Dr. Metablog

Occupations Not For Me

Here are some career paths that it's just as well I didn't tread.   

1.  Taxi driver in a large city (especially a city that's not on a grid, such as Boston or London. Even the DC-diagonals drive me nuts). I've earlier written about my incapacitating directional disability, but I neglected to mention that I tend to get into a bit of a panic when I'm lost --  I start driving much too fast and far too waywardly. So, dear friends, imagine me a befuddled cabbie, sweating super-profusely, while the fares in back scream bloody murder when I take the exact wrong turn for the fourth consecutive time. It would be a freakin' nightmare. Related occupations that won't work: tour guide, wilderness guide, tracker.

2.  Dog-groomer. I've hinted at my lack of affection for doggies before. I just don't think I'd do a good job blow-drying Fido or brushing Fifi's teeth. (Incidentally, I'm joined in my prejudice against curs by gentle Will himself, whose references to canines are uniformly unfriendly: the superbly wicked sisters in King Lear, for example, are "dog-hearted daughters.")    

3.  Trapeze artist. I'm terrified of heights and I have absolutely no sense of rhythm. Imagine me launching myself at just the right moment to catch my partner by the ankles. Related opportunity for ignominious failure: dance instructor.   

4.  Surgeon.  I'm far too squeamish to be poking around in someone's innards.  Even channel surfing has become a dangerous pastime since we accidentally acquired the live surgery channel.  Motto:  "all gore, all the time."  I have to keep clicking that remote lest I accidentally pause at an open-heart moment. The FCC should mandate a warning and a five-second delay:  "Caution:  palpitating inner organs on view shortly." 

5.  Hostage.  Chained to a bed somewhere in the 'stans wouldn't work for me. I must have my oatmeal every morning at 7 a.m., and I need to move my bowels shortly afterward. Moreover, if I don't eat lunch right on time, I get wicked headaches. Not to mention that I don't function well in rooms that are either too hot or too cold or not well ventilated, and which are peopled with chain-smoking guards. On the whole, I'd be a mighty cranky hostage.    

Book Report: Fiction by Michael Chabon

I liked the film Wonder Boys (2000) so very much that I set out to read all of Michael Chabon's writing. Here's my interim report. I couldn't finish The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (William Morrow, 1988). The book is reported to have sold well and it has been widely praised, but, I'm sorry, I thought it was precious juvenilia and should never have been published. I do, however, love the title. A Model World (1991) and Werewolves in Their Youth (Random House, 1999) are collections of short stories. I found them both mighty insubstantial, and I confess to wearying of the little boy whose father left the family (a far-too-frequently-repeated motif). Wonder Boys (1995) is a fine, complicated, clever, satisfying novel.  Grady Tripp, Terry Crabtree, and James Leer are all memorable creations. The Passover service (omitted in the film) is top-flight -- comic and moving at the same time. The story is fast, funny, and original -- even richer than the fine, little-known movie. 

I respected more than I loved the pullet-surprise winning Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (Random House, 2000). It's engaging but overcrowded. While reading it, I was too conscious of the artifice and too aware of the novel's debts: Nabokov, a pinch of Pynchon, Doctorow, etc. Chabon's a great storyteller with a bright future. So far, he's doesn't have the heft of Bellow or the fluency of Roth, but he's up there in the big leagues. I'm hoping Summerland and The Final Solution are as good as the novels I've read so far. It's going to be fun to follow Chabon's career. He's a talented guy.

October 25. Today I read the novella The Final Solution (Harper Collins, 2004). It's a snazzy mystery. Chabon returns to his infatuation with mythic figures; he also re-creates the hero-sidekick relationship that is an obsession of AAKC -- this time its S. Holmes and Linus Steinman.  A very entertaining story, although sometimes I worried that I was reading a filmscript-in potentia.  Perhaps I'm too suspicious: not many directors are jumping to cast a parrot in the lead role. 

October 30.  I read forty or so pages of Summerland (Miramax, 2002). Two words: "teen" and "fantasy." Not at all my cup of tea.  I hope that Chabon doesn't continue to indulge himself with such trivialities. He's too good for this stuff.

