Dr. Metablog

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 prior 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 or 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 (and what, pray tell, prompted me?), I took a peek at the current website of Cornell's English Department. (In the index-card 1950s, when the manual typewriter was the acme 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 flared from the electronic page and dazzled mine eyne. 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 the British isles 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 Beowulf-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 this 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 to wonder whether they are polymaths or just ornery uncooperative academics. 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, for me 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 mere absorption of Anglophone novels. I was initially suspicious of these extensive claims, but after reflecting a while I recognized 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 in Othello. Wouldn't it be comforting if "cultural studies" is at least in part merely traditional wine in spiffy 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 successors and the beneficiaries of the late revered Professor 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 has been undermined 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 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 ferociously 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?.... 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 nonsense. 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." Goodness gracious!

I'm afraid that these entrancing plays are doomed to be put through the "cultural studies" homogenizer. Or "theorized" out of all compass.

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 few of them members of the class of 1895 -- who had walkered and wheel-chaired to their Sixty-Fifth. Geezers, I thought. 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 superannuated guy who shakes his ebony 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."

[February 4] Thurston Dale replies:  "I guess I'm a geezer, too (Cornell, '65). I'm glad I majored in English before criticism turned crazy. Great teachers -- Mizener, Abrams, Parrish, Novarr."

[March 17] Anatole Miles Webber writes: "Vivian, you were naive back in the 1950s and you're still naive now. You assume that the Cornell English Department of your youth, 65 years ago, was normative and normal. You were then and still are oblivious to the fact that the Department's 1950 curriculum was the product of stress and change and compromise. Try to remember that there were at least three forces at work and that various faculty members had various degrees of commitment to them. The first group was the oldest -- the traditionalist who studied, as they had always done, literature as history and biography and philology. Get the text and the context right was their primary concern. Then there were the 'new critics" -- heirs to Leavis and Scrutiny in England and the southern agrarians (Ransom, Tate, Warren) in the US. But the main intellectual current riling English Departments were the fierce critics out of New York (mostly Jewish) circles (Kazin, Trilling, Fiedler, Paul Goodman, Irving Howe, etc). In retrospect, even though Cornell brought both Lionel Trilling and Cleanth Brooks to Ithaca during your and my years there, the new winds made little impression on our education. Cornell was peaceful, isolated and non-ideological. It appears from your writing that you preferred it that way and still do. It was stable until the theory people brought in novelty and confusion and excitement.

[April 15] Parnell Pratt replies: "And also monumental pretension. And eventual collapse and failure."

[May 3] Lance Birdseye (Lt., USAF) writes: "What a funny website this is. Hey, folks, join the real world."

 

New Old Books from the 1940s

I read George Hutchinson's Facing the Abyss, a report on the culture of the 1940. Hutchinson assesses books that were influential during that troubled decade.

When I came of age in the 1950s, I encountered a good share of these books. I was a curious, library-addicted lad and 1940s culture lingered in the 1950s air. Yet Hutchinson brings to attention whole shelves of important writing of which I was shamefully ignorant. Through the resources of Interlibrary Loan and second-hand internet bookstores, I've now become acquainted with a bunch of new old books. Here's some of them (with more to follow). 

Hutchinson claims that Jo Sinclair's Wasteland (1946) is an important contribution to the Jewish-American novel. Perhaps it is, by priority, but I found it disappointing and superficial. The main man, Jacob Braunowitz changes his name to John Brown and hides his Jewishness, but it doesn't work -- he lives in a "wasteland" neither integrated into America nor bolstered by his inherited religion. Along comes a Freudian psychoanalyst and in a few magical sessions Brown is liberated to embrace his Judaism. For me, the novel was simplistic and implausible. Harry Brown's A Walk in the Sun (1944) is the most persuasive and realistic war novel I've ever read -- it accomplishes more in 150 pages that Norman Mailer achieved in 600. Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac (1949 is a pioneering classic of environmentalism -- though nowadays less widely known than Rachel Carson's Silent Spring but much more learned and innovative. It's a very good book but frankly I found the "lyrical" prose a bit too gooey for my taste. Isaac Rosenfeld's Passage from Home is a distinguished novel of adolescent alienation. It's kinky (about a boy's semi-sexual relationship to his deceased mother's sister). It's a far better novel, I think, than Salinger's similar and imitative Catcher in the Rye. What a pity that Rosenfeld died of a heart attack at age 38!  A great loss to literature. I also read Anatole Broyard's Kafka Was the Rage, a memoir of Greenwich Village in the 1940s although not published until 1985. It's a noteworthy collection of short essay, able to be much more candid about sex and sexuality than if it had appeared during the time it chronicles. Broyard claims that 1946 was the best year ever: the war was over and he had freedom and the G I Bill. 

A pretty good for me too -- in 1946 just seven years old, sitting on the sunny stoop eating raisins.

Trump, Chaucer, etc.

Chaucer's Pardoner, some will remember, has long blonde hair and speaks in a high treble voice. Chaucer calls him "a gelding or a mare." A gelding is obviously a eunuch; what Chaucer means by mare is less clear -- perhaps "female eunuch" -- whatever that entails -- or a gay male or possibly even a woman cross-dressed as a man. In any case, a person of ambiguous sexuality -- "gender fluid" in modern idiom. 

Update: the Naval Academy Nimitz library at Annapolis has purged from its shelves a book by Robert S. Sturges called  "Chaucer's Pardoner: Gender Theory." Isn't it reassuring that our national security will no longer be endangered by a discussion of the Pardoner's identity.

