Dr. Metablog

Redskins /Injuns/ Native Americans/ Human Beings

In the beginning there was Tonto, the "faithful Indian companion" and there were "renegades" who didn't want to live on the reservation. I was a perfectly naive urban lad, and of course I bought the whole package.

In my defense, I early developed serious qualms at the Saturday westerns where buckskinned redskins were regularly drilled by six-shooters to fall picturesquely from pinnacles or palaminos. My first serious movie, Red River, featured a memorable and even-then-revolting scene in which redskins were remorselessly and shockingly slaughtered.

I'm proud to say that early on I started to identify with the underdogs. Renegades indeed? But some of my sympathy was bought with eroticized stereotypes of women (such as Debra Paget in Broken Arrow). And then there were Rudy York and Allie Reynolds, who were real people. How to reconcile the stereotypes to the facts? Beyond my childhood abilities.

It's astonishing how much of my view of our native cousins was generated by the movies. And by Fenimore Cooper as well, although at this present moment the only clear remembrance of the Leatherstocking saga that remains in my mind is a gruesome scene in which fiendish Mohawk "squaws" torture a white captive.

In school there were maps of territory inhabited by the Navajos and the Iriquois and the Comanche and the Pawnee. All very exotic but I for one had no concept that these names signfied people with lives and identities and histories. P. S. 217 textbooks certainly did not use the word "genocide."

In the 1960s, I read perhaps a hundred "captivity narratives."  And also Theodora Kroeber's very moving biography of Ishi. Exposure to these books opened my mind.

And since then I've visited the cliff dwellings in Mesa Verde and read about the vast city of Cahokia. But my knowledge remains literary, rather than experiential. Although I live in the great west (and just two blocks from Arapahoe Avenue), I've rarely encountered genuine native Americans -- they're mighty scarse in these parts. And the few folks whom I've met who claim Indian "blood" are far blonder than I.

 

 

Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal

I remember that my first and until yesterday sole viewing of Bergman's The Seventh Seal took place in August of 1958 at one of those big old downtown Brooklyn movie palaces. I was in the company of Leigh Anderson and Alice Bruno, who might not remember the day -- or remember me, for that matter.

It was a memorable occasion because Bergman mattered, or so it seemed at the time. Like everyone in my age-cohort, I had grown up on westerns and crime and horror and musicals. I knew what to expect in a movie theatre. A beginning, a middle and an end, for one thing. A resolution. But then along came Fellini and Kurosawa and Bergman and the rules changed. It was exciting and puzzling and like other observant college kids, I was trying to figure it all out. Movies had been Saturday entertainment;  I did not know that thee could be "intellectual."

The Seventh Seal took me by surprise in all kinds of ways. It was episodic and the episodes didn't tie together into a linear narrative. Its emotional range -- from sexy to sordid to brutal to picturesque to ruminative -- was more than I could fathom or follow. It didn't have a Hollywood plot -- no one ended up with the money or the girl.  And then there were these long brooding silent shots in which the point lay in the cinematography (I word I didn't wouldn't learn for twenty years). I had no vocabulary to help me understand what I saw -- I didn't even know the word "allegory", or if I did, I didn't connect it with movies.

Last night, The Seventh Seal came around again, this time not in a palace but right there on the big hdtv.  I was hoping it would still be as magical as it was in the 1950s, but alas, not so. It seemed, I'm sorry to say, stagey and contrived and pretentious. The allegory -- the despairing knight's search for meaning in a godless universe -- came across, last night, as shallow. The discovery that there ain't a god out there does not shock this born and raised atheist, although I do feel for Bergman and all those others whom it cost so dearly to surrender the illusion.   

Hey, Everybody! Look at Me! It's my Birthday! Coming Real Soon!

 At about this time last year, I posted, right here on this blog, pictures of a couple of objects that I thought would make good birthday presents for yours truly. Those of you who are skeptical that I did so can access the link here.

But what a washout -- not one person took the hint. There was not even an inquiry, even though my suggestions were eminently sensible. 

I'm going to try again this year. After all, the economy is picking up, and there's more loose change out there.

So -- friends, relatives, fans of Vivian de St. Vrain, and Vrainites everywhere -- what about a castle in Ireland? There are many for sale, and they're quite reasonably priced, as castles go.

For example, here's Ballindooley, a "starter" Castle in Galway.

Even though it's small, it has undeniable "curb appeal." The realtor claims that it was built toward the end of the 15th century in the Norman style and probably for the DeBurgo family. The realtor also notes that there's "a new stone parapet and that there have been recent repairs to the machicolations" 

Inasmuch as I wouldn't dream of owning a castle where the machicolations were all busted up, I'm happy for the reassurance. The price: a bargain at a mere 950,000 euros. 

Though I wouldn't turn up my nose at Ballindooley, I would certainly prefer Killaghy Castle at Mullinahone in Tipperary.  

It's a better value. The original castle was built, the realtor claims (I haven't seen the documentation) in the first decade of the 13th century, a "long house" was added during Tudor times, and two more buildings were attached during the 18th century. So it's already been updated.

Plus there are two walled gardens with "excellent mature specimen trees."  An ominous note though: "price upon request."

So, loyal readers, it's time for you to chip in your pennies and farthings and join together for one big happy birthday for me.

And please, don't forget that in order for me to care for your gift properly, I'm going to need a bit of an endowment --  which I do not see as much of a problem. Plus furnishings.

And by the way, for those of you who are not "in the know" about castles, a "machicolation" is a "projecting gallery at the top of a castle wall, supported by a row of corbeled arches and having openings in the floor through which stones and boiling liquids could be dropped on attackers." 

I like a castle that says, "everybody welcome." 

Tobacco in My Life

My lifetime tobacco consumption consists of one cigarette. Actually, half of one cigarette. I believe it was a Lucky Strike. Or perhaps an Old Gold. It was certainly one of these:  
It was 1952. My older brother came home from a summer job in the Poconos with a cigarette tucked into the sleeve, like this. So cool, so macho:

That's not my brother, but it might have been (although he drove a Dodge). A pack of Luckies in the shooulder was just about the most glamorous thing I had ever seen.

So I tried one. I stole one of my brother's coffin nails, hid in the cellar, and lit up. 

It was hideous and I was bilious.

I confessed as much to friends who were already secret smokers. The word of advice -- "After you do it for a while, you get over feeling sick."  Not a persuasive argument, at least to me. It seemed stupid.

