Dr. Metablog

In Which 3-year-old Lola Describes the Structure and Functioning of the Contemporary American Family

"Mommies are parents;  daddies are kids."

More Coffee-Shop Conversation

At Ozo's, a woman jumps the queue. A man standing on the line taps her on the shoulder. "Excuse me, but you've jumped the line." Woman: "You ought to keep your hands to yourself." Man: "Wow, you crash the line, and you have the grievance. So 'entitled.' You must be a Romney supporter." Woman (outraged): "I am not a Republican." Man: "Then stop acting like one."

Who's Laughing Now?

Many years ago, when I was young and invulnerable, it was most amusing that Mr. Barkis, the "willin'" carrier in David Copperfield, offered up his shillings with such agony.

Barkis is bedridden with a cripplingly painful illness. He has a locked box of coins, and although he has become "near," he has the generous impulse to give David a guinea. However, to fetch the money costs him a martyrdom. "He endured unheard-of agonies in crawling out of bed alone, and taking it from that unlucky box....  We heard him uttering suppressed groans of the most dismal nature. This procedure racked him in every joint."  

Barkis's pain was, once upon a time, comic. Nowadays, alas, I can only imagine that Barkis has ruptured a disc, and must endure a chronic, unameliorable, incurable torture that will only end with his death.

And then there's the Fat Boy, in Pickwick Papers, who cannot prevent himself from falling asleep. What's so funny about chronic fatigue or narcolepsy? At my present advanced age, I tend to fall asleep every time I lie down with a book, even if the book is a  wild extravagant wonderful novel by Charles Dickens. Inopportune sleep by day is almost as unpleasant as insomnia or nightmares (or insomnia plus nightmares) at night.      

I think also of Mr F.'s demented Aunt, in Little Dorrit , who can no longer follow the conversation, but "after regarding the company for ten minutes with a malevolent gaze, delivered the following fearful remark:'When we lived at Henley, Barnes's gander was stole by tinkers.'"' 

Is her senility, or as we would now say, her Alzheimer's, so very amusing.

It were, but now it ain't no longer.

Dickens died young, at 58, so there is no way to know whether his sense of humor would been softened by the ravages of disease and age.

Where We Are, 2012

The Republicans now draw most of their strength from the former "slave states." Here's the evidence and the map: 

In 2012, Republicans won only 55 electoral votes from the free states. Obama carried 332.

I don't think it's coincidence or merely an association.  I think it's a cause.

In order to support slavery, a person has to deform and distort his brain; he has to learn to make or accept arguments that are innocent of fact and logic and fellow-feeling.  He has to damage his intelligence and ruin his morals, and, apparently, he must pass the consequences on to his children and grand-children.

And so the sins of slavery continue to be visited upon us, yea even unto the seventh generation. 

Othello/ Otello

I prefer my opera to be aural rather than visual. Opera is a form that is made for listening, not watching -- at least in my view. The music, Mozart or Verdi, is frequently transcendent and most satisfying. But on those occasions when I venture to the opera house and I have to deal with the cultic, cachectic audience and the grand-opera worshippers as well as the ridiculous plots, the unhandsome singers, the interminable intermissions, the staginess and artifice and the general all-around silliness -- as well as pay through the nose for the privilege of doing so, well then, I'm not always a happy fellow.

I know the sound of Verdi's Otello moderately well, having played the Placido Domingo version often enough for the laser to have bored holes into the cd. Moreover, as it happens, I'm moderately familiar with Shakespeare's play). But I had never seen a performance of Otello until this past Saturday when we betook ourselves and our bagels and our Granny Smiths to the Century Theatre to watch the Metropolitan Opera's Live in HD performance. It was, frankly, glorious -- Renee Fleming in the electronic flesh, moving us to tears with the willow song (along with Verdi's bonus, dubious Ave Maria).  

She was superb; so were the orchestra, the costumes, the sets, even the overacting, villainous Iago, who would have twirled his mustachios, if he had had them, and the non-acting, expressionless Othello.

Our "guide," a robust, comfortable mezzo whose name I should know but didn't catch, made the claim that Verdi's Otello improved upon Shakespeare's Othello. A highly dubious claim, I think, but then, I don't know how to measure the value of the grand "Othello music," that Shakespeareans so much admire, against the cellos and the bassoons. Whether for better or worse, however, there's a heck of a lot in Shakespeare's play that didn't make it across the centuries and genres and into Verdi's opera. More than can be said in a paragraph or a blaguepost. 

