Marcia Bjornerud, Reading the Rocks; Jeremy Braddock, Collecting as Modernist Practice; William Shakespeare, Pericles; Bill Schutt, Bite; William T. Taylor, Hoof Beats, how horses shaped human history; Laura Brown, The Counterhuman Imaginary; Mary Antin, The Promised Land; Marcia Bjornerud, Turning to Stone; Leonard Cassuto, Academic Writing as if Readers Matter; Cathy Caruth, Literature in the Ashes of History; Elisha Cohn, Still Life; Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit; Peter Bogucki, The Barbarians; Paul Veyne, Palmyra; George Hutchinson, Facing the Abyss; Percival Everett, James; Arlie Russell Hochschild, Stolen Pride; Jo Sinclair, Wasteland; Niall Williams, Time of the Child; Isaac Rosenfeld, Passage from Home; Anatole Broyard, Kafka Was the Rage; Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March; Abdulrazak Gurnah, Gravel Heart; Charles Dickens, Great Expectations; Sy Montgomery, Soul of an Octopus; Zibby Owens, On Being Jewish in America; Evi Bassoff, My Twinkling Grandmother; “Karen Palmer,” She’s Under Here; Sophy Roberts, A Training School for Elephants; Mike Stark,Starlings, the Curious Odyssey of a Most Hated Bird; “Maritza Duran,” From the Dictator’s Shadows; Pierre Zalloua, Ancestors; Dorothy Armstrong, Threads of Empire, a History of the World in Twelve Carpets; Shari Rabin, Jews of the West; Rachel Cockerell, Melting Point; Anne Tyler, Three Days in June; Anne Tyler, A Patchwork Planet, Karen R. Jones, Beastly Britain; Anne Tyler, A Spool of Blue Thread; Andreas Daum, Alexander von Humboldt; Ian Stewart, The Celts, Israel Zangwill, Children of the Ghetto; Joyce E. Chaplin, The Franklin Stove; Dyson and Rowland, Archeology and History in Sardinia from the Stone Age to the Middle Ages; Thomas Levenson, So Very Small.
Dr. Metablog
Dr. Metablog is the nom de blague of Vivian de St. Vrain, the pen name of a resident of the mountain west who writes about language, books, politics, or whatever else comes to mind. Under the name Otto Onions (Oh NIGH uns), Vivian de St. Vrain is the author of “The Big Book of False Etymologies” (Oxford, 1978) and, writing as Amber Feldhammer, is editor of the classic anthology of confessional poetry, “My Underwear” (Virago, 1997).
DR. METABLOG’S
GREATEST HITS
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From the “new non-fiction” shelf of the Boulder Public Libary, I borrowed On Being Jewish Now (2024). It’s an anthology of a hundred or so short pieces written in response to the savagery of October 7, 2023. The essay are repetitively, predictably sorrowful, indignant and nationalistic. I skimmed my way through three hundred emotional pages. I understand the hurt.
I did not anticipate novelty or new learning, so I was stunned when I came upon the entry by one Danny Grossman, who, while serving as a U S diplomat in 1985, paid a visit his and my ancestral Ukrainian village, Starokonstantinov. A way-off -the-track village, not on any tourist’s must-see list.
Starokonstantinov seemed to Mr Grossman a impossibly dreary place, consisting of “low slung uninspired buildings, each one the same bleached out color of dirty sand. A “godforsaken area.” Looking for traces of its Jewish population, he visited a cemetery that had “very obviously been violated. Tombstones were in pieces. Hebrew words inscribed on their fragments were scattered across the field. Grossman reminds us that Starokonstantinov’s Jewish population (including many members of my family, “were slaughtered, both by ordinary Ukrainians who became lawless and hungry to scapegoat their neighbors and by German soldiers ‘just doing their job.’” Starokonstantinov is a place of ghosts.
Grossman’s visit was forty years ago. I doubt it’s any better now.
I follow the horrid Russian invasion of Ukraine closely enough that I would know if Starokonstantinov has been droned or bombed . So far, it’s not been mentioned, which is just as well. It’s not a place that needs more trouble.
A few of my Irish and Italian friends, curious about their ancestry, have made pilgrimages to the villages from which their ancestors migrated to Boston or New York. I will not be making such a trip. There’s nothing for me in Starokonstantinov: not a building, not a transmitted memory or anecdote. Nothing for me to return to — not even a graveyard
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I read George Hutchinson's Facing the Abyss, a report on the culture of the 1940. Hutchinson assesses books that were influential during that troubled decade.
When I came of age in the 1950s, I encountered a good share of these books. I was a curious, library-addicted lad and 1940s culture lingered in the 1950s air. Yet Hutchinson brings to attention whole shelves of important writing of which I was shamefully ignorant. Through the resources of Interlibrary Loan and second-hand internet bookstores, I've now become acquainted with a bunch of new old books. Here's some of them (with more to follow).
Hutchinson claims that Jo Sinclair's Wasteland (1946) is an important contribution to the Jewish-American novel. Perhaps it is, by priority, but I found it disappointing and superficial. The main man, Jacob Braunowitz changes his name to John Brown and hides his Jewishness, but it doesn't work — he lives in a "wasteland" neither integrated into America nor bolstered by his inherited religion. Along comes a Freudian psychoanalyst and in a few magical sessions Brown is liberated to embrace his Judaism. For me, the novel was simplistic and implausible. Harry Brown's A Walk in the Sun (1944) is the most persuasive and realistic war novel I've ever read — it accomplishes more in 150 pages that Norman Mailer achieved in 600. Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac (1949 is a pioneering classic of environmentalism — though nowadays less widely known than Rachel Carson's Silent Spring but much more learned and innovative. It's a very good book but frankly I found the "lyrical" prose a bit too gooey for my taste. Isaac Rosenfeld's Passage from Home is a distinguished novel of adolescent alienation. It's kinky (about a boy's semi-sexual relationship to his deceased mother's sister). It's a far better novel, I think, than Salinger's similar and imitative Catcher in the Rye. What a pity that Rosenfeld died of a heart attack at age 38! A great loss to literature. I also read Anatole Broyard's Kafka Was the Rage, a memoir of Greenwich Village in the 1940s although not published until 1985. It's a noteworthy collection of short essay, able to be much more candid about sex and sexuality than if it had appeared during the time it chronicles. Broyard claims that 1946 was the best year ever: the war was over and he had freedom and the G I Bill.
