Dr. Metablog

Fiction by Jhumpa Lahiri; Anthroponomastics

Last week I read and was much impressed by Jhumpa Lahiri's collection of short fiction called Interpreter of Maladies (1999), especially the first story "A Temporary Matter," which shouldn't leave a dry eye in the house. I've now read Lahiri's only published novel, The Namesake(2003). It's a fine book. I didn't know, although I should have, that a film of The Namesake, directed by the great Mira Nair, is now in release. I'll try to see it.

Lahiri writes about Bengali immigrants in America. Acculturation is not a new subject in our fiction. Like other groups, the Bengalis bring their own flavor to the American gallimaufry. In The Namesake, the first generation keeps the customs and the food and largely self-segregates; members of the second generation go to good colleges and become engineers and doctors, understand but don't write Bengali, eat pizza and Chinese takeout, and aren't keen about arranged marriages.

In Bengali society, individuals apparently have two names: an official public name, and what Lahiri calls a pet name, but which anthropologists call a hypocoristic. The central character in The Namesake was supposed to be called Nikhil, but through a bureaucratic error, his pet name, Gogol, became his school name. So he goes through the first years of his life as Gogol Gangulia. The name inhibits and embarrasses him. Before he matriculates at Yale, he changes his name back to Nikhil, yet he's always caught between the two identities signified by these rival appellations. 

Jhumpa Lahiri is a pseudonym for Nilanjana Sudeshna. She's married to Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush. I can't imagine what's on her passport or what's she's named her two children, but it's a sure thing that she's thought more than a little about nomenclature  -- as must anyone who feels that his name doesn't properly fit his character. I myself am ambivalent about my own name.  Vivian de St. Vrain isn't exactly "me," if the truth by told. It's French, and I don't always feel French. My teachers couldn't always pronounce my given name properly, and I had to correct them, which was embarrassing for a shy youth. And Vivian -- it's so ambisexual. I would have preferred to have been named something decisive and less ethnic. I should have had Gogol's courage. Or Nilanjana Sudeshna's. 

Boustrophedoniana

I'm fond of a passage in Gulliver's Travels where Jonathan Swift describes Lilliputian script. In a single sentence, Swift manages to attack and nail two of his favorite targets: "ladies" and "England." The Lilliputians "manner of writing is quite peculiar being neither from the left to the right, like the Europeans;  nor from the right to the left, like the Arabians; nor from up to down, like the Chinese, nor from down to up, like the Cascagians, but aslant from one Corner of the Paper to another, like Ladies in England. 

In good satirical fashion, Dr. S. supplements truth with fancy: the "Cascagians," who write from bottom to top, may sound like the Carpathians or Sarmatians or some other trans-Caucasus people, but they don't exist. It appears that Swift invented them in order to complete his survey of the directions in which writing might flow.

Yet even including the fantastical Cascagians, Swift's list is not comprehensive. There are other possibilities for writing beside up and down, right and left or aslant.      

In boustrophedon (a lovely Greekish word that signifies "turn like an ox plowing"), alternate lines move in opposite directions. Lines one, three, five and seven and so on proceed from left to right; lines two, four, six, and eight from right to left. Ancient languages such as Safaitic were written in boustrophedon; some Etruscan inscriptions, still undeciphered, seem to follow the same pattern. Boustrophedon is not unreasonable, but it's certainly awkward for those who have made a fetish of left to right.

Here's how Shakespeare transforms boustrophedonically.      

It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul,—

!srats etsahc uoy, uoy ot ti eman ton em teL

It is the cause. Yet I'll not shed her blood;

,wons naht sreh fo niks retihw taht racs roN

And smooth as monumental alabaster.

.nem erom yarteb ll'ehs esle, eid tsum ehs teY. 

Survival of the fittest, applying even to scripts, no doubt led to the extinction of boustrophedon.

Query: would our brains be more supple and more imaginative if we had retained this style of writing? Or would we simply be more perplexed? Or dizzy? And would we, as a civilization, prize as the peak of wit and award the laurel to the palindrome? 

Incidentally, Rongorongo, the indigenous language of Easter Island, was apparently written in reverse boustrophedon, i.e. bottom to top -- a compositional practice that any satirist, even Swift, would have been delighted to invent.