For starters, Shakespeare created a multi-layered society, not just elaborate sets. His city of Venice has a sense of itself as a successful, orderly, civilized, and advanced community. Into this world strides Othello, not only an outlander but an African and a erotic exotic. Although Venice needs his soldiership, he's still a black man in a racist world who marries a willful patrician lady who prefers him to  the "wealthy curled darlings of the nation." It's an unlikely, perilous match: he's "declined into the vale of years" while she's very very young. He's a soldier who's been around the world; she's the secluded mistress of the house affairs. He's commanding; she's naive. 

Verdi must have loved Othello, although not necessarily for the right reasons. How could a play that ends on a bed, with a climactic murder-suicide, not have excited the instincts of the composer of Aida. Nothing more appropriate for grand opera than Othello and Desdemona -- and yet o so simple a representation compared with Shakespeare's rich figures and complex society.

Imagine a Merchant of Venice in which Shylock is not Jewish, or a King Lear in which Lear is a troubled forty-something and you're well on your way to grasping an Othello in which melanin is replaced with melodrama.    

As a result, even when Verdi brought tears to my eyes, it was because I was seeing through the opera to the play that lies beneath it.

And sometimes I was crying because I so desperately missed the beauties and the profundity that Verdi had not seen fit to include.

A Man and a Woman

I find it utterly fascinating that Romney and Obama, who are so unlike in so many ways and yet both to the best of our knowledge good "family men," are both descended from polygamists. 

Barack's great-grandfather Obama Opiyo had five wives and his grandfather, Hussein Onyango, had at least four. Such was the Luo tradition. Barack's father's bigamy was unlawful rather than traditional -- he left what used to be called a "grass widow" behind when he escaped Kenya.

Both of Mitt's great-grandfathers, Miles Romney and Helaman Pratt were polygamists. Miles had four wives and thirty children, Helaman had five wive and who knows how many offspring. Both families fled the U. S. en masse when a divine revelation and the enforcement of the Morrill Act ended polygamy in 1890.

And yet preachers and politicians continue to proclaim that "marriage is between one man and one woman, and always has been, since the time of Adam and Eve." 

It ain't so. Nothing could be more ahistorical or more false. The biblical patriarchs were all polygamists and King Solomon himself, a model of wisdom, we are told, collected an astonishing, exhausting household of 300 wives and 700 concubines. Plural marriage was part of Jewish tradition way into the first millenium. Another Abrahamic religion, Islam, is notably polygynous even as it is furiously anti-polyandrous. Marriages over the world have taken every shape imaginable, sometimes formally, sometimes informally. The idea that marriage is  permanent and unchanging is a canard belied by the immediate and symmetrical family histories of our two candidates. 

Amnesia on Film: Mirage (1965)

I was half-way through this neglected Cold War paranoia-mystery-Hitchcocky black-and-white (and noir all over) amnesia movie when I realized that I was watching a lineal ancestor of the Jason Bourne films. It's all there: the trauma, the amnesia, the shadowy organization determined to eliminate the amnesiac, the assassins, the hair-breadth scapes, the chases, the murky plotting.

David Stillwell (note the encouraging onomastic pun in his surname) played by the ever-upright Gregory Peck, has accidentally defenestrated his mentor and has gone into what this film calls "unconscious amnesia." He's got to figure it all out, which he does via Bourneian flashbacks, evem while being pursued by a bunch of very bad guys, who fortunately, are most amateurish with their pistols.

There's also a dollop of Bond in the mix: a nuclear secret, a threat to world peace and in addition a possibly helpful, possibly dangerous former mistress. 

And there's Walter Matthau as a shambling amateurish detective. Early Walter Matthau -- taking a few first steps on the road to becoming the real Walter Matthau. 

It was a superior movie during the first mysterious hour, but as the mystery unravelled, it turned into cliche and incoherence. Too bad, because the noir atmosphere was splendidly realized and the shots of 1960s Manhattan a genuine treat. 

Mirage is a political movie, but it's hard to track its politics. Howard Fast, who wrote the novel from which the screenplay is adapted, leaned far left while the director, Edward Dmytryk, leaned right. The film teeter-totters.  