A pretty good for me too — in 1946 just seven years old, sitting on the sunny stoop eating raisins.
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Chaucer's Pardoner, some will remember, has long blonde hair and speaks in a high treble voice. Chaucer calls him "a gelding or a mare." A gelding is obviously a eunuch; what Chaucer means by mare is less clear — perhaps "female eunuch" — whatever that entails — or a gay male or possibly even a woman cross-dressed as a man. In any case, a person of ambiguous sexuality — "gender fluid" in modern idiom.
Update: the Naval Academy Nimitz library at Annapolis has purged from its shelves a book by Robert S. Sturges called "Chaucer's Pardoner: Gender Theory." Isn't it reassuring that our national security will no longer be endangered by a discussion of the Pardoner's identity.
The list of 381 censored books can be found at
Click to access 250404-LIST%20OF%20REMOVED%20BOOKS%20FROM%20NIMITZ%20LIBRARY.PDF
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After struggling through a run of mysterious and puzzling works, I'm cheered to discover a book written by Cornell English faculty member that I could read with pleasure from beginning to end. And understand. And which alerted me to books and poems with which I was not familiar. No theory, no pretentious jargon; just honest scholarship and intelligent stylish analysis,
It's Facing the Abyss, American Literature and Culture in the 1940s, by George Hutchinson, who is Cornell's Farr Professor of American Culture.
Unlike Professor Hutchinson, who is a considerably younger man, I myself was alive (although barely sentient) during the 1940s. I was too young for serious reading, so 1940s culture didn't come to my aluminum desk until the 1950s when I belatedly came to awareness. As a result, I read many of the books that Hutchinson discusses a decade past their relevance. Hutchinson also mentions many influential books that I didn't read at all and therefore came as a surprise — and which underlined my ignorance. For example, during the 1950s, my high school and college years, I read many books of 1940s Jewish American writers to whom Hutchinson devotes a long chapter: Mailer, Bellow, Malamud, Rukeyser, Arthur Miller, etc. But my acquaintance was incomplete. I confess that I had never heard the names of Jo Sinclair or Isaac Rosenthal, both of whom Hutchinson scrutinizes at full. One name missing from Hutchinson's survey is J D Salinger, who started to publish in the 40s but only became famous with Cather in the Rye in 1951. Just as well — I never caught Salinger fever although many of my friends were quite infected.
Hutchinson has presented me with a reading list of books that I should have known but didn't and that will keep me engaged for months. I'm grateful.
Hutchinson's chapter on WWII is most revelatory. Without being unduly partisan, it exposes and corrects the "greatest generation" mythology that I had half come to accept.
After reading Facing the Abyss, I continued my investigation of Cornell English faculty publications by taking a couple of wild swings at Elizabeth S. Anker's mystifying On Paradox, the Claims of Theory (Duke UP, 2022). (Anker holds a joint appointment in Cornell's law school and its Department of Literature in English.) I can say just two things for certain about this difficult book: a) I didn't understand two consecutive sentences, and b) it's not about literature, not even tangentially. In fact, I'm not sure what it's about — as far as I can tell, it's not about the law. I have rarely attempted anything in English prose that I found quite so impenetrable. I never even grasped what Anker means by paradox.
I'm sure it's mea maxima culpa, but so be it.
[April 4] PGB writes: "Every time you post something, it becomes ever clearer that you're not the right person for this investigation. Give it up and stick to something within your abilities, like basketball. You write well on basketball. Do yourself a favor: stay away from the deeper issues that Anker discusses."
[April 4] Vivian de St. Vrain responds: "Perhaps you're right, PGB (whoever you are). The shoemaker should stick to his last. This Anker book is not intended for me, but I I wonder for whom it is intended. It's got to be an extremely small specialized audience. Six or eight people, worldwide. I doubt anyone on Cornell's English faculty then or now could make heads or tails of it."
[April 6] Artie Greengroin writes: "Thanks for hanging in there. I hope you find other Cornell English Professors who know how to write English. I'm not optimistic, though. BTW, I think PGB is harshing on you, but I agree that your basketball essays are pretty good."
[April 8] Vivian de St. Vrain responds: "Thanks for the recommendation, Artie and PGB. If anyone is interested, my basketball essays are here.
[April 9] Charles Evans (Mercer College) writes: "I agree. Vivian, your notes on basketball are quite good. But you're just not smart enough to understand philosophy."
[April 10] Joe J. Keen (Northwest Nazarene University, Nampa, Idaho) writes: "I agree with Charles Evans. The basketball entries are amusing. But, Vivian, you're no philosopher."
[April 16] Vivian de St. Vrain writes: The "Artie Greengroin" who posted on April 6 does not exist. Artie Greengroin is not a real person; he's a character invented by the WWII novelist Harry Brown. Come on, Artie you can use your real name. Don't be afraid. Don't hide behind a pseudonym. We're all friends here."
[April 30]. Chester Bacon writes: "Thanks for bringing the Hutchinson book to my attention. I've read and been enlightened by it. But following your recommendation I'll stay away from the Anker book. And I do like your basketball essays."
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Every once in a while, I experience something that I call a "cultural convergence" — perhaps an event reported in a daily newspaper that closely resembles something on the very page of the novel that I happen to be reading. A cross-genre overlap, let us say.
Here's in example of such a coincidence that amused me much.
Yesterday evening I watched the classic western The Magnificent Seven (1960) and this morning I read, once again, Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. It's hard to believe but yes, there is a very brief moment where two such very distinct works brush against one another.
Unlike TN, The Magnificent Seven is a violent spectacle that steers clear of humor, or subtle characterization or extensive dialogue. After the climactic concluding battle to preserve the Mexican village has been both lost and won, the two surviving gunmen share a moment before trotting off on their separate ways. Chris Adams (Yul Brynner) inquires of Vin Tanner (Steve McQueen) if he has a plan for what comes next. Laconic Vin, cowpoke and gunslinger, responds, "driftin'.
