trot, or swagger, or stagger, or promenade down an avenue, boulevard, lane, causeway, footpath, or promenade?  English overflows with words that are specific, evocative, and suggestive.  Let's have fewer street-walkers and more sidewalk-promenaders.  Keats said the the poet should "load every rift with ore," and so should the writer of non-fiction.  But be careful not to overload;  don't let your writing to slide toward the baroque. And at last

J)   feel perfectly free to ignore the canard that you were taught in grade school, -- that every piece of writing needs a conclusion.  It doesn't.  As a general rule, avoid formal conclusions.

Upper West Side Then and Now

From 1965 to 1969 we lived on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Now we've returned for a month-long visit. In days of yore, we were the busy young parents pushing our baby carriage down Broadway. Now forty years more 'mature,' we step aside as nannies manuever the twins (without question there are both more nannies and more twins) around and past us.

And the eternal West Side -- has it also matured?  Certainly it's a more prosperous neighborhood and a more crowded one. With scores of giant high-rise apartment houses added in the intervening years, it's become even more densely populated. Paradoxically, it's also safer. In the 1960s, received wisdom stated that to wander onto 85th Street or onto Columbus Avenue after dark was to risk death or at least a good mugging. Now the area is peaceful morning, noon and night, and newly-fashionable Columbus Avenue houses dozens of trendy ethnic restaurants. Forty years ago, it was foolish to venture across Central Park to the aristocratic East Side, where, it was rumored, there lived people who were fair-skinned and blond. Some areas of the Park, like The Ramble, were famously dangerous and were visited only by those who were itching for action. Now, single women jog without the least concern. We took advantage of the new freedom by taking frequent jaunts to the row of fabulous museums along Fifth Avenue. (In the 1960s, museums were difficult for West Siders to access but admission was free; today, they're easy to reach but the ticket prices are staggering.) In the good old days, West Side street-corners were gathering points for enterprising drug-dealers. On this visit, I didn't spot a single dealer or a single transaction. Moreover, the neighborhood used to be thick with policemen on patrol; this time, police are scarce and apparently unnecessary.  Why the improvement in public safety?  In a word, money. Only the rich can afford to live on the Upper West Side, and rich people don't need to knock you down and empty your wallet.  They have other fish to fry. 

There's a new feature of transportation: droves of briefcase-bearing suit-wearers are shuttled Wallstreetway in luxurious "private cars."  Meanwhile, the subway is as efficient and as filthy as ever, but nowadays we pay not with tokens but with "metro cards." The New York Times, then 10 cents, is now $1.25; it has fewer columns, a larger font, and poorer writing. More changes: in yesteryear, a man shouting in public was very likely a paranoid schizophrenic; now a noisy talker has a gimmick in his ear and a cell phone and he's doing nothing more lunatic than snapping up undercapitalized mortgages. 

Dogs, here as elsewhere, are horribly indulged. One day we peeked into a "pet exercise" gymnasium and later were amused by a well-appointed van labeled "Pet Limousine." Although there are many more curs, there are fewer piles of canine poopery on the sidewalks; most dog-walkers make use of plastic bags. Thank you, dog-walkers.

Affordable supermarkets have disappeared and there are only specialty food shops where the prices are beyond astronomical. But where do the waitresses, cooks, cleaning ladies, nannies, cashiers, shop girls, bank tellers, kioskers, subway maintenance men, bus drivers, janitors, and policemen shop?  Where, in fact, do they live? Not in the neighborhood; not since the entire West Side went condo.

It's still a polyglot world, but there's much less Spanish and a lot more Russian, Chinese, Hindi and Arabic.

More novelties: there's a Duane Reade (sometimes two) on every street and there's a second crowded Starbucks visible from the Starbucks where you sit poring over your wireless laptop and nursing your gigantico skinny dry vanilla latte. In the 1960s, there were seven movie theaters within walking distance -- including the New Yorker and the Thalia, the mother churches of cinema worship. Now, there are none -- nor even a single dvd rental store. It's all Netflix and downloads.