Mirage was remade three years later as Jigsaw, in which an LSD overdose was substituted for amnesia. Jigsaw doesn't seem to be available on Netflix, but I'll look for it. "Unconscious amnesia" apparently mutated, during the hippie yers, into "drug amnesia." A new genre

A Splendid Sentence

All that is good and all that is bad about opera is summarized by the following splendid sentence. It comes from a plot summary of Donizetti's L'Elisir d'Amore.  Prepare to savor. 

"At the pre-wedding feast, Adina and Dulcamara entertain the guests with a barcarole."

Is that genius, or what? 

Here's the situation: The plot's a little thin and needs to be padded. Barcaroles were big in the 1840s. By good fortune, Donizetti just happens to have one in his drawer, or perhaps he has been thinking about gondoliers since his last trip to Venice. So let's slip a barcarole in there. 

Moreover, the barcarole is beautiful. Perfectly wonderful and enjoyable. It's a lovely as the excuse for its presence is ridiculous.

That's why we love grand opera -- the inevitable and constant juxtaposition of the glorious and the absurd. 

Thanks, Metropolitan Opera in HD, for bringing it to our attention.  Let's hope for many more afternoons of such transcendent, splendid silliness.

Ah that in real life we could while away our empty hours with barcaroles.

Lyin' Ryan? We Report, You Decide

There's been so much noise about Governor Romney stonewalling calls to release his tax returns and so much commentary about the one he did release, that the anomalies in running-mate Paul Ryan's tax returns have been overlooked. 

When Ryan made his 2011 taxes public, he had to "amend" what he and his lobbyist wife had initially reported. It seemes that he had "inadvertently" failed to report $61,122 in income. Now sixty grand might be chicken feed for the Governor, but it's a big hunk for the Representative. It raises his total income to $323,416 and bumps up his taxes by $19,917. The sixty-thousand bucks comes from an income-producing trust that he inherited from his wife's mother, a successful Oklahoma attorney. Moreover, on June 6 of this year, Ryan amended two years of financial disclosure reports that he filed with the clerk of the House of Representatives which show that the trust produced income of between $100,001 and $1 million.

So Ryan "forgot" that he had inherited a small fortune from his mother-in-law, and he "forgot" to report to the IRS just about 20% of his income.  Fortunately, he remembered both of these facts when he began to come under consideration for national office and knew that his finances would be closely scrutinized.  

Ryan is a supposedly a policy wonk, touted for his attention to detail. He's an expert in taxation and expenditure -- or so we're told.  But he's not, apparently, attentive to his own affairs.

He's also the person who claimed to have run a sub-five minute marathon and to have climbed o-so-many of Colorado's mountains.

So, constant reader, here are your choices. Either Paul Ryan (a) "inadvertently forgot" to include $60,000 worth of income on his 2011 taxes, or (b) he's a untrustworthy, lying scumbag who suits the facts to the situation, and who was hoping to get away without paying his fair share and only came clean when it looked as though someone would notice. 

We report;  you decide.

(I'm trying to think, if I were the recipient of a $60,000 a year inheritance, which I'm not, whether I could possibly "forget" to report it as income. Nope, can't imagine such a circumstance.)

Tweeblaarkanniedood, or Khurob, or Nyanka, or Anyango, or Whatever You Want to Call It.

I read with enthusiams Richard Fortey's Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms (New York, 2012), a pop biology book which describes various plants and animals that originated millenia ago and that survive outwardly unchanged to the present day. It's a great subject and might have been a great book if Fortey had been less anecdotal and more informative, and if he not just blathered into the tape recorder but had paid attention to organization and prose style.

Ever since my summers at Makamah in the 1940s, I've had an affection for horseshoe crabs. They were abundant then, although scary and definitely not-to-be-stepped-on, and although I can't say for sure, I wouldn't be surprised to find that they are very rare now, especially in populated areas like the Sound. I would not have known that horseshoe crabs date from the pre-hemoglobin era and that their blood (or blood-equivalent) is based not on iron but on copper. I did not know anything about velvet worms or the various ancient slimes with which Fortey is so taken, but I am well-acquainted with horsetails, which, however primitive they may be, continue to thrive rather wonderfully around our West Bradford pond. 

Of all Fortey's species, my favorite is unquestionably the welwitschia, or, as it is sometimes called, the tweeblaarkanniedood, or khurob, or nyanka, or onyango -- a plant which is no less exotic than its various names. 