In Twelfth Night, there's a similar question and a similar answer, but in a far different idiom. Antonio asks Sebastian, who has survived a shipwreck, about his plans. Sebastian's view of his future is essentially the same as Vin's, but there is none of that "ah shucks" minimalism in his reply. Instead, Sebastian responds, "My determinate voyage is mere extravagancy."
[While Vin's one-word answer is clear as clear can be, Sebastian's "mere extravagancy" requires a bit of a gloss. Nowadays, "extravagancy" (usually "extravagance") signifies a "lack of restrain in purchasing luxury goods." Not so in 1600, when "extravagant" remained much closer to its root etymological inheritance. The word descends from L. vagare, "to wander." Extra-vagance therefore means something like "wander beyond." Here's a more familiar example of the word at work: when Roderigo characterizes Othello as an "extravagant and wheeling stranger," he does not criticize Othello for spending too many ducats on his fancy get-up. He means that he's a rootless and wandering non-native. (Wheeling? my dictionary glosses wheeling as "roving, wandering, drifting"). And also: "mere" did not then connote triviality; its meaning is closer to "pure." "Determinate" meant and still means "decided.")
Therefore Sebastian's sentence –"My determinate voyage is mere extravagancy" — is directly equivalent to Vin's "driftin''". Cultural convergence at its best.
It's just two ways of talkin'.
I sometimes wonder about Shakespeare's intent here. Why did he bother to put such a difficult sentence in Sebastian's mouth? For purposes of characterization, certainly. But at the expense of clarity. Wouldn't it have been more economical, more transparent, for Sebastian to say something plain, such as "I don't have a plan, I'll just wander." It's certain that some percentage of Shakespeare's audience, perhaps most, will not grasp the meaning of the sentence as written and will be left puzzled. Yet as he so often does, Shakespeare preferred eloquence to transparency.
In my opinion, Shakespeare delighted in his own fluency. And sometimes I think that Shakespeare wasn't just writing to be heard by his Globe or Blackfriars audience. He was writing to be read and studied – although I doubt he could have imagined a future in which his sentences would be glossed with crowded inches of small-type footnotes.
It it possible that Shakespeare also had an inkling that, as Beethoven once put it, he was writing for "a latter age?"
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Can it possibly be true that the universe as we know it is becoming larger and larger? The more we learn, the more it seems to expand. The scientists who know about such things now brag that the Milky Way numbers between 200 and 300 billion stars, nearly all of which are probably circled by planets. Moreover, these same experts now claim that there are something like one or two trillion such configurations — some of them small but most larger than our own personal galaxy. And to top all that, there's a rumor circulating that our universe might be just one of an untold, possibly infinite number of other universes. Some of them Big Banging, some expanding, some collapsing.
These numbers are staggering and incomprehensible, at least to me. I can't even get a hold of a million of anything, even grains of sand, let alone a billion (a thousand million!) enormous stars.
Now they tell me that our universe began 13.8 billion years ago, more or less, and will go on for a hundred billion more. That's another very large number for me (or you) to assimilate.
It's all mighty perplexing. And then let me add the toughest question of all: why is there something rather than nothing? Yes, why is that? How come?
There are some who find this sort of information dismaying because it confirms the triviality, the meaninglessness of our individual lives. How can I possibly worry about last night's insomnia or my latest nosebleed — or indeed my very own life — in a world of a gazillion planets, stars, ultramassive black holes, neutron stars, galaxies, and a universe which may have no discernible boundary or beginning or ending.
Yet I myself find all this information not dismaying but comforting – maybe even inspiring.
What are the odds that a planet might support life? Very small. And that the planet's precarious lifeforms would evolve for a couple of billions of years and then generate intelligent life? And that a million years of mating and surviving by various evolving primitive and then recognizable humans might lead to my ancestors — and that after thousands of lucky matings eventually resolve into my parents Manny and Lil who happened upon the precise instant to beget Me. And that I, in the second half of my 80s, way past my shelf life, would still be here to enjoy these extra innings.
All this work of creation and evolution and luck to culminate in Me.
It's a miracle of cosmic proportions and should be hosannahed. Here I am, enjoying my still functioning brain. My stomach is mellow after a full meal and my skin is glowing from a stroll in the warm sun. At the end of the day, I will crawl under the covers with my bedmate and ladylove. Truly the stars have aligned to my benefit.
Nor let us not underestimate the consummate joy of mattress and blanket.
My assemblage of molecules has had a great run — much more than could be reasonably anticipated. Soon my molecules will disassemble and then reassemble into someone else. I'm very glad to contribute to this phenomenon.
But if so — if we are so fortunate, as I believe us to be, why don't we as a people celebrate our good fortune? Take pleasure in our lives. What's the need for this continuing strife and wars and enslavements and genocides? What's the point of it? We're all sitting here, billions of us, for a second or so in an infinitely boundless and timeless universe. Why must half of us make life miserable for the other half? Why can't all we just get along?
Truly we are a horrid species.
I wonder whether other planets that support intelligent life have done any better. I hope so.
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I first encountered the word "text" — as did everyone else of my cohort — as the first component of "textbook." At P S 217, textbooks were issued on the first day of school. Then, later in the day, we ritually scissored brown paper grocery bags and improvised protective book covers. It was not unusual for the covers to be in better shape than the retirement-eligible books. At college, I was surprised to find that I was required to purchase my own textbooks — a discovery that busted a hole in my precarious budget.
And then the word "text" sat still for a number of years until it emerged as a term of art in critical theory. "Text" became a generic word for anything written: novels, poems, plays, signs, advertising slogans, tattoos — anything that could be analyzed and discussed. I think, in retrospect, that the idea was not to "privilege" one form of writing over another. "Text" is to poem as "provider" is to doctor.
Nowadays, "text" has emerged from the gloom of academic criticism and has become the most frequently used of words. Who could have predicted it? I myself, formerly a writer of letters and postcards and until recently of emails, and for many years at one point a user of the telephone, now send and receive multiple "texts" in a day.
The noun has also acquired a variety of verb forms: "I'll text you"; "I texted you"; "Text me when you arrive"; "Talk to you later. I'm texting."
All derived, ultimately, from L. texere textus, to weave; or textor, a weaver.