There were some years there when I faulted myself for not being as adventurous as my peers. Just another example of my conservatism and caution. But now I think that not finishing that cigarette may have been the single wisest act of my otherwise brainless adolescence. If I had smoked that cigarette to the nub, I'd still be fighting the addiction.

I was, in those days, surrounded by smokers. My father smoked an occasional cigar but mostly a pipe, filled with Prince Albert tobacco.  It came in a can something like this one: 

He was forever fussing with his pipe -- knocking it, grinding out the remnants of the previous pipeful, refilling, lighting up. It was quite ritual. But stinky nevertheless.

My mother smoked cigarettes, lots of them, until she came down with the ulcers. I was often sent around the corner to the candy store to buy her a pack of Chesterfields (no problem selling cancer sticks to children in those benighted days). Our house always stunk, especially when friends of my folks would visit. Everyone in their crowd  smoked. Mostly chain-smoked.

No air in our home, just smog.

It's hard to know how tall I would have been, or how intelligent, if I hadn't been raised in a blue haze.

In college, my roommates all smoked. It didn't like it, but I didn't have the courage to complain. In those days, the deck was stacked in favor of the smokers, who had the rightaway. To object was to be fussy, or finicky, or unmasculine. Some of the professors smoked while teaching -- an act which gave the students permission to light up as well. It was nasty. Abstainers had no purchase. 

Then things began to change.  We went from this

and this

 

to this (in 1964):

 

 And then throughout the '70s and '80s, there were the constant revelations about the fakery and lying of the big tobacco companies, who chose profits and destroying lives over honesty and public health.

Nowadays, no smoking in anyone's home, no smoking in buses or planes, no smoking in restaurants, no smoking in government buildings, and no smoking (as of next month) on the mall.

But I'll tell you what still makes me sick. It's a bunch of teen-agers, hanging out in front of the coffee shop, puffing theatrically and addicting themselves -- and subtracting an average of ten years from lives. In the old days, when doctors smoked Camels, or were reputed to do so, there may have been some excuse for smoking;  but now, when the evidence is all in, a kid who starts to smoke is a complete raging fool.

I'm sorry but I have no nostalgia for the great age of cigarettes, though they were, as a Lorillard executive once said, "the perfect product;  make it for a penny, sell it for a dollar, and it's addictive as hell."

Goddesses Excellently Bright

At the Perfect Pear, our local eatery, dinner was less than ambrosial, but halfway through the mashed potatoes, the room was suddenly illuminated by an astonishingly beautiful young woman who arrived (drums, and trumpets, and more trumpets) with bland boyfriend in tow. She was lambent and glowing -- so lovely that I felt the urge to get up and whisper in her ear that her brilliance had refreshed and cheered my entire day.

Of course I did no such thing.  I'm not that kind of guy.  

Later, I fell into a reverie and brought to mind the very few magnificently beautiful women whom I had encountered in my life. Now I don't mean women who are merely or very attractive, of whom there are, thankfully, many; nor women upon whom one's youthful self has lavished an intense passing crush. I mean women who are goddess-beautiful. Women around whose brows flames flicker, and who, when they walk, do not touch their feet to the ground. Here they are:

In Ithaca, Margaret Chow, a sylph or naiad. In Cambridge, the young Aprhodite who sprawled so fetchingly in Widener's periodical room, unconscious of the attention she garnered. At the pottery, Mariel ----- ("Ariel with an M,"she said), a psychologist, who, though already greying, was a perfect Juno. Students: in New York, Ms. ----- Pavony, who glowed for almost an entire silent semester, right up to the precise moment that she contributed to the discussion in the squeaky voice and accent of a 1930s M-G-M telephone operator. In Denver, Ms. {exotic first name] Samuels, who, I'm happy to say, remained silent on the rare days she deigned to come to class. A Hindu fertility goddess, yes -- but perhaps also a daughter of Zion. On the airplane: the radiant Denver actress, who confided to me that her best part "so far" was a Midol commercial. On the bus: the young lady with the electric green eyes. At the Folger: the luscious student from France, as lovely as a young woman can possibly be, who said to me, "Can I ask you a question about Shakespeare? Why do some of the lines stop in the middle of the page and some go right to the margin?" Oh, would that she had not asked!

And while I mused over my small handful of goddesses excellently bright, I remembered that on two separate occasions, forty or fifty years ago, an older gentleman had approached Mrs. Dr. Metablog to say, in these or equivalent words, "thank you for being so beautiful."

At the time, I was taken aback, but now, in my pre-dotage, I fully comprehend.

(It stands to reason that I must also have encountered young men of great beauty, but, try as I will, I can't bring any to mind.)

Senior Bowl

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

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

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

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

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

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

A major breakthrough in golden-years tv.

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

Where Sonia Slept

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More on Sonia Green: here.

Libraries in My Life

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

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

Youth and Age -- Tennyson's Ulysses

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

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

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

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

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

                           Come, my friends

"Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Though much is taken, much abides,

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

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

One equal temper of heroic hearts 

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

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

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

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

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

De Sternuente, or, Of Sneezing

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

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

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

Remembering

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

My Mysterious Uncle Max

Who knows what crimes or dark deeds my black-sheep Uncle Max had committed that made made him such a pariah in our o-so-respectable family, but they must have been something awful. Although he was my father's older brother, his name was never mentioned except with embarrassment or distaste.

Inasmuch as I'm now the "patriarch," it's time to get the family stuff on the record for the benefit of the kids, the grandkids, and the extended mishpucha. So here's all I know about my mysterious uncle. Spoiler alert: it doesn't add up to villainy.

Max was the oldest of the four (Sol, Mollie, and Mannie succeeded him). He would have been born about 1895, just about the time the family escaped the Ukraine for the Lower East Side. He studied at Albany State Teachers College for a while, but I don't think he earned a degree. He lived in Paris during the 1920s and perhaps 1930s. He was invited to but did not attend my parents' wedding. He was divorced (a source of immeasurable shame in those years). My mother said, "Uncle Max is very selfish." There was something shady about the way he made his living, but I don't know the details, except that, for a while, he ghost-wrote doctoral dissertations. He lived with a woman to whom he wasn't married. He died of a heart attack during the 1950s. 