Michael: get back to work!  Get serious! 

On Foley, Rascal Beadles, and "Hypocrisy"

It's the scandal of the month that Republican Representative Mark Foley solicited sex from adolescent male congressional pages in the same years that he headed the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children and made his reputation for his work on legislation targeting sexual predators.

Foley has been universally condemned for his "hypocrisy," as well he should be. It's especially piquant that his castigation of a much-reviled-by-moralists former president has resurfaced to embarrass him and to amuse the rest of us: "It's vile. It's more sad than anything else, to see someone with such potential throw it all down the drain because of a sexual addiction." What kind of rationalizing maneuvers were going in the Foley mind when the Congressman uttered these words about Bill Clinton?

Foley's "hypocrisy" is anything but unique.  Shakespeare nailed the phenomenon centuries ago. In one of his great wisdom-in-madness moments, King Lear sees beneath the surface: "Thou rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand!/ Why dost thou lash that whore? Strip thine own back;/ Thou hotly lust'st to use her in that kind/ For which thou whipp'st her."

Every few weeks or so, it's discovered that one of our very own American beadles is enthralled by the exact sin against which he inveighs. There's the anti-pornography campaigner who has accumulated some unusual apparatus in his clammy basement; the anti-vice TV preacher caught with a shady lady in a by-the-hour motel on the Memphis strip;  the anti-gay state legislator photographed dancing in a downtown bar that caters only to men; the radio talk-show host who wants to send drug-users up the river for life but is himself addicted to hillbilly heroin; the flabby propagandist for virtues who pulls all-nighters at Atlantic City blackjack tables.  ll of them are hypocrites, I suppose, but in my view "hypocrisy" is a label that has no explanatory value.

It's not as though people set out to become hypocrites. It's not an aspiration or a chosen career path. There's no Hypocrisy 101.

I'm not an anti-vice campaigner or a psychologist and have no particular claim to expertise in this area, but I don't believe that people like Foley are cloven-footed sociopaths.

Nor do I hold to the theory that it's simply protective coloration: "if I scream loud enough no one will suspect me." That shabby dodge has long since worn through; who else do we suspect nowadays if not the loudest shouters?

I think the migration to hypocrisy must be very gradual. The Foleys of this world are driven by the flesh. Their vice becomes their obsession. I believe that they try to turn that obsession, that vice, in a positive direction.  Let's say a person is fascinated by adolescent boys;  he can then take on the cause of sexual exploitation and he can manage his compulsion in a socially acceptable manner. He can study it, observe it, catalog it; he can stay in close touch with the temptation but not succumb to it; he can in fact turn his vice into virtue. It's an excellent game plan.  It's a healthy compensatory reaction.

I'm sure that there are anti-vice campaigners who employ such tactics successfully. But there are others who, in moments of weakness, do succumb. Now they're in a tricky psychological pickle.  Who better to appreciate the damage to adolescents than the person who has made a professional study of the outcomes?  So now Foley and the others know in their hearts that they are truly hateful. Perhaps they persuade themselves that their power makes them invulnerable. Meanwhile, they redouble their efforts to help the exploited; they pass legislation and start foundations.  And so the gulf between their professed beliefs and their private practices becomes deeper and deeper. Good deeds and evil deeds become inextricably entwined.

In the story, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (a child-molester) inhabited the same body.

I think that what must happen next is that self-loathing kicks in, big time. And as we all know, self-loathing and self-betrayal are twinborn. So the Foleys among us cooperate in their detection.  They engage in riskier and riskier behavior until they are exposed. Because, in fact, they want to be exposed. As Lear says, they "strip [their] own back[s]."  Because once they're exposed and the punishment commences, they can then set out on the path of redemption, which, I'm absolutely convinced, they crave as much or more than they crave the pleasure of their vice. 

When La Rochefoucauld said that "hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue," he acknowledged that the term "hypocrisy" did not explain anything--that it's an incidental by-product of human frailty.

