Dr. Metablog

Advice for Writers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

G)  know and respect his readership. He must provide all the information that a reader needs to follow the argument. Yet at the same time, he must resist the temptation to be over-explicit. Let readers do some of the work. Let them complete the connections that the writer only suggests. It will keep them on their toes, make them feel intelligent, and retain their interest. And while they're so engaged, the writer might remind himself of another precept, which is to try to

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

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

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

Cornell English Then and Now -- 3A

I am absolutely buffaloed by Laura Brown's book, The Counterhuman Imaginary (Cornell UP, 2023).

PART ONE:  THE TITLE

The title of this book 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 made a guess that the novelty word "counterhuman" must be a coinage that signifies 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: 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 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 a 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 a deal 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 don't have brains and don't 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 book takes seriously what Shakespeare regarded as an ironic jokey extravagance? Gosh, I hope not.

I grasp the idea: Laura Brown, the John Wendell Anderson 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.

Nevertheless, I have to say it --  what a deliberately off-putting title. It's clearly designed to repel a general reader, someone like myself, and to speak only to those coterie fellow-traveler in-groupies who might understand either or both of the words "counter-human" and "imaginary."

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. You're so prejudiced against this writer that you can't give her a fair hearing."

[January 25] Vivian de St. Vrain responds: "Marianne, I'm trying my best to be fair and honest."

Words of My Life -- Poop

Nowadays, the ordinary meaning of the noun "poop" is feces. Perhaps because "poop" is a word of the nursery, it is 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 golden-haired maiden would flirt while leaning against the taffrail of the "poop."" My fantasy life would have turned to dreck if I had known or suspected that "poop" carried stercoraceous overtones. Thank goodness I knew nothing.

The poop deck, I 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 a celebrated passage in Anthony and Cleopatra in which Anthony was greet by Cleopatra. It's the epitome of classical conspicuous consumption and 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.

 

A impressively decorated vessel and a spectacular poop, though because languages change and develop, now draws involuntary undergraduate titters. In truth, generations of teachers of Shakespeare have amused themselves with a notorious (or perhaps mythic) 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."  Although their conversation is mighty vulgar, Shakespeare makes it seem authentic.

 

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."

 

Certaibly, the word poop has, over the centuries, done its duty.

 

 

Other words of my life: try here.

Cornell English Then and Now -- 2

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 way too harsh about Braddock's vocabulary. Those words that you poke fun at are the regular vocabulary for people of his generation;  you're an out of touch member of the way back when.  

[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." 

 

Cornell English Then and Now -- 1

Here's a truth that blows my freakin' mind: since I earned my B. A. in English from Cornell University in 1960, sixty-five years have come and gone. Glaciers have melted and rivers have changed their course since, way back when, in a previous millennium, I was first introduced to serious literature -- to Chaucer and Milton and George Eliot.

My professors in those far-away-and-long-ago-days were exclusively male and for the most part veterans of WW2 or the Korean war. They wrote definitive scholarly articles for the Philological Quarterly and for Modern Philology; they published learned monographs on canonical poets and novelists; and they taught courses with such forthright titles as The Seventeenth Century and Wordsworth and Coleridge. Although I was an indifferent student before I arrived at Cornell, I found an intellectual home in the Department of English. Inasmuch as I did not have a brain for rigorous science or for the tough analytic philosophy that was then in fashion, I was fortunate that the work of English suited my limited abilities -- curiosity, patience, a good memory, and something of a feel for language.

Just yesterday (what prompted me?), I took a peek at the current website of Cornell's English Department. (In the index-card 1950s, when the manual typewriter represented the summit of technology, the word "website" would have signified a dark corner colonized by spiders.) Even at first glance, the 2025 Cornell website said to me "very very different, very 'now'." While an occasional word or phrase was recognizable, it was the novelty -- the modernity, I guess -- that flew off the electronic page. Time marches on, no doubt, but whether it marches boldly forward or plunges over a cliff remains to be established.  

First of all, it's no longer the Department of English. It's now, hurrah, the "Department of Literatures in English." What a welcome redefinition -- an assertion that English is a world language and that it houses a world literature. Nowadays, if I sit down with a work of fiction, I'm just as likely to read a novel by a writer from Africa or India or Australia as one from Britain or North America. There's not a reason in the world why Chinua Achebe or Abdulrazak Gurnah should not be studied in an English Department. I respect this shift in focus and I regret that my 1950s Chaucer-to-T. S. Eliot English department was so parochial, so provincial. I can only admire the fact that the Department of Literatures in English has annexed to itself whole continents of writing -- a case of academic imperialism that for this one time seems wholly right and just.

The website also reveals that, in a nation in which the study of the humanities in higher education is at risk, Cornell's English is a huge thriving enterprise. There are fifty-one people on permanent staff, almost all of professorial rank. Of this number, twenty-seven -- or slightly more than half -- are women. And among those pictured on the site, a significant number are "of color." Undoubtedly, the present department is a far more representative collection of individuals than my 1950s faculty. Moreover, the chair, the associate chair, the director of undergraduate studies, the director of graduate students, and the director of writing are all women. It may once have been the case that the occasional female interloper was a token for display only, but not so now.

And what do these handsome and distinguished men and women study? Fortunately for me, members of the faculty list their areas of concentration. Most claim two or three specialties, some as many as five; a few recalcitrant individuals list none, leaving me in the dark as to whether they are polymaths or just ornery uncooperative beings. Among the fifty-one, the single expertise most commonly claimed is "cultural studies." This preponderance set me back a bit, because "cultural studies" is not a term I recognize nor one that existed, as far as I know, in the 1950s, when the word "culture" was synonymous with "civilization" -- sometimes just Western Civilization -- and when "cultured" meant something equivalent to "educated" and possibly even "socially established." But now, apparently, "cultural studies" is, and I quote a respected source, "an academic field  that... investigates how cultural practices relate to wider systems of power. These include ideology, class structures, national formations, ethnicity, sexual orientation and gender." Am I correct, and is it possible, to infer from this litany of nouns that "cultural practices" comprehends just about everything that we as a society say or do? Clearly the Department of Literatures in English lays claim to a heck of a lot of intellectual territory -- and that it is a far more aggressive entity than is revealed by its absorption of Anglophone novels. I was initially suspicious of these extensive claims, but I soon realized that if I set to one side the self-aggrandizing listing of ideology, ethnicity, class... etc,), cultural studies may in practice simply bring to the forefront such elements as imperialism and nationhood in Robinson Crusoe or race and gender are Othello. Wouldn't it be comforting if "cultural studies" is at least in part merely traditional wine in garish new bottles? I, for one, certainly hope so.

After cultural studies, it is "literary theory" that claims the largest group of adherents -- thirteen, or about a quarter of the faculty. This revelation surprised me because I would have guessed that "theory" had long since gone the way of the aurochs and the mouflon. "Theory" had its herd of enthusiasts in its obscurantist heyday in the last century, yet it seems to be alive and kicking at Cornell -- but only, I suspect, as a vestigial remnant of an earlier time and only among the more senior members of the Department.

Following "theory" in popularity among the professoriate are the seven members who stake their claim to "gender studies." Six other say "African-American." The nine who announce a specialty in creative writing may not know that they are the beneficiaries of the late revered James McConkey. Not a single member of the faculty offers "Shakespeare" or "Milton" as an area of expertise. I do not doubt that the study of gender and African-American and Asian-American literatures is a good thing, but I would have wished that the authors of the finest works of art in all of Anglophonia be accorded equivalent attention and status.   

Would a reincarnated Youthful Me elect take a degree from such a faculty?  I'm skeptical, but I can't say for sure because I don't know whether or not, in the classroom, the scrupulous examination of literature and ideas is compromised by transitory and faddish ideologies. I must confess that the biases of the website make me feel old and wary and out of touch. And tired.

Well then, what does take place in the classroom?

Let's sample some evidence.

In days of yore, I enrolled in "Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama," a course taught by the memorably distinguished scholar and teacher David Novarr. The course was organized as a chronological march from Kyd and Marlowe in the 1580s right through to Ford and Massinger -- the last playwrights of significance before the theaters went dark in 1642. I remember savoring some delightful comedies by Ben Jonson and Francis Beaumont and also a couple of ferocious brilliant tragedies by Thomas Middleton -- writings, I suspect, that 2020s English majors are not destined to encounter -- even though an acquaintance with these plays is essential background for understanding the timeless works of Shakespeare.  

There's no equivalent course in the present curriculum, but there is an analogue, and it appears in the catalogue of offerings thusly: 

ENGL 3240. Blood Politics:  Comparative Renaissance Drama

Blood is everywhere. From vampire shows to video games, our culture seems to be obsessed with it. The course examines the power of "blood" in the early modern period as a figure that continues to capture our imagination, not only as a marker of racial, religious, and sexual difference and desire, but also as a dramatic player in its own right. How does a politics of blood appear on stage when populations are being expelled and colonized for reasons (mis)understood in terms of blood? In the course of trying to answer this and other questions of blood, we will read plays by Shakespeare, Webster, Kyd, Cervantes, Lope de Vega, and Calderón de la Barca. Topics include honor, revenge, purity, the body, sexuality, conversion, and death.

The course description itself is a mess -- both incomprehensible and meretricious. I'm shocked by the catchpenny pandering. Do 2020s teachers need to lure students into their classrooms with "vampires" and "videos?" The assertion that "blood is a dramatic player in its own right" is both absurd and foolish. The description reads like advertising copy for a cheesy low-budget horror flick playing at some louche all-night grind house.

Moreover, "blood" isn't "everywhere." 

I'm afraid that these entrancing plays are destined to be put through the "cultural studies" homogenizer.

Ah, well.

Back in 1960, I had a summer job in Ithaca and therefore happened to be loafing around the campus when the University hosted its returning alumni. Among the returnees were the old folks  -- some of them members of the class of 1895 -- who had assembled for their Sixty-Fifth. Geezers, I thought. I never imagined that I myself would ever live to be quite so "mature." It's sobering to realize that those codgers were the same age -- 86 -- as I am now. Should I  return to Ithaca this coming spring, for my very own Sixty-Fifth, I will be perceived by the young 'uns exactly as I observed those Class of 1895 guys: as ancient and irrelevant.