I met him three times. Once, he came to a family gathering, My father wouldn't speak to him. Another time he paid an weekday afternoon call to our East 9 Street home. I found him in the kitchen talking with my mother: "This is your Uncle Max." And then, when I was thirteen, he called and asked if he could take me to the finals of the NCAA basketball tournament at Madison Square Garden. After a lot of discussion and negotiation, I was allowed to meet him at the arena. Max was small, hard of hearing, and very ordinary.  He tried had to be congenial. He told me that he had taken "Robert" as a middle name. Frankly, he seemed no more menacing or odd than any other of my uncle-ry or than other men of his generation. What else do I remember of that evening?  During the game, an errant pass hit off a player's head and bounced into the basket.

I never saw Max again.

And yet my father once confessed to me that he told Max that "if he ever did that again, I'd kill him." My father, mildest of men, threatened someone with violent death?  Because he did what?  Dad wouldn't say.

Here's a spooky story, and I'm going to tell it exactly the way it happened, no embroidery or exaggeration. On the night of my father's funeral, my brothers and I and our wives gathered around the formica kitchen table in the old house. Uncle Max's name came up. I said, "I know the name of the woman who he lived with." "What is it?"  "It's Sarah Clyne, spelled with a C and a Y." There was a Manhattan telephone book (five inches thick and at least two thousand pages). I picked up the book and it fell open. I put my finger on a name. The name was Sarah Clyne. "I said, did you see what happened?  I just opened the book at random and my finger fell on the name Sarah Clyne, Max's lady. It seems like a sign that I should call her."

But I didn't.

Here's the only picture of Max of which I have knowledge. He's with "little grandma." The picture is taken in front of 334 Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn.

Bird, Bigbird, and Little

One high noon, many years ago, when I was myself barely fledged, and was an undergraduate at a "large Eastern university,"  I spotted three well-known members of the humanities faculty on the hunt for lunch. They were Ephim Fogel, David Grossvogel, and Don Kleine. An unforgettable assemblage!  Fogel, Grossvogel and Kleine, I thought -- sounds like the name of a law firm invented by Tom Pynchon.

I had not reflected on this  -- to me  -- amusing incident until this week, when I was reading the bird book that I mentioned in a previous post. There I discovered that the largest known bird was the recently extinct elephant bird, a distant Madagascan cousin of the ostrich, which stood 10 feet tall and tipped the scale at 880 pounds. Its eggs were 3 feet in circumference and would have provided three chicken-size egg omelets for about 55 people. I also learned that the smallest bird is the bee hummingbird which the calipers says is two inches long and which weighs .06 of an ounce. Its egg is the size of a pea, which means than it would take a small flock of hummingbirds many days to make me a decent breakfast. 

Here's a bee hummingbird:

And here's an imaginative reconstruction of the elephant bird, a grossvogel if there ever was one.

 

They are not drawn to scale.

Birthday Gift Suggestions

I've been studying (or more exactly being dazzled by) the illustrations in a magnificent four-pound coffee-table extravaganza called The Horse From Cave Paintings to Modern Art. It was first published in France (Cheval dans l'art) in 2008 and came to me through the Abbeville Press on Varick Street in NYC and also through the generosity of our local public library (it's too expensive to purchase). The history of the horse in art begins with the Chauvet Cave and includes thousands of years of wonders. But I don't write merely to extol the book, however great it be. 

I call it to your attention because I have a birthday coming up soon and any number of my friends and relatives and readers of this blague have been asking me what I would like as a gift. This book has given me a few ideas. At the outset I'd like to say that I'm not really interested in the monumental paintings that fill most of the pages of the book: battle scenes, hunting scenes, royal processions. Not my cup of tea. Besides the fact that they are too large for the condo, most of them are a little on the pretentious side, and frankly. I don't think they'd work with our understated decor.

However, I'd like to suggest that friends, relatives and constant readers might want to pool their pennies and present me with one of the smaller, more discreet objects. 

My first choice:  

It's known as the Chariot of the Sun sculpture. It's bronze with a little bit of gold leaf and was found a hundred years ago in a Danish bog, where it had apparently sat for about 3500 years. It might be a little the worse for wear but I don't mind. At three feet long and two feet high it would sit nicely on the dining room table. No longer bog-bound, it presently resides in the National Museet in Copenhagen but I'm sure the museum would entertain a reasonable offer. I think you can assume that unlike the callous Danes, I would treat the sculpture right and not stick it a swamp somewhere.

If the Chariot of the Sun is unavailable, or the Museet (the phone number for the "butikken" is 33 47 38 30) proves to be sticky to deal with, I have another suggestion. It's not as good, but good enough.

 It's Charlemagne.  A ninth-century bronze equestrian statuette. The picture is misleading because the statuette is only nine inches tall, which makes it just right for a window sill or the top of one of the stereo speakers. The rendering of the emperor himself is a little stiff, and the sword that should be in his right hand is missing, but the horse, imitating Roman models, is pretty damn good. Charlemagne and his horsey are in the Louvre just waiting for an offer. The statuette is so small that it shouldn't cost much.  

And please, friends, no tacky reproductions.

Silly Dreams

In last night's dream, I was back in college anxiously sitting a final exam in a literature course. I remember that the exam was titanically difficult and unnerving but I can recall only one specific question. "Discuss Ernest Hemingway's father's Buddhist leanings." I must say that my dreamatorium was working overtime to come up with that one. Also on the exam: I was presented with pictures and was asked to supply their literary significance. The one I remember was a photograph of a generic urban street with five unoccupied parking spaces. My answer to the question was this: "These spaces were left open when Ernest Hemingway and four of his friends left for the bar in order to get themselves soused." I remember thinking that my answer was pretty damn clever and should get me full marks. I also dreamed a short-answer quiz. In this case I can't recall the questions, but only that I gave as one of my answers the word "praestorium." I have no idea what "praestorium" means, except that it sounds like a portmanteau of the names of two ancient Roman officials (praetor and quaestor) with an attached (and redundant) noun suffix.

It's sad that fifty years after the fact I'm still dreaming about examinations. I'm thankful these recent dreams were foolish rather than nightmarish. Nevertheless, I think it's time to read up on Hemingway, a writer to whom I've clearly paid too little attention this last half-century. You never know when someone's going to ask a hard question about Hemingway or his father.