There's been a phenomenal growth of personal services: not just the barbershops and hairdressers of old, but also whole galaxies of nail care shops. Who could have imagined that in the new millennium, fingernails would become the cornerstone of the economy?  An economy of which I'm not a part; my nail care consists of occasionally biting off a sliver of stray keratin and taking a cosmetic nibble or two at the paronychium. I don't believe I've spent a nickel, lifetime, on my nails, nor do I intend to do so. Nope, no manicures, nor pedicures, nor medicures (what the heck is a medicure?) nor massages nor aromatherapy for me. Nor will I have my ears candled (a process that one medical website calls 'useless and dangerous") or my eyebrows threaded or any part of my body, public or private, waxed.  It appears that every facial feature and every organ has an entire industry dedicated to its hygiene and its remediation.  Is the upper West Side experiencing an outbreak of good health? Or a triumph of narcissism?

One final observation: since we lived here, many expensively-architected fancy-shmancy private schools have appeared. Meanwhile, public schools have been allowed to slide further into poverty. Ugly, concrete block buildings surrounded by chainlink fence and razor wire -- not temples of learning, but prisons. The gap between rich and poor, evident then, has become a chasm. Manhattan is safer and more livable than it was (at least for the properous), but it will not be truly healed until its citizenry moves beyond "private wealth and public squalor."

Antimylarmonofilamentarianism

In 1895, my grandparents wisely left the abysmal, backward Ukraine and struck out for the new world.  Nine years later, my father was born in a cold-water flat in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn.  The date of his birth: December 22, 1904, exactly at the winter solstice. "And they called his name, Emanuel, God with us." If he had been born in the old country, before the Russian authorities imposed legal cognomina upon us, he would have been named Emanuel ben Isaiah -- his father's name appended to his own as a patronymic.

Despite his traditional moniker and his commitment to the essence of Judaism, my father was fiercely hostile to the irrationalities of religion.  His view -- and my grandfather Isaiah's even more strongly -- was that for a thousand years our lineage had been kept in poverty and darkness not just by the czars but also by the rabbis.  In politics, my father and grandfather began as socialists and became New Dealers; in philosophy, they rejected theological doctrine and were among the children of the enlightenment whom Moses Mendelssohn had led to the promised land of evidence and reason.  I doubt that any of my ancestors knew Karl Marx's sentence that "the criticism of religion is the beginning of all criticism," but they acted as if they had absorbed it from the cradle.  My brothers and I were taught to resist religious exclusivity, superstition, and ceremony.   

We now have a religious controversy in our peaceful, progressive, and largely secular western town.  A group of orthodox Jews have petitioned the city council for permission to construct an eruv.  What is an eruv?  It’s a “symbolic boundary that allows orthodox Jews to carry things, including their own children, outside their home during the Sabbath." (Carrying is considered work, and orthodoxy's strict interpretation of religious law prohibits sabbatical labor.)  A latter-day eruv is constructed out of fishing line that is strung on utility poles; curiously, it may incorporate functioning electric and telephone wires.

I know that my forbears detested eruvim and similar expressions of irrational piety.  I myself am not enraged by these useless but harmless superstitions.  Constructing an eruv does not endanger our species; it's not like opposing contraception or prohibiting stem-cell research. An eruv consoles the believers and doesn't much bother the rest of us.  Yet if there is a spirit in the sky, which I very much doubt, I would hope that he would not be so small-minded as to issue ukases about carrying infants on Saturdays; infants should be carried as much as they want, which is just about everywhere and always.  And if any god were so narrow as to promulgate an inside/outside-the-home rule, I would hope that he would be intelligent enough not to be flummoxed by such transparent trickery as hanging mylar filament on poles.   