The use of "text" in religious ceremony, as in a cleric's, "today's text is…" has never been a part of my life.
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Elisha Cohn is an associate professor in Cornell's Department of Literatures in English. Her Still Life, Suspended Development in the Victorian Novel (2016) strikes me as two books in one. The first is quite lovely and filled with a variety of splendid apercus. Cohn explores "lyric moments" in the novels (confession: I read closely only the chapter on Thomas Hardy, the novelist with whom I'm most familiar). She observes that Hardy (a poet as well as a novelist) occasionally stops the progress of the story and allows his characters to experience a moment of stasis or reflection or reverie that is more a characteristic of lyric poetry than prose. I was much impressed by her analyses of these moments — and wondered why I had failed to notice such events — or non-events — myself. So criticism did what it's supposed to do — widens our understanding and appreciation of works of literature. I returned to the Victorian novel armed with a new way of seeing. In fact, I'm now reading Little Dorrit again for the express purpose of ascertaining whether a non-poet like Dickens employs the same Still Life method. So far, not the case — Dickens has his own particular (and very successful) methods of expanding the consciousness of his characters.
Ah, but then there's the other side of Cohn's book which attempts to develop her useful insights within the slough of "theory." I half suspect that Cohn felt obliged to make herself relevant or contemporary or tenure-worthy with her tumble into this quicksand — but perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps she devoutly believes in an apparatus that I find so incomprehensible and transient. In this second part of the book, many famous names are invoked and admired; some of these are very French and very revered; others are merely professors at American universities. Pages of text and footnotes defend against the horrid possibility that Still Life might be "insufficiently theorized." And in these speculative paragraphs Cohn discusses the deprivilegization of hierarchical thought in favor of forms of lateralization in which individuations are impersonal and singularities are pre-individual and which reterritorialize along the lines of preexisting structures of power which re-consolidate into static concepts, etc., etc. Which is when I either descend into a reverie (or nightmare) of my own or hurl he book across the room.
[February 23 Audrey ap Howell writes: "Vivian de St. Vrain, you've go it wrong. The notion that there are poetic moments in the novels is well established. The originality of this book lies in its theorizing of these moments. You would know this if you had read carefully and not skimmed."
[February 24] J C Occhiogrosso writes: "This is a well-written book. Complicated but not obscure."
[February 25] Reuben Musgrave writes: "I bet that Cohn is a delightful teacher — if she keeps to the events in the novels and stays away from bewildering 'theory.'"
[February 25] Savannah Courtermanche writes: "All novelists pause the plot for moments of reflection. Nothing new here."
[March 5] Joy Jourgenson writes: "This difficult monograph would have been more useful as a series of short, insightful essays. Too bad it had to be expanded into a repetitive static book. Not the author's fault — just the tune of the times."
[March 6] Eli Munn writes: "Vivian, you're too old and out of it to have an opinion worth anything. Shut it down and go back to your knitting."
[March 15] Rogers Roggen writes: "I wonder, Vivian, how you can work yourself up into such a snit about Cornell when the USA is going to hell in a handbasket. Shouldn't you put your effort into more pressing matters."
[March 18] Homer vanNess writes: "Reuben Musgrave, are you possibly the "Cousin Rube" that I heard my parents mention? I know there's a Musgrave branch to my family. (I found your name doing a random googlesearch). If you are Cousin Rube, could you pm me at hvanness@gmail.com. I'd love to hear from you. I think you went to Cornell; so did I but much later."
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Vivian de St. Vrain writes: "Cathy Caruth is the Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of English at Cornell University. She has written quite a number of books but the one that I selected for this Cornell English Department project, partly because of its engaging title, is Literature in the Ashes of History. Alas, the title is misleading, because Caruth doesn't concern herself with literature in any recognizable way. Rather, the book investigates psychoanalytic theories, especially of loss and trauma. Although in an earlier part of my life I read and studied all of Freud's major works, I found this book to be far too subtle and abstruse for my downright brain. I have therefore asked assistance from my long time friend A. Barnett Langdale, Jr. Barney is a very smart medical school graduate, a therapist, and psychologist (though not a psychoanalyst) and a person for whose opinions I have great regard."
A. Barnett Langdale, Jr., writes: "Thanks, Viv, for entrusting me with the of task of reading and evaluating this book. I fear that I shall disappoint you, because I had a hard time understanding Literature in the Ashes of History. In order to profit from reading this book, one must accept certain assumptions about Sigmund Freud and about the art of psychoanalysis. Caruth sets out to modify and reinterpret the famous fort-da episode in Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle. This became an immediate problem for me, because I have never agreed with Freud's analysis of his grandson's play — perhaps because his interpretation clashes with what I have learned from long years of closely observing children in my professional practice. Events such as fort-da can generate a spectrum of meanings and a variety of interpretations equally as valid or invalid as Freud's. As I result, I read this book with a great deal of resistance to its assumptions and their ramifications.
Many of the arguments that Caruth creates ("suggests" is her usual verb) are too arcane for me. She carries her readers away from common sense. She inhabits an intellectual world in which every event or fact carries its own negation. And that negation bears a consequent negation, and so on ad infinitum, like the images in a pair of opposed mirrors, leading inevitably to a situation in which, as Macbeth says, "function/ Is smothered in surmise and nothing is/ But what is not."
Vivian de St. Vrain responds: 'Many thanks, Barney. In the course of reading Literature in the Ashes of History, I came to think that its procedure is, in a sense, a lot like theology. If you make certain assumptions about god and angels and creation, you can generate a fantastically complicated superstructure of ideas that has absolutely no relations to the world in which we dwell. This book is not theology, it's psychoanalytic theory, but it shares a similar procedure, because, despite its highly-elaborated complexity, its assumptions are unprovable if not absolutely false. Intelligence and sophistication can take you only so far. I'm afraid that in the end, there's no more heft in this kind of study than there is in theology — the "subject without an object." Ultimately, it's Cloud-Cuckoo-Land."
[February 15] Walter Balletto writes: "Before you dismiss this intelligent book out of hand, you might want to read the ecstatic review by Michael Levine in The Undecidable Unconscious: A Journal of Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis. It's online. Levine makes the effort to read carefully, which neither you nor your friend Langdale do."