May 26.  Marion Morrison, Ph.D., an associate professor of English at the University of Iowa, writes: "I'm confused about 'reverse boustrophedon.' Is it real, or is it another Dr. Metablog 'invention'?  Is Rongorongo a metablogian Cascagian?  I'm skeptical. And how does it work?  Can you favor us with a few lines in so-called 'reverse boustrophedon?'

Vivian replies:

Devoutly to be wish'd....

noitammusnoc a siT' .ot rieh si hself tahT

The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks

dne ew yas ot peels a yb dna ;emor oN

And by opposing end them. To die- to sleep-

,selbuort fo aes a tsniaga smra ekat ot  rO

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune

reffus ot dnim eht ni relbon sit' rehtehW                                                      

To be, or not to be- that is the question:

My New Career

Ever since I retired a few years ago, friends and relations have been asking what I intend to do with the rest of my life. It's time to start on a new career, and after much deliberation, I've decided to fulfill a lifelong dream. I've always had the soul of a power forward;  now I'm going to make it happen. With this blague entry, I declare my eligibility for the NBA draft.

Let me confess:  I don't expect to be a lottery pick. There's too much college talent and too many 7-foot Lithuanian teenagers. High second round is what I aspire too.  I might even have to play a year or two in a European league to sharpen my game -- no problem. 

I figure that to play in the NBA, a guy needs three things: the game, which I have; the attitude, which I certainly have; and the body, which I am working on. 

Let me point out that at 5' 10 1/4"  (formerly 5' 10 3/4") I am a full five inches taller than Earl Boykins. Plus I can get into the air higher than Yao Ming; I'm a better three point-shooter than Shaquille O'Neal; and I'm a more consistent at the charity stripe than Ben Wallace. Those are some big names there. Not only that, I'm a better interview than anyone in the league past or present--even better than Sir Charles himself. I'm a team player. I don't need to play 48 minutes;  I don't need to take the game-winning shot. On defense, there's not a player in the league whose flopping will be more authentic. 

Because I've lived a more-or-less bookish life, my body is still in tiptop shape. No gimpy knees or repaired Achilles tendons or fused vertebrae. True, the A-fib could be a problem down the road, but I don't imagine that the apical hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, of which I have the merest tad, will hold me back in the slightest. 

To the club owners and general managers who are reading this blague entry -- let me point out that I appeal to an entirely different demographic than players now in the league. Until now, there was no one to be a "spokesman" for Beltone hearing aids or Avodart or AARP. Untold, untapped commercial opportunities waiting to be seized!!

I've been running this idea by my friends and family for the last few weeks, and I'm sorry to say that there's a lot of ageism and size-ism and negativity out there.  Let's leave that skepticism behind us! I'm ready to roll! I just have to decide on the appropriate tats.   

(For an update on this subject, read more here.)   

An Overheard Anecdote

We were flying Frontier from DC back to Colorado. Two old guys (old, but younger than I) were swapping stories. Here's one. "Rosie and I were at a hotel in Vegas, in bed.  About one in the morning, we hear a hooker knock on the door across the hall.  'Anyone want a little action.' No answer. Then, sure enough, she knocks on our door. 'Want some action?'  Rosie says, 'Move on, honey, I'm working this room.'" 

Good dialogue. 

I assume that Rosie is the wife.  But the story, at least to my tired old ears, has a slightly different valance if she's a date, a business associate, or a mistress.

A Violent Literary Dream

Last night I dreamed that I was in conversation with two English professors (both male and middle-aged) from a college in New Orleans (query -- why New Orleans?). One of them said, "Rex is a very good baseball player. Thanks for recommending him." I said, "Yes, he's good, even though he has two prosthetic shoulders. But I didn't recommend him to you as a baseball player. I recommended him as a novelist. He writes detective stories."  One of the professors said, "I like his stories, but he doesn't transcend the genre"  ("transcend the genre" is an actual verbatim quote from the dream. I don't invent the dialogue; I only report the facts.)  And then I said, and I think I remember this accurately, "if you want to read someone who 'transcends the genre,' you should read novels by Leonardo Sciascia." Once those words were out of my mouth, I started to feel foolish -- did I mention the name Sciascia because I was genuinely trying to add to the conversation, or was I just showing off?  (I often bother myself with such questions in 'real life'.)  While I was cross-examining myself, a young woman appeared on the "set."  She was no one I recognized, but I can report that she was wearing a white blouse and a long, dark skirt. She held a gift-wrapped package and she opened it, pulling out a book. She said, "here's something that will transcend the genre." And then she shouted, "Transcend the Genre."  "Transcend the Genre."  Just at that moment I heard shooting and realized that a sniper was firing at at her. She took a bullet to the stomach and another to the head, and lay there at my feet, dead and bloody. It seemed like a good time to wake up, and I did so.