I have no intuitive conception of god, but I think that the orthodox trivialize our shared longing for transcendence when they sanctify such petty practices.  It would be far more pious for the orthodox to take every nickel spent to appease the Ancient of Days and bestow it on a poor Jewish family from Tashkent.  If these folks can't locate eligible Jews, there are Hondurans and Sudanese a-plenty who deserve their attention. When the orthodox re-direct their enthusiasm and their resources toward truly charitable enterprises, they will honor the universal immigrant experience and they will also practice the very worthy Jewish virtue of compassion.  Constructing an eruv is a foolish waste of time.

Here's my father's view:  "It took us hundreds of years to fight our way out of the ghetto and they want to put themselves back in jail.  If the rabbis had their way," he would say, "Mahler and Bernstein and Gershwin would play accordion in a klezmer band in Bialystok, Einstein would balance the books for a caftan maker in Kiev, and a hundred and fifty Jewish Nobel Prize winners would spend their days davening in a dim synagogue in Vilna."

I think it’s in a Wallace Markfield novel that an old Jewish guy confronts a group of twenty-something Jewish hippies/slackers in Miami Beach.  After a heated discussion, he admonishes them:  "And don't ever be ashamed that you’re Jewish.  It’s enough that I’m ashamed that you’re Jewish."

Which is pretty much how I feel about the eruvistas.  Well, not exactly ashamed.  Embarrassed, perhaps, by their superstitious infatuation with the "dark backward and abysm of time." 

Jane Austen Nude

Today's posting is contributed by the art historian, Alan Saxe-Popette. 

Jane Austen's private life has been thoroughly explored for events of dramatic interest. It is therefore a wonder that there has been such inattention to the portrait, identified some forty years ago, that pictures the nude novelist reclining on a green baize fainting couch.  One would have supposed that writers of fiction and especially film directors would have seized on the opportunities that the portrait presents, especially since the only other surviving representation of Jane Austen is her sister Cassandra's amateurish, unflattering, and essentially asexual sketch.  The Austen nude has faded inexplicably from view.  Older readers will surely remember the mid-1960s flurry of journalistic interest, some of it nasty and anti-feminist -- a cover story in Time ("Did Jane Disrobe") as well as the scandalmongering reportage of Huntley and Brinkley.  But just like the revelations concerning Wordsworth's French mistress and like the notoriety that greeted Edith Wharton's pornographic short story Beatrice Palmato, the brouhaha over the Austen nude quickly evaporated.

The portrait itself, a full-length study in chalk and colored pencils, resides in the Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and his Circle, which is housed in Room 319 of the New York Public Library, where it may be viewed upon request.  Perhaps it is unfortunate that the account of the Austen nude first appeared in the pages of the Keats-Shelley Journal, a publication sponsored by the Pforzheimer.  More scholarly attention might have been paid if the identification of the portrait had been announced in a journal of larger circulation, such as Nineteenth-Century Fiction or Romantic Studies.

The late R. W. Chapman, who knew more about Jane Austen than any scholar of his generation, resisted the idea that the portrait was genuine.  His attack on its authenticity, published as an appendix to the revised edition of the Complete Works of Jane Austen, is scathing, but is rather a consequence of Chapman's Victorian prejudices than of the facts.  Chapman was a traditionalist who believed that young females, even brilliant female novelists, should be, above all, decorous.   His Jane Austen was a bulwark of conservative and hierarchical values and he would certainly not have recognized the modern revisionist conception that situates the novelist in an uneasy alliance with transgression and subversion.  In private, moreover, Chapman was notoriously prudish.  He is reported to have confessed to his great friend Kathleen Tillotson (herself a well-known scholar of English fiction) that "I just don't want to go to my grave thinking that I've looked upon dear Miss Austen's pubic hair."