"Mr. Kripke"

When I was in graduate school (fifty years ago, believe it or not), I enrolled for a course called "Modern American Poetry." In the unthrilling days of yesteryear, "modern" still meant the generation of Eliot and Pound. This particular course, however, was so up-to-the moment that it might have been called "last month's American poetry." Some of the poets whom we studied turned out to be mere flashes in the pan, and none of them, I think, ever came close to Yeats or Frost. Nevertheless, it was good to know about Olson and Hall and Bly and Snodgrass and Levertov. There were major omissions to the curriculum: Sylvia Plath had not yet flashed across the horizon, and Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Corso and Duncan were far too rude to have been invited to this particular party.

Our instructor was a genial man named John Lincoln Sweeney. Although he was not a bristling-with-bibliography kind of academic celebrity, he knew everything about the subject and was famous as a supporter of poets and artists. I knew that he was "different" -- even my callow unsophisticated eye noticed the elegant bespoke suits and the aristocratic mien. At the Woodberry Poetry Library in Lamont, Sweeney was listed as "curator" but I have not doubt that he was also patron. Woodberry collected not only books but also records and audiotapes and films of poetry readings. It was a spectacular resource. There was a rumor that there were poetry gatherings at  Sweeney's mansion on Beacon Street, across the river, but I was never invited. Why would I have been?

Here's a photograph of Jack and Maire Sweeney:   

Sweeney's letters are now housed in the Trinity College, Dublin Library. "Correspondents include Conrad Aiken, William Alfred, Padraic Colum, e.e. cummings, Richard Eberhart, Leon Edel, T.S. Eliot, Robert Fitzgerald, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, Thomas Kinsella, Philip Larkin, Marianne Moore, Edwin and Willa Muir, Wallace Stevens, and Richard Wilbur." The paintings (Picasso, Modigliani, Matisse) were bequeathed to the National Gallery of Ireland.  

There were about twenty students in "Modern American Poetry." Nineteen of them were regular; one was irregular. Whenever "Mr. Kripke," whom I remember as an exceedingly scruffy young fellow, signalled that he wanted to participate in the conversation, time stopped. Both the instructor and my classmates treated Mr. Kripke, who spoke in halting, awkward, and oracular tones, with extraordinary deference. "What's the deal?" I asked, privately.  "He's supposed to be very smart," I was told. I myself didn't understand a word that Mr. Kripke said during the entire semester. Not a single word. When I don't understand, it's hard for me to tell whether the speaker is spouting hot air, or I'm just not smart enough.

"Mr. Kripke" dropped from my consciousness. But just the other day, I noticed an advertisement in the NYRB for a colloquium honoring the achievement of Saul Kripke, Distinguished Professor at Princeton and at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Here's the scoop: according to wikipedia, "a recent poll conducted among philosophers ranked Saul Kripke among the top ten most important philosophers of the past 200 years." Top ten?  This is no trival praise. No wonder everyone stopped to listen. It was like having Michael Jordan in your gym class.

Kripke was apparently a prodigy who made important contributions to modal logic, whatever that is, while still in his teens. For example:

A Kripke model is a triple , where is a Kripke frame, and is a relation between nodes of W and modal formulas, such that:

• if and only if ,
• if and only if or ,
• if and only if .

Which. frankly  I never doubted.

Mr. Kripke had a couple of branches of logic (and mathematics) named after him before he entered college. No wonder I didn't understand (and still wouldn't) what he was struggling to say. The most recent philosopher I can understand is John Locke, and then only the easy parts.  

In retrospect, that class in poetry had more drama than I gave it credit for. Here was John Sweeney, civilized and be-boutonniered, acquaintance of Yeats, friend to every important poet in America. And there was Saul Kripke, not only a mathematical and philosophical genius but also the son of "the only conservative rabbi in Omaha, Nebraska." 

And then there was me.   

Dog-faced Man

Here's a sad childhood memory.

Just around the corner from us, on Ditmas Avenue, there lived the ugliest man I've ever seen in my entire life. He was a small, always solitary old man. He was not deformed, just plain ugly.  His nose and mouth stuck way out, but his chin receded; he had very long canine teeth and the world's saddest eyes. He walked the ugliest little dog. 

I confess that when we passed in the street, I looked away, even though I was fascinated enough by his repulsion to steal a surreptitious backward glance. I imagine that everyone else averted their eyes, and that the poor fellow lived in a world not only without friends, but without eye contact.

Later I learned that he made his living my exhibiting himself at a Coney Island freak show.  He was the "Dog-Faced Man."

This was the 1950s.  I hope that freak shows are a thing of the past. 

Downtown Bradford

When we arrived in Bradford, Vermont in 1967 (during the troubled waning years of the LBJ presidency), I remarked to Mrs. Dr. M., "this "downtown" looks like it hasn't changed a bit since the 1920s." The downtown was one block long then; it's no more extensive now, forty-four years later. And not much different.

We sat in the window of the Local Buzz, one of our newer enterprises (real coffee comes to Bradford, at last!) and watched the folks go by. Couples, the guy way too skinny and the lady way too fat. Young blonde guys, tattooed, trying desperately to grow their scruffy beards. An occasional suit -- a lawyer or insurance agent. Tourists in campers, looking mighty skeptical. An occasional gaggle of bicyclists, coming from somewhere, going elsewhere, all a-helmeted and bespandexed. But very few guys in "farmer greens."    

Nor have there been any new buildings to compromise the 1920s time-capsule. Stores have changed owners and purposes, of course. Gove (pronounced as in rove, not as in glove) and Bancroft was an independent pharmacy (the kind of place that had big old colored bottles in the window) that disappeared must be a quarter of a century ago and has been superseded by the new Kinney's out at the four corners (where also resides Orange County's only four-way traffic light). Similarly, Gove and Morrill, an independent hardware store, has been replaced with a shiny new Aubuchon (a northeastern chain). The old Gove and Morrill, three decades dead, was a great place of a young fellow to purchase his hardware needs. Lester Wakefield and Bart Morrill knew everything and gladly would they teach. They also had a bit of a machine shop in the basement and would drill out that rusted part for you, no charge. Their shop was a shrine of Yankee frugality. The Aubuchon employs what looks like minimum wage help -- the kids know how to run the Visa through the slot, but they know little else, so you're pretty much on your own. I'm sure that Kinney's and Aubuchon make a better profit than the stores that they replaced.