It follows, therefore, that my reservations about the 2025 English curriculum have their exact parallel in the 1895ers perspective on my 1960 curriculum. It's not hard to imagine that they -- I mean the members of the class of 1895 -- who had been educated in elocution and Old Norse, would have been shocked and perhaps outraged by the 1950s "modern" curriculum that I found so enticing and illuminating.

And now, because I don't want to go full curmudgeon and become the kind of codger who shakes his crooked stick at the modern world and deplores the decline of civilization, I'm going to make an effort to find out what's really going on in 2025. I have therefore set myself the task of reading a representative sample of the books written by members of the present-day English faculty.

I'll report on my studies right here.

Stay tuned.

[January 18] Bernhard Starr writes:  "Vivian, you are right about the course description. It's a disgrace. It's badly written and ridiculous. Why didn't you include the name of the prof. who wrote it?  He/she needs to be exposed. What "populations are being expelled and colonized" by Volpone or The Changeling?  And did you look other course descriptions -- are they equally silly?  What's worst about the course description is that it doesn't respect the plays that the class is going to examine. They're not important interesting dramas to the teacher -- they're just fodder for an ideology. 

[January 19] Vivian de St. Vrain replies: "Mr. Starr, I didn't identify the author of the course description because the website doesn't identify him/her. Just as well. Also, I didn't read other course descriptions though I might do so in the future. I think you're correct that the course description does not respect the dramas or their authors. Which is, as you suggest, mighty disappointing." 

[January 19] Bernhard Starr replies:  "I think I'd rather study Old Norse."

Books I Read, 2024

Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls; Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep; Felipe Alou, My Baseball Journey; Guy de la Bedoyere, Gladius, the World of the Roman Soldier; Gordon Dee Alcorn, Owls; Martin H. Levinson, Brooklyn Boomer; J.N. Adams, Bilingualism and the Latin Language; Sybille Haynes, Etruscan Civilization, a Cultural History; Philip Freeman, Julian, Rome's Last Pagan Emperor; G & L Bonfante, The Etruscan Language, An Introduction; Ernest Hemingway, The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories; Booth Tarkington, The Magnificent Ambersons; Ellen Gilchrist, In the Land of Dreamy Dreams; Kim Chernin, In My Mother's House; Ines Augrain Thomas, Memoirs of an 84 Year Old; Louise Penny, The Cruelest Month; Abramovitch and Galvin, Jews of Brooklyn; Helen Czerski, The Blue Machine, How the Ocean Works; Ian Buruma, Spinoza, Freedom's Messiah; Robert Leighton, Tarquinia, an Etruscan City; Joseph B. Solodow, Latin Alive; William Shakespeare, Coriolanus, Barry S Brown, La Signora Watson e I Segreti di Parkington Manor; Carlo Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli; Patrick Joyce, Remembering peasants, a personal history of a vanished world; Charles Darwin, Origin of Species (parts); Sean Sayers, The Making of a Marxist Philosopher, Leo Tolstoi, Anna Karenina; David Gibbins, The History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks; Lisa Kaltenegger, Alien Earths; Nicholas Kristof, Chasing Hope; William Shakespeare, Much Ado about Nothing; Abdulrazak Gurnah, Other Lives; Mollie Gillen, The Masseys; Hibl & Hibl, The Handel Lamps Book;  William Shakespeare, King Lear; Caroline Dodds Pennock, On Savage Shores; Andrew Lipman, Squanto, a Native Odyssey; Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd; Lee Siegel, Groucho Marx; Ben Goldfarb, Eager, the Surprising Secret Life of Beavers; Robert Louis Stevenson, The Lantern Bearers and other Essays; Alice Munro, Too Much Happiness; Margarette Lincoln, London and the 17th Century; Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending; Mark Kurlansky, The Basque History of the World.

Deaths, 2024

The year got off to an early start when Brad Gombas died on December 16. Brad was the brother of my late brother-in-law Allen Gombas. I knew him in the 1970s, when he was a young man; he lived most of his life in New Mexico where he established a career as a builder and craftsman. I wasn't in touch except through the extended family communication chain. On December 26, my friend from 1965 Ray Pike died at age 90. Ray was an accomplished journalist. Nancy Pike and AGP were the young mothers of a playgroup that included the infants NGP and Nina Pike -- in an earlier life it now seems. We saw Ray and Nancy at least once a year for many decades. Then on the last day of the year Sue Palmer died (peacefully, I'm told), after many many years of illness and pain. She was a superbly talented artist and a friend, though not a close one, since 1969. In February, we lost Nancy Levitt. Not a close friend (wife of a colleague) but a long time acquaintance  -- a regular at the Takacs, seated just in front of us these past 30 years. Sheldon "Spike" Cohen, later Alan Mills, a friend from the PS 217 schoolyard, died in March. Esophogeal cancer that had metastasized. A long drawn out death, with many months of hospice care. In May. Bill Wood died. He was a world-famous scientist and a friend. It must be 20 years now since his wife, Renate Wood, a poet, left us. Bill had been in a relationship with another old acquaintance, Marilyn Krysl, for these many years. Marilyn died a couple of months after Bill; she had been in "memory care" for several months. During the summer, we lost two former English colleagues. The first to go was congenial Chuck Squier, at the age of 91, who had moved to Boise, Idaho to be near his children; he was a friend and also a long time neighbor on the Hill; the second: nice guy Doug Burger. In August I discovered that Anatol Anton had died earlier in the year. I knew Anatol when he was a member of the CU Department of Philosophy in the 70s or 80s, but hadn't been in touch since he left Boulder to return to San Francisco. Anatol was a cheerful bear of a man, far to  the political left, who grew up in Greenwich Village with a semi-famous painter for a father. Fred Litto, classmate from P S 217 and Erasmus, died in Brazil, where he had lived for 50 years; we always planned to get together, but it never happened. Another PS 217 friend, Tony Sogluizzo, died in the spring but I didn't find out about it until much later. He was a genuinely decent and gentle man who had a good career as a librarian. Late in December, we attended the dignified funeral of Bill Belew, husband of Lynn's friend Sharon Belew.  And so the year came to an end.  

 

Another Creative Dream

I'm aware that Oscar Wilde is reputed to have said that the most terrifying words in the English language are -- "I would like to tell about you my dream."  But I'm going to report on last night's dream anyway, because it's so bizarre and interesting (at least to me).

I'm sitting at a table in a restaurant with my ladylove. Actually, it's not exactly a restaurant; it's more like a nightclub of the kind that's familiar to me only from 30s films, not from real life. Small tables in a very large room, patrons wearing fancy slick clothes -- men in dark evening wear, women in shimmering white. Low chatter. Everything normal except that wandering among the tables is a giant African lion, male, with an intimidating mane and a long swishing tail. 

I say to my lady, "I don't like the looks of this. That lion could easily carry off a small child."  End of dream, or at least, end of what I remember.

Once again, it's clear that my nighttime self is far more imaginative than my pedestrian daytime self, who would never in a million years have thought to introduce a whopping big lion from the Serengeti into an ordinary restaurant. I'm not nearly so visionary. Does the dream have any meaning? An obvious interpretation is that even places safe for recreation can be dangerous.  Or, conversely, that dangers can be domesticated and made safe. Take your pick. 

My Life with Museums -- an Introduction

In the course of my long life, I've visited hundreds of museums -- more than I can possibly count or remember. Nor just the famous and glorious ones: how many times, driving in unfamiliar locality, or wandering in a new city, have I been irresistibly lured into the local landmark?  Even in the most modest establishment, there's something new to learn and discover. Nevertheless, my focus, lifetime, has been on art museums, where even the most iconic, most reproduced painting or sculpture acquires new life when viewed in the flesh. Let's face it: copies can be useful and informative, but the real thing is the real thing -- always revelatory, and sometimes transcendent or sublime. In fact, let me confess, in the Rembrandt Gallery at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City, I experienced a transient version of the so-called Stendhal Syndrome. Once and once only, but never to be forgotten.

I'm dazzled, in memory, by the vast holdings of the Borghese, the Louvre, the Rijksmuseum, the British Museum, and an early love, the under-appreciated Brooklyn Museum right there on Grand Army Plaza.  

I'm grateful to the exhibitions and the hard-working curators that introduced me to major painters I wouldn't otherwise have appreciated: Aelbert Cuyp and Jan Steen at the National Gallery, Camille Pissarro at the Jewish Museum in New York; many more. And also the specialized museums, chief among them the Vasa Museum in Stockholm, which taught me more about life in the seventeenth century than could a fleet of books. And a special favorite, the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York -- a most wonderful and comprehensive display of an ancient and modern craft. But also the many local museums that I visited during my thirty-eight cross-country migrations. Who could ever forget the Donna Reed Museum in Denison, Ohio, or the Jell-O Museum somewhere near Buffalo, New York?  Gosh, I'm still hoping that someday I will make it to the National Museum of the American Coverlet in Bedford, Pennsylvania.

And then there are the troubling museums. I wonder if I will ever have the courage to enter the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. It was disorienting enough to visit an open-air museum, somewhere in Lithuania, where a variety of preserved structures from that country's miserable past have been brought together to simulate a peasant village. It was a strange dispiriting visit. After all, my ancestors as far back as we can know lived and worked in such a sad little village. My visit was, I suppose, educational -- but also melancholy and depressing. The village seemed not so much preserved as embalmed.

Words of My Life: the List So Far

My series of posts called Words of My Life was inspired by a Federico Roncoroni's Sillabario della Memoria, viaggio sentimentale tra le parole amate. Roncoroni's book is a unique and I think original kind of autobiography -- a history (voyage, he says) of words that have been been loved by him. Words of My Life is a  homage to Roncoroni. So far I've written brief essays on the following words (and I intend to continue). Just as is the entirety of the blog, these essays constitute an autobiography in shards and fragments. Here's the list of entries thus far. Each mini-essay is just a click away.

barmagillion

boobs

boot

bottom

cishet,

hack

fango

fluff

joint

jot and tittle,

mucilage.

orts

outing

pairings

pandiculation

provider

ramps

roux

sleepers

slouch,

 spatchcock,

stopper.

troll

 umpire, 

whores

worship

yips

 

Sleeping: a History

I'm a terrible, terrible sleeper. It's a lifelong plight and a serious disability. Truth to tell, I'd have more success as a contestant in a tango contest, or as a heldentenor yodeling in front of thousands, or as a trapeze artist or as a sumo wrestler than I have as a sleeper.