In the 1960s, there was considerable resistance to the authenticity of the portrait, perhaps because, compared to Cassandra's prim drawing, the new rendering revealed a young woman in full beauty and bloom.  Jane retains the familiar apple cheeks and the dark hair, but her eyes are knowing and forthright rather than subdued, and her long, glossy and loose black locks, secured only by a single cherry-colored ribbon, appear as they were described by Jane Austen's grand-niece, who recalled her aunt having "large dark eyes and a brilliant complexion, and long long black hair down to her knees."  Opinions will of course vary, but many will find that in this portrait, Jane looks somewhat Italian or Gypsy or perhaps even Levantine.  Her expression is eager, her waist slim, her legs short but shapely, and her breasts, despite their surprisingly large aureoles, magnificent.   

Misgivings about the portrait's authenticity survived even until the 1970s.  But then it was established that the chamber in which Austen posed was the drawing room at Steventon that she shared with Cassandra.  There's a useful description in Constance Hill's Jane Austen, Her Homes and Friends (1902).  Hill, it is well known, had access to the Lefroy family papers.  The Lefroys were important connections of the Austens.  It was James Lefroy who wooed Jane and then inexplicably broke off his relationship with her and retired to Ireland.  Jane's brother James Austen's daughter married a Lefroy;  Jane's grand-niece Anna Lefroy, the child of this union, left a remembrance of her great-aunt's sitting room.  "I remember," wrote Anna, "the common looking carpet with its chocolate ground that covered the floor, and some portions of furniture.  A pointed press, with shelves above for books, that stood with its back on the wall next the Bedroom, & opposite the fireplace;  my Aunt Jane's Pianoforte -- & above all, on a table between the windows, above which hung a looking glass, 2 tonbridge-ware work boxes of oval shape, fitted up with ivory barrels containing reels for silk, yard measures, etc."  In the portrait, these two same oval Tunbridge work-boxes appear just to the left and behind Jane Austen's head;  the keyboard of "Aunt Jane's Pianoforte" is in part visible to the right; the oval cheval-glass is exactly as Anna described it.  Moreover, the ingenious young art historian Oksana Sartry, who, using powerful magnifiers, was able to identify the books in the press, discovered not only Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison and Robert Bage's Hermsprong, both novels known to have been much studied by Austen, but also a folio with the words "Volume the Second" inscribed on its spine.  "Volume the Second" was the name that the novelist gave her manuscript collection of early works (which included the unfinished novel, The Watsons).  With this confirmatory evidence, skepticism was at last dispelled.  Austen's remark to her sister Cassandra (reporting on a day spent with James Lefroy), "imagine to yourself everything most profligate and shocking" took on new meaning.  And what did Jane mean when she wrote to her sister, "here I am once more in this Scene of Dissipation & vice, and I begin already to find my Morals corrupted."

What was the exact occasion for the portrait and why was it found among the Lefroy papers?  There are two views.  The first is that Jane sent it to James Lefroy as part of the courtship process:  "here's what you get if you marry me."  This explanation is certainly possible, but the greater likelihood is that it was a "revenge" portrait:  "here's what you have scorned."

That the drawing has sexual content is undeniable, but it is absurd to think, as some have suggested, that Jane Austen would allow herself to be depicted in a post-orgasmic state.  It is true that Jane's skin is rosy and flushed and that her plump nipples are erect, but the placement of her hand just above the tendrils of abundant black hair is traditional and would not seem to indicate that she had pleasured herself.  Those who argue that Jane had recently masturbated seem, frankly, to have surrendered to prurience.  I myself, after the very closest scrutiny, can discover no evidence whatsoever of what one writer has called "a clitoral cleft in arousal."  Jane Austen was bold, but she would never, ever, have exceeded the bounds of modesty.