It's the only plant in its order (although it can claim fossil relatives) and it hangs on in Namibia and Angola. It's a very distant relative of pines and spruces, having diverged in the late Permian. Welwitschia has an extremely odd growth habit. It makes only two true leaves in its lifetime, but the leaves, which might be imagined as very wide ribbons, grow constantly throughout the long life of the plant. The leaves can be fifteen feet long;  the plant can live for a thousand and some think even two thousand years.  Here's a welwitschia: it's not a classically handsome plant, not a garden beauty.   

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.)

Amnesia on Film: Unknown (2011)

Here's a case of double amnesia, in which a second case of the disease is overlain over the first (as usual, once the amnesia genie is activated, screenwriters cry havoc and let slip the dogs of anything goes).

Our hero, played by a tired Liam Neeson, awakes from a coma not remembering much but thinking he's Dr. Martin Harris, a geneticist. He has no identification, and no one knows him, even his young wife. Turns out, he's not Dr. Harris at all, but a professional assassin who has somehow forgotten that his alias is an alias. It takes an innocent new girlfriend and several car chases and some highly-choreographed fist fights before he comes to his senses. Once he realizes that he's a professional killer, however, he turns over a new leaf and becomes a Good Guy. He thwarts the intended assassination and with solemn steps and slow, begins a new moral life.

Here's the question that occurred to me:  a guy is a long-time, career assassin. He has an accident and forgets that he was a murderer. Then little by little he remembers. Is it probable that his personality would change and he would be reborn to innocence and good citizenship, I only ask because that's the red herring that Unknown's audience is asked to masticate? I myself don't buy it.

Neeson asks, over and over, "Who am I?"  In serious works of literature (cf. Lear's "Who is it that can tell me who I am'), such a question is tragic.  In amnesia movies, "Who am I" is not tragic but merely mcguffinic.

Does Religion Rot the Brain?

Unaware that I was choosing a splashy and controversial best-seller, I selected from the library's new book shelf something called Unorthodox (New York, 2012), by one Deborah Feldman, and a sadder, more dispiriting book I have rarely read.

Ms. Feldman had the misfortune to be raised in the Satmar branch of the Hasidic movement -- a sect that, at least as she describes it, is unhappy, puritanical, finicky, repressive, ferociously anti-rational, patriarchal, and bossy.  Boys study Talmud but girls are not educated past a high school -- what would be the point, when, as Deborah's grandfather once told her, "girls belong in the kitchen?" Feldman's memoir is not just dreary, it's ostentatiously lurid. Its subtitle is "the scandalous rejection of my Hasidic roots" -- and the attention-mongering scandals that she recounts are mostly sexual in nature. 

There is a old story that John Ruskin collapsed in a heap when he discovered, on his wedding night, that his bride had pubic hair. Feldman out-Victorians the great Victorian, claiming that she did not know that she had a vagina, an entrance, an opening, "down there." Is such ignorance possible in this age?  And then she explores her sexual failings, mostly her vaginismus-induced post-honeymoon extended virginity -- which she blames on her Satmar upbringing (although want of curiosity might also be a factor).

Feldman's memoir has upset the Hasidic community and there is at least one website devoted entirely to attacking its veracity.  And in fact the memoir does contain the commonplace omissions and elisions of autobiography --  none of which seem to invalidate the whole. However, the defenders of the sect miss the point (as does Ms. Feldman).

The Satmar movement isn't reprehensible because it dishonors brains and women and especially women's brains. It's reprehensible because it is erected on a lie. "We learn in school that God sent Hitler to punish the Jews for enlightening themselves. He came to clean us up, eliminate all the assimilated Jews.... "  What an absurd and odious doctrine! Are we expected to entertain the hypothesis that six million Jews died for eating lobster?  "The first and greatest Satmar rebbe said that if we became model Jews, just like in the olden days, then something like the Holocaust wouldn't happen again, because God would be pleased with us." So Hitler and the Nazis and the SS and the camps are a) the fault of the Jews themselves, and b) God can be placated if all Jewish women wear thick stockings and wigs and cover themselves from collarbone to wrist and knee.  It's a brainless argument, and one that, if you think about it for a few seconds, gives the victory to Hitler. Plus, it's an argument that creates a god who is reven crueler and more idiotic than usual.  

Indoctrinated with this criminal bullshit, the survivors of the Shoah and their descendants voluntarily re-ghettoize themselves and, of their own foolish accord, imprison themselves into a new dark age of their own invention.