Bad sleeping runs in my family. I suppose that I inherited the trait from my father. Growing up, we never knew where we'd find the old guy in the morning, because during the night he'd wander from room to room and from bed to chair and even onto that scratchy old green tufted sofa. For me, the hardest part of any day has always been the night -- and, believe it or not, the problem has become more severe as I grapple with old age.

My usual routine is to fall asleep prematurely (and unwisely) at 10:00 pm. Then I wake at 12:30 am, usually in a fright from a ghastly nightmare, my brain alert, but my body yearning for oblivion. Then I'm up for a while, involuntarily reprising some atrocious embarrassment or shameful failure in some earlier part of my life. Unable to find the right situation for my ancient limbs, I twirl beneath the blankets like a rotisserie chicken. I don't want to disturb my peacefully-slumbering bedmate, so I wander the residence, finally to settle in an auxiliary bed. Then my wayward brain starts to ruminate on the state of the nation, especially on the prospect of a second term for the moronic demagogue. At this point, I reluctantly surrender to necessity and take a sleeping pill (the powerful hypnotic ambien). I read or watch a basketball game on the TV, but after about 45 minutes the drug takes hold and the muscles in my eyes slacken so much that I can no longer bring the separate images of right and left eye together. Eventually I fall into "airplane sleep" -- the kind of shallow surface sleep that we all experience when we fly "economy" or "coach" (better called "steerage"). At about 6 in the morning, I wake out a second horrid dream, relieve myself, and try to snatch a couple of peaceful hours --  a hope which I regularly fail to accomplish. Eventually, "the darkness has passed/ And it's daylight at last."  I'm foggy-headed for a while but at last I regain my equilibrium until it's time for another nighttime bout with Morpheus. And that's how I pass one third of my life. 

On the cheerful side, although I'm a bad nighttime sleeper, I'm a fairly proficient daytime napper. The most wonderful and memorable sleeps of my life have been afternoon naps. When I was in my teens, back there in the Eisenhower era, it was my weekend custom to trot to the schoolyard in the morning and play three-on-three half-court basketball for a couple of hours (in those days I enjoyed an endless "second wind"). Then I'd come home for a mid-day dinner -- perhaps if the parents were feeling flush it would be a roast beef or roast pork along with a bounty of potatoes (the most soporific of vegetables). Then I'd retreat to my room, tune the old wood-cased Philco to a Dodgers game, perhaps even to a double-header, and allow myself to be soothed by the rhythmic cadences of Red Barber and Connie Desmond. A deep, profound and most satisfying nap would then ensue -- the kind of sleep where you're so far gone that you don't know if it's day or night, summer or winter when, hours later, you crack an exploratory eyelid.

Where are the sleeps of yesteryear?

In my maturity, sleep has been, as I've said, a combat zone. In these last years I've achieved weekend afternoon depth just two times. Alas and alack, it was the drugs, the sedatives for my two surgeries that did the trick. When you're anesthetized, at least as I experienced it, there's nothing -- no sound, no dream, certainly no twirling -- between the moment the anesthetic kicks in and moment it leaves. You're just not there. You're nowhere.

The ancient formula was somnus imago mortis. That is to say, sleep is the simulacrum of death. Sleep is designed to prepare us for death. There was a time that I would scoff at such a pious formula -- but not any more. I think that if death is what I experienced during anesthetized sleep, why, then, there's nothing to fear. It will be peaceful and long and very boring, but not at all stressful.

I would like my tombstone to read, "No More Insomnia, Forever."

Words of My Life -- Outing

During my lifetime, the word "outing" has mutated beyond recognition. It first entered my youthful vocabulary (as did so many other words) through the medium of baseball. An "outing" -- in the old days --meant to me only a stint on the mound. "Podres has had a good "outing" today." The more general meaning of "outing" as a short trip taken for pleasure, such as a picnic, or a jaunt in the country, only came into my  life many years later. "They enjoyed a family outing to Montauk." The fact of the matter is that my family of origin didn't go on "outings," but at some point I must have heard I heard about such journeyings from friends or read about them in novels.

These days, I rarely encounter the baseball or picknicky meanings of "outing." "Outing" has transformed into the obnoxious word that describes the odious and hostile practice of exposing the sexual identity of a person against his/her will.  From picnic to nasty, alas.

Frankly, I prefer the traditional significations and activities.

My Life in Objects XIX: Bronze Door Plate

It's my newest acquisition, purchased on Ebay just a couple of days ago, but already a favorite. It's a bronze door plate, very beautiful and heavy in the hand. It's inscribed PULL. It bears no manufacturers or identifying marks but the style is mighty pure Victorian. I imagine it came from a demolished once-elegant downtown department store. What the heck do I plan to do with it?  Why, it will be attached, next summer, to the old iron gate that we mounted at the entrance to the "waterfall garden." It's whimsical, of course, because the gate helps to define the space, it guards absolutely nothing and is easily circumvented. 

If PUSH had been available I would have purchased it too. But PULL is sufficient. A plate saying NO SOLICITORS has also been proposed -- but that addition might be just a little bit of overkill (and silliness).

My Baseball-First Vocabulary

Folks who weren't there can hardly appreciate how thoroughly the nation and neighborhood into which I was born was baseball-saturated. In the 1940s and 1950s, the heyday of the fabled Dodgers, baseball was Brooklyn and Brooklyn was the world -- of this there was, nor could be, any doubt.   

Baseball was the all-encompassing medium though which we learned about success and failure, defeat and resiliency, exhilaration and sadness, and ultimately of the knowledge of good and evil.  

Not only morality, but language itself. It's an unimpeachable fact that my early vocabulary was solidly baseball-based. It took years and sometimes decades before I discovered that many baseball words also carried an off-the-diamond significance.

Readers may scoff at this claim to the linguistic priority of baseball -- because they can't imagine or can't believe how central pitching and catching was to our experience. So "let's go to the tape."

Take, for instance, the word "pennant." During my salad years, "pennant" was a common everyday word that meant only "league championship." If you finished  first in your league, you "won the pennant." I had not the least glimmer of an idea that a "pennant" was also physical object -- a flag, it turned out, usually triangular and usually nautical. To me, a pennant was immaterial and metaphorical. When Russ Hodges famously (to those of us of a certain age) screamed, in 1951, "the Giants win the pennant, the Giants win the pennant," there was no reason for twelve-year-old me to suspect that the word had an extra-baseball existence. (Nor did I know that "league" meant anything but National or American, major or minor.)

Another such word is "battery," which to me and to my cohort of scruffy schoolyard friends meant nothing more than the duo of pitcher and catcher. "Today's battery is Newcombe and Campanella"; "they're facing the 'brother battery' of Mort and Walker Cooper." But later it came to pass that the word battery was known to the world beyond Ebbets as a source of electric power-- in those days lead-acid and now lithium. And that, in addition, "battery" had violent associations -- as in "assault and battery" -- or its military signification as an assemblage of cannons. (The word "batter" had already leapt its baseball perimeter. Thanks to my mother, I was early familiar with the tasty mixture that could be baked into cookies or bread). And "bat" was the old hickory or ash, not a flying mammal.

There are many other baseball words that migrated away from their first home. A "rubber" was a 4" wide strip of something -- was it really made of rubber?-- that lay on the mound just 60 feet and 6 inches from home plate. Later, a rubber became an eraser and then the material from which automobile tires are made and then, much much later, a condom. A "mound," of course, was first and foremost a pitcher's mound, not a geographical feature. A "dugout" was where players gathered when they weren't on the field; later it became a kind of canoe. "Stuff" -- some days a pitcher had his good stuff, but some days his sinker just didn't drop. A "stance" was a batter's pose in the box; some batters had an open stance and some a closed. "Clutch" did not denote holding tight to something or other; it meant only a "clutch hit". A "blast" was not a bomb going off; it was long four-bagger. The "count" was not degree a of knighthood; it was the state of balls and strikes on the batter.  The next batter would wait on a metaphorical "deck" long before a deck became a pack of cards or an exposed porch. A "blooper" was a "Texas leaguer"; only later did it become a flawed outtake. Strike! Three strikes and you're out. Later, a labor movement. And many more.

"Fair" and "foul" indicated where a batted ball fell to the earth in relation to the first or third base lines. Macbeth's "So foul and fair a day I have not seen" was many years into the future. 

More on Starokonstantinov

The (website) "My Shtetl -- Jewish Towns of Ukraine" gathers information about Starokonstantinov -- "Old Constantine" -- the town from which, in 1895, my courageous grandparents emigrated to America. The site is in Russian but it can be mechanical translated into awkward but intelligible English.

Some of my friends of European extraction have been able to return to the old country villages where their families originated, but that option is not available to me. Trust me, there's no pilgrimage to Starokonstantinov in my future -- even if the town happens to survive the Russian invasion and the rockets. My grandparents did not bring to Ellis Island happy memories and nostalgia or pique my curiosity with warm fuzzy memories of their earlier years. Nevertheless, Starokonstantinov provokes my curiosity. For how many decades did my ancestors live in this so-obscure-to-me town?  How did they manage to survive?

One of the compilers of the My Shtetl website, Yevgenii Schneider, has unearthed a report on Starokonstantinov written in 1884 by a certain N. I. Zuts, a lieutenant in the 45th Azov Infantry Regiment. Why or for whom these paragraphs were written I have no idea, but some of it largely duplicates information that I have previously posted. According to Lieutenant Zuts, Starokonstantinov was founded in 1505 as the village of Kolyshchentsy in a grant from the king of Poland to one Ivan Labunsky. On January 5, 1561, Labunsky's descendants sold Kolyshchentsy to Prince Konstantin Ostrozhsky. Three months later, Ostrozhsky was permitted by the king to found a city first called Konstatinov, then Novokonstantinov, and finally in 1632 renamed Starokostiantyniv. A castle was constructed in 1571. In 1620, the city passed into the possession of the princes Zaslavsky, and in 1682, to the princes Lubomirsky. Starokonstinov became part of Russia in 1793.