The list of 381 censored books can be found at

https://media.defense.gov/2025/Apr/04/2003683009/-1/-1/0/250404-LIST%20OF%20REMOVED%20BOOKS%20FROM%20NIMITZ%20LIBRARY.PDF

Cornell English Then and Now -- 6

After struggling through a run of mysterious and puzzling works, I'm cheered to discover a book written by Cornell English faculty member that I could read with pleasure from beginning to end. And understand. And which alerted me to books and poems with which I was not familiar. No theory, no pretentious jargon; just honest scholarship and intelligent stylish analysis, 

It's Facing the Abyss, American Literature and Culture in the 1940s, by George Hutchinson, who is Cornell's Farr Professor of American Culture.

Unlike Professor Hutchinson, who is a considerably younger man, I myself was alive (although barely sentient) during the 1940s. I was too young for serious reading, so 1940s culture didn't come to my aluminum desk until the 1950s when I belatedly came to awareness. As a result, I read many of the books that Hutchinson discusses a decade past their relevance. Hutchinson also mentions many influential books that I didn't read at all and therefore came as a surprise -- and which underlined my ignorance. For example, during the 1950s, my high school and college years, I read many books of 1940s Jewish American writers to whom Hutchinson devotes a long chapter: Mailer, Bellow, Malamud, Rukeyser, Arthur Miller, etc. But my acquaintance was incomplete. I confess that I had never heard the names of Jo Sinclair or Isaac Rosenthal, both of whom Hutchinson scrutinizes at full. One name missing from Hutchinson's survey is J D Salinger, who started to publish in the 40s but only became famous with Cather in the Rye in 1951. Just as well -- I never caught Salinger fever although many of my friends were quite infected. 

Hutchinson has presented me with a reading list of books that I should have known but didn't and that will keep me engaged for months. I'm grateful.

Hutchinson's chapter on WWII is most revelatory. Without being unduly partisan, it exposes and corrects the "greatest generation" mythology that I had half come to accept. 

After reading Facing the Abyss, I continued my investigation of Cornell English faculty publications by taking a couple of wild swings at Elizabeth S. Anker's mystifying On Paradox, the Claims of Theory (Duke UP, 2022). (Anker holds a joint appointment in Cornell's law school and its Department of Literature in English.) I can say just two things for certain about this difficult book: a) I didn't understand two consecutive sentences, and b) it's not about literature, not even tangentially. In fact, I'm not sure what it's about -- as far as I can tell, it's not about the law. I have rarely attempted anything in English prose that I found quite so impenetrable. I never even grasped what Anker means by paradox.

I'm sure it's mea maxima culpa, but so be it. 

 

[April 4] PGB writes: "Every time you post something, it becomes ever clearer that you're not the right person for this investigation. Give it up and stick to something within your abilities, like basketball. You write well on basketball. Do yourself a favor: stay away from the deeper issues that Anker discusses."

[April 4]  Vivian de St. Vrain responds: "Perhaps you're right, PGB (whoever you are). The shoemaker should stick to his last. This Anker book is not intended for me, but I I wonder for whom it is intended. It's got to be an extremely small specialized audience. Six or eight people, worldwide. I doubt anyone on Cornell's English faculty then or now could make heads or tails of it."

[April 6]  Artie Greengroin writes: "Thanks for hanging in there.  I hope you find other Cornell English Professors who know how to write English. I'm not optimistic, though. BTW, I think PGB is harshing on you, but I agree that your basketball essays are pretty good."

[April 8] Vivian de St. Vrain responds: "Thanks for the recommendation, Artie and PGB. If anyone is interested, my basketball essays are here.

[April 9]  Charles Evans (Mercer College) writes: "I agree. Vivian, your notes on basketball are quite good. But you're just not smart enough to understand philosophy."

[April 10] Joe J. Keen (Northwest Nazarene University, Nampa, Idaho) writes: "I agree with Charles Evans. The basketball entries are amusing. But, Vivian, you're no philosopher."

[April 16] Vivian de St. Vrain writes: The "Artie Greengroin" who posted on April 6 does not exist. Artie Greengroin is not a real person; he's a character invented by the WWII novelist Harry Brown. Come on, Artie you can use your real name. Don't be afraid. Don't hide behind a pseudonym. We're all friends here."

[April 30]. Chester Bacon writes: "Thanks for bringing the Hutchinson book to my attention.  I've read and been enlightened by it. But following your recommendation I'll stay away from the Anker book. And I do like your basketball essays."

Driftin'

Every once in a while, I experience something that I call a "cultural convergence" -- perhaps an event reported in a daily newspaper that closely resembles something on the very page of the novel that I happen to be reading. A cross-genre overlap, let us say.

Here's in example of such a coincidence that amused me much.  

Yesterday evening I watched the classic western The Magnificent Seven (1960) and this morning I read, once again, Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. It's hard to believe but yes, there is a very brief moment where two such very distinct works brush against one another.  

Unlike TN, The Magnificent Seven is a violent spectacle that steers clear of humor, or subtle characterization or extensive dialogue. After the climactic concluding battle to preserve the Mexican village has been both lost and won, the two surviving gunmen share a moment before trotting off on their separate ways. Chris Adams (Yul Brynner) inquires of Vin Tanner (Steve McQueen) if he has a plan for what comes next. Laconic Vin, cowpoke and gunslinger, responds, "driftin'. 

In Twelfth Night, there's a similar question and a similar answer, but in a far different idiom. Antonio asks Sebastian, who has survived a shipwreck, about his plans. Sebastian's view of his future is essentially the same as Vin's, but there is none of that "ah shucks" minimalism in his reply. Instead, Sebastian responds, "My determinate voyage is mere extravagancy."  

[While Vin's one-word answer is clear as clear can be, Sebastian's "mere extravagancy" requires a bit of a gloss. Nowadays, "extravagancy" (usually "extravagance") signifies a "lack of restrain in purchasing luxury goods." Not so in 1600, when "extravagant" remained much closer to its root etymological inheritance. The word descends from L. vagare, "to wander." Extra-vagance therefore means something like "wander beyond." Here's a more familiar example of the word at work: when Roderigo characterizes Othello as an "extravagant and wheeling stranger," he does not criticize Othello for spending too many ducats on his fancy get-up. He means that he's a rootless and wandering non-native. (Wheeling? my dictionary glosses wheeling as "roving, wandering, drifting"). And also: "mere" did not then connote triviality; its meaning is closer to "pure." "Determinate" meant and still means "decided.")