[February 15] Vivian de St. Vrain responds: "At first I thought that Mr. Balletto was being ironic, inventing an improbable self-parodic name for an academic journal. Who would believe there is actually such a publication? But I looked it up and, by golly, it's real. Moreover, it's published, mirabile dictu, by the University of Nebraska Press!!!"
[February 16] Janet Rich asks: "You haven't said anything about Caruth's presence in a Department of English. Shouldn't she relocate to Psychology?"
[February 16] Herbert Lecovin (Cornell '61) asks: "I wonder how many of Caruth's colleagues can read and understand her work?"
[February 16] Anita Robillard writes: "Caruth is on an island, and instead of welcoming friends to join her, she erects walls and barricades to keep them out."
[February 17] Joel Salzberg writes: "What do you mean by "island." She teaches at Cornell; Cornell's not an island."
[February 17] Anita Robillard writes: "It's a metaphor, Joel."
[February 17] Herman S. Levi writes: "I don't understand why you compare psychoanalysis to theology. They're nothing alike."
[February 18] Vivian de St. Vrain responds: "Professor Levi, let me refer you to a familiar passage in the Leviathan, where Hobbes writes of "names that signifie nothing, but are taken up and learned by rote from the Schooles, as hypostatical, transubstantiate, consubstantiate, eternal-Now and the like canting of Schoolemen." Similarly, the words of psychoanalysis, such as pleasure principle, Ego, etc. signify nothing at all. Theologians and psychoanalysts can be very smart people, but the net practical result of their involuted speculation is transitory, wrong, useless, specious, and false."
[April 1] Skye Barasch writes: So, Vivian, is there anyone on the Cornell English faculty whose work meets your antiquated approval? It's all bad, according to you.
[April 1] Vivian de St, Vrain responds: Actually, Ms/Mr Barasch, I'm just about to add a paragraph on a member of the faculty whose book was very informative and comprehensible. No abstruse jargon, I'm glad to say. Stay tuned; my comments will appear here in a day or two. I do wonder, now that I think of it, if I'm unconsciously picking the least approachable books to report on. I'll try to mend my ways.
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When dealing with a child, always make your appeal to the better side of his/her nature.
No one owns anything; the most you can say is that you have a lifetime lease on it.
As far as I can tell, I am just a long link in a chain going from nowhere to nowhere.
If you lose your man, go directly to the basket.
Never omit an opportunity to do a favor for a friend, and never be embarrassed to accept a favor from a friend. People like to help one another.
Anyone can make money if he makes it the sole business of his life to do so.
When the stock market is going up, everyone is a genius.
The czars and the rabbis kept our family in darkness for a thousand years. It took hundreds of years for us to fight our way out of the ghetto, and they (the orthodox and the Hasids) want to put themselves back in it.
Don't forget to wash behind your ears.
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I have just read Mary Antin's autobiography, The Promised Land, first published in 1911. It is a book that I should have known much earlier in my life but only discovered a week or so ago. The larger part The Promised Land is the familiar story of immigrant life in a new country — the author's struggles to adapt to an unfamiliar culture, her achievements and triumphs, and her unabashed flag-waving patriotism. More strange and more informative, is the picture of life "old country," as viewed through the eyes of a young woman. Antin grew up in provincial, impoverished Polotzk, a small city now in Belarus, but which at various times has been administered and exploited by the ungentle hands of Varangians, Poles, Lithuanians, and Germans. During Antin's youth (she was born in 1881), Polotsk was a part of Russia. It was not a good time to be a Jew in Polotsk or indeed anywhere within the Pale of Settlement. (Her story is especially pertinent because I myself have a hunk of Belarusian-Jewish genes — as do, therefore, my children and grandchildren.)
Antin's life in that bleak part of the world was, I think, triply suppressed. In political freedom and standard of living, by the Russians; in domestic and personal relations, by oppressive Hasidism and the rabbis who enforced its demanding rules; and thirdly, because Antin had the misfortune to be born female. She had every reason to leave Polotsk behind.
Antin recognized early that she was a "prisoner" because "the Czar" commanded Jews to stay within the Pale. She "accepted ill usage from the Gentiles as one accepts the weather. The world was made in a certain way and I had to live in it." Polotsk was a place of constant ethnic strife fueled by dangerous superstitions. "The Gentiles said that we had killed their god and that we used the blood of murdered Christian children in the Passover." The Jewish community of Polotsk was always under threat of violence — "the peasants would fill themselves with vodka, and set out to kill Jews. They attacked with knives and clubs and scythes and axes, killed them or tortured them, and burned their houses. This was called a pogrom." There was also the threat of the draft, where recruits served until the age of 41. (My maternal grandfather, Joseph (Usilewski) Green told me that he had been drafted into the Russian army for a twenty-year term; I now understand that he must have entered the army at age 21. In 1904 Grandpa, age 26, deserted and came to America. Good move.) Some men escaped the draft by paying crippling bribes to conscription officers. Taxation was onerous. "Peace cost so much a year in Polotsk."
Antin also explains that as stifling as was the Czar, the rules of religion were harsher. "Within the wall raised by the vigilance of the police, another wall, higher, thicker, more impenetrable was the religion of the Jews." The rabbis favored piety (as they conceived it) to independence or freedom or prosperity and they enforced the most minute regulations and prohibitions of all actions day and night. Antin tells of a wife who found a blemish on the chicken she was preparing to cook. She consulted the rabbi who pronounced the chicken traif. That night, the family went hungry.
Polotsk seems to have had no dissenters or freethinkers, or at least none that Antin notes. I imagine that those who challenged orthodoxy either left of their own accord or were shunned.
Girls were offered little outside the family kitchen or nursery. They were expected to marry young and produce many children, especially sons who could distinguish the family with their Torah studies. Schooling was discouraged for girls, who were taught to pronounce but not understand Hebrew.
At its prime, Polotsk had 60,000 inhabitants, perhaps 60 per cent of whom were Jewish. There were twenty-three synagogues. Today there are no synagogues and no Jews.