And speaking of chains, we now have a Subway, which, I must be the most impoverished looking Subway in existence. Other eateries: Chan's House (the poorest, least authentic Chinese restaurant in the entire occident).  And another house, the House of Pizza, which replaced, many years ago, The Chimes (a semi-glorified diner). In between the Chimes and the pizza place, there was for a few controversial years at that corner location a breakfast shop that was run by very very young, robotic Stepford girls, reputed to be members of the harem of some charismatic off-brand far right Christian cultist. The food was marvelously inexpensive but the place was o so creepy.  

There's a second-hand bookshop, Booked Solid, that is loaded with romances and "genre" paperbacks; trade books that find their way to the shelves are accidental tourists.

Two banks where there used to be just one.

The Paradise Cafe, Bradford's first venture into culinary artistry, lasted a year or two but then devolved into the Richardson Insurance Agency, though it is my impression that Kermit Richardson himself has long since collected on his policy. Taylor-Palmer insurance is  still in the same white clapboard house that it inhabited half a century ago, and Hod Palmer, after a brief foray into gourmet cooking, has been restored to the world of his fathers. The Colatina, an out-of-the-can red-sauce Italian restaurant, is still in business, still enticing those Dartmouth boys to drive half an hour for some north of Hanover pizza. Perry Oil, which dominates its side of the street, is still going strong, still filling those propane tanks, and still run by genuine Perrys. Hill's, a kind of old-fashioned notion shop, like a Woolworth's  -- how come it hasn't been obliterated by a Target or a K-Mart? The Bradford Public Library, now reroofed, is a handsome Victorian Gothic building, but lacks books.   

"All is flux," Heraclitus used to say. But then he'd never been to downtown Bradford.    

Things I'll Miss

I'm reconciled to the idea that death comes to all, but nevertheless, there are a few earthly things that I'm genuinely going to miss.

Is there anything more wonderful, when you've been out early in the morning in the rain or in a heavy dew, and your feet are wet and cold, than returning home and putting on clean, dry socks, especially those excellent white cotton ones that they sell at Costco?  Definitely a moment that makes life worth living. And also: purchasing, opening and playing a new music cd -- preferably one that you've thought about acquiring for a long time. Another: watching young healthy athletic people run down the street, especially women with long ponytails a-bobbing. Also: the perennially pleasurably sound of a bat (wooden, not aluminum) connecting with a high, hard one. Rum raisin ice cream. A well-made glazed donut. The sight of the first soft, red peony of the year just as it breaks the ground. The waxy pink flower of the tamarack, always a surprise. My Swiss Felco #2 hand pruner (which our cousins across the sea call it a secateur), a friend for many seasons, which fits my hand perfectly and which if you give it an occasional oiling and sharpening, cuts absolutely true. The sound of rain on an uninsulated metal roof -- and also like the clickety-clack and pinging of the roof on a cloudy day when the sun comes in and out and the roof alternately expands and contracts -- it's an all-percussion symphony. The old downtown of an old city that I'm visiting for the first time. A one-year-old boy or girl learning to walk, at the stage when the strides are of unequal and inconsistent length, the child hovered over by admiring young parents, she with a hand outstretched, he recording the moment on tape; the child the center of the universe, thoroughly doted upon, as is exactly appropriate. A deep, luxurious weekend afternoon nap, so profound that when you wake up you don't know, for five seconds, where you are or what day it is. A sleep so deep that somnus imago mortis kicks in;  nothing more satisfying: the kind of thing that makes a guy want to live a few more years.

More on Lola's Language

Lola and I brought some windfall apples to the horses. The horses are Morgans, very friendly, but intimidatingly large to a 22-month-old child. We stood on one side of the gate, the horses trotted up to the other side as soon as we announced our presence. They like to lean over the fence and look in our pockets for apples.

Lola said, and I quote, "Back Mommy." I contrued this opaque construction to mean "I believe that I would now like to rejoin my mother back at the house as quickly as possible."

Lola is succinct, but she sure knows how to make herself understood. 

Songs My Mother Sang

My mother had a pretty fair soprano and as a young adult performed in amateur musicals. She sang in that high, quavering style that I associate with artists of the 1920s and 1930s, such as Ruth Etting ("America's Radio Sweetheart"). I remember that sometimes, when she wasn't busy putting the laundry through the wringer or scrubbing the sink or dusting under the beds, she'd sit at the old Hardman piano and sing the songs of her youth. She sang tin pan alley songs, Gilbert and Sullivan ballads, so-called "Negro spirituals," and also what I now know to be Victorian parlor songs. Her taste was formed in the earlier part of the century (she was born in 1905) and had as far as I can tell ceased to change after about 1935 with the arrival of my older brother and diapers. My mother sang, for example, 1919's "Look for the Silver Lining": "A heart, full of joy and gladness,/ Will always banish sadness and strife./So always look for the silver lining,/ And try to find the sunny side of life." She sang "I've been Working on the Railroad" (first published in 1894) with the refrain "Someone's in the kitchen with Dinah/ Someone's in the kitchen I know/ Someone's in the kitchen with Dinah/Strummin' on the old banjo."  Neither she nor I knew that "Dinah" was a generic name for a female slave, nor did we speculate about what the heck was going on in that kitchen. She sang "Oh, the old gray mare, she ain't what she used to be,/Many long years ago."  She sang a version of what I can now identify as Ed Haley's 1894 hit, "The Fountain in the Park", with the familiar lyric "While strolling in the park one day,/ In the merry, merry month of May,/ I was taken by surprise/ by a pair of roguish eyes..."  Sorry, but I can't remember the rest. She sang, "Shine on harvest moon/ Up in the sky."  And also "Aint She Sweet." And "Home Sweet Home" ("Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam,/ Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home").

But the song that stands most vividly in my memory was "Bill" from Showboat. It's a lovely song, but I took it wrong. When my mother sang "I used to think that I would discover/ The perfect lover some day," I  decided that she was finding fault with my father, to whom I was most loyal. In my mind, my father was noble and manly and intelligent, and I resented her singing about "Bill, who's not the type at all/ You'd meet him on the street and never notice him." The refrain was particularly painful to my seven-year-old self: "And I can't explain,/ It's surely not his brain that makes me thrill./ I love him because he's I don't know,/Because he's just my Bill."

I've since learned about fiction, and make-believe.  I can forgive her. 