A Recurring, Violent Nightmare

I wish I had pleasant dreams but I only have nightmares. Here's one of them. Beginning with early adolescence and continuing to this day, I've had a recurring dream in which I've murdered someone--I don't know whom. The victim is always an unidentifiable male, and his death is always violent. Ordinarily, I beat him to a bloody pulp with a shovel. I have problems disposing of the gory body, but usually I bury it next to the neglected garage that lay behind our house on East 9 Street in Flatbush where I lived my first seventeen years. It's an anguishing dream not because I've killed someone, but because I've failed to conceal the body properly and because I'm going to be arrested and punished. It's amoral  -- I don't feel guilty that I'm a murderer -- just embarrassed because I'm incompetent. It's a very realistic nightmare. A couple of times it's been so vivid to me that even after I was wide-awake, it took me ten or fifteen seconds to realize that I was not being hunted by the police and that I could proceed normally with my life.

I don't know why I should be so oppressed with this fantasy. In the daylight hours, I'm your run-of-the-mill peaceful person. Never killed anyone.

Imagine my surprise when I read (and studied the illustrations of) J. M. DeMatteis's 100% autobiographical "graphic novel" Brooklyn Dreams (Paradox, 2003) and discovered that my nightmare is not entirely my own. DeMatteis suffers from exactly the same recurring dream. "I remember the body -- buried out behind my apartment building... or maybe stuffed in a trash can across the street....  Some poor, innocent schmuck I've either hacked up with a machete... or machine-gunned with Cagney-like ferocity... or maybe just kicked down a flight of stairs."  DeMatteis labors under the guilt that's provoked by this dream, and, like me, he can't explain it except to speculate that his life is a nightmare from which he's trying to awake.  But here's what's so fascinating to me: DeMatteis is a product of the exact same Brooklyn neighborhood as I (see map).  He grew up at the corner of Ocean and Foster, and he hung out at Newkirk Plaza, a commercial island that would nowadays be called a shopping center, where I endured painful haircuts, carried my mother's dry cleaning back and forth, and entered and exited the BMT subway.  Was there something about Flatbush, or, more particularly, something about "the Plaza" that made us killers in our dreams. Yes, I rather think there was.

Is it significant that DeMatteis is a kind of replacement child? He is the survivor of a pair of fraternal twins. His potential sibling was spontaneously aborted -- although DeMatties speculates, that, prescient about life's forthcoming difficulties, he might have "jumped." DeMatties' mother was about to be "scraped" when the doctor had second thoughts. In Brooklyn Dreams, DeMatteis describes his mother's and father's hysterical, debilitating and inconsistent protectiveness -- traits often discovered in parents who haven't properly grieved the loss of a child. 

Is it possible that the person whom DeMatteis thinks he murdered is, on some level, the unborn twin?   

And so we have still another variation of the replacement child syndrome. 

Death and Dying in Boulder, Colorado

Our local newspaper, the Boulder Daily Camera, has announced a new policy. No longer will obituaries be considered news. They've been turned over to the classifieds and will be written by friends or relatives of the deceased and placed by funeral homes. Bottom line: deaths are now an opportunity for revenue enhancement.       

I'd always taken it for granted that keeping track of who's born, who's married, and especially who dies constitutes a considerable part of the mission of a local paper. Such events are bread-and-butter matters -- part of the soul of the community. 

The Daily Camera is certainly not where we find out what's happening in the big world -- it's woefully inadequate in that regard, although it does pick up and truncate a few pieces off the wire. The Camera's sole reason for being is that it covers local news, and by doing so allows Boulder's citizens to feel that they have something in common. 

But in fact the Camera only masquerades as a local paper. It's a holding of the folksy-titled Prairie Mountain Publishing, which is a joint venture of E. W. Scripps Co., the newspaper conglomerate, and the MediaNews Group (MediaNews itself owns the Denver Post and four other Colorado papers;  Prairie Mountain also owns the Colorado Daily). There's nothing local about the Camera and there's no reason for its absentee owners to care two cents worth who lives or dies in Newlands or South Boulder or Wonderland Hills. The Camera's job is to extract as much money as possible from Boulder and to forward the cash to Prairie Mountain Publishing.