Therefore Sebastian's sentence --"My determinate voyage is mere extravagancy" -- is directly equivalent to  Vin's "driftin''". Cultural convergence at its best.

It's just two ways of talkin'. 

I sometimes wonder about Shakespeare's intent here. Why did he bother to put such a difficult sentence in Sebastian's mouth? For purposes of characterization, certainly. But at the expense of clarity. Wouldn't it have been more economical, more transparent, for Sebastian to say something plain, such as "I don't have a plan, I'll just wander." It's certain that some percentage of Shakespeare's audience, perhaps most, will not grasp the meaning  of the sentence as written and will be left puzzled. Yet as he so often does, Shakespeare preferred eloquence to transparency. 

In my opinion, Shakespeare delighted in his own fluency.  And sometimes I think that Shakespeare wasn't just writing to be heard by his Globe or Blackfriars audience. He was writing to be read and studied --  although I doubt he could have imagined a future in which his sentences would be glossed with crowded inches of small-type footnotes.

It it possible that Shakespeare also had an inkling that, as Beethoven once put it, he was writing for "a latter age?"

It's Big! We're Little!

Can it possibly be true that the universe as we know it is becoming larger and larger? The more we learn, the more it seems to expand. The scientists who know about such things now brag that the Milky Way numbers between 200 and 300 billion stars, nearly all of which are probably circled by planets. Moreover, these same experts now claim that there are something like one or two trillion such configurations -- some of them small but most larger than our own personal galaxy. And to top all that, there's a rumor circulating that our universe might be just one of an untold, possibly infinite number of other universes. Some of them Big Banging, some expanding, some collapsing.

These numbers are staggering and incomprehensible, at least to me. I can't even get a hold of a million of anything, even grains of sand, let alone a billion (a thousand million!) enormous stars.

Now they tell me that our universe began 13.8 billion years ago, more or less, and will go on for a hundred billion more. That's another very large number for me (or you) to assimilate. 

It's all mighty perplexing. And then let me add the toughest question of all: why is there something rather than nothing? Yes, why is that? How come?

There are some who find this sort of information dismaying because it confirms the triviality, the meaninglessness of our individual lives. How can I possibly worry about last night's insomnia or my latest nosebleed -- or indeed my very own life -- in a world of a gazillion planets, stars, ultramassive black holes, neutron stars, galaxies, and a universe which may have no discernible boundary or beginning or ending.

Yet I myself find all this information not dismaying but comforting - maybe even inspiring.

What are the odds that a planet might support life? Very small. And that the planet's precarious lifeforms would evolve for a couple of billions of years and then generate intelligent life?  And that a million years of mating and surviving by various evolving primitive and then recognizable humans might lead to my ancestors -- and that after thousands of lucky matings eventually resolve into my parents Manny and Lil who happened upon the precise instant to beget Me. And that I, in the second half of my 80s, way past my shelf life, would still be here to enjoy these extra innings.

All this work of creation and evolution and luck to culminate in Me.  

It's a miracle of cosmic proportions and should be hosannahed. Here I am, enjoying my still functioning brain. My stomach is mellow after a full meal and my skin is glowing from a stroll in the warm sun. At the end of the day, I will crawl under the covers with my bedmate and ladylove. Truly the stars have aligned to my benefit.

Nor let us not underestimate  the consummate joy of mattress and blanket.

My assemblage of molecules has had a great run -- much more than could be reasonably anticipated.  Soon my molecules will disassemble and then reassemble into someone else. I'm very glad to contribute to this phenomenon. 

But if so -- if we are so fortunate, as I believe us to be, why don't we as a people celebrate our good fortune? Take pleasure in our lives. What's the need for this continuing strife and wars and enslavements and genocides? What's the point of it? We're all sitting here, billions of us, for a second or so in an infinitely boundless and timeless universe. Why must half of us make life miserable for the other half? Why can't all we just get along?

Truly we are a horrid species.

I wonder whether other planets that support intelligent life have done any better. I hope so.

Words of My Life -- Text

I first encountered the word "text" -- as did everyone else of my cohort -- as the first component of "textbook." At P S 217, textbooks were issued on the first day of school. Then, later in the day, we ritually scissored brown paper grocery bags and improvised protective book covers. It was not unusual for the covers to be in better shape than the retirement-eligible books. At college, I was surprised to find that I was required to purchase my own textbooks -- a discovery that busted a hole in my precarious budget. 

And then the word "text" sat still for a number of years until it emerged as a term of art in critical theory. "Text" became a generic word for anything written: novels, poems, plays, signs, advertising slogans, tattoos -- anything that could be analyzed and discussed. I think, in retrospect, that the idea was not to "privilege" one form of writing over another. "Text" is to poem as "provider" is to doctor.

Nowadays, "text" has emerged from the gloom of academic criticism and has become the most frequently used of words. Who could have predicted it? I myself, formerly a writer of letters and postcards and until recently of emails, and for many years at one point a user of the telephone, now send and receive multiple "texts" in a day.

The noun has also acquired a variety of verb forms: "I'll text you"; "I texted you";   "Text me when you arrive"; "Talk to you later.  I'm texting."

All derived, ultimately, from L. texere textus, to weave; or textor, a weaver.

The use of "text" in religious ceremony, as in a cleric's, "today's text is..." has never been a part of my life.