Why I Hate Machines

So I've been trying, by god, to figure out why the riding mower has been cutting on an angle, the right side leaving the grass higher than the left, and I've been crawling under the machine looking at the cutting deck from all angles and not being able to understand the mechanism except it's obvious that it's not parallel to the ground, and my neighbor Ed was by and he's kind of a genius with machinery which I most definitely am not, and I said to him, Ed would you take look and see why the mower is cutting at an angle and he said, Well, here's one problem your left rear tire is flat which made me feel really dumb because I was so busy trying to understand the suspension system on the deck that I never even looked at the tire and I said, Flat, how can it be flat, I never run it anywhere but over the grass and he said, Well, look right there it's got a thorn in it, A thorn, I said, how can a thorn penetrate a Carlyle Super Tuff tire, and he said, Oh yeah they do that, but I can fix it, I'm busy today but I'll do it tomorrow I have a system you just push through what looks like knitting needle with sticky stuff on the end and pull it out, it will seal it right up, it's a tubeless tire isn't it? and I said Yes it is, and if you could fix it tomorrow that would be great, well next day he took the tire and tried it his way but he couldn't get it to hold air so he says Take it down to PTOs and they'll patch it from the inside, so I put it in the trunk of the car and drove to town and they fixed it and then I put it back on the axle, it has three small washers and one large washer and one of those spring nuts and I started the mower but by god the mower wouldn't move and I thought what the heck is going on here, I put everything back exactly as it came off and it was running just fine when I took it off so what could I possibly be doing wrong, I took the wheel off and put it on again and I still couldn't figure it out so I got in the car and drove over to Ed's, he was cutting wood but he stopped and I said, Ed, what's wrong with that lamb, why do you have him penned up all by himself and he said, You know how the lambs are always butting heads and pushing each other around, well I went out in the field and he was down, couldn't move a bit, so I took him home and I don't know whether his brains are addled or he's really hurt, I thought we'd better have him slaughtered but you can see he's doing better, getting up and eating so we'll hold off a day, and I said Maybe he has a bad back like me, and he said, No, he's too young for a bad back, so I said, Well, maybe he has vertigo like you, which is not all that funny because Ed lost a week to vertigo last June, and he kind of laughed and said, Well, is your mower working now, and I said, Not exactly, the engine's fine and the belt turns but it's not moving frontwards or backwards and he said, How can that be, I'll come over and take a look so later that day he came by and sure enough it wouldn't move, so we took off the wheel again and studied it but I certainly couldn't figure it out and he couldn't either, everything looked good and perfect, we puzzled over it for a while and then he called the John Deere dealer in North Haverhill and the technician said maybe you lost the key when you took off the wheel and Ed said, O yes of course, we must have lost the key, I didn't think of that, and I said What the heck is the key and he said Well, in a lot of these machines the axle is broached which means there's a slot in it and a slot in the wheel and you have to have a key which is just a small piece of metal otherwise the axle will spin but the wheel won't rotate, so we looked all around for the lost key but couldn't find it and then Ed said, Look at your tire they didn't even mount it right, it's out of round, you'd better bring it back in and while you're there check if the key is in the shop somewhere, it might have stuck in the wheel because of the grease, so I took the wheel and put it in the trunk and drove back to PTOs and showed him that the tire was out of round, the owner was embarrassed about the bad job he had done and wouldn't even look me in the eye but he re-mounted the tire and when he finished I said, By the way, you didn't happen to find the key I lost it, and he said I'll look inside but he couldn't find it, so he said I'll make you another one which was nice of him though the key is only at most a 50 cent piece but it saved me from having to go to Napa Auto Parts or drive 30 minutes to North Haverhill to the John Deere dealer, so he made the part it took him only a couple of minutes, he had the stock he just had to cut and file a two inch piece, I brought it home and I put the key in the slot and put the wheel on, I had to use a board for a lever to get the rear of the mower up in the air and it was tricky because I held the board with my right hand and the wheel in the left but I managed alright and then I got on the tractor and started the engine and everything worked perfectly except that the tractor still wouldn't go either forward or backward, I took the wheel off and put it on again, but it still wouldn't work, so I walked over to Ed's and I said, Ed, I can't for the life of me figure it out, I got the key and it fit just perfectly but the machine still doesn't move, and he said It's got to work, it makes perfect sense, I said, Hey look, your lamb looks a lot better but why did you put a hog panel across your driveway, he said It's because of the dog, he's been getting out, tomorrow he's going to be snipped and that will quiet him down a bit, which is a good idea because the dog is far too friendly even to me and I don't particularly like dogs, he's a beagle mix, not as bad as their other dog which was a rescue dog a bulldog, very ugly in my opinion, which also got out and trotted over to the pottery where he was  seen running off with the Murrays' Silkie in his mouth, a Silkie is a fancy chicken, they charged Ed a hundred and sixty dollars for vet bills and mental anguish, the chicken died anyway, so Ed got out his rifle and shot the bulldog and then dug a hole four feet deep, he said that all the way down it was nothing but powder, it's been that dry the last few weeks, anyway Ed came by again and we tried the machine and it wouldn't go forward or backward and I was about to surrender and load up the damn thing and take it back to the dealer when we lifted both back wheels off the ground and suddenly the axle which hadn't been turning even though the belt had been turning started to spin, it must have been something about the gears that didn't mesh properly anyway we put the wheel back on again and I started it up and by god it ran as good as ever but I had wasted a whole day fussing with the mower just because it had picked up a goddamn thorn probably blackberry which is why in brief I hate machines.