-
I've never visited my parents' graves. I don't even know where they are buried. I've been told that my father is buried between my mother and his sister Mollie, but I don't know where they lie. I have a paper that tells me where my sister Susan, who died as an infant, is buried, but I've never been there. I don't know where my brother Eugene lies.
I know exactly where Althea and Phyllis are buried — just up the hill, under the big maple. I visit once a year and bring a stone to place on their markers. Phyllis's is a bronze plaque affixed to a stone; Althea's is just the capital letter A and her dates (1939-2016). It's what she wanted.
Dan Goss is buried in Staten Island somewhere. I visited once, with Althea. A's mother, Grandma Anne, wanted her ashes divided in half and spread, part with Phyllis and part with Dan. She has no gravestone, nor wanted one.
I have told my family that I want my tombstone to read, "No more insomnia, forever." But that's a joke.
Nowadays it's the custom to scatter the ashes on a favorite place, which is nice, but there's no place to visit. Especially no place for those buried at sea.
-
After a severe cold snap, it's a welcome warm Friday afternoon. We're on the semi-famous mall enjoying a long-postponed promenade. A woman, in her seventies, stops us. "Can you help me?" I'm embarrassed to confess that my first reaction to her plea was that she must be one of our many panhandlers. But not so. She continued: "It's my husband, he has Parkinson's, can you help me get him to the car?" He, Bill, was standing frozen, unable to speak, unable to move, his balance precarious. "Two years ago," she said,"he was robust. He's having a bad day." And indeed he was. I took Bill's left arm under the shoulder, his wife the other arm. Lynn grasped my left hand and carried Bill's useless stick, and together we shuffled him infinitely slowly and gently to the curb. "I thought we could go out for coffee," she said, "but I was wrong." While we stood quietly, Bill's wife went to fetch their car which was parked only fifty feet away. She backed it to where we stood (Lynn now supporting Bill on his right side). We helped Bill into passenger seat. His wife buckled him in.
I asked her, "do you have help?' "Yes, she said, "friends." "Do you have children?" "Yes, but they don't live nearby." She thanked us generously and drove off.
I was sad for both him and her. He, because his dreadful disease is going to kill him very soon. And she, because her life now consists of morning-to-night care taking — in bed, out of bed; dressing and undressing; into a comfortable chair for a while and then and out of it; brief awkward walks; three times a day lifting the spoon to his lips. And what's known in the care taking trade as "toileting."
I'm convinced that she doesn't know how bad he is. Caretakers are always behind, always catching up. If she knew, she'd have had a wheelchair at the ready. He needs constant care– not just family or friends, but professional assistance. Can they afford a place in a memory care facility or nursing home? Not everyone can.
Afterward the incident, we went to a coffee shop — a normalizing activity for us. But, sitting there, I was shaken. Certainly profound sadness for the ill husband and the encumbered wife, and in addition a touch of personal PTSD.
And then the inevitable pondering. "To this favor must we come." It's not just Bill. We're all doomed — even that cute infant in the next booth, rapturously examining her fingertips. A host of diseases, some as bad as Parkinson's, waiting at the door, waiting.
-
I'm a lifelong fan of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. I love all the shipboard stuff, the adventure, the exoticism, Crusoe's self-reliance, his psychological complexity, his religious ponderings, and especially the recapitulation of nascent capitalism on the island. I'm as entranced as ever by the attempt to domesticate goats, by his attempt to build a boat, by the single footprint on the beach, by Friday's escape and the battle with the cannibals. With a little effort, I have been able to set to one side the novel's faults: the author's careless repetitions, his appalling colonialist racism, those last anticlimactic adventures and the return to England, the unnatural absence of sexuality or passion, the paranoia and the unnecessary violence. Massive defects, yes indeed, but Robinson Crusoe is still a great eternally wonderful mishmash of a novel.
So it came as a surprise to read Laura Brown's one-sentence summary of the novel in The Counterhuman Imaginary: "Robinson Crusoe enacts a self-creative other-than-human vitality by setting matter in motion through the persistent repetition of irresistible succession."
Maybe Robinson Crusoe does "enact" and "set matter in motion" — I don't know, can't say. But I do not plan to undergo the pain and woe of making sense out of her ungainly and mystifying sentence. For Laura Brown, Robinson Crusoe is not the pleasure and challenge that it has been for three hundred years — it's just raw material for her dry-as-dust ideological machine.
And a waste of my precious time.
[February 1] Bernhard Starr writes: "Brown transforms the gold of literature into the dross of criticism."
[February 1] Professor Merlon Crenelle, Southwestern Louisiana U., writes: "Vivian, you're totally unfair. You take one sentence out of the chapter and make fun of it. You don't even bother to see how the sentence is related to the larger argument. You owe Professor Laura Brown an apology. You're irresponsible."
[February 1] Marianne Morrison, Ph. D. writes: "Vivian, I agree with Mr. (Ms.?) Crenelle. Youve not tried to understand Brown. Your lazy."
[February 2] Vivian de St. Vrain responds: "Whether I'm lazy or not, Brown writes in an obscure code. Why should I have to try to crack the code? Why can't she write in English? She's a Professor of English, for goodness sake. It's not my job to figure out what she's trying to say; it's her job to make it plain."
[February 2] Sean R. Fine writes: "It makes me wonder about the "imaginary" in which Laura Brown seems to thrive. Closed, cloistered, self-congratulatory."
[February 3] Thurman Valentino (SVDGA) writes: "I think that Vivian de St. Vrain is absolutely correct not to try to figure out what that sentence means. It's not a reader's responsibility. My opinion is that Laura Brown is smart enough to produce a complicated argument, but not smart enough to make complicated argument clear."
[February 3] Michael F. Bristol writes: "Or maybe, dear Viv, you're not smart enough to figure it all out."
[February 4] Vivian de St. Vrain replies: "OK, Bristol, if you're so smart why don't you just tell us exactly what "persistent repetition of irresistible succession" means."
[February 4] J C Occhiogrosso suggests: "One thing regularly follows another?"
[February 7] Beulah Withee writes: "The problem is not with just that one sentence. It's that whole paragraphs and pages are filled with such difficult sentences. After each of these, a reader has to pause and interpret before going on to the next one. It puts far too much burden on the reader."