My Teachers, 1944-1956

My first twelve years of formal schooling were pretty much a bust. I blame my underachieving, unserious self. I was much more interested in punchball, the Dodgers, comic books, and radio serials than in the lessons, which were unchallenging and drab. At school I learned reading, writing and 'rithmetic, for which I'm grateful, and also a little Latin. I was an autodidact, not a student, right out of the gate. I liked to read and fortunately the Avenue J branch of the Brooklyn Public Library (though only a storefront) was within walking distance; so was the McDonald Avenue branch where, during high school, I worked for 75 cents an hour shelving books. I was an omnivorous reader and although I did not have a strong understanding or much of an imagination, I had an excellent memory. Reading saved me. Reading rescued me. "If it hadn't been for reading, we'd have been entirely at the mercy of sex."

I don't blame my teachers. A few had thrown in the towel, but most of them tried their best. They were overworked, underprepared, unsupported, and in some cases prodigiously ignorant even of the subjects they taught. The conditions under which they worked were not propitious. At P. S. 217 classrooms were designed (!!!) for 48 students (pupils, we were called in those days) but on high-attendance days, there were always a few unenthusiastic kids lolling in improvised seats by the window. In most classes, lessons were taught; but in others, especially at Erasmus Hall High School, there was only disorder and hubbub -- and sometimes a tad of danger.   

My first grade teacher, Mrs. Callery was a diminutive gloomy woman. I remember telling my mother, "Mrs. Callery doesn't like me." My mother said, "You must be kind to her. She lost four of her boys in the war" (it was 1944). I remember that I construed "lost" to mean "misplaced" and was therefore dumbfounded by Mrs. Callery's forgetfulness. White-haired Mrs. Sherwood, in third grade, left no impression except for her extreme old age (possibly 55), but Mrs. Cares (Sarah Cares!!, great name for a teacher) was quite kind. Mrs. Finsmith in fifth was a cipher, but Mrs. Donnelly, whose white hair was dyed a radiant blue, made it her business to make life as miserable as possible for me, and succeeded. My favorite teacher in those early years was strict Mrs. McNulty, who insisted that we memorize fractions, decimals, and percentages, and taught us how to format a "friendly letter." In seventh grade, we went "departmental." I remember Mr. Harry Shapiro ('the bald headed hero") who spoke of "we scientists"; Mrs. Georgia Kieselbach, an aloof music teacher who had a trained operatic voice; Mr. Maxwell Proshan, a pathetic incompetent, and the twin (as I remember them) art teachers, Mrs. Nellis and Mrs. Ennis. At Erasmus Hall, I had good instruction in Latin from old Miss Beulah Withee and even older Mr. Gabriel Cussen (who I now realize must have been an ex-priest) but bad lazy non-teaching from Harry Wedeck, a pretentious fake. Miss Edna Goetschius, a biology teacher, complained to me more than once that I didn't know how to stipple. Mr. Lindlar, an ineffectual physics teacher, would mysteriously disappear between classes and return reeking of alcohol. My mathematics teachers were competent (Mr. Ebersman), angry as all shit (Mrs. Altschul), or suicidal (Mrs. Bonime). An English teacher who was well-read and competent, Mrs. Harriet Felder, was an "Oxfordian" caught up in the conspiracy theory that Shakespeare wasn't Shakespeare. Walter Balletto, who whiled away our time teaching "Discussion English" was a curiosity. I had no experience nor could I recognize gay folk, but I now realize that Mr. B was more interested in his own theatricality than in any instruction he might have rendered. I later learned that he lived with his mother and collected Kirsten Flagstad records, information which my 1950s self could not even begin to assimilate. I remember also an art teacher, Mrs. Schauben, who kept her protruding ears in check with a thin rubber band; perhaps we weren't supposed to notice, but I've never forgotten. The gym teachers were simple-minded jokesters, although I remember thinking even then that the martinet Mr. Eis would have been more at home in the SS than at EHHS. 

It was, in retrospect, quite a zoo. But I know that some of my coevals, who were smart enough to choose their teachers wisely and take it all seriously, managed to get themselves a decent education. I didn't; my only success was to get out alive and then move on.   

Here's a good picture of Erasmus Hall High School in the old days.

Reposted: Antimylarmonofilamentarianism

In 1895, my wise and courageous grandparents 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 religious irrationalities. 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 and the Cossacks 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 spoke and acted as though such wisdom had been absorbed from the cradle. My brothers and I were taught to resist the exclusivity, superstition, and ceremony of religion.   

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. If you're within the lines, you're "in" your home.

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 the god of Abraham and Isaac has become so narrow as to promulgate an inside/outside-the-home rule, I would hope that he would also 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 human and 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 the eruvim-makers can't locate eligible Jews, there are Hondurans and Sudanese a-plenty who deserve their attention. When the believers 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. The effort spent to construct 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 waste 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." 