The Prairie Mountain overlords have placed a new publisher, Al Manzi, at the Camera; Manzi is a corporate lifer. I'm reliably informed that he came with specific instructions to up the Camera's profits. 

And so, obituaries are now on a pay-to-play basis.

How is it that there have been absolutely no complaints about the new policy?  Boulder is a contentious, argumentative city.  It would be reasonable to expect that the Camera's letters-to-the-editor columns would be saturated with protest, but there's been nary a word. Why?  Because Manzi has instructed the editorial staff not to publish any letters that protest the new policy. It's good to be the publisher. 

Here are some proposals for Al Manzi.  Why stop with obituaries?  Or with wedding and anniversary announcements, which are obviously fair game. Letters to the editor: why not?  Why should a newspaper give free space to community opinion. Let those who can pay, pay. And editorials. Why should there be editorials when there can be advertorials?

Here's a phrase to remember:  "revenue center."   

In today's paper, there's an announcement that the Camera's editor, Sue Deans, who has local roots, has resigned. Could it be that her departure is related to Manzi's policy changes?  Would anyone be astonished to discover so?   

Two Erotic Poems

Here are two excellent poems, of different eras and origins, that are at heart surprisingly similar. The first, "Politics," written in the pre-World War 30s, is by W. B. Yeats.

How can I, that girl standing there,

My attention fix

On Roman or on Russian

Or on Spanish politics?

Yet here's a traveled man that knows

What he talks about,

And there's a politician

That has read and thought.

And maybe what they say is true

Of war and war's alarms,

But O that I were young again

And held her in my arms!

This lovely verse restates a perennial literary theme: the conflict between public and personal, or, between the life of duty and the life of pleasure. The speaker of the poem, whoever he is, withdraws from a troubling weary political conversation into a succinctly limned but very concrete and nostalgic sexual fantasy. The anxieties heaped up in the first ten lines are overpowered by the buoyancy of the concluding two. The hinge of the poem is the daring "But O" -- "O" being the most dangerous syllable in poetry, which, when wrongly used, can be a sentimental disaster, but when discreetly employed, as here, condenses into one moan an outburst of genuine feeling that overwhelms a stultifying social ritual. For a pleasing moment, the speaker, powered by that great "O," withdraws from politics to enjoy, at least in his imagination, the pleasures and consolations of sex.  I 

Here's another poem -- a song, actually -- quoted first in sixteenth-century manuscript version and then modernized.

Westron wynde when wyll thow blow

     The smalle rayne down can rain

Cryst if my love were in my Armys

     And I in my bed Agayne.

(And now the modernized version.)

Western wind, when wilt thou blow

     The small rain down can rain?

Christ, that my love were in my arms

     And I in my bed again.

In this anonymous quatrain, it's not politics but the cruel world itself that is so discomforting. It's winter, and the singer waits for the western wind that is the harbinger of spring. "Small rain" is not an idiom that is still in use;  nowadays we say "light rain" -- the meaning is something like "April showers."  In the traditional world that we have lost, "small rain" might even have had just a touch of biblical resonance: "as the small rain upon the tender herb, and as the showers upon the grass." The "small rain," when it will at last come, will bring an end to harsh sterile winter and signal the start of fertile spring. To paraphrase the first two lines: "when will the western wind bring in the showers that will cause the earth once more to bloom?"  And then the hinge expletive "Christ" (paralleling Yeats's 'O' but shockingly blasphemous) which precipitates a potent sexual fantasy: in his warm, no longer wet wintry bed, the speaker can shower sex upon his beloved.

Four exquisite, unmatchable lines of erotic poetry that are, miraculously, even more spare and resonant than Yeats's.