Boustrophedonia

I'm fond of a passage in Gulliver's Travels where Jonathan Swift anatomizes Lilliputian writing:  "their manner of Writing is very peculiar, being neither from the Left to the Right, like the Europeans; nor from the Right to the Left, like the Arabians; nor from up to down, like the Chinese;  nor from down to up, like the Cascagians;  but aslant from one Corner of the Paper to the other, like Ladies in England." In one paragraph, Swift manages to nail two of his favorite targets:  "ladies" and "England." 

In good satirical fashion, Dr. S. supplements truth with fancy: the "Cascagians," who write from bottom to top, may sound like the Carpathians or Sarmatians some other trans-Caucasus people, but they don't exist.  It appears that Swift invented them in order to complete his survey of the directions in which writing might flow.  Yet even including the imaginary Cascagians, Swift's list is not comprehensive.  There are other possibilities for writing beside up and down, right and left.       

In boustrophedon (a lovely Greekish word that signifies "turn like an ox plowing"), alternate lines move in opposite directions.  Lines one, three, five and seven and so on proceed from left to right;  lines two, four, six, and eight from right to left.  Ancient languages such as Safaitic were written in boustrophedon;  some Etruscan inscriptions, still undeciphered, follow the same pattern. 

Boustrophedon is not unreasonable, but it's certainly awkward for those who have made a fetish of left to right.  Here's how Shakespeare transforms boustrophedonically.      

It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul,—

!srats etsahc uoy, uoy ot ti eman ton em teL

It is the cause. Yet I'll not shed her blood;

,wons naht sreh fo niks retihw taht racs roN

And smooth as monumental alabaster.

.nem erom yarteb ll'ehs esle, eid tsum ehs teY. 

Survival of the fittest, applying even to scripts, no doubt led to the downfall of boustrophedon. Query:  would our brains be more supple and more imaginative if we had retained this style of writing? Or would we simply be more perplexed?   Or dizzy?  And would we, as a civilization, prize as the peak of wit and award the laurel to the palindrome? 

Incidentally, Rongorongo, the indigenous language of Easter Island, was apparently written in reverse boustrophedon, i.e. bottom to top -- a compositional practice that any satirist, even Swift, would have been delighted to invent.

May 26.  Marion M., associate professor of English at the University of Iowa, writes:  "I'm confused about 'reverse boustrophedon.'  Is it real, or is it a another Dr. Metablog 'invention'?  Is Rongorongo a metablogian Cascagian?  I'm skeptical.  And how does it work?  Can you favor us with a few lines in so-called 'reverse boustrophedon?'