My Life in Jokes* **

Why did the moron throw the clock out of the window?  Because he wanted to see time fly. &&&  How do you say "refrigerator" in Italian?  Ice-a box. &&& Why do fireman wear read suspenders?  To hold their pants up. &&& Knock-knock. Who's there?  Anita. Anita who?  Anita borrow a pencil. &&&  "Over the Cliff" by Hugo Furst. 'The Russian Surgeon's Revenge" by I. Kutchakokoff; "The Yellow Stream" by I. P. Daley?  &&& Guy is walking in the woods and meets a friend. The friend has a black eye and a bloody nose. "What happened to you?  "Guy beat me up." "Why?"  "I don't know. I was looking for hotel I'm supposed to stay at, and I came upon this man lying on top of a woman. I asked him, how far is the Olde Log inn and he jumped up and hit me."  &&&  Horse wants to try out for the Dodgers. Leo Durocher says, sure he's a horse but the Dodgers are in the dumps; let's see what he can do. "Can you throw?" Horse picks up a ball, walks to the pitching mound, and throws a 105 mile fastball right down the middle of the plate. "Can you hit?" Horse picks up a bat and steps to the plate. On the first swing, he hits a tremendous line drive off the scoreboard in right field. "Run," says Durocher. "Run," says the horse. "Why do you think I'm here?  If I could run I'd be at Hialeah." &&& Man is knocked down by a bus. He's lying in the road, bleeding to death. A friend comes by, says, Solly, how you doink? Solly says, "I make a living." &&&  Truman, Churchill, and Stalin are driving in a car down a narrow road. There's a cow in the middle of the road, blocking the way. Churchill gets out of the car, waves his hands and screams at the cow, but he can't get it to budge. Truman gets out, picks up a stick and starts beating the cow. It still won't move. Stalin gets out, walks up to the cow and whispers something into the cow's ear. The cow bolts and disappears into the woods. They get back into the car. Truman and Churchill say to Stalin, "What in the world did you say to the cow to get her to run like that. Stalin says, "I told her I'd put her on a collective farm." &&& Man is in a nightclub. Everyone's singing and dancing. He gets an urge to take a dump. Can't find the toilet. He's having a hard time holding it in. Waiter tells him the bathroom is upstairs.  He goes up to the next floor, can't find the toilet. He's about to explode.Finally he sees a hole in the floor. He squats and lets fly with a tremendous load. He gets dressed, goes downstairs. Everyone has disappeared; no music, no dancing, no drinking. He finds the waiter. "What happened?" Waiter says, "Where were you when the shit hit the fan?"  &&& The mayor of Muncie, Indiana is scheduled to preside at a ceremony honoring a local girl-made-good now called Lolita Lamour, but who grew up in Muncie under the name Flora Faye Fluck. But he's worried that he might mispronounce the name and embarrass himself. He practices:  Flora Faye Fluck. Flora Faye Fluck.  Finally, the big day arrives. The mayor makes his speech. "And here she is, ladies and gentleman, Lolita Lamour, known to all of her friends here in Muncie as Flora Faye Klunt." &&&  A man is walking on a beach. He comes upon a naked woman lying on the shore. He jumps on her, screws her, and continues on his way. After a half-a-mile he meets three or four members of a search party. One of them says, "A woman has drowned. Have you seen a dead body on the beach." Man says, "O my god. Was she dead?  I thought she was English."  &&&  A scorpion say to a turtle, "I need to get to the other side of the Dead Sea.  Let me climb on your back and you swim across."  Turtle says, "But if you're on my back, you could sting me." Scorpion says, "Why would I do that?  If I sting you, we'd both drown." Turtle says, "OK, get on my back."  They get to the middle of the Dead Sea, and the scorpion stings the turtle. Turtle says, "Why did you do that?" Scorpion answers, "Because this is the Middle East." &&&  An airplane is flying over the Atlantic Ocean.  Suddenly, the loudspeaker comes on. "This is your pilot. If you look out of the window on the right side of the plane, you can see smoke coming out of the #1 engine. If you look out the left side, you can see flames coming out of the #2 engine. Now look down. If you look closely, you can see a small life-raft floating in the ocean. I am speaking to you from that raft." &&& Searching for the meaning of life, a man travels to Tibet, climbs the highest mountain, comes to a monastery where the wisest man in the world lives. He asks the monk, "What is the meaning of life." The monk says, "life ... is a barrel."  The man goes back to Cleveland, thinks about it for five years. What does it mean, life is a barrel?  He can't figure it out, so he gets back on the boat, travels to Tibet, climbs the mountain, finds the monk, and asks him, "What did you mean, life is a barrel." The monk shrugs his shoulders. "OK, so life isn't a barrel." &&&  Old guy, maybe a bluesman, bottle of hooch in a brown paper bag, sits on a bench in the middle of the night, downtown, playing air-sax, nodding. Young fellow comes by, cheerful, asks him, "Crosstown buses run this way?"  Blues guy looks up, pauses for a second, and then drawls, "Doo--dah, doo-dah." &&& A man, 93, and his wife, 91, go to the rabbi and tell him that they're miserable and want a divorce. The rabbi says, "You've been unhappy all these years and you wait seventy years to get a divorce. What are you thinking?" Man says, "We wanted to wait until the children were all dead."  &&&  "My brain!  My second favorite organ." (W. Allen). &&&  Man goes to the rabbi in distress. He says that his wife is trying to poison him. "How do you know that?  "I saw her putting stuff in my coffee." Rabbi says, "It's got to be a mistake. I'll talk to her." Two days later, the rabbi calls him. "Your wife came in. I talked to her for three hours.Three hours straight I talk to her." "So what's your advice?" "Drink the poison." &&& Man goes to see his doctor. The doctor says, "I have good news and bad news. The bad news is that you have terminal cancer and you're going to be dead in a month." "So what's the good news." "Well," the doctor says, "You see that cute nurse over there. I finally fucked her." &&& An older guy is walking down the street. He meets a friend and they chat for a few minutes. Man starts to leave, turns back to his friend, and says, "By the way, when we met, was I walking north or south?" "You were going south." "Good," says the guy, "then I've already had my  lunch." &&& George W. Bush goes for dinner at the ADL where he's served a bowl of matzo ball soup. He looks at it suspiciously, but then, remembering all the strange foods he's eaten at ceremonial dinners, takes a bite. Not bad. He turns to his host: "Tell me," he says, "do the Jews eat any other part of the matzo, or only the balls?" &&& Two old guys are ritually washing a corpse.The first one says, "Look at the schlong on this guy. He's a horse." The second guy says, "It's just like mine." First guy says, "You have a dong like this. I don't believe it. I've never seen anything half as large."  The second guy says, "I said it was like mine. I didn't mean mine was just as large.  I meant mine is just as dead."  &&&  Knock-knock.  Who's there?  "Yo mama."  "Yo mama who." "Yo mama. This is no joke. Open the damn door and let me in."

 * All jokes are as remembered.  No websites or other research tools have been employed.

**  All jokes are genuine historical artefacts and many not conform to the highest standards of contemporary taste.

Fragment of a Genuine Telephone Conversation

The grand-daughter (now age eleven), studying the Darmstadt Madonna (1528) by Hans Holbein the Younger that is reproduced in q previous post:  "It doesn't look like Madonna."

Grandpa:  "I think it may be a different Madonna."

How to Harvest Me

Yesterday I renewed my expired driver's license. I was worried about the eye exam because of the cataracts, but I passed easily. Believe me, the bar for visual acuity not set very high.

On my previous license, "hair" was "brown";  this time, it's "gray."

The clerk asked, "Are you willing to be an organ donor?"  "Sure," I answered, "but I don't know whether  anyone would want my organs."