Here's what I learned from this book. Satmar is a check-your-brains-at-the-door cult that controls 130,000 adherents who manifest all the symptoms of obsessive compulsive disorder. It's "bad things will happen to me if I step on a crack on the sidewalk" raised several painful orders of magnitude.  

Ms. Feldman may have escaped the cult but she's still in the dark. She's left Satmar behind because she couldn't read the books she wanted to read or wear the clothes she wanted to wear and because she couldn't locate her own vagina. But it's not her vagina that readers should worry about;  it's her brain.  

Precision in Language

Grandma (affectionately):  "You're a silly duckling."

Lola (age 2+):  "I'm not a duckling.  I'm a people."

More About Lola's Use of Language

At two-and-a-half, Lola has become very precise. Grandpa: "That's a nice white sweater you're wearing."  Lola: "It's a jacket."  Grandpa: "You're tired. Why don't you put your head down on the bed." Lola: "It's not a bed; it's a pad." Grandpa: "It's a nice blue pad."  Lola: "It's green."

All this precision is coupled to idiosyncratic pronunciations. Ketchup, for example, is "kep-tuck."

Predators and Prey

I was almost asleep but semi-conscious and I heard a noise outside. It could have been the wind knocking over a chair, but it might also have been a raccoon, a skunk, or a groundhog.  Or even a coyote, a beast that we hear but almost never encounter. Whatever it was, I was immediately electrified, the "flight or fight" response fully engaged. Ready to go hand to hand with a groundhog or any other rodent. But then I thought, hey, I'm an apex predator. Why I am being so skittish, so fearful? I'm not a prey animal. I can hold my own with anything out there.

The first hand axes date from about 2.5 million years ago.  (A hand axe is nothing more than a piece of flint or other stone, knapped into a point one side, adapted for cutting or throwing). The first spearpoint appears 250,000 years ago. Spears for throwing, or lances for poking are a major breakthrough for in hunting or self-defence.

I wonder why it took 2.25 million years for one of my hominid ancestors to think to mount an axe on a shaft of wood. How hard could it have been?

Eventually the bow and arrow appears in the archeological record, but not until 25,000 years ago. The pace was picking up.

My point, however, is that for a couple of millions of years, my forebears were not predators. They  were prey, hiding from the European lion (50% larger than the modern African lion), from the giant hyenas, from the cave bear, from big old snakes, and other extinct mega-predators. Cowering on the savannah, clutching a hand axe, for millions of years. It hardwires the brain.

No wonder that a noise in the night makes me fearful. Two million years as prey doesn't disappear from the DNA just because we've recently eliminated or neutralized all the major predators. 

I think that human beings haven't realized that they are predators and are almost entirely shaped by the prey experience.  As a result, we're afraid of animals; we're afraid of our shadows; we're afraid of noises in the night. We're afraid of each other.

I doubt that we'll ever grow up and learn to comport ourselves confidently but not aggressively. As a species, we're just plain scared. 

We should be lions, not chickens. 

Three Advantages to Old Age

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

2.  No longer any need to fuss with contraceptives.

3.  Read an entire magazine article while urinating. 

Life: Boon or Thorn?

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

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

  They may not mean to, but they do.

They fill you with the faults they had

  And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in the turn

  By fools in old style hats and coats,

Who half the time were soppy-stern,

  And half at one another's throats.

Man adds on misery to man.

  It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,

  And don't have any kids yourself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Under the wide and starry sky,

Dig the grave and let me lie.

Glad did I live and gladly die.

And laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:

Here he lies where he longed to be.

Home is the sailor, home from the sea,

And the hunter home from the hill.

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

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

Here's another Victorian variation on the thema Larkiniana.

Is life a thorn?

Then count it not a whit.

Man is well done with it.

As soon as he's born,

He should all means assay

To put the plague away.

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

Starfish Metamorphosis

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

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

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

A Tumbrilism Revival

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

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

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

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

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

Other priceless Romney tumbrilisms:

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

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

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

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

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

Amnesia on Film: Cowboys & Aliens (2011)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vegetable Love

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lord of the Flies; a 1950s Allegory

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reposted: The Sculpin, Slimy or Mottled?

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

Senior Bowl

I was talking on the 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.

A Suppressed Event

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bringing Ourselves Up to Date on the Subject of Abkhazian Consonants

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

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

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

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

Amnesia on Film: Clean Slate (1994)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

La Traviata "Updated"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exactly my point.