Cornell English Then and Now -- 5

Elisha Cohn is an associate professor in Cornell's Department of Literatures in English. Her Still Life, Suspended Development in the Victorian Novel (2016) strikes me as two books in one. The first is quite lovely and filled with a variety of splendid apercus. Cohn explores "lyric moments" in the novels (confession: I read closely only the chapter on Thomas Hardy, the novelist with whom I'm most familiar). She observes that Hardy (a poet as well as a novelist) occasionally stops the progress of the story and allows his characters to experience a moment of stasis or reflection or reverie that is more a characteristic of lyric poetry than prose. I was much impressed by her analyses of these moments -- and wondered why I had failed to notice such events -- or non-events -- myself. So criticism did what it's supposed to do -- widens our understanding and appreciation of works of literature. I returned to the Victorian novel armed with a new way of seeing. In fact, I'm now reading Little Dorrit again for the express purpose of ascertaining whether a non-poet like Dickens employs the same Still Life method. So far, not the case -- Dickens has his own particular (and very successful) methods of expanding the consciousness of his characters.

Ah, but then there's the other side of Cohn's book which attempts to develop her useful insights within the slough of "theory." I half suspect that Cohn felt obliged to make herself relevant or contemporary or tenure-worthy with her tumble into this quicksand -- but perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps she devoutly believes in an apparatus that I find so incomprehensible and transient. In this second part of the book, many famous names are invoked and admired; some of these are very French and very revered; others  are merely professors at American universities. Pages of text and footnotes defend against the horrid possibility that Still Life might be "insufficiently theorized." And in these speculative paragraphs Cohn discusses the deprivilegization of hierarchical thought in favor of forms of lateralization in which individuations are impersonal and singularities are pre-individual and which reterritorialize along the lines of preexisting structures of power which re-consolidate into static concepts, etc., etc. Which is when I either descend into a reverie (or nightmare) of my own or hurl he book across the room.

 

[February 23  Audrey ap Howell writes:  "Vivian de St. Vrain, you've go it wrong. The notion that there are poetic moments in the novels is well established. The originality of this book lies in its theorizing of these moments. You would know this if you had read carefully and not skimmed." 

[February 24] J C Occhiogrosso writes: "This is a well-written book. Complicated but not obscure."

[February 25]  Reuben Musgrave writes:  "I bet that Cohn is a delightful teacher -- if she keeps to the events in the novels and stays away from bewildering 'theory.'"

[February 25] Savannah Courtermanche writes:  "All novelists pause the plot for moments of reflection. Nothing new here."    

[March 5]  Joy Jourgenson writes:  "This difficult monograph would have been more useful as a series of short, insightful essays.  Too bad it had to be expanded into a repetitive static book. Not the author's fault -- just the tune of the times."

[March 6]  Eli Munn writes:  "Vivian, you're too old and out of it to have an opinion worth anything. Shut it down and go back to your knitting."

[March 15] Rogers Roggen writes:  "I wonder, Vivian, how you can work yourself up into such a snit about Cornell when the USA is going to hell in a handbasket. Shouldn't you put your effort into more pressing matters."

[March 18] Homer vanNess writes:  "Reuben Musgrave, are you possibly the "Cousin Rube" that I heard my parents mention? I know there's a Musgrave branch to my family. (I found your name doing a random googlesearch). If you are Cousin Rube, could you pm me at [email protected]. I'd love to hear from you. I think you went to Cornell; so did I but much later."

 

Cornell English Then and Now - 4

Vivian de St. Vrain writes: "Cathy Caruth is the Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of English at Cornell University. She has written quite a number of books but the one that I selected for this Cornell English Department project, partly because of its engaging title, is Literature in the Ashes of History. Alas, the title is misleading, because Caruth doesn't concern herself with literature in any recognizable way. Rather, the book investigates psychoanalytic theories, especially of loss and trauma. Although in an earlier part of my life I read and studied all of Freud's major works, I found this book to be far too subtle and abstruse for my downright brain. I have therefore asked assistance from my long time friend A. Barnett Langdale, Jr. Barney is a very smart medical school graduate, a therapist, and psychologist (though not a psychoanalyst) and a person for whose opinions I have great regard."

A. Barnett Langdale, Jr., writes: "Thanks, Viv, for entrusting me with the of task of reading and evaluating this book. I fear that I shall disappoint you, because I had a hard time understanding Literature in the Ashes of History. In order to profit from reading this book, one must accept certain assumptions about Sigmund Freud and about the art of psychoanalysis. Caruth sets out to modify and reinterpret the famous fort-da episode in Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle. This became an immediate problem for me, because I have never agreed with Freud's analysis of his grandson's play -- perhaps because his interpretation clashes with what I have  learned from long years of closely observing children in my professional practice. Events such as fort-da can generate a spectrum of meanings and a variety of interpretations equally as valid or invalid as Freud's. As I result, I read this book with a great deal of resistance to its assumptions and their ramifications.

Many of the arguments that Caruth creates ("suggests" is her usual verb) are too arcane for me. She carries her readers away from common sense. She inhabits an intellectual world in which every event or fact carries its own negation. And that negation bears a consequent negation, and so on ad infinitum, like the images in a pair of opposed mirrors, leading inevitably to a situation in which, as Macbeth says, "function/ Is smothered in surmise and nothing is/ But what is not."

Vivian de St. Vrain responds: 'Many thanks, Barney. In the course of reading Literature in the Ashes of History, I came to think that its procedure is, in a sense, a lot like theology. If you make certain assumptions about god and angels and creation, you can generate a fantastically complicated superstructure of ideas that has absolutely no relations to the world in which we dwell. This book is not theology, it's psychoanalytic theory, but it shares a similar procedure, because, despite its highly-elaborated complexity, its assumptions are unprovable if not absolutely false. Intelligence and sophistication can take you only so far. I'm afraid that in the end, there's no more heft in this kind of study than there is in theology -- the "subject without an object." Ultimately, it's Cloud-Cuckoo-Land." 