Surely no one would want my myopic, be-cataracted eyes. Nor my ears (although they would be  supplemented with an expensive set of hearing aids at no extra charge). My heart?  Well, if it came with a "Use at Own Risk" label and a whole library of erratic ECG printouts. Certainly not my spine, which was a "second" or "factory reject" ight from the womb. I would not recommend it even at a severe markdown. My liver -- I think I can recommend my liver. It's barely been used and should command a premium. My prostate -- now there's a bargain in the making. A prostate is supposed to be the size of a walnut, but mine is more like a potato, perhaps a Yukon Gold -- and yet as far as I know it is cancer free. It could be chopped up and transplanted into three or four men.

My best organ, if it's an organ, is definitely my knees, both right and left.  I'm at the age where knee-replacement is commonplace, but I have the knees of a twenty-five year old: flexible, functioning, pain-free, even if somewhat prone to hyperextension. Some linebacker who's abused his own would be overjoyed to extend his career with an perfectly wonderful set of knees.  Or a basketball player, preferably someone who wants to regain his "hops." Maybe, in someone else's body, my knees could finally win the trophies and renown that they deserve.   

 

Lola's Language at Eighteen Months

Her language consists mostly of nouns: "baby" -- both herself and her beloved doll; "wawa" (water);  "mommy";  "daddy"; "ayi" (Chinese for aunt);  "didi" (Chinese jiějie, older sister); "paopao" (Chinese, grandmother); "pock" (pocket); "book"; "ball": "eye"; "nose" etc.  Her words are occasionally less specified than they will soon become; for example, "duck" seems to mean "bird." At the zoo, she identified an emu as a duck. Similarly, "gogo" (Chinese for dog), means mammal, even including the zoo's llama. "Up" can mean either up or down; it seems to signify a change of position. "No" occasionallly means "yes"; she seems to conceive it as a response to a question. There is, however, no ambiguity to her very definitive "mine."

When she slid down the slide in the park, her audience exclaimed "whee."  Lola responded, "I do whee," understanding "whee" to be the name of the action rather than an exclamation of pleasure. 

A Very Distressing Memory

There's been a re-birth of nativism in the "give me your tired, your poor" land that I love. The right-wingers, who need someone to hate, have decided that anti-Hispanic and anti-Muslim noise-making is just what our beleaguered country needs right now.

All of which brought to mind a painful memory. Sometime in the 1970s, I was sitting in a coffee room at the U. -- a rare event for me -- and a group of people were recalling happy moments from their various childhoods. One of the participants was a grey-haired woman perhaps 15 years older than I. She was a secretary or administrative assistant at not mine but some other department. She was a kindly, competent, unpretentious woman with whom I occasionally exhanged a few words of greeting or business.

 I can't remember exactly what the other participants ibn the discussion remembered from their early days -- probably hunting trips with dad, hitting the winning single in a softball game, a romp with the family dog -- but I will never forget what Masako recalled: "When I was in the internment camp in Utah, one day Marian Anderson came to sing for us."

 

Certified Dialogue Transcribed Verbatim from Real Life

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." 

Haircuts: A Lifetime of Sweating in the Chair

When I was a child, haircuts were perpetrated at Joe's Barber Shop on Coney Island Avenue. It was a pleasant place: there were wall-to-wall mirrors on either side of Joe Montuori's shop, and a boy sitting in the chair could lose himself in the series of infinitely-regressing images. Joe always had a friend or two in the shop with whom he spoke incomprehensible rapid-fire Italian. The haircutting itself was an ordeal. Joe charged 75 cents a head, but my mother had driven a bargain: three haircuts (myself and my two brothers) for $1.80. Joe revenged himself on me by a) working the electric buzzer as rapidly as possible, and b) frequently re-arranging the angle of my head with a blow from the heel of his hand. Back home, my mother would sigh and say, "Turn around. Let's see what he did to you this time."

I'm not big on personal adornment, and, perhaps because of my early hair-chopping experiences, I've never been comfortable in the barber's seat. As soon as the cloth is fastened around my neck I feel hogtied and hopeless. "What are they going to do to me today?" Once, on the west side of Manhattan, in the late 1960s, when my hair was rather long (it seems absurd that you could signal your opposition to the war in Vietnam by letting your hair grow, but such was the case), I walked into a shop and asked the barber to "leave it long." He immediately transformed me into a rabid supporter of carpet-bombing. Also in New York: when I naively wandered into a shop with a specialized clientele, a hair technician employing a razor and a variety of gels and lotions turned me into someone whose hair was giving off signals with which the rest of his body was not in accord. In Hanover, New Hampshire, in an upstairs 'salon,' the barber suddenly stopped work, drew back, studied me for fifteen or twenty seconds, and asked, "Are you Jewish." I mumbled something about not really wanting to discuss my ethnicity with him, whereupon he launched into a disquisition of which I understood not much and remember less, except that that it involved prophecy, the Book of Isaiah, and The Hatching of the Egg. He hauled out his heavily annotated King James Version and pointed me to various passages underlined in coded colors. As it happens, I'm more conversant than most people with scripture, and so I can assert with moderate authority that his reading of the Bible was -- how shall I say -- original. It took me an hour to extricate myself from his insistent and wayward scholarship: fifteen minutes of hair-cutting and forty-five minutes of exegetical enthusiasm.   

For a decade or so, when our finances were perilous, my wife cut my hair. There were some benefits (a guy could cop a feel while being ministered to) but I must admit that although my good woman was earnest and effective, she never fully mastered tonsorial technique. She had the habit of yanking upwards on the strands with the scissors, with the result that each snip produced a stab of pain -- although nothing more intense than might have been alleviated by the injection of a dozen or score shots of novocaine directly into the scalp. And then there were the ear nicks.

After a while, I returned hair responsibility to the world of commerce. I had success for many years with Liz of Chicago Hair across town. Liz was good at her work and respected my multiple cowlicks. But then she started to raise her prices. When she reached $20, I would just hand her the Visa and ask her not to tell me what she charged. When she went to $30, I retaliated by spacing the haircuts further and further apart in order to keep my annual cost constant. But when she broached the $40 barrier, the puritan in me rebelled. I started to patronize the cheap ($14) barbershop across the street from the college. There's a rotating staff and it's hit-and-miss: sometimes the results are acceptable, sometimes disastrous.   

When I come home from the expedition, my wife says, "Let's see what they've done to you today."

And then she sighs.