(It seems to be the case that Ukraine was a largely unpopulated or underpopulated frontier until a few hundred years ago. When and why did my people decide to try their luck on this vast semi-empty plain?) 

Zuts expresses frustration that it hard to count Jews because of "the special conditions of their life, which is generally distinguished by great mobility and inconstancy with respect to place of residence: in the city there are many Jews who live permanently or for a very long time due to their trade and other affairs and are not included in the city population. Jewish houses, not being the property of one person, and sometimes constituting the property of several families, cannot serve as data by which, even desirably, with a small error, it would be possible to determine the number of their inhabitants. When concluding marriages among themselves, many, even the majority of Jewish families, accepting a son-in-law for a year, two, three or even five years, depending on the marriage conditions and the son-in-law's property status, subsequently move to other localities."

 

The good lieutenant seems genuinely mystified by the communal customs of the Jewish population. Zuts admires one aspect of Jewish life: "the charity of the Jewish residents is expressed primarily in the fact that poor Jews receive help from the wealthier ones. Independently of this, there is a Jewish Hospital in the city, located in a house built with public funds and maintained with money donated by two wealthy Jews, Israel Epstein and Abraham Krasnoselsky."

 

And Zuts adds this very interesting detail of Jewish life. "All Jewish houses are built almost according to the same plan and the same model, having the character of a guest house, i.e. on both sides of the corridor there is a row of rooms; each room has a door into the common corridor and is also connected to the neighboring rooms by doors, mostly double-leaf. Consequently, each room has 3 doors and only the corner rooms have 2 doors." Zuts describes what is familiar to me as a "shotgun house" -- a style not at all rare in the new world but apparently exotic to the lieutenant.

The website also contains a few pictures of houses typical of Jewish inhabitants. As far as I can tell, these are recent photographs of older homes in various states of repair.

The website does not make it clear who, if anyone, is living in these houses today.

In addition, Evgeniy Schneider appends a brief history of the Jewish community of Starokonstantinov. I've transcribed it.

"Jews have lived in Starokostiantyniv since the end of the 16th century. In 1629, there were 130 Jewish families (about 25% of the total population), and the community was the second largest in Volyn. During the Khmelnytsky period, the Jews of the city and the surrounding area took refuge in the fortress. On the Ninth of Av, the Cossacks broke in and killed everyone. Starokostiantyniv was also destroyed several times by the Haidamaks in the early 18th century. But Jews continued to settle there, and in 1765, 1,801 Jews were registered in the city and its surrounding area. In 1802, the number of Jews was 2,053. In 1827, when Tsar Nicholas I issued an order to mobilize Jews into the Russian army, serious unrest broke out in Starokostiantyniv. In 1847, there were 6,611 Jews in the community, and in 1897, 9,212 (60.7% of the total population). Most of the local Jews were Hasidim, followers of the tzaddikim of the Chernobyl and Sadagora dynasties. In 1911, the city's population was about 20,000, including 11,800 Jews. With the establishment of Soviet power in Volyn in 1920, the Jewish community was disbanded. By 1926, there were 6,934 Jews in the city (41.3% of the population). There was a secondary school with instruction in Yiddish.
At the end of 1931, there were 4,837 Jews in the city (about 33% of the population), of whom more than a quarter were deprived of the right to vote ("disenfranchised").  The Germans occupied Starokostiantyniv on July 8, 1941. In late August 1941, the Jews were confined to a ghetto. The Jewish population of Starokostiantyniv and its environs was exterminated in a series of actions from August 1941 to November 1942.  Today, the town has a small Jewish community, "Shalom." In 2012, it had 80 members."  A tragic story.

 

The website posts another picture that intrigues me. It's an old photograph, probably from the the turn of the last century, of Jewish workers in what is called a "cigarette factory." I know that when Isaiah came to America, in 1895, he made his living rolling cigars. I just wonder if he followed a trade that he had begun in Starokonstantinov. Would he, perhaps, have recognized any of these contemporary, doomed Jewish workers?

 

My Aunt Mollie

This post is written for my children, grandchildren, and any potential future descendants. Aunt Mollie was an important person to my in earlier years. She should be remembered.

Mollie was my father's older sister. She was born in 1900, the third of the four children of Isaiah and Eta. She was an extremely private person and never revealed the least personal information about herself. I know nothing of her childhood and I am not even certain that she attended high school. I know that she was for many years employed in the surgical instrument field, where she advanced to a responsible management position and earned a reasonable salary (for those days). She retired early, perhaps in her fifties. She never married nor introduced me or anyone else in our family to a boyfriend, lover, or suitor, though in later life I learned that it had been her constant habit to visit a "Mr Isgin" every Wednesday. Who was Henry Isgin? I believe that he was a fellow worker at her place of employment and I know that when he died he willed Mollie his Long Island City house. That's all I know; I hope that her relationship with him was satisfying.

Mollie's curly black hair never grayed. Her eyes were so dark that there was no visible distinction between iris and pupil. My daughter, who knew her only in her last years, remembers her as small, squarish, and big-bosomed.

Mollie never "moved out"; during my childhood, she lived with her parents and later with Eta only in a small ground-floor apartment at 334 Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights. When Eta died in 1963, she moved across the river to a her own place at last, a modest apartment in Greenwich Village, where she lived until her death in 1985. She enjoyed the concerts and the theater and her independence. She was a solid New Yorker; like my father, she never learned to drive an automobile. Unlike my father, who was uncomfortable outside his familiar sphere and was averse to travel, Aunt Mollie was an adventurous sort. She traveled the world, usually solo. She was constantly on the move. I heard tell, for example, that she was a passenger on one of the first commercial flights to China (in the 1930s).

In 1952, she offered to take me on a trip to Washington DC. I jumped at the chance. It was my first time out of Brooklyn and quite the revelation: gosh, there were other cities, other neighborhoods in the universe! We stayed at the Mayflower Hotel (gosh, there were hotels!), ate in "restaurants" -- another novelty -- visited the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials, and even took a boat ride up the river to Mt. Vernon. We heard Harry Truman deliver a Fourth of July address from the base of the Washington Monument. It was exhilarating and inspiring -- a first toe-in-the-water alternative to my very marked provinciality and to the exaggerated caution of my parents. I am sure that I would never "gone away" to college, or relocated to the Rocky Mountain west, or traveled to other continents if it hadn't been that Aunt Mollie introduced me to a bit of the world outside the P S 217 schoolyard world in my thirteenth year.

Mollie also helped me financially. She wasn't rich but as a single woman with a good income she accumulated enough cash to intervene, generously, at critical moments. In a sense, she was the family banker. She gave me a couple of thousand dollars for part of the down payment on the Hackett Hill property and later held, on favorable terms, the mortgage on my house on 10th Street. When she died, she bequeathed me the remainder of the principal.  Although these were not great sums, they were nevertheless very crucial to me and to my family's financial well-being.

Even more important: Mollie admired and, I believe, loved my wife -- which was a very good thing because my own mother was not so positive.

I can't say that I ever had a real conversation with Mollie. She asked little and told less. She was not curious, or thoughtful, nor well-educated -- not even a reader. She was always a little crude and could be critical and blunt (though not to me). To my brother, when he was going through a tough period in his financial life, she said, "Why don't you just get a real job." To a niece, she offered, "Why don't you just lose weight."  A true Victorian at heart, she regarded all illnesses as mental and moral weakness.

Mollie was proud of her extraordinary vigor and health. She once told me that she went 40 years without seeing a doctor. She was robust and middle-aged at 84, dead at 85 -- every one of her organs having failed. Loss of mental acuity was the first sign of decay. In 1984, she called my father on the telephone and said, out of the blue, "Pop is here."  Dad said, "What do you mean Pop is here. Pop died in 1946." Mollie answered, "Yes, I know that. So why is he here."  After that shocking moment, the end came quickly.

I' have never visited my parents' graves, but I'm told that Mollie is buried on my father's right and that my mother is buried on my father's left. So Dad lies forever between the two women to whom he was closest in life. 

Words of My Life: Bottom

"Bottom" is another of the many words that came into my life through the medium of baseball. As soon as I was able to walk and talk, I learned that an inning has both a "top" and a "bottom." "Bottom of the ninth" was an optimistic phrase because there was always the Ebbets Field hope that the Dodgers might come through with a game-winning rally. Later, when I discovered that there was more to human existence than baseball, the various and colorful meanings of "bottom" began to reveal themselves. For example, the posterior part of the human body, which I knew as the ass or the behind or the tuchas, was, I learned, called the "bottom" by people of sophistication. A euphemism?  A Britishism? 

Even later on, I discovered that bottom, signifying buttocks or butt was not the root meaning of the word but a metaphorical extension of its original sense. Old English botm, cognate with Latin fundus, meant land or farm or soil. This meaning of "bottom" is well-preserved in the phrase "bottom land" -- the level and fertile acres along the banks of a watercourse. Many English family names are consequently topographical surnames of ancient inhabitants of various river fronts -- such as Bottoms, Robottom, Higginbottom, Ramsbottom, Longbottom, Winterbottom, and Bottomley. Names that have nothing to do with either innings or asses.

The oddity that "bottom" can refer both to farmland and to the human butt can sometimes yield unconscious comedy. For example, in 1977, I was a guest at a wedding in the infelicitously named Kent village of Pett Bottom. I must hope that Pett is a variant of Pitt, a "hollow," rather than commonplace "pet" with a supernumerary "t".

These days, "bottom" is more likely to mean something like "the essence" -- as in such phrases "to get to the bottom of the matter"; or "the bottom of one's heart."

And then there's egregious Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream, who does not disdain the mandatory pun: "This is to make an ass of me."

Shakespeare likes the word "bottom." Here's Malcolm's most memorable characterization of Macbeth.  