[February 9] Gabriel Cussen III writes: "I tried to read the book but I didn't get very far. Do visitors to this blog remember the criticism of academic articles and books: "What is new is not true and what is true is not new." This book is even worse, because what's true is utterly trivial."
[February 9] Bernhard Starr responds: "Gabriel Cussen, I agree with you. There's no there there."
[February 13]. Herbert Lecovin (Cornell '61) writes: "The important question is what is going on in her classroom. Does she lecture in this dialect and does she expect her students to write as she does?
-
I'm still trying to come to terms with Laura Brown's book, The Counterhuman Imaginary. I've wrestled the title to a draw, and now I'm going to take a crack at the Introduction. Is this task a good use of my limited time?
Let me quote a sentence that I take to be the very heart of the book and the heart of the problem. It's a humdinger.
"Human story telling is found to provide a subtle scenario for affirming the other-than-human, based on an imputed commonality that replaces human priority with cross-species inclusivity that transcends the human."
Laura Brown's prose reads as if it were first drafted in German and then rendered into English by Google Translate.
It takes effort, but once you penetrate its peculiar idiom, it makes a kind of sense. For those of my readers who are still with me, let me try to parse this sentence. I suspect It may mean something like, "human beings project thoughts and feelings onto animals and objects."
"Human story telling" [that is, literature]
"is found to provide" [the passive "is found," should be deleted even though it functions as a compliment to the person (i.e. the author herself) to whom this insight has been revealed.]
"a subtle scenario" [I don't know exactly what the phrase "subtle scenario" means; nor do I think that anyone else does.]
"based on an imputed commonality " [I understand "commonality" because I know that humans and animals share many features. I don't see the necessity for the word 'imputed"; imputed by whom? who other than humans can "impute."]
"that replaces human priority" [i.e. there should be no preference for humans over animals and rocks, despite the paradox that humans and not animals can think about the equivalence.]
"with cross-species inclusivity" ["inclusivity" is implicit in the previous rejection of "human priority." Wow, these abstract nouns do pile up (commonality, priority, inclusivity). Suggested simplification: "that includes other species"]
"that transcends the human.]. Transcends, in this final clause, smuggles into the argument a new idea, because "to transcend" means "to surpass." The claim now, as this snake of a sentence winds its weary way to conclusion, is that the meaning that humans attach to things is greater than the humans who do the attaching. At least I think that is what it may mean.]
So after completing this investigation, I think that the claim is that literature projects ideas onto animals and also things. And sometimes these projections illuminate and enhance both things and animals.
I'm exhausted. I had planned to discuss the Introduction at greater length, but I've had enough. Instead of proceeding with the introduction, I'm going to try to understand the chapter on Robinson Crusoe (a novel that I first read as a boy and have read several times since, and which I feel that I understand). Stay tuned.
[January 31] Petal Rivera writes: "So it seems that Brown's book is not a novelty of ideas, but a novelty of language."
[January 31] Sean R. Fine writes: "I agree with Ms. Rivera. Simple ideas cast in pretentious language to make them seem important. This emperor of literary criticism has no clothes. None whatsoever,"
[February 1] Joel Salzberg writes: "Vivian, good job of unravelling that sentence even though I still don't quite understand it."
{February 1] Viola Pilbeam writes: "Vivian, you're too kind. Why don't you just admit that this whole book is absurd American nonsense."
[February 4] Helena Hotchkiss-Jones replies: "This absurdity can't be blamed on the Americans. It's as much the fault of Deleuze, Adorno, etc."]
[February 4] Joel Salzberg replied: "Who is Deleuze Adorno?"
[May 2] Evelyn Efflandt writes: "Joel, you always were a couple of candles shy of a menorah."
[May 3] Vivian de St.Vrain replies: "Evelyn, you always were a nasty bigot."
-
I am absolutely buffaloed by Laura Brown's book, The Counterhuman Imaginary (Cornell UP, 2023).
The title is a puzzle. Why does the adjective come after the noun? And what does the word "counterhuman" mean? (One hundred and forty-six pages to go and I'm already off balance. I'm worried that if I can't understand the title I'm going to have a heck of a difficult time with the content.)
I took a guess that the coinage "counterhuman" would signify something monstrous or terrifying, like a vampire, troll or ogre. But I was not even in the ballpark. "Counterhuman," I have now discovered, is a term of art in contemporary literary criticism that refers to everything that is not human: not only animals, natural phenomena such as storms and earthquakes, but also "things" or objects — anything that is constructed or manufactured. Not "inhuman' — just not human. (But why "counter" rather than "non" human?)
Moreover, the word "imaginary," which I have for a lifetime understood to be an adjective signifying what is not material but rather a product of the human mind, as for example, art and literature and dreams, has also undergone metamorphosis. According to wiki, the adjective-turned-noun "imaginary" "is the set of values, institutions, laws, and symbols common to a particular social group and the corresponding society through which people imagine their social whole.” That's a deal of territory, but I think I understand: "imaginary" is essentially a synonym for what I might, naively, have called "culture." (Might an alternative to The Counterhuman Imaginary be The Culture of Things? It's a more inviting title and much less pretentious.)
But now I'm stopped in my tracks. The "imaginary, it appears, is "the work of a particular social group." How in the world, then, do the "counterhuman," who are incapable of thought, possibly generate "a structure of ideas?" Pots and pans and volcanoes and marmosets don't have brains that think or speak, except when we humans attribute such traits to them.
In a whimsical moment, Duke Senior, in As You Like It, proposed that there are "tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones." Am I to understand that this author takes seriously what Shakespeare regarded as an ironic jokey extravagance? Gosh, I hope not.
I think I now get the point: Laura Brown, the prestigious Class of 1916 Professor of English at Cornell University, intends to defend a paradox. She will explain to me how non-humans, things without an intelligence, can create a culture. I'd better pay close attention. Or perhaps the author means to advance the trivial but more sensible and less sensational idea that humans can attribute culture to animals and things.
Nevertheless, I must say what's on my mind — what a deliberately off-putting title. It's clearly designed to repel the general reader, someone like myself, and to speak only to coterie fellow-travelers who might understand either or both of the words "counterhuman" and "imaginary." Not a large potential audience.