 

 

[February 15] Walter Balletto writes: "Before you dismiss this intelligent book out of hand, you might want to read the ecstatic review by Michael Levine in The Undecidable Unconscious: A Journal of Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis. It's online. Levine makes the effort to read carefully, which neither you nor your friend Langdale do."  

[February 15] Vivian de St. Vrain responds: "At first I thought that Mr. Balletto was being ironic, inventing an improbable self-parodic name for an academic journal. Who would believe there is actually such a publication? But I looked it up and, by golly, it's real. Moreover, it's published, mirabile dictu, by the University of Nebraska Press!!!"

[February 16] Janet Rich asks: "You haven't said anything about Caruth's presence in a Department of English. Shouldn't she relocate to Psychology?"

[February 16] Herbert Lecovin (Cornell '61) asks: "I wonder how many of Caruth's colleagues can read and understand her work?"

[February 16] Anita Robillard writes: "Caruth is on an island, and instead of welcoming friends to join her, she erects walls and barricades to keep them out."

[February 17] Joel Salzberg writes: "What do you mean by "island." She teaches at Cornell; Cornell's not an island."

[February 17] Anita Robillard writes: "It's a metaphor, Joel."

[February 17] Herman S. Levi writes: "I don't understand why you compare psychoanalysis to theology. They're nothing alike."

[February 18] Vivian de St. Vrain responds: "Professor Levi, let me refer you to a familiar passage in the Leviathan, where Hobbes writes of "names that signifie nothing, but are taken up and learned by rote from the Schooles, as hypostatical, transubstantiate, consubstantiate, eternal-Now and the like canting of Schoolemen." Similarly, the words of psychoanalysis, such as pleasure principle, Ego, etc. signify nothing at all. Theologians and psychoanalysts can be very smart people, but the net practical result of their involuted speculation is transitory, wrong, useless, specious, and false."

[April 1]  Skye Barasch writes:  So, Vivian, is there anyone on the Cornell English faculty whose work meets your antiquated approval?  It's all bad, according to you.

[April 1]  Vivian de St, Vrain responds: Actually, Ms/Mr Barasch, I'm just about to add a paragraph on a member of the faculty whose book was very informative and comprehensible. No abstruse jargon, I'm glad to say.  Stay tuned;  my comments will appear here in a day or two. I do wonder, now that I think of it, if I'm unconsciously picking the least approachable books to report on. I'll try to mend my ways.

Wisdom from my Father

When dealing with a child, always make your appeal to the better side of his/her nature. 

No one owns anything; the most you can say is that you have a lifetime lease on it.

As far as I can tell, I am just a long link in a chain going from nowhere to nowhere.

If you lose your man, go directly to the basket. 

Never omit an opportunity to do a favor for a friend, and never be embarrassed to accept a favor from a friend.  People like to help one another.

Anyone can make money if he makes it the sole business of his life to do so.

When the stock market is going up, everyone is  a genius.

The czars and the rabbis kept our family in darkness for a thousand years. It took hundreds of years for us to fight our way out of the ghetto, and they (the orthodox and the Hasids) want to put themselves back in it.

Don't forget to wash behind your ears.

Mary Antin, The Promised Land (1911)

I have just read Mary Antin's autobiography, The Promised Land, first published in 1911. It is a book that I should have known much earlier in my life but only discovered a week or so ago. The larger part The Promised Land is the familiar story of immigrant life in a new country -- the author's struggles to adapt to an unfamiliar culture, her achievements and triumphs, and her unabashed flag-waving patriotism. More strange and more informative, is the picture of life "old country," as viewed through the eyes of a young woman.  Antin grew up in provincial, impoverished Polotzk, a small city now in Belarus, but which at various times has been administered and exploited by the ungentle hands of Varangians, Poles, Lithuanians, and Germans. During Antin's youth (she was born in 1881), Polotsk was a part of Russia. It was not a good time to be a Jew in Polotsk or indeed anywhere within the Pale of Settlement. (Her story is especially pertinent because I myself have a hunk of Belarusian-Jewish genes -- as do, therefore, my children and grandchildren.) 

Antin's life in that bleak part of the world was, I think, triply suppressed. In political freedom and standard of living, by the Russians; in domestic and personal relations, by oppressive Hasidism and the rabbis who enforced its demanding rules; and thirdly, because Antin had the misfortune to be born female. She had every reason to leave Polotsk behind.   

Antin recognized early that she was a "prisoner" because "the Czar" commanded Jews to stay within the Pale. She "accepted ill usage from the Gentiles as one accepts the weather. The world was made in a certain way and I had to live in it." Polotsk was a place of constant ethnic strife fueled by dangerous superstitions. "The Gentiles said that we had killed their god and that we used the blood of murdered Christian children in the Passover." The Jewish community of Polotsk was always under threat of violence -- "the peasants would fill themselves with vodka, and set out to kill Jews. They attacked with knives and clubs and scythes and axes, killed them or tortured them, and burned their houses. This was called a pogrom." There was also the threat of the draft, where recruits served until the age of 41. (My maternal grandfather, Joseph (Usilewski) Green told me that he had been drafted into the Russian army for a twenty-year term; I now understand that he must have entered the army at age 21. In 1904 Grandpa, age 26, deserted and came to America. Good move.) Some men escaped the draft by paying crippling bribes to conscription officers. Taxation was onerous. "Peace cost so much a year in Polotsk."

Antin also explains that as stifling as was the Czar, the rules of religion were harsher. "Within the wall raised by the vigilance of the police, another wall, higher, thicker, more impenetrable was the religion of  the Jews." The rabbis favored piety (as they conceived it) to independence or freedom or prosperity and they enforced the most minute regulations and prohibitions of all actions day and night. Antin tells of a wife who found a blemish on the chicken she was preparing to cook. She consulted the rabbi who pronounced the chicken traif. That night, the family went hungry.