 

                          I grant him bloody,
Luxurious, avaricious, false, deceitful,
Sudden, malicious, smacking of every sin
That has a name: but there's no bottom, none,
In my voluptuousness: your wives, your daughters,
Your matrons and your maids, could not fill up
The cistern of my lust, and my desire
All continent impediments would o'erbear
That did oppose my will:

 

This "bottom" is not farmland or butt; it's the low point in a downward trajectory. This "bottom" is associated with "cistern" -- a receptacle for holding water.  Curiously, Shakespeare regularly uses the word in its relation to the water of oceans, most specifically the sea-bottom:  

 

            the slimy bottom of the deep.    (Richard III)

 

O coz, coz, coz, my pretty little coz, that thou didst know how many fathom deep I am in love! But it cannot be sounded; my affection hath an unknown bottom, like the Bay of Portugal.  (As You Like It)

 

By heaven, methinks it were an easy leap,
To pluck bright honor from the pale-faced moon,
Or dive into the bottom of the deep,
Where fathom-line could never touch the ground,
And pluck up drowned honor by the locks.  (I Henry IV)

 

As is the ooze and bottom of the sea. (Henry V)

 

Who ever yet could sound thy bottom? find
The ooze, to show what coast thy sluggish crare
Might easiliest harbour in?                                   (Cymbeline)

 

 

I suspect that Shakespeare would have savored the modern phrase, "bottom feeder."  But I doubt he would have understood, any more than I do, the names of the fifth and sixth quarks, which are top and bottom (exactly like an inning).

 

Other words of my life:  slouch, cishet, yips, ramps, jot and tittle, worship, mucilage. spatchcock, umpire, stopper.

My Onion Heart

Last night I woke from a dream with this peculiar phrase repeating itself in my half-conscious brain: "it fills my onion heart with fear and trembling."  

I have a couple of questions to ask of my capricious dreamatorium, which although capable of creating passable iambic pentameter is rarely self-explanatory.  

a) What is "it?"  What is the nameless dread that precipitated this piece of blank verse, and b) what in the living heck is an "onion heart."  And why am I accused of having one?  Is an "onion heart" pungent and tasty, when eaten either raw or sauteed?  Or is it layered with a succession of scales and therefore mysterious and perhaps unknowable.  

Frankly, I don't have a good theory, except to say that I don't feel that to be described as having an "onion heart" is complimentary. If my dreamatorium wanted to say something nice about my heart, it had such relevant and easily available alternatives as "lionheart" or "braveheart." Or even "sweetheart," for goodness sake.

My Career as a Dowser

When we built the summer house/cabin/hovel in 1977, we needed to dig a well, and someone, probably the plumber, hired a dowser. I didn’t approve – I would have hired a credentialed hydraulic engineer. For me, dowsers belongs in the same crazy box as astrologers, phrenologists, flat-earthers, Shakespeare-author conspiracists, along with the lunatics who report on visits to the earth by ancient astronauts. Nevertheless, a dowser arrived, an elderly gentleman. Curiously, he dowsed with an old pair of rusted pliers rather than the traditional forked willow stick. He was an enthusiast for his trade and, ignoring my skepticism, showed my how to cut a willow and exactly how to hold it. After he left, I tried it out. A most odd experience, one of the oddest in my life, then took place. As I walked about, brandishing the rod, from time to time the tip of the willow would turn suddenly down. Not in a subtle way, but forcefully and dramatically – strongly enough to redden and even slightly cut the palms of my hands.  

Even more strange -- if I handed the willow to another person and he or she walked about, nothing happened. Nothing, that is, until I held that person's wrist. Then the dowsing rod went all crazy and twisted downward out of the holder's hands. 

It was a wondrous incredible experience and is vivid in my memory now these fifty years. But it was a one time only event.

Every once in a while, over the decades, just for fun, I would cut a piece of willow and walk about, but I’ve never been able to reproduce the phenomenon. The dowsing rod doesn’t dowse, doesn’t do anything at all;  just behaves like an ordinary piece of wood. 

I don't believe in dowsing. I don't believe that you can find underground water, or even underground electric wires as some think, by walking about with a piece of willow in your hands.  On the other hand, I know that something peculiar and very real happened to me that one time. Was there water underground. I don't know, but I know that I wouldn't dig a hole on the basis of that fleeting evidence. I am a man of reason, or at least I like to think so.

Incidentally, the place that the 1977 dowser picked out for us to dig was a great success. We've enjoyed a bounteous  supply of water for all these many years. 

But now that I know more about wells than I did half a century ago, I can read the landscape well enough to recognize that the dowser picked an obvious place to dig a well -- with or without the help of his magical pliers.

Amnesia on Film: Crossroads (1942)

 

Just when you think that the repository of amnesia films has been drained dry, along comes this entertaining oddity from 1942. In Crossroads (1942), French diplomat David Talbot, played by William Powell with William Powell's unvarying mustache and accent, contracts a very bad case of movie amnesia. "Retrograde amnesia," it's denominated. He can't remember anything that happened before his years-ago accident, and although he seems to have lived an exemplary life since, he's subject to a vicious blackmail attempt by a trio of blackguards who try to convince him that in his earlier life he was a career criminal. After many a twist and turn, all is revealed and set right; however, Talbot never regains his memory but goes blithely along with his personal history obliterated. This lack of resolution is unusual and perhaps unique for amnesia movies but the filmmakers seem unconcerned about the psychological effects that the huge gap in Talbot's self-knowledge ought rightly to afflict him. Once again, movie amnesia is unmoored from any remote approximation to real life.

 

Powell's principal antagonist is played by Basil Rathbone. My favorite scene in the movie is one in which Powell and Rathbone are pictured profile-to-profile. Both actors have truly outstanding, near cyranoesque noses and I am sure that the director framed the scene to emphasize their nasal symmetry. Powell and Rathbone go nose-to-nose for a few long and very amusing moments. I can't find a proper picture but this one is close (that's glorious Hedy Lamarr between the two olfactory eminences):

My Life with Shakespeare - I

As a rule, I keep my distance from live performances of a Shakespeare play because I seldom enjoy the experience and regularly find it misleading. This has not always been the case. A few versions, notably the lucid Scofield Coriolanus at Stratford in 1962, are still vivid in my brain. What has happened?  Somewhere along the way, I've lost patience and lost interest in playgoing. Am I alone?  I remember sitting in some theater or other in the way back when, when, glancing left and right in my row, I could not help noting that a significant cadre of my fellow spectators were not engrossed in the performance but were nodding off, and that others in my vicinity were clearly bored, drifting passively toward sweet sleep.

This is a phenomenon that I had never encountered at a baseball game where everyone is alert and engaged. Anything but silent and sometimes raucous?

So why were all these numb Shakespeare spectators sitting as still as stones?

And why was I among them, inasmuch as I too, let me confess, was bored by the performance. I was not, as I yearned to be, lost in the words or engaged by the action. While I wasn't sleeping, except possibly for a second or two here and there, I was treading mental water, so to speak. Not exactly hypnotized, but certainly not transfixed. And I was in this state of inattention even though I knew the words that the actors were saying as well or better than they knew them themselves. Eventually, in the course of time, I came to admit to myself that to attend a Shakespeare play was not for pleasure but rather to honor an eminence, to pay dues to a cultural icon, to participate in a ritual of cultural hegemony -- and that I had paid good money in order to worship at the shrine of Shakespeare and to lend my support to what has long been labelled "Shakespeare idolatry."  This revelation, or apercu, or insight made me unhappy as I am not by nature given to reverence. To try to bend my will to admire on-stage oratory felt inauthentic, contrary to myself as I knew myself. 

Yet I am an unabashed, unapologetic lover of Shakespeare. Not of the theater, but of the book. When I sit myself down to read one of Shakespeare's most excellent plays, the experience can be and often is utterly transcendent. 

It is reading that unlocks the play; puts me in touch with true genius.There's something about the one-on-one concentration that you can give to a book in your very own hands in your very own chair that you can't give to a performance, where you're crammed into your space and have lost to your neighbor the battle for the arm rest. You're distracted by the inevitable snuffles and sneezes of your fellows and by the too-clever sets and costumes and lighting and artifice -- all of which interferes with your grasp of what is most important about poetic drama -- the words. But at home, I'm dazzled by the poetry and I am transported with aesthetic bliss (however defined). I'm moved to tears and laughter and also admiration.

He's endlessly fascinating, this Shakespeare guy, and intelligent, and a poet like none other. 

It's all I need; a comfortable posture for my ancient limbs, a bit of silence, a book --  and I'm in awe. 

Performances, in my opinion, erect a barrier to understanding and obscure rather than illuminate the plays. It's necessarily so, because directors and actors interpret the play.  It's their job;  it's what they do. Interpret. And every interpretation, no matter how skillful, is an obstacle.

A reader is less constrained and can keep his mind open. No one, no thing, to mediate between the eyes and the page.  

Performances are especially hazardous when directors deliberately attempt to make a play relevant or in accord, somehow, with the zeitgeist of the decade. Clever catchpenny novelties do nothing for me. Why must plays be set anywhere but where Shakespeare intended them?  Any effort to update a play, or make it "contemporary" or "feminist" or "anti-fascist" or "anti-colonial" or whatever, produces only distraction and distortion. Which is why the long history of Shakespeare on stage is a woeful history of addled misinterpretation. Nahum Tate's notorious King Lear of 1681, in which Edgar and Cordelia embrace at the end and Lear is pensioned off is ludicrous, but not more absurd than last year's Queen Lear.

Query: if I'm so disdainful of live performances, how is it that I'm so fond of Shakespeare on film.

But that's a subject for another day. 

My Life in Cooking

And now for another installment in my long-running "autobiography by topics." 

Today's topic is my life as a cook. I say cook, rather than chef, because my kitchen work has always been functional rather that artistic -- the very opposite of sophisticated or elegant. I am most definitely not a chef -- just a guy who can put a meal on the table. Confession: I prefer to my own food to what is presented to me at all but the most elite restaurants. I'm basically a hamburger-and-ketchup plebeian; fancy foods with exotic ingredients do nothing for my pedestrian palate. Why leeks, chives, ramps or shallots when your everyday yellow onion will do the job. Especially if it's one of those amazingly sweet Vidalia onions.