May 18. Marion Morrison, associate professor of English at the University of Iowa, who has contributed to this blague in the past, writes:  "Dr. Metablog, or Vivian, or whatever you're calling yourself today, I'm embarrassed for you. That's the most mysognynistic dream I could imagine. As soon as true creativity arrives on the scene of your dream, in the form of a young, attractive and obviously creative woman, your unconscious killed her with a shot to the heart. Your dream admits no other interpretation." 

May 19.  Spike Schapiro writes:  "Marion, that's a crock of you know what. The dream is not a bit 'mysogynistic' -- I presume you mean 'misogynistic'. It's about pretentiousness. The woman who shouts "transcend the genre" is an pretentious intellectual bully. She deserves to be obliterated -- incidentally, not with a bullet in the heart, as you claim, but in the head and stomach. You can't even get the facts right. But what can you expect from someone who thinks that Rider Haggard wrote a novel called King Solomon's Minds, which is what you called it in your pretentious little slice of literary you know what. Hey everyone, click on "in the past" in the preceding paragraph and check out what I'm saying. Marion, go back to the classroom where you can poison the brains of another generation of vulnerable children."

What We Read in the Fifties: The Bridge of San Luis Rey

The Bridge of San Luis Rey, although published in 1927, was still widely read in the 1950s both by the  general public and by students in classrooms all over America. It's a fine novel but it's unfortunate that Thornton Wilder's philosophical premise is so naive and lame. In 1714 a rope bridge over a gorge in Peru breaks and five people perish. Brother Juniper investigates the lives of the fallen, assuming that the good lord wouldn't have allowed them to die without a reason. Eventually, the well-meaning priest learns that the five victims were no worse and no better than any other quintet of ordinary mortals. His conclusion is displeasing to officialdom and both he and his compilation of facts are burnt by the Inquisition.

By the oddest of odd coincidences, I had recently read an essay on the rope bridges of the Incas, in which I learned that, though brilliantly designed, these bridges required annual renewal. My reading of The Bridge of San Luis Rey was therefore colored by questions not of theology but of engineering. Why didn't they repair the damn bridge?  Why did they think that a fiber bridge wouldn't rot?  Why doesn't Brother Juniper investigate the bridge maintenance department? The conclusions to which the novel seems to come -- that a) sometimes good people die for no good reason, b) that god is either indifferent or not there at all, and c) the Spanish inquisition was unpleasant -- don't seem particularly challenging. Is it possible that the novel's theses were daring in the 50s classroom?  They seem mighty tame today.

Though the frame of The Bridge of San Luis Rey is bland, the accounts of the five people who die are sharp and colorful and imaginative and rather beautifully written. There are moments, in fact, when Wilder's storytelling seemed almost post-modern. Here's part of a paragraph about the twins Manuel and Estaban. To me, it sounds like an extract from The Hundred Years of Solitude.

Because they had no family, because they were twins, and because they were brought up by women, they were silent. There was in them a curious shame in regard to their resemblance. They had to live in a world where it was the subject of continual comment and joking. It was never funny to them and they suffered the eternal pleasantries with stolid patience. From the years when they first learned to speak they invented a secret language for themselves, one that was scarcely dependent on Spanish for its vocabulary, or even for its syntax. They resorted to it only where they were alone, or at great intervals in moments of stress whispered it in the presence of others. The Archbishop of Lima was something of a philologist; he dabbled in dialects; he had even evolved quite a brilliant table for the vowel and consonant changes from Latin into Spanish and from Spanish into Indian-Spanish. He was storing up notebooks of quaint lore against an amusing old age he planned to offer himself back on his estates outside Segovia. So when he heard one day about the secret language of the twin brothers, he trimmed some quills and sent for them. The boys stood humiliated upon the rich carpets of his study while he tried to extract from them their bread and tree and I see and I saw. They did not know why the experience was so horrible to them. They bled.... 