Polotsk seems to have had no dissenters or freethinkers, or at least none that Antin notes. I imagine that those who challenged orthodoxy either left of their own accord or were shunned.

Girls were offered little outside the family kitchen or nursery.  They were expected to marry young and produce many children, especially sons who could distinguish the family with their Torah studies. Schooling was discouraged for girls, who were taught to pronounce but not understand Hebrew. 

At its prime, Polotsk had 60,000 inhabitants, perhaps 60 per cent of whom were Jewish. There were twenty-three synagogues. Today there are no synagogues and no Jews.

Gravestones

I've never visited my parents' graves. I don't even know where they are buried. I've been told that my father is buried between my mother and his sister Mollie, but I don't know where they lie. I have a paper that tells me where my sister Susan, who died as an infant, is buried, but I've never been there. I don't know where my brother Eugene lies.

I know exactly where Althea and Phyllis are buried -- just up the hill, under the big maple. I visit once a year and bring a stone to place on their markers. Phyllis's is a bronze plaque affixed to a stone; Althea's is just the capital letter A and her dates (1939-2016). It's what she wanted.  

Dan Goss is buried in Staten Island somewhere. I visited once, with Althea. A's mother, Grandma Anne, wanted her ashes divided in half and spread, part with Phyllis and part with Dan.  She has no gravestone, nor wanted one.

I have told my family that I want my tombstone to read, "No more insomnia, forever." But that's a joke.  

Nowadays it's the custom to scatter the ashes on a favorite place, which is nice, but there's no place to visit. Especially no place for those buried at sea.

On the Mall

After a severe cold snap, it's a welcome warm Friday afternoon. We're on the semi-famous mall enjoying a long-postponed promenade. A woman, in her seventies, stops us. "Can you help me?" I'm embarrassed to confess that my first reaction to her plea was that she must be one of our many panhandlers. But not so. She continued: "It's my husband, he has Parkinson's, can you help me get him to the car?" He, Bill, was standing frozen, unable to speak, unable to move, his balance precarious. "Two years ago," she said,"he was robust. He's having a bad day." And indeed he was. I took Bill's left arm under the shoulder, his wife the other arm. Lynn grasped my left hand and carried Bill's useless stick, and together we shuffled him infinitely slowly and gently to the curb. "I thought we could go out for coffee," she said, "but I was wrong." While we stood quietly, Bill's wife went to fetch their car which was parked only fifty feet away. She backed it to where we stood (Lynn now supporting Bill on his right side). We helped Bill into passenger seat. His wife buckled him in.

I asked her, "do you have help?'  "Yes, she said, "friends." "Do you have children?" "Yes, but they don't live nearby." She thanked us generously and drove off.

I was sad for both him and her. He, because his dreadful disease is going to kill him very soon. And she, because her life now consists of morning-to-night care taking -- in bed, out of bed; dressing and undressing; into a comfortable chair for a while and then and out of it; brief awkward walks; three times a day lifting the spoon to his lips. And what's known in the care taking trade as "toileting."

I'm convinced that she doesn't know how bad he is. Caretakers are always behind, always catching up. If she knew, she'd have had a wheelchair at the ready. He needs constant care-- not just family or friends, but professional assistance. Can they afford a place in a memory care facility or nursing home? Not everyone can.

Afterward the incident, we went to a coffee shop -- a normalizing activity for us. But, sitting there, I was shaken. Certainly profound sadness for the ill husband and the encumbered wife, and in addition a touch of personal PTSD. 

And then the inevitable pondering. "To this favor must we come." It's not just Bill. We're all doomed -- even that cute infant in the next booth, rapturously examining her fingertips. A host of diseases, some as bad as Parkinson's, waiting at the door, waiting.

Cornell English Then and Now -- 3C

I'm a lifelong fan of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. I love all the shipboard stuff, the adventure, the exoticism, Crusoe's self-reliance, his  psychological complexity, his religious ponderings, and especially the recapitulation of nascent capitalism on the island. I'm as entranced as ever by the attempt to domesticate goats, by his attempt to build a boat, by the single footprint on the beach, by Friday's escape and the battle with the cannibals. With a little effort, I have been able to set to one side the novel's faults: the author's careless repetitions, his appalling colonialist racism, those last anticlimactic adventures and the return to England, the unnatural absence of sexuality or passion, the paranoia and the unnecessary violence. Massive defects, yes indeed, but Robinson Crusoe is still a great eternally wonderful mishmash of a novel. 

So it came as a surprise to read Laura Brown's one-sentence summary of the novel in The Counterhuman Imaginary: "Robinson Crusoe enacts a self-creative other-than-human vitality by setting matter in motion through the persistent repetition of irresistible succession."  

Maybe Robinson Crusoe does "enact" and "set matter in motion" -- I don't know, can't say. But I do not plan to undergo the pain and woe of making sense out of her ungainly and mystifying sentence. For Laura Brown, Robinson Crusoe is not the pleasure and challenge that it has been for three hundred years -- it's just raw material for her dry-as-dust ideological machine.

And a waste of my precious time.

 

[February 1] Bernhard Starr writes:  "Brown transforms the gold of literature into the dross of criticism."

[February 1] Professor Merlon Crenelle, Southwestern Louisiana U., writes: "Vivian, you're totally unfair. You take one sentence out of the chapter and make fun of it. You don't even bother to see how the sentence is related to the larger argument. You owe Professor Laura Brown an apology. You're irresponsible."

[February 1] Marianne Morrison, Ph. D. writes: "Vivian, I agree with Mr. (Ms.?) Crenelle. Youve not tried to understand Brown. Your lazy."

[February 2] Vivian de St. Vrain responds:  "Whether I'm lazy or not, Brown writes in an obscure code. Why should I have to try to crack the code?  Why can't she write in English? She's a Professor of English, for goodness sake. It's not my job to figure out what she's trying to say; it's her job to make it plain."