Vivian replies:

Devoutly to be wish'd....

noitammusnoc a siT' .ot rieh si hself tahT

The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks

dne ew yas ot peels a yb dna ;emor oN

And by opposing end them. To die- to sleep-

,selbuort fo aes a tsniaga smra ekat ot  rO

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune

reffus ot dnim eht ni relbon sit' rehtehW                                                      

To be, or not to be- that is the question:

My New Career

Ever since I retired a few years ago, friends and relations have been asking what I intend to do with the rest of my life.  It's time to start on a new career, and after much deliberation, I've decided to fulfill a lifelong dream.  I've always had the soul of a power forward;  now I'm going to make it happen. With this blague entry, I declare my eligibility for the NBA draft.

Let me confess:  I don't expect to be a lottery pick.  There's too much college talent and too many 7-foot Lithuanian teenagers.  High second round is what I aspire too.  I might even have to play a year or two in a European league to sharpen my game -- no problem. 

I figure that to play in the NBA, a guy needs three things:  the game, which I have;  the attitude, which I certainly have; and the body, which I am working on. 

Let me point out that at 5' 10 1/4"  (formerly 5' 10 3/4") I am a full five inches taller than Earl Boykins.  Plus I can get into the air higher than Yao Ming;  I'm a better three point-shooter than Shaquille O'Neal;  and I'm a more consistent at the charity stripe than Ben Wallace.  Those are some big names there.  Not only that, I'm a better interview than anyone in the league past or present--even better than Sir Charles himself.  I'm a team player.  I don't need to play 48 minutes;  I don't need to take the game-winning shot.  On defense, there's not a player in the league whose flopping will be more authentic. 

Because I've lived a more-or-less bookish life, my body is still in tiptop shape.  No gimpy knees or repaired Achilles tendons or fused vertebrae.  True, the A-fib could be a problem down the road, but I don't imagine that the apical hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, of which I have the merest tad, will hold me back in the slightest. 

To the club owners and general managers who are reading this blague entry -- let me point out that I appeal to an entirely different demographic than players now in the league.  Until now, there was no one to be a "spokesman" for Beltone hearing aids or Avodart or AARP.  Untold, untapped commercial opportunities waiting to be seized!!

I've been running this idea by my friends and family for the last few weeks, and I'm sorry to say that there's a lot of ageism and size-ism and negativity out there.  Let's leave that skepticism behind us! I'm ready to roll!  I just have to decide on the appropriate tats.   

(For an update on this subject, read more here.)   

Seventy-two Virgins

It appears to be the case that martyrs of a certain persuasion will be rewarded in the afterlife with the ministrations of seventy-two virgins.  It would take a theologian of extraordinary skill to explain why acts of violence should be rewarded with sexual indulgence.  I raise a far less knotty question: if the aim is bliss, then why virgins?  Why not women of experience and expertise? Benjamin Franklin, the most practical of our Founding Fathers, was dogmatic on this nice point:  shun the callow in favor of women who've been around the block, because "every Knack... by Practice [is] capable of improvement."  I think that B-Frank would agree that there is something about the virgins-for-martyrs deal that's kind of, how shall I say, impractical or counter-intuitive or even kinky.   

Here's a second theological conundrum. What is the reward when the martyr is herself female?  I must presume that she will be blessed with seventy-two male virgins -- if not, there's a very serious afterlife asymmetry.  Not to reward females who give themselves to the cause would be a statement that the culture of religious martyrdom does not support sexual equality, which I can hardly bring myself to believe.  But in the case of female martyrs, the matter of sexual expertise is further exacerbated.  Specifically, of what conceivable value are seventy-two knackless male virgins?  If we postulate that each male virgin is good for between ten and fifteen seconds of actual intercourse, they will be used up at the rate of four to six every minute, which means that on average a martyress would enjoy a sum of only twelve or so minutes of pleasure (setting aside time for re-mounting and repositioning), which is surely insufficient exercise to produce a meaningful let alone heavenly experience.   

Nor will it be all that great for the male virgin at the end of the queue who has to settle for sloppy seventy-seconds.