My lack of gourmet-ism originated with my family of origin, back there in 1940s Flatbush where cooking was not at all imaginative. Its basics were Velveeta cheese and those slimy canned Harvard beets. No frills but a sufficiency where "enough [was] as good as a feast." My mother, who presided over the kitchen, did it all, every bit of it (my father would have starved rather than extend himself to boil water). Mom was a functional cook and her limited repertoire of meals repeated weekly. I never knew her to try something new nor did I once see her consult a cookbook. Spices were limited to salt and pepper. Chicken was boiled, lamb chops were broiled, flounder was poached. There was too much malodorous liver and too much tongue and too many salmon croquettes. Almost all meals were accompanied with mashed potatoes. My favorite food, in those days, was noodles with a meat-and-tomato sauce (which would nowadays have been upgraded to "Bolognese"). (The word "noodles" was later promoted to "spaghetti" and has now been ennobled to "pasta.") On an occasional flush Sunday there was roast beef. The family celebrated Thanksgiving with a grand turkey and counter-celebrated Yom Kippur with a defiant roast pork.

What a tedious chore it was for my mom to set out twenty-one meals a week for the five of us, but she did so without complaint.

The only memorable meals of my childhood were supplied by my grandmother Sonia. Unsurpassed blintzes, potato latkes, jams and jellies. My favorite meal in those days: black radish, onion and pumpernickel complemented with gribbinis. I have written about my love affair with the black radish here.

The first steps into cookery of my own arose out of my native frugality. When I was in college, most of my friends ate in the dorm cafeteria or in nearby restaurants but I soon discovered that with a little initiative I I could eat better and cheaper. It was a bit of a learning process, because, growing up, I regarded cooking as a kind of alchemy in which only married women were privy. In 1957, I abandoned the dormitory for a remarkably grotty off-campus apartment and discovered that I too could turn on a gas burner and transmogrify raw ingredients into food. For the next three years I lived on a hunk of meat and a boiled potato and warmed frozen peas -- at a quarter the cost of an equivalent restaurant meal! Not elegant food -- but what a revelation!  It was not only an improvement in standard of living, but a demonstration to myself that I need not imitate my father's example of dependent helplessness. 

My galley skills, such as they were, were also good for my social life. Dates with my girlfriend (later my wife of more than half a century) often began with me preparing a Saturday night dinner for her. Fortunately for the two of us, she was not put off by my want of culinary imagination.

Let me record a sad reminiscence about the way in which we were all hog-tied by Eisenhower-era conservatism: I did all the cooking until June of 1960, when AGP and I married. At that point, it seemed mandatory and inevitable  that kitchen responsibilities should be transferred from me to her. It was, we believed, an inviolable rule of the universe that wives cooked and husbands ate. That was the way things were in that reactionary pre-feminist period -- even though my bride had until that point never prepared a single meal in her entire life. How conventional, how thoughtless we both were. However, true to the stereotype, AGP rapidly became a much better cook than I could have imagined. But what socially-constrained idiocy! How blinkered were the two of us! It's embarrassing to confess it all even sixty-plus years after the fact. 

Once the three children joined us, cooking became less fun and more of an obligation -- and now a chore at last shared by the two of us. Inasmuch as we were both employed, food preparation became a weekend activity. Together we'd cook up a cauldron of beef stew or a spaghetti sauce or something else that could get us through the week. Lunches were improvised, but I was always the breakfast cook. I wish I could properly estimate the number of eggs that I scrambled or pancakes that I flipped. They would stuff a moderately-sized warehouse, I'm sure. For AGP, meals became a burden. If I remember correctly, it was not so much the labor of preparation as it was the organization that distressed her. Just gathering the ingredients and keeping the refrigerator stocked became dull boring work. Her point, and I know she was correct in this, was that even if I did I half the cooking, she had 100% of the responsibility. Things became even more complicated when the kids went through their vegetarian phases and when their complicated after school activities made orderly scheduling next to impossible. 

I remember that one summer, sometime in the 70s. I announced that I would do all the gathering and cooking for two months. AGP's only task was to lie in the hammock all day and to eat whatever I produced. AGP enjoyed the vacation, but she pointed out that it our society, men could get the credit for labor that was taken for granted for women. She was once again correct in her assessment, but nevertheless I felt that I had done a good deed. I think she enjoyed the kitchen respite. 

Eventually the kids left home and life became simpler. We were now "recovering parents."  Food preparation became simpler and fun again. Joint fun.

Unfortunately, it was only a few years later that AGP began her long decline. Of course I took over more and more of the kitchen responsibilities. I think for the last ten years that AGP was with me, I was the head and only cook. How else would we have survived?  As a result, I became more interested in the work. As I have said, I never became a chef, but I do take some pride in my general competence around the kitchen -- especially in my barbecued spare ribs, my beef stew, my stuffed cabbage (grandma Sonia's recipe) and my transcendent lasagnas. 

Nowadays, in my miraculous second relationship, cooking, like everything else, is shared equally. 

Gosh it's been a long haul.

A New Orleans Conversation

For our annual winter stay in New Orleans, we rented a place in the old Bywater district. It's a feature of the neighborhood that one house is a perfect example of classic vernacular architecture while the next one over is a ramshackle mess, smelling of mold and nearly swallowed by yellow cat's paw creeper. And then one over after that is a vacant lot, the home having been demolished years ago.

Almost all Bywater houses touch or impinge on the sidewalk, European-style, and many of their owners decorate the public way with pots of common annuals, especially those lovely rocket pink snapdragons. Others set out repurposed bathtubs and various other containers filled with flowering perennial plants that I can't identify. It's a mighty colorful area -- when it isn't derelict. 

Somewhere on Royal Street (or was it Decatur?) between Desire and Independence, we admired the sidewalk garden of a renewed double-shotgun (a common kind of home) and fell into neighborly chat with the bright-eyed old lady sitting on its porch (or stoop, or veranda, or patio). We offered, "good day for taking some sun," and she, perhaps lonely, launched into a monologue: "my friend takes care of me. He's young. I broke my hip last year, so no more stairs." Etc. And then she asked, quite out of the blue, "how old do you think I am?" Clearly, she was proud to boast of her many years.

Now, I've been around enough blocks to know that it's never a good idea to estimate someone's age. It's a difficult art -- you must guess about ten percent below what you think is accurate, because if you guess older you've insulted the inquirer and if too much younger you're guilty of insincere flattery. So I hesitated, kept quiet. At last, to break the silence, I replied "well, ma'am, how old are you?" I thought I had given a safe response because I could see that she wanted me to be curious. "I'm 84, can you believe it?" 

I was more surprised than she had imagined, because if I had ventured a guess, I would have said 92. Or at the lowest, way up in the 80s, because, well, the woman looked ancient and frail. She reminded me my two grandmothers, who died at 87 and 89 and who, in their last years, rarely if ever left their homes but if they did venture out, did nothing more adventurous than to sit on a bench for a few warm minutes. 

But I'm 85, a year older than my new Bywater acquaintance. She's inactive, winding down her life, resting in a soft chair, and I'm not only upright and walking, but happily exploring a distant city. For a moment I felt a bit of superiority, of triumph. I certainly did not say to my elderly friend, "yeah, you're 84 but I'm 85, look at me." I'm not that crude. But I confess that those or similar words passed through my brain. Not a sentiment that I admire in myself and one I quickly banished. It was unhandsome, ungenerous even if it came and went in a millisecond.

I know that I'm fortunate to be moderately vigorous, still strolling the avenues and enjoying good health. Yet I am very aware I that my well being is not an achievement about which I can be vain or proud. It's simply the luck of the draw, luck of the genes. In addition, it's a fact that I have been fortunate enough to have had access to a lifetime of superior medical care. Without that surgery in 2010, and the later one a decade ago, I would not have been touring the Bywater. I'd have been dead or at best, wheelchair-bound and in pain, gorging on advils and aspirins and narcotics. A moment's reflection served as a good antidote to any feeling of superiority that I might harbor. 

Still musing, I began to wonder about my Royal Street friend. Who is she, aside from an ancient person savoring the sun?  What memories does she hold? Who knows, perhaps she lived a wild and varied life. Was she a traveller, an adventurer?  Enjoying complicated and deep relationships with a series of devotees?  Perhaps she was a talented musician -- a soloist in the church choir -- or an artist?  I allowed myself to fantasize what she was like in her glamorous thirties -- crossing the equator on a cruise with her first husband, the one with the estate in Jamaica. And the children: one a famous surgeon, the other, the unlucky one who was a hero in Iraq but who took years to regain his footing. Or was she, perhaps, a scholar?

Everybody has a story; what is hers?  

My Life in Gambling

This will be a very short entry, because gambling is not a part of my life. I'm not averse, just uninterested. My brain lacks a gambling gene.

I don't bet on sports; I don't participate in office pools; I've never once been to the track. I don't bet on cards because I don't play cards, not even solitaire. I've never put so much as a nickel into a slot machine. I've never bought a single lottery ticket. 

My idea of gambling is to put a dollar into a Coke machine -- sometimes you get the Coke, sometimes the machine fails. That's chance enough for me. 

Two Astonishing Dreams in One Single Night

The first:  I dreamt that I received a phone call from my deceased older brother's deceased first wife (who has, by the way, been dead for thirty or more years). She says, very clearly, "______ is dead" (I leave out the name of the person she mentioned because some people are squeamish or superstitious -- but a person very much alive. I'm shocked. I say, "what happened."  There's no answer at the other end although I hear the sounds of paper rustling. I ask again and once more there is  no response. Then I say, "did he do himself in." There is quiet at the other end of the line. End of dream. I take the non-answer as agreement -- yes, it was suicide  After a while, I wake up, less troubled than puzzled. How peculiar -- how different from my usual "lost-in-the big-city" or "can't-find-the-classroom" fantasy.