An East 9th Street Memory

It was an entirely different world -- East 9th Street in the old days. Sometimes it seems so long gone that I find it hard to believe it even though I was there: the last horse-drawn vegetable trucks and milk-wagons in America, an "old-clothes man" shouting his cry in the street, an itinerant knife-sharpener with his pushcart. On the street, a few, very few, rusting 1930s automobiles (it was the war, and all the factories were turning out tanks). And me, in first grade, wearing hand-me-down knickerbockers with long socks as if I were some turn-of-the-century waif.

Next door to us was a two-family house. On the first floor, the very ancient Mr. and Mrs. Pynn, who tended their gladioluses in the tiny backyard. He was a retired merchant marine. (How did an old Cornish sailor come to live in our neighborhood?)  On the second floor were the Pynn's tenants the Rhodins, Thor and Pearl, who were at least a generation or so older than my parents and who had three adult children (Thor Jr, Yammie [actually Hjalmar] and Peggy) none of whom I ever met and whose existence I was aware only because Mrs. Rhodin would boast of their exploits -- Thor Jr. was a physicist who, she said, worked on The Bomb. The Rhodins were very quiet people. He, a tall, thin, aloof man who never spoke, was either unemployed or retired;  he emerged from the house twice a day to walk his poodle. Mrs. Rhodin "went to business," as the saying was in the neighborhood.

One hot summer day, I was reading in the back bedroom. Windows (ours and the Rhodins) were wide open. Across the narrow driveway, I heard Mrs. Rhodin launch into a furious tirade. All the promises Mr. Rhodin had made to her. How little he had accomplished. The kind of place they lived in. Stuck in Brooklyn. She supported him while he lazed around at home. And other complaints that I couldn't understand or don't remember -- but there could be no doubt about her fury. Her litany of objections was loud and it seemed to go on for hours. A one-way street, though; I never heard Mr. Rhodin's voice.  Stunned, I shamelessly eavesdropped. 

Was it days, or weeks, or months later that Mr. Rhodin was run over by a bus on 18th Avenue and instantly killed?

Was there a connection between the tirade and the accident? And was it an accident?  Even in my childish naivete, I thought suicide. And because I knew Pearl and Thor's secrets, I felt as though I were a bit of an accomplice. 

Hosseini's The Kite Runner

Every American should read Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner (Riverhead, 2003) -- but for its political relevance, not its literary achievement. The novel is set in Afghanistan, which is one of the few countries where recent American foreign policy hasn't been entirely incompetent and disgraceful, so to read it feels reassuring and even patriotic. Inasmuch as we're engaged in a never ending war in Afghanistan, every one of our fellow citizens should have an idea why we're there and what we're doing. It's not at all obvious -- Afghanistan doesn't have a single drop of oil.  Americans should know how bad the Taliban was and might become again, and also why we should remain vigilant against any rabid fundamentalist theology--even ones that are near and more domestic than Islam.

In The Kite Runner, the conflict between Afghanistan's dominant Pashtuns and the exploited Hazaras reminds us that there are countries that are far more absurdly tribal than our own.

Even though I learned a great deal from this novel, I feel that as a work of art, The Kite Runner is profoundly disappointing. It came highly recommended to me and I set out to fall in love, couldn't.  It's an overpraised work. It's advertised as written in "hard, spare prose" (I'm quoting from the back-cover blurb), but in fact it's written in prose without any style at all -- and worse still, every paragraph or so there's a sentence that must make a discriminating reader cringe. The novel is very weak in characterization: aside from the autobiographical narrator, there's only one figure of any dimension --Baba-- and all the rest are flat as pancakes. The novelist is particularly bad with women, who are never more than wallpaper. The child Sohrab, in whom so much is invested, speaks an idiom that no living child has ever spoken. Has the author ever had a conversation with a real boy  The plot is filled with obvious contrivances, artificial cliff-hangers, and (goodness gracious!) a climactic fist-fight. And while I appreciate the author's love of his native country, it doesn't seem at all honest to attribute Afghani problems to "Arabs, Chechens, and Pakistanis." In this novel, the Taliban is represented by a character who is half-German, a sociopathic admirer of Hitler, and (we eventually discover) a pervert who preys on little boys. He's a grotesque villain who seems to have wandered into an ostensibly serious novel from a James Bond melodrama. Why can't the author face the fact that the the Taliban are home-grown Afghani fascists? He would have given us a stronger novel if he had done so.   