I think if this extract were presented to ten literate readers, nine of them would immediately guess "Marquez." Of course, its Marquezness would be even more obvious if Manuel and Estaban would fly up to the ceiling or be transformed into a thousand glorious butterflies. I don't know whether Marquez ever read The Bridge of San Luis Rey, but I certainly wouldn't be surprised to discover that he had done so.       

Incidentally, Manuel dies and his twin Estaban wrestles with "the guilt of the survivor." Is it relevant that Thornton Wilder's own twin died at birth?  And does it follow that Wilder, despite the fact that he came from a large and accomplished family, might well be thought of as some curious sort of replacement child? 

Favorite Royal Cognomina and Sobriquets

Reading an introductory history of Spain (I'm appallingly ignorant about the Iberian peninsula), I learned of the dark age king with the excellent name of Wifred the Hairy. Wifred stimulated me to recall other monarchs with colorful sobriquets: Vlad the Impaler, Ethelred the Unready, Ivan the Terrible, Charles the Fat, Edward the Confessor, Pippin the Short, Eric the Red, William the Conqueror, Richard the Lion-Hearted, Joanna the Mad, Suleiman the Magnificent. When my learning and memory failed, wikipedia rode to the rescue: Sviatopolk the Accursed, Ismail the Bloodthirsty, Ivailo the Cabbage, Alfonso the Chaste, Louis the Indolent, Denis the Farmer, Piero the Gouty, Fulk the Ill-tempered, Edgar the Outlaw, Louis the Pious, Eric the Priest-hater, William the Silent, Olaf the Stout, Bayezid the Thunderbolt, Garcia the Tremulous, and Alfonso the Wise. Then I thought, how sad that in this formal age of first and last names we no longer make use of such picturesque appellations. Let's return to the earlier tradition. I propose, as a start, Mel the Bigot, Mike the Ear-biter, Rush the Blowhard, George the Truculent (or George the Decider), Alberto the Forgetful, and Dick the Dick. Suggestions are very welcome. The world is all before us, where to seek. 

May 15.  Pauline Harlem, acclaimed author of The Joy of Anagrams, suggests these two: Woody the Perplexed and Warren the Promiscuous.

May 16. Spike Schapiro comments:  "Who in the living heckola is 'Ivailo the Cabbage.'  Did you make that up, Vivian?  Do the rules of your game allow me to invent vegetable sobriquets?  Suppose I said, 'Ivana the Beet' or 'Penelope the Melon'?  Would that be amusing or pertinent?  What's the deal here?

Vivian replies:  Spike -- Ivailo the Cabbage, King of Bulgaria, was also known as "Ivailo the Lettuce" and "Ivailo the Radish."  Why would I try to deceive you?  Besides, I'm not nearly so inventive.  For more info, click  here.

Another "Loyal Bushie."

In the previous post, I recorded two archetypes of "Loyal Bushies" -- the Moronotron and the Henchdoofus. Here's another one.

The Spoiled Rich Prick. Typically, the SRP attended boarding school at Phillips something-or-other or at St. Somebodies in New Hampshire. Although he learned nary a thing, and his SATs were under 1000, he was admitted to Yale (which his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather attended) and in his senior year was tapped for membership by Numskull and Boners. The SRP went on to study at the Harvard Business School, where he graduated dead last in his class. Although eligible for the draft, through his father's influence he was able to secure a place in the National Guard, from which he was frequently absent-without-leave.  For a decade or so after Harvard, the SRP was distinguished for booze, cocaine and drabbing. Friends of the family set him up in a business, which failed, and then bought him out for many millions. Then the SRP's father decided that he was too incompetent to enter the family business, so he had him elected governor. He still holds high political office and is famous for his laziness, rhetorical incompetence, anti-intellectualism, partisanship, ignorance, truculent stubbornness, petulance and bonehead errors in matters of national consequence. 

Spike Schapiro comments:  "Thanks for this portrait. I guess you had Dan Quayle in mind."

"Loyal Bushies": Two Archetypes

Here are two types of "civil" "servants" prominent in the Bush era.