Later in the night, I dream that it's time for me to write a novel (remarkable in itself because I am a most unimaginative, uncreative person and not a writer of fiction). In the dream, I compose the first paragraph of a novel. I can't remember my exact words, but basically I set the scene in an old, tired, tumble-down country tavern where a couple of nondescript folks are sitting and drinking. It's all very fuscous, grey, washed out. (In retrospect, it seems as though I've plagiarized Thomas Hardy.)  But I complete the paragraph with this remarkable sentence: "A brindle cat supplied the color." A wonderful detail, even if I do say so myself. But here's an oddity. Even though my well-informed dreamatorium found and deployed the word "brindle," my conscious self is not familiar with the word. What a revelation!!

I wake out of the dream and, immensely curious, immediately google the word "brindle" which turns out to mean something like tortoiseshell -- a standard very familiar domestic cat color. My daytime self is therefore dazzled by the pertinent vocabulary of my night time self.

I am also impressed by the use of the word "supply" -- a brindle cat supplied the color" --where my more pedestrian daytime self might have said, "there was a brindle cat." 

Once again, I find that although I'm a moderately dull kind of guy during the day, my unconscious or dream life is imaginative and daring.  How can this happen?

Moreover, I wonder what would my life have been like if I had been granted easy access to the creative side of my brain? Is it possible that I would have written many a sentence as accomplished as "a brindle cat supplied the color." 

[Addendum April 24 

Just a few minutes ago I woke out of the usual troubled sleep.  I must have been dreaming, but I can't recall a single detail except that the name "Karlheinz Stockhausen" came vividly to me.  I even said the name out loud (there's a witness). But why in the living blazes would Karlheinz Stockhausen be in my mind, or unconscious mind, or dream life?  I am aware that KS was a composer of electronic music; that is to say, I've heard his name. But I'm not interested in electronic music and as far as I know I've never heard a single note of any of his compositions. He's not a figure to whom I've given a moment of conscious thought. And yet there he was in my mind and in my mouth. Without the slightest inkling of context. 

Minds (especially my very own) are mighty mysterious.] 

State of the Person

If there can be a "state of the union" address, and in Colorado a "state of the state," why should we not have a "state of the person" -- specifically, the state of this person, i.e. me. An annual report. Today seems like a good day for it -- inasmuch as I have just now passed a weighty milestone, my 85th birthday. 

On the whole, let me say, without bragging, that this particular person is in a surprisingly good state.

My Brain: it's still working. I believe that I am as competent as ever at analyzing problems and drawing conclusions and planning appropriate actions. Nor have I lost a significant amount of language. There is even an occasional moment in which I wow myself with a well chosen word or a smidgeon of wit. That's the good news. The downside is that my recall system has definitely lost ground. Noun loss, it's called. My memory for names has woefully declined, so much so that it's become a considerable annoyance. I can recognize an acquaintance on the street, or, say, actors in a film, or an athlete, but I cannot bring up a name. I test myself when I watch NBA basketball on the TV.  A familiar player appears on my screen: I know where he went to college and who he played for last season and the strengths and weaknesses of his game, but by golly I can't recall his name. I find this to be highly frustrating -- and perhaps a scary harbinger of future debility. Sometimes the moniker  bobs to the surface a day later, making me aware that my storage system is still working. No question but that my celebrated, prize-winning instant recall is a thing of the past. Also starting to fail: short-term memory. Nowadays, when I read a long novel, by the time I come to the conclusion I've forgotten details from the first chapters. A couple of times now, when I've read a good new novel or a classic old one, I've turned right around and gone through a second time. Trust me, this was not a characteristic of my younger brain. I also find it difficult to acquire and retain new knowledge. I spent four years studying Italian and made no more than a year's progress. I had to complete the same lessons over and over again just to make it stick -- only to have the expression or the conjugation or whatever evaporate in a month. I can't memorize poetry -- which I once did so effortlessly. So I've mostly given up new areas of information -- although this last month I'm taking a crack at learning Etruscan -- a challenge even though it's an extinct language with only about 250 known words. No struggles with pronunciation, thank goodness! 

My mood: generally positive and cheerful, except between 2 am and 4 am, when I lie awake filled with real and imaginary dread. I experience sadness, of course, but not depression. No need for anti-depressants or anti-psychotics, thank goodness.v I'm optimistic, on the whole, still taking pleasure in small things,

My Body: still functioning although some routine tasks have become difficult. Putting on socks and shoes, for example. I'm just not limber -- not even as limber as I was at 75. When things fall to the floor in the morning I tend to let them lie until later in the day when I'm slightly more supple. When I work in the garden, I keep a long stick next to me so I have something to help me arise. Sometimes I feel myself starting to shuffle, the way my father did in his last years -- and then I make a determined effort to lift my feet. I have almost all of my own teeth (a couple of fakes) and with the help of specs and hearing aids my eyes and ears are valiantly continuing to do the job.   

Your older body has accumulated some deficits: a touch of cancer, four kinds of heart peculiarities, the threat of another TIA or UTI. But I do as I'm told and take the pills that my various doctors recommend. I asked the fine serious woman who serves as my cardiologist, "what is going to kill me?" She replied that at my age, and given my state of health, the most likely causes were a) a fall, and b) an infection. Consequently I've become mighty careful about where I set my feet. I don't know what to do about infections except to be vigilant. But it would be foolish not to recognize that at this age life is precarious and that anything can happen at any time. I could keel over before I finish the next sentence. One undeniable symptom of deterioration is that my stamina is much diminished. Much more resting between tasks, many more naps.

The hardest part of the day continues to be the nighttime. I've aways been a bad sleeper and I'm no better now. Lying awake can lead to alarmism: is that pain in my knee a bruise or is it a blood clot that will go to my heart, or is it a symptom of a metastatic cancer?  But alarmism is not as troubling now as it was in days of yore -- no matter what happens now, they can't take the first 85 years from me. Frankly, I'm more worried about living too long than I am about dying.

I'm always been troubled with nightmares and continue to be so. I envy those who turn out the light at 11 and wake up at 7. It would be blissful to be one of those elect. On most nights, instead of sleeping I roll and twirl like a rotisserie chicken. It's wonderful that the Widder Malkinson is able to ignore my tossing and turning.

Family: I'm most pleased about my family and family relations. Although I was not a perfect father, I was a hard-working and serious one, and I think that my children would acknowledge such. I love all three of my children more than they can know -- or at least, more than they could know until they had children of their own. I like all my kids and grandkids and on the whole they like me. I believe that I grew closer to my kids during the years of A's long decline. I have good conversations, or at least polite ones, with the older grandchildren but the three younger ones treat me with no more interest or respect than if I were an orange cone -- which is probably appropriate for their age; I certainly did not engage with my grandparents or people of their generation when I was 9 or 11. I hope to live until the the young guys are in their twenties when they might find it consequential to talk with their aged GP. 

I've made an effort to keep in touch with cousins -- especially cousins on my father's side. After all, I am by far the oldest member of my extended family -- the "patriarch," I like to say. 

Love: here's a great success story. My relationship with the Widder has been near-miraculous -- a ten-year honeymoon, although it may seem soppy to says so. Of course in some ways it's easier to form a relationship at this age of little responsibility -- no conflict over children, no careers, no declining parents, no money worries, very few obligations. Both Lynn and I appreciate this much simpler life. Her and my offspring have been generous with us -- a boon that we do not take for granted. Moreover, it's common knowledge that people in a loving situation live longer than singletons -- so we're both, in theory, keeping each other alive.

Friends: very important to me at this stage of life. I work at keeping in touch. But every month, it seems, some 50-year friendship comes to an end. The death and diseases of my friends and family and former colleagues are the most painful feature of this octogenarian life.

Intellectual life: I read a lot and write a bit, but I no longer read books about books. I like writing this blog. At this point in my life, I read at least 9 non-fiction books for every novel. In addition, I've become fascinated by the films of the 40s and 50s and watch as many as two or three a week. There's something reassuring about the black-and-white cinematography,  the ubiquitous fedoras, the coast-to-coast trains, and even the ever-present curl of cigarette smoke. 

The world: quite a mess. A period of great reaction. There's a real danger of losing our democracy. And losing our planet. But I'm cheered that there are so many people of good will in the world and in my life.

When I was a young fellow peering at the calendar, I thought "the year 2000 is a long way off. If I should live to the new millennium, I'll be 61 years old and I'll have lived a long life."  Now I'm a quarter century beyond that marker, still going strong. Who ever would have guessed?  My principal emotion at this point: gratitude. Gosh I've been fortunate.

Ball Games I Played During the 1940s and 1950s.

Basketball, volleyball, punchball, stickball, dodgeball, box ball, box baseball, baseball, softball, stoop ball, touch football, handball, kickball, wall ball. Ping-pong. Hit the penny. Never played tennis or tackle football. Never even heard of soccer.

What have I forgotten?

The Piacenza Liver

It's humiliating for me to confess that until a few weeks ago I had never heard of the Piacenza Liver, which is a life-size bronze Etruscan replica of the liver of a sheep, and unquestionably European civilization's most heralded metal liver. How could I not have known? 

The PL was unearthed in 1877 and dates from the first century BCE. Here's a picture of this most important artifact:

Because my knowledge of sheep livers is so appallingly slim, and because most readers of this blague are not doubt similarly ignorant, let me quote an expert description of the object: "In the Etruscan model, the liver is reversed, with the convex part of the gallbladder pointing down. On the right side of the gallbladder, we find a pyramid-shaped structure that was referred to as the processus pyramidalis corresponding with the caudate lobe in humans. On the other side of the gallbladder, we see a protrusion that was called the processus papillaris corresponding with the paracaval part of the caudate lobe." In other words, it's one heck of an accurate liver model. Yet It is not its fidelity to the shape and form of a sheep liver that makes the PL so crucial: it's the markings and inscriptions on its face. As you can see, the surface of the PL is divided into segments, on each one of which is inscribed a word or two in the long-extinct Etruscan language.