Another Variation on the "Replacement Child" Theme

In Charles Dickens' Dombey and Son (1848), which I've just re-read, Dombey's treasured son Paul dies when his older sister, Florence, is about six years old. Dombey has never liked his daughter Florence (he seems to blame her for being a girl) and likes her less after he loses Paul. Dombey could transfer his affection from his dead son to a possible "replacement," his living daughter. But he shuns that very legitimate psychological option. Instead, Florence is neglected, ignored, exiled, and eventually even struck by her hard-hearted father. In real life, it's inevitable that Florence would become alienated, bitter, and distorted. In Dickens' fairy-tale world her love for her father endures and she remains cheerful and optimistic. Although she experiences a truly horrible childhood, she suffers no permanent psychological deficit. Eventually, she reconciles with her father, forgives him (sic!) and produces two children (named Paul and Florence, of course).  Dombey, now chastened, grandfathers these true replacement children.   

It's a big, good novel, and Dickens makes us laugh and cry but sometimes against our will and always in defiance of our knowledge of real--as opposed to idealized--children. Dickens' optimism and his faith in the power of forgiveness are wonderful but utterly otherworldly. Replacements, even quasi-replacements such as Florence, rarely fare so well.      

Radio Baseball

Yesterday the Yankees were drubbed, absolutely demolished, by the Detroit Tigers. Sent home packing. Their loss joyed my vindictive, Yankee-hating heart.   

When I was a boy hanging out at the P. S. 217 schoolyard and learning about life, there was no question but that the pin-striped Yankees were privileged bland tea-sipping Republicans, while the Brooklyn Dodgers were a bunch of upstart and underachieving heroes to whom we neighborhood kids could relate;  they were colorful, they were multicultural (before the letter), they were Democrats, and they were ours. 

I watched this week's games on the TV and savored not only the outcome, but all the pealing bells and slick technological whistles that modern TV can offer: the multiple replays, the ball-tracking systems that allow the viewer to inspect both the pitcher's grip and his release and also the spin he puts on the ball.  I could count the number of rotations on Kenny Rogers' lovely curve. 

Although TV is amazingly informative, in my heart I prefer baseball on the radio -- the radio of my youth, that is. In those days, baseball was radio and radio was baseball. It's no wonder that baseball was the nation's game -- and it's only game -- when radio was the dominant medium.

I love the perennial rhythms of radio baseball: "Steps to the plate... digs in... closed stance... takes a few practice swings.... steps up on the rubber... round comes the right arm...  slider low and outside....  checks the runner on first...  looks down for the sign...  the pitch... high fly to left...  settles under it... two gone in the third...."  It's an enduring, comforting sound. 

Radio baseball as I remember it transformed the players into larger-than-life figures. It romanticized them. Radio baseball was a never-ending oral epic, Homeric in dimension. TV, with all its wealth of detail, turns the players into ordinary mortals; it makes them too familiar, too common. It plucks out the heart of the mystery. It's impossible to believe that these young men with their stringy beards and their horrid tattoos and their acneed faces are reincarnations of the bronze-age superheroes of my childhood. If an announcer were honestly recording what the TV sees, it would be, "steps up to the plate... digs in...  adjusts his nuts...  steps out of the box... spits a huge goober into the dirt...  now he's really excavating his left nostril."

Radio was reverent; television is intrusive.

Radio baseball was noble, and radio listeners were the better for listening to it. Radio baseball brought us together. On East 9 Street, where I grew up, there was very little in common among the Petrantos, the Burkes, the Bernsteins, the Constantinos, the Pynns, the Rhodins, and the Meinekes who populated the block  -- except that we could all talk about Cox, Reese, Snider, Robinson, Campanella. I have a strong memory of riding my Ivor Johnson (later my Raleigh three-speed) on a hot summer evening when there were so many people sitting on their porches, or on their stoops, or on the fire escapes listening to Red Barber and Connie Desmond that I could bike for many a mile and not miss a single pitch. Radio baseball turned us into a community. Which is why we'll never, ever, forgive that foul black-hearted traitor Walter O'Malley.