[February 2] Sean R. Fine writes: "It makes me wonder about the "imaginary" in which Laura Brown seems to thrive. Closed, cloistered, self-congratulatory."

[February 3] Thurman Valentino (SVDGA) writes: "I think that Vivian de St. Vrain is absolutely correct not to try to figure out what that sentence means. It's not a reader's responsibility. My opinion is that Laura Brown is smart enough to produce a complicated argument, but not smart enough to make complicated argument clear."

[February 3] Michael F. Bristol writes: "Or maybe, dear Viv, you're not smart enough to figure it all out."

[February 4] Vivian de St. Vrain replies: "OK, Bristol, if you're so smart why don't you just tell us exactly what "persistent repetition of irresistible succession" means."  

[February 4] J C Occhiogrosso suggests: "One thing regularly follows another?"

[February 7] Beulah Withee writes:  "The problem is not with just that one sentence. It's that whole paragraphs and pages are filled with such difficult sentences. After each of these, a reader has to pause and interpret before going on to the next one. It puts far too much burden on the reader." 

[February 9] Gabriel Cussen III writes: "I tried to read the book but I didn't get very far. Do visitors to this blog remember the criticism of academic articles and books: "What is new is not true and what is true is not new." This book is even worse, because what's true is utterly trivial."

[February 9] Bernhard Starr responds: "Gabriel Cussen, I agree with you.  There's no there there."

[February 13]. Herbert Lecovin (Cornell '61) writes: "The important question is what is going on in her classroom. Does she lecture in this dialect and does she expect her students to write as she does?

Cornell English Then and Now: 3B

I'm still trying to come to terms with Laura Brown's book, The Counterhuman Imaginary. I've wrestled the title to a draw, and now I'm going to take a crack at the Introduction. Is this task a good use of my limited time?

Let me quote a sentence that I take to be the very heart of the book and the heart of the problem. It's a humdinger.

"Human story telling is found to provide a subtle scenario for affirming the other-than-human, based on an imputed commonality that replaces human priority with cross-species inclusivity that transcends the human." 

Laura Brown's prose reads as if it were first drafted in German and then rendered into English by Google Translate.  

It takes effort, but once you penetrate its peculiar idiom, it makes a kind of sense. For those of my readers who are still with me, let me try to parse this sentence. I suspect It may mean something like, "human beings project thoughts and feelings onto animals and objects."

"Human story telling" [that is, literature]

"is found to provide" [the passive "is found," should be deleted even though it functions as a compliment to the person (i.e. the author herself) to whom this insight has been revealed.]

"a subtle scenario" [I don't know exactly what the phrase "subtle scenario" means; nor do I think that anyone else does.] 

"based on an imputed commonality " [I understand "commonality" because I know that humans and animals share many features. I don't see the necessity for the word 'imputed"; imputed by whom? who other than humans can "impute."] 

"that replaces human priority" [i.e. there should be no preference for humans over animals and rocks, despite the paradox that humans and not animals can think about the equivalence.] 

"with cross-species inclusivity" ["inclusivity" is implicit in the previous rejection of "human priority." Wow, these abstract nouns do pile up (commonality, priority, inclusivity). Suggested simplification: "that includes other species"]

"that transcends the human.]. Transcends, in this final clause, smuggles into the argument a new idea, because "to transcend" means "to surpass." The claim now, as this snake of a sentence winds its weary way to conclusion, is that the meaning that humans attach to things is greater than the humans who do the attaching. At least I think that is what it may mean.]

So after completing this investigation, I think that the claim is that literature projects ideas onto animals and also things. And sometimes these projections illuminate and enhance both things and animals. 

I'm exhausted. I had planned to discuss the Introduction at greater length, but I've had enough. Instead of proceeding with the introduction, I'm going to try to understand the chapter on Robinson Crusoe (a novel that I first read as a boy and have read several times since, and which I feel that I understand). Stay tuned.

 

 

[January 31]  Petal Rivera writes:  "So it seems that Brown's book is not a novelty of ideas, but a novelty of language."

[January 31] Sean R. Fine writes: "I agree with Ms. Rivera. Simple ideas cast in pretentious language to make them seem important. This emperor of literary criticism has no clothes. None whatsoever,"

[February 1] Joel Salzberg writes: "Vivian, good job of unravelling that sentence even though I still don't quite understand it."

{February 1] Viola Pilbeam writes: "Vivian, you're too kind. Why don't you just  admit that this whole book is absurd American nonsense."

[February 4] Helena Hotchkiss-Jones replies: "This absurdity can't be blamed on the Americans. It's as much the fault of Deleuze, Adorno, etc."]

[February 4] Joel Salzberg replied: "Who is Deleuze Adorno?" 

[May 2]  Evelyn Efflandt writes: "Joel, you always were a couple of candles shy of a menorah."

[May 3] Vivian de St.Vrain replies: "Evelyn, you always were a nasty bigot."

Cornell English Then and Now -- 3A

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

The title is a puzzle. Why does the adjective come after the noun? And what does the word "counterhuman" mean?  (One hundred and forty-six pages to go and I'm already off balance. I'm worried that if I can't understand the title I'm going to have a heck of a difficult time with the content.)

I took a guess that the coinage "counterhuman" would signify something monstrous or terrifying, like a vampire, troll or ogre. But I was not even in the ballpark. "Counterhuman," I have now discovered, is a term of art in contemporary literary criticism that refers to everything that is not human: not only animals, natural phenomena such as storms and earthquakes, but also "things" or objects -- anything that is constructed or manufactured. Not "inhuman' -- just not human. (But why "counter" rather than "non" human?)