 

This find is obviously not one of your run-of-the-mill uninformative liver sculptures. It's brimming with meaning. Let us recall that Etruria was an advanced and prosperous civilization that dominated northwestern Italy from about 800 BCE to 500 BCE until it  gradually fell under the sway of the ambitious militaristic Romans. In the ancient world, Etruscans were famous not only for their arts and commerce, but also for their skill in consulting the gods through the process of haruscopy -- divination by examining the liver of a sacrificed sheep. The Etruscans passed along this accomplishment to the Romans who rarely made important decisions without the advice of the gods, which they acquired through the medium of a professionally certified haruspex. Inasmuch as the Romans, employing haruscopy, ruled the world for a thousand years, the power of the sheep liver-and-haruspex team cannot but be acknowledged. 

 

I have no idea, nor do scholars of the Etruscans, know when or why haruscopy originated. Etruscan civilization is replete with mysteries and moreover the Etruscan language is not fully understood. It's an "isolate" -- like Basque --an island in a sea of Indo-European languages to which it bears no relation. Etruscans arrived in Italy a long time ago -- long before they possessed a written language. When? From where did they come? How did it happen that they became proficient in haruscopy?  No one knows and there are not even any decent theories -- it's all lost in the dark backward and abysm of time.

 

Readers of a skeptical bent will wonder, what special powers are incorporated in the liver of a sheep?  Why not the pancreas or the spleen? Some might even ask, why a sheep?  Why not, for example, goats?  Goats are far more intelligent than sheep, and it stands to reason that a goat liver would house more prophetic oomph than the liver of a mouflon or an urial. For that matter, why is haruscopy to be preferred to less messy systems of augury such as ornithomancy, which utilizes the flights of birds, or ceraunoscopy, which works by the study of lightning and thunder. No bloody sacrificing required in either case. Livers, in my opinion, though I've never come face to face with a sheep's, are kind of gross and not for the squeamish. But as William Cowper told us many years ago, "God moves in a mysterious way,/ His wonders to perform" and although Cowper was not specifically referring to the multiple gods of the polytheistic Etruscans, his words certainly apply. So divination by liver it was and has remained so. Whether or not the Romans would have conquered the world without the Etruscan facility with sheep livers is impossible to say.   

 

A closer look at the PL reveals that each demarcated section is inscribed with a series of Etruscan letters. Inasmuch as Etruscan is an extinct language that has been only deciphered in part, the words are not fully understood.  Although Etruscan is almost impossible to translate, it's easy to transliterate, because the script is written in a version of the alphabet devised by some Phoenician genius and then passed along to the Euboean Greeks and then on to the Etruscans and to the Romans and eventually to us. 

 

Here's the most recent transcription of a part of the outside ring of words on the PL.

 

1.   tin cil en

2.   tin thvf

3.   tines neθ

4.   uni (thought to be Etruscan equivalent of Juno i.e. Iuno) 

5.   tec

6.   lvsl

7.   neθ (thought to be Neptune)

8.   caθ

9.   fufluns (Bacchus?)

10. selva (Silvanus?)

11. leθns

12. tluscv

 

Kind of impenetrable, is it not?  Almost entirely opaque with only a few good guesses. But, alas, that's the sorry state of Piacenza Liver knowledge. Scholars are agreed that the markings are the names of the various gods -- each associated with a section of the live. It follows that the PL is a teaching instrument, a show-and-tell. It's not difficult to picture a veteran learned haruspex instructing his or her aspiring students to study the PL closely. Any peculiarity or disorder or irregularity in the liver would reveal much to a gifted haruspex.  

It's shocking to me that the tourist-oriented website of the city of Piacenza advertises its Duomo, a 12th century Romanesque church, its Passerini-Landi Library, and the Palazzo Farnese, a 16th century great house, but offers not the slightest mention of its foremost liver (which is housed in the palazzo). An inexplicable omission.

 

What We Read in the 1950s: The Magnificent Ambersons

Although The Magnificent Ambersons was first published in 1918, it was still admired and almost canonical in the 1950s when I was coming to awareness. It was the sort of unchallenging social realism novel in the Sinclair Lewis or John Marquand tradition that was then school-and-societyy approved. Did I read it then? I can't say for certain. I can swear that I read Tarkington's Penrod series which was specifically targeted to young people. I would have thought that this week's reading of The Magnificent Ambersons was a return to familiar territory, but it doesn't much matter because I didn't recognize a single word of it. All was newer than new -- and disappointing to boot.

Tarkington's reputation, once sky-high (two Pulitzer prizes), has plummeted since the 50s and I doubt that my grandchildren or their co-eval friends have ever heard his name. Strange to say, the edition that was on the shelf at the Boulder Public Library had all the marks of a high school text, with commentary, footnotes, and sample questions designed to challenge those dedicated young folks who were diligent enough to make it to the end. I suspect that students and their teachers will find themselves repelled not only by the superbly snobby, unattractive, and bratty central figure but also, and especially, by the frequent and offensive use of the slur "darkies." Mighty off-putting, I'm afraid.

The Tarkington mini-revival was precipitated by a viewing of Orson Welles' 1942 The Magnificent Ambersons - a film that deserves to be called "rivetting" -- but rather for the cinematography than for the disturbing, perverse family drama that it depicts. Welles thought it was his best work. Audiences will neither be able to concur or disagree with his assessment because some forty minutes of his completed film were cut and destroyed by a studio editor in order to make the work more commercial and more palatable. Moreover, a happy ending was sutured onto the film -- the original had been much "darker." Though how much darker is hard to imagine, because even as it stands it's a gloomy story of perverse values and gratuitous tragedy. In the edited and "improved" version, George Minafer survives his automobile accident and reconciles with attractive Lucy Morgan. In the novel and apparently in Welles' version, George dies of his injuries. In both novel and film, George is a self-centered prig and frankly, when the film came to conclusion, I myself would have been quite willing to let him die. In no way had he earned the favors of such a self-respecting and intelligent young lady as Lucy. Hadn't paid his dues, even though to make some money he had taken up a dangerous work involving "nitro-glycerine." I do wonder what might have been depicted in those purged Welles minutes because the film follows the novel closely, almost slavishly.  What did Welles include that the novel passes over, or more suggestively, what did Welles invent and add? 

I think that one of the reasons that Booth Tarkington has sunk without much trace is because of his exceedingly short-sighted and reactionary stance. The Magnificent Ambersons is anti-modern, but not out of any deep ecological, philosophical or psychological conviction. Tarkington idealizes the Indiana of his childhood and doesn't much like change. People are moving into his town (Indianopolis though he never uses the name) from Eastern Europe and they're outworking and displacing the good old solid Americans -- those established families with their shared values and small-town friendliness. These new arrivals make money and build large ugly house and instead of horse-drawn carriages they drive automobiles. The new auto industry is a particular bete noir for Tarkington. The Ambersons lose their money investing in it and George gets himself run over by a vehicle that was plunging down the street at 20 mile an hour.  Autos bring speed and soot and social disruption.

At this moment, I do not feel a need to read any more novels by Booth Tarkington.

New Words of Etruscan Interest

I have just finished reading Sybille Haynes comprehensive study, Etruscan Civilization, A Cultural History (2000). It's not only a window into a remarkable extinct world, but also a trove of exciting words new to me. And as readers of this blague are well aware, vocabulary excites Dr. Metablog.

For example: a skyphos is a two-handled cup for drinking wine. Here's an especially handsome one from the 5th century BCE.

It's decorated with a portrait of a hoplite, a Greek soldier. 

Then there's the versatile word symplegma, which sounds suspiciously like a noxious bodily discharge -- but isn't. If one searches for the word symplegma, the first meaning that one encounters is a "genus of ascidian tunicates in the family styelidae." What the heck are any kind of tunicates doing in a volume on  Etruscan civilization? But on further investigation it emerges that symplegma has a second and more pertinent definition. It's a word that is used by art historians and archeologists for a depiction of sexual intercourse. Honest to Pete, who would have guessed?  How the two symplegmata -- the tunicate and the fornicate -- are related, is, I must say, quite a mystery.

Another word with two distinct significations is tibia. We all know that the tibia is the bone that connects ankle and knee. I did not know that for students of ancient world it also refers to a brooch or clasp.  

Bucchero is the name of typical and common Etruscan ceramic distinguished by its burnished black glaze. Here's a bucchero oinochoe (or jug for wine).

Speaking of jugs, there's also the aryballos, which is a "globular flask" used to contain perfume or oil. Another kind of jug is the "canopic jar", which was used by the ancient Egyptians to store a guy's (or gal's) inner organs during the process of mummification. I have no idea how mummies were processed, nor have I any desire to be enlightened.

A coroplast was, in antiquity, an artisan or sculptor who created terracotta figurines. Here's a lovely example of such a one's work.

Nowadays, Coroplast, Inc. is the name of a large company that produces corrugated plastic sheets used in packaging and signboards.   

A felloe or felly is the outer rim of a wheel to which spokes are attached. I imagine that this word is well known to bicyclists and wheelwrights, but I had never encountered it. My chagrin, my apologies. An acroterion is an architectural ornament mounted at the apex of corner of a building, a kind of rooftop gargoyle. An anthemion or palmette is a design consisting of radiating petals. Sometimes anthemia are carved into acroteria. If two anthemia are set back to back they are said to be addorsed.

 

Words New to Me Once Again

A dvandva compound is a formation in which two individual nouns are joined to form a new word. Wik offers the example "singer-songwriter." I think that "barber-surgeon" is therefore a dvandva, although I am confident that I am the first person ever to denominate it as such. Anaptyxis is a term in linguistics for the demotic insertion of a vowel between two consonants, as in filim for film or realitor for realtor. A calque a word-for-word translation from one language to another. Clausula is a term in ancient rhetoric for a consciously-contrived rhythmic ending to a long sentence. If I've ever employed a clausula, I am sure that it's been entirely fortuitous.

A suffete was a Carthaginian official or magistrate. A groma is a Roman surveying instrument that had plumb lines hanging from four arms at right angles. I do nor know how it was employed but it must have worked very well because the Romans did some remarkable surveying. A gromatic text is therefore a record of a survey. An ostracan is a fragment of ancient pottery onto which writing has been scratched or incised. Since ostraca are durable they are a primary source of archeological information. A cippus was a cylindrical stone used as a gravestone by the Etruscans and as a boundary marker by Romans. Here's a handsome old cippus.