Do I have a chip on my shoulder as I turn from the title to the Introduction. Yes, I believe I do.
[January 25] Marianne Morrison, Ph.D. writes: "Vivian, you should not go on with this. Your so prejudiced against this writer that you cant give her a fair hearing."
[January 25] Vivian de St. Vrain responds: "Marianne, I'm trying my best to be fair and honest."
[January 26] Petal Rivera writes: "Vivian, I think you're naive to suggest a less pretentious title. I hate to say it, but the point is not to avoid pretense, but to be pretentious. No modesty in this book."
[January 27] J C Occhiogrosso writes: "Vivian, you're being deliberately obtuse. C'mon, it's not so difficult."
[February 4] Vivian de St. Vrain responds: "Ok, J C, if it's so easy, why don't you suggest a better title."
[February 12] Winifred A. Walker writes: "Like it or not, this is typical academic jargon. If you want to read this book, you must master the idiom."]
-
Nowadays, the ordinary meaning of the noun "poop" is feces. Perhaps because "poop" is a nursery word, it is apparently less offensive than "crap" or "shit." And yet less infantile than kaka or doodoo.But "poop" did not refer to the work of the lavatory until about 1720. Nor do I remember it being in general use during my childhood.
I myself first encountered the word "poop" in the escapist seagoing novels to which I was addicted as an adolescent: the Bounty trilogy, the Hornblower series, Treasure Island, Mr Midshipman Easy, and the buccaneering books of Rafael Sabatini, Jeffery Farnol, and many many others whose names have been long forgotten. In these romantic novels, it was often the case that a handsome young midshipman and a pretty maiden, her golden hair cascading over her shapely shoulders, would flirt while leaning against the taffrail of the "poop." Had I known or suspected that "poop" carried stercoraceous overtones, my budding fantasy life would have turned to dreck. Thank goodness I knew nothing.
The poop deck, I soon deduced, was the roof of the cabin built into the aft of a sailing vessel. Why "poop?" From the French word for stern, poupe, itself derived from the Latin puppis (also signifying stern). Wherefore puppis? No one knows — the word has no analogues in other ancient languages.
Shakespeare used the naval "poop" in the celebrated passage in Anthony and Cleopatra in which Anthony was greeted by Cleopatra. It's the epitome of classical conspicuous consumption as well as Shakespearean eloquence.
The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne,
Burn'd on the water: the poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfumed that
The winds were love-sick with them.An impressively decorated vessel and a spectacular poop, which, because languages change and meanings shift, now provokes involuntary undergraduate titters. In truth, generations of teachers of Shakespeare have amused themselves with the notorious (or perhaps mythical) student blunder: "her poop was beaten gold."Other varieties of "poop." There's the poop that means exhausted, as in "I'm pooped." And poop as inside information. "I got the true poop on this." And poop as a useless or ineffectual person (thought to derive from nincompoop): "He's an old poop." A party-pooper.Shakespeare himself knew still another, and rarer, poop. In Pericles, a pander and a bawd discuss their need for fresh "creatures." Their conversation is mighty vulgar.Bawd: The stuff we have, a strong wind will blow it to pieces.Pander: The poor Transylvanian is dead that lay with the little baggage.Bawd: Ay, she quickly pooped him; she made him roast-meat for worms.Poop was also, it would seem, a slang term for the female genitalia. The Bawd has "denominalized" (as the linguists say) the word and converted it into a verb ("she pooped him)" that has the force of "infect with a venereal disease."Certainly, the word poop has, over the centuries, done yeoman duty.Other words of my life: try here. -
To begin my project of getting a fix on Cornell's Department of Literatures in English, I attempted to read Professor Jeremy Braddock's Collecting as Modernist Practice (Johns Hopkins, 2012).
My plan is to read these Cornell contributions to knowledge with as much empathy and as little prejudice as I can muster.
Despite my good will, I got off to a bad start. The title of Braddock's book, Collecting as Modernist Practice, struck me as dispiriting and uninviting. It's an uncompromising coterie title that seems to say to me (and to every general reader), "I don't care whether you read this book or not." And indeed the copy that I borrowed from the university library had sat on the shelf unthumbed and pristine for the twelve years since its publication. Perhaps it's the minuscule typeface.
Collecting as Modernist Practice is not a page-turner. I found it rough going, and I now confess that I read closely only the introduction and one chapter — and skimmed the rest. Braddock studies the work of collecting and anthologizing art and poetry in the modernist (mostly 1920s) period. The chapter that I studied, The New Negro in the Field of Collections, was enlightening and I was glad to have read it. Braddock is an indefatigable researcher. Sentence after sentence is supported by extensive archival work and a plenty of footnotes. I do wish that the author was as interested in the art and mystery of literature as he is in literature's reception. Collecting as Modernist Practice might be more at home in a department of sociology.
Braddock's prose style is awkward and forbidding. He loves long static sentences with complex subjects and predicates that are sutured with weak verbs. In the pages that I studied, I rarely encountered a metaphor or any other figure of speech. Braddock is also partial to newly-coined polysyllabic abstractions that he may think add heft to his thesis, but which in fact frustrate his readership: minoritarian, identitarianism, anthologization, narrativizing. On the whole, entirely too much suffixizationality.
I will always be grateful to Braddock for introducing me to Witter Bynner's 1917 Spectra hoax, of which I was ignorant, and especially for acquainting me with the fabulous name of one of poets that Bynner invented: Anne Knish.
[January 13] Oksana Sartry writes: "Vivian, I don't think that you're entirely fair to Braddock. It's true that his prose style is imperfect, but remember that the book is most likely his dissertation. And for a diss. it's quite good. I also think that when he writes about poetry, he's quite thoughtful and insightful."
[January 13] Marianne Morrison, Ph. D. writes: "Vivian, your too harsh about Braddock's vocabulary. Those words that you poke fun at are the regular vocabulary for people of his generation; your out of touch.
[January 14] Oksana Sartry replies: "I wonder why Johns Hopkins published this diss. in its modernism series. Good diss., but immature book."
[January 17] Sean R. Fine writes: "I'm interested in modernism, but frankly, this book is absolutely unreadable. Whatever value it has is buried beneath tons of jargon. Gives academia a bad name."
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