A.  The Moronotron. Just under 30 years old, he/she (let's say she) comes from a large family of home-schooled children, five of whom are still active in the LifeForce Harvest Church of Milan, Ohio, pastored by the Reverend Mike. Family trauma (one of her brothers committed suicide; another had to be disowned when he moved to San Francisco with his friend Gabe; that her mother recently entered alcohol rehab has only strengthened her faith. She graduated from Brethren College, where students and faculty bask in an "authentic relationship with the Lord," with an honors degree in Christian Communication. After Brethren, she attended law school at Regent University, where she chaired the debate team and counseled pregnant teens. She was making fundraising calls for the Santorum campaign in 2004 when she was offered the position of assistant undersecretary for policy in HHS -- her roommate's cousin was a fraternity brother of a 'prayer partner' of Lynne Cheney's aunt Sylvia's husband. As White House liaison, she "relayed" information from the President's "closest advisers" to the Secretary. Now undersecretary of HHS, she oversees 160,000 employees and a budget of 800 gajillion dollars. She is unmarried and doesn't date, enjoys Fruit Loops, and someday, when her life is less busy, hopes to travel to third-world countries to bring good news to the unenlightened.

B. The Henchdoofus. He is now close to 60, a graduate of the Chadron State College in Chadron, Nebraska, with a degree in marketing. At Chadron, he captained the cheerleading squad and made a complete recovery from the illnesses (depression, fatigue, etc.) that made it impossible to for him serve in the military during the Vietnam era. He joined Exxon Mobil right out of college. He had worked his way up to a moderate-sized cubicle when he left to head up Patriotic Americans For Clean Energy (wholly funded by Exxon). PACE lobbied for a "balanced approach to offshore oil drilling." In 2000, President Bush appointed him chair of the Advisory Council of the Food Safety and Inspection Service. In 2001, he founded a K Street lobbying firm called ACS Associates which had as its principal client the American Melamine Council. ACS (from which his wife Christine continues to draw a $30,000 monthly stipend) is often credited with the resurgence of profits of both the melamine and the pet-food industries. He was recently appointed Undersecretary for Nutrition Policy in the Department of Agriculture. He's a dedicated environmentalist and hunter, and enjoys the wilderness in his SUV, his ATV, and especially in his Arctic Cat Panther 360 snowmobile equipped with an ATN 24x75LU peak performance titanium night vision telescope mounted on a Remington X-40 high-powered assault rifle.

Book Report: Peter Pouncey, Rules for Old Men Waiting

Rules for Old Men Waiting (Random House, 2005) is both a good and bad novel. Some of the time it's rather wonderful, but there are long stretches that are maximally pedestrian. It's distinctly odd that the story-within-a story -- a WWI morality about good and evil in the face of combat-- is gritty and real and exciting, while the frame is flaccid and unconvincing and also offers some of the woodenest dialog I've read in the new millennium. Rules for Old Men Waiting is a first novel by a sexagenarian that recounts the story of an old man who's decided to devote his last days to writing fiction. It's less involuted than it sounds but still a little too self-consciously theatrical. Pouncey must have had tons of trouble bringing the novel to a close, because in the last few pages he invents a new character to help him staple on an ending. Nevertheless, the novel is an honest, respectable effort -- and extremely effective when Pouncey sticks with his strengths. 

My geezer group is going to read Rules for Old Men Waiting later this month, so stay tuned for a fuller report.

"The Answer" is not the Answer

I never, ever, thought that the Denver Nuggets' acquisition of Allen Iverson was a good idea. He has skill, he has speed, and he's the most resilient guy in the world. He can do everything on a basketball court except win games. These last four losses against San Antonio prove the point. It's not just that last night he was 6 for 22;  it's that when the Nuggets come down the floor, whether Iverson eventually shoots or not, he clings to the ball and dribbles around while the rest of the team stands and watches. Iverson turns his teammates into spectators. Last night, Carmelo had three points in the fourth quarter; he barely touched the ball.  Nene, who can score off almost everyone down in the post, might as well have sat for the last twelve minutes.   

Of course it's clear that the Nuggets can't advance in the playoffs until they find themselves a reliable three-point shooter.

It's just as obvious that Iverson isn't going to become a team player; he's 31 years old and he's averaged 23 shots a game with a .422 percentage for an entire career. He's not going to alter his game, but he's definitely going to deteriorate. I'm afraid that we're stuck with him. Meanwhile, Philadelphia has done better with Andre Miller than with The Answer. In addition, we gave Philly two first-round draft picks to help them fill in their gaps. I like Philadelphia's chances;  I don't like ours.