Moreover, the word "imaginary," which I have for a lifetime understood to be an adjective signifying what is not material but rather a product of the human mind, as for example, art and literature and dreams, has also undergone metamorphosis. According to wiki, the adjective-turned-noun "imaginary" "is the set of values, institutions, laws, and symbols common to a particular social group and the corresponding society through which people imagine their social whole.” That's a deal of territory, but I think I understand: "imaginary" is essentially a synonym for what I might, naively, have called "culture." (Might an alternative to The Counterhuman Imaginary be The Culture of Things? It's a more inviting title and much less pretentious.)

But now I'm stopped in my tracks. The "imaginary, it appears, is "the work of a particular social group." How in the world, then, do the "counterhuman," who are incapable of thought, possibly generate "a structure of ideas?" Pots and pans and volcanoes and marmosets don't have brains that think or speak, except when we humans attribute such traits to them. 

In a whimsical moment, Duke Senior, in As You Like It, proposed that there are "tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones." Am I to understand that this author takes seriously what Shakespeare regarded as an ironic jokey extravagance? Gosh, I hope not.

I think I now get the point: Laura Brown, the prestigious Class of 1916 Professor of English at Cornell University, intends to defend a paradox. She will explain to me how non-humans, things without an intelligence, can create a culture. I'd better pay close attention. Or perhaps the author means to advance the trivial but more sensible and less sensational idea that humans can attribute culture to animals and things.

Nevertheless, I must say what's on my mind -- what a deliberately off-putting title. It's clearly designed to repel the general reader, someone like myself, and to speak only to coterie fellow-travelers who might understand either or both of the words "counterhuman" and "imaginary." Not a large potential audience.

Do I have a chip on my shoulder as I turn from the title to the Introduction. Yes, I believe I do.

 

[January 25] Marianne Morrison, Ph.D. writes:  "Vivian, you should not go on with this. Your so prejudiced against this writer that you cant give her a fair hearing."

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

[January 26] Petal Rivera writes: "Vivian, I think you're naive to suggest a less pretentious title. I hate to say it, but the point is not to avoid pretense, but to be pretentious. No modesty in this book."

[January 27] J C Occhiogrosso writes:  "Vivian, you're being deliberately obtuse. C'mon, it's not so difficult."

[February 4] Vivian de St. Vrain responds:  "Ok, J C, if it's so easy, why don't you suggest a better title."

[February 12] Winifred A. Walker writes: "Like it or not, this is typical academic jargon. If you want to read this book, you must master the idiom."]

Words of My Life -- Poop

Nowadays, the ordinary meaning of the noun "poop" is feces. Perhaps because "poop" is a nursery word, it is apparently less offensive than "crap" or "shit." And yet less infantile than kaka or doodoo.

But "poop" did not refer to the work of the lavatory until about 1720. Nor do I remember it being in general use during my childhood.

I myself first encountered the word "poop" in the escapist seagoing novels to which I was addicted as an adolescent: the Bounty trilogy, the Hornblower series, Treasure Island, Mr Midshipman Easy, and the buccaneering books of Rafael Sabatini, Jeffery Farnol, and many many others whose names have been long forgotten. In these romantic novels, it was often the case that a handsome young midshipman and a pretty maiden, her golden hair cascading over her shapely shoulders, would flirt while leaning against the taffrail of the "poop." Had I known or suspected that "poop" carried stercoraceous overtones, my budding fantasy life would have turned to dreck. Thank goodness I knew nothing.

The poop deck, I soon deduced, was the roof of the cabin built into the aft of a sailing vessel. Why "poop?" From the French word for stern, poupe, itself derived from the Latin puppis (also signifying stern). Wherefore puppis? No one knows -- the word has no analogues in other ancient languages.

Shakespeare used the naval "poop" in the celebrated passage in Anthony and Cleopatra in which Anthony was greeted by Cleopatra. It's the epitome of classical conspicuous consumption as well as Shakespearean eloquence.

The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne,
Burn'd on the water: the poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfumed that
The winds were love-sick with them.

 

An impressively decorated vessel and a spectacular poop, which, because languages change and meanings shift, now provokes involuntary undergraduate titters. In truth, generations of teachers of Shakespeare have amused themselves with the notorious (or perhaps mythical) student blunder: "her poop was beaten gold." 

 

Other varieties of "poop." There's the poop that means exhausted, as in "I'm pooped." And poop as inside information. "I got the true poop on this." And poop as a useless or ineffectual person (thought to derive from nincompoop): "He's an old poop."  A party-pooper.

 

Shakespeare himself knew still another, and rarer, poop. In Pericles, a pander and a bawd discuss their need for fresh "creatures."  Their conversation is mighty vulgar.

 

Bawd:  The stuff we have, a strong wind will blow it to pieces.

Pander: The poor Transylvanian is dead that lay with the little baggage. 

Bawd:  Ay, she quickly pooped him; she made him roast-meat for worms.

 

Poop was also, it would seem, a slang term for the female genitalia. The Bawd has "denominalized" (as the linguists say) the word and converted it into a verb ("she pooped him)" that has the force of "infect with a venereal disease."

 

Certainly, the word poop has, over the centuries, done yeoman duty.

 

 

Other words of my life: try here.

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 too harsh about Braddock's vocabulary. Those words that you poke fun at are the regular vocabulary for people of his generation; your out of touch.  

[January 14] Oksana Sartry replies: "I wonder why Johns Hopkins published this diss. in its modernism series. Good diss., but immature book."

[January 17] Sean R. Fine writes:  "I'm interested in modernism, but frankly, this book is absolutely unreadable. Whatever value it has is buried beneath tons of jargon. Gives academia a bad name." 

 

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 since  1965 Ray Pike died at age 90. Ray was an accomplished journalist. Nancy Pike and AGP were the young mothers in 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.

nostalgia

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 while 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 the world outside the P S 217 schoolyard 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 obviously 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 constructed of layers 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.