But I'm cheerful. It's autumn and the Republican Yankees have lost. It's a favorable omen. Is it too much to hope that, inasmuch as the Yankees have lost in October, the Democrats could win in November?   

What We Read in the Fifties: My Antonia

During the 1950s, I spent four long years treading water at Erasmus Hall, a jam-packed public high school at the bepigeoned corner of Flatbush and Church avenues.  Among the required books in our overcrowded 11th grade English class was Willa Cather's prairie novel My Antonia.

I've just returned to My Antonia after an interval of fifty years.  It's an excellent novel, though I confess with shame that I remembered very little of it.  I managed to retain a bit of the Nebraska atmosphere and emotion -- the empty, roadless steppe, the harsh winters, the sod houses, and the spirit of the indomitable settlers.  I had absolutely zero recollection of the novel's details and not so much as a glimmer of the story.  But then, there isn't much in the way of plot -- simply the history of narrator Jim Burden's socially confused and sexually troubled response to the "Bohemian" immigrant Antonia Shimerda, a vibrant girl (and later a woman) two or three years older than he.  I remembered Antonia herself -- wild, willful, determined, and ultimately triumphant -- but I hadn't even a trace memory of Jim.  Perhaps it's because Antonia remains in Nebraska where she tames her prairie acres and also births and nurtures uncountable children, while Jim, burdened with advantages and a middle-class education, leaves Black Hawk to become a lawyer for the railroad (in effect, an antagonist of the smallholding farmer) and, if I've read correctly, remains unmarried and childless, a rueful observer rather than an actor in the great pioneer epic.

I'm also astonished that I had no recollection of buxom, eager Lena Lingard, who teaches Jim about sex.  Was I so virginal and naive that I was unable to construe Cather's circumlocutions?

I didn't remember, and surely didn't appreciate, that My Antonia is a lovely, evocatively written book, extremely economical and at the same time rich in telling detail.   

When I read My Antonia for the first time, I hadn't encountered a plot of grass larger than the outfield at Ebbets Field (297 feet down the right field foul line), so "prairie" was a concept I had to take on faith. Now that I've been to Willa Cather country many times -- not yet to Red Cloud itself but to Hastings, where the author spent her adolescence  -- My Antonia no longer seems quite so extra-terrestrial.  Still, I wonder why the Italians and Irish and Jews and 'Negroes' who populated Erasmus Hall were supplied with such books-- My Antonia along with O. E. Rolvaag's no-longer-read Giants in the Earth, which is a desperately grim story of Norwegian immigrants in the Dakotas. I felt, and I think I was encouraged to feel, that they were the heroic, admirable, hard-working truly American immigrants, while we (shopkeepers, telephone linesman, garbage collectors, school-teachers) had somehow snuck in the easy, city way.  Why weren't we asked to read books about us?  Weren't we just as genuine?

Midway through the novel, Jim takes a few seconds to meditate on the relations between old families like his own (his grandparents came from Virginia) and the Czechs and Scandinavians whom they looked down upon.  Conventional wisdom was that "all foreigners were ignorant people who couldn't speak English."  "But today," says Jim, speaking as a surrogate Willa Cather herself, "the best that a harassed Black Hawk merchant can hope for is to sell provisions and farm machinery and automobiles to the rich farms where that first crop of stalwart Bohemian and Scandinavian girls are now the mistresses."   It's an observation that applies not only to the economics of Nebraska in the 1880s, but is perpetual to the American experience.  Immigrants work hard.  Is it possible that today's anti-immigration frenzy is driven by the fear that the present crop of brown-skinned newcomers will work so furiously that they'll leave in the lurch the neo-nativists who seem to have contented themselves with a lazy respectability?