Dr. Metablog

My First Earthquake

Here we are again in Alameda, California.  Last night, just after 8 pm, we were lying in bed reading (me: Conrad's The Secret Agent;  she, Roth's Exit, Ghost) and recuperating from the grandchildren's pre-Hallowe'en hysteria, when I said to A., "Would you please stop shaking the bed."  She, of course, replied, "I'm not moving," and I joked, "Then it must be an earthquake."  And, much to my surprise, so it was.  Five point six on the Richter scale, just twenty miles south of here, five miles underground, along the Calaveras fault.  There's the possibility of another one, but so far, nothing that we've been able to discern.  Astonishing to say, but just a few hours ago, the sure and firm-set earth was feverous and did shake -- which put me in mind of the fragility of our earthly being and also made me recall some other natural phenomena that I've witnessed.

All that I can remember of the famous 1945 hurricane was watching at the window while my father, out in the storm, tried vainly to secure his precious peach tree, which was being shredded to oblivion by the fierce winds.  I have a vivid recollection of the great blizzard of 1947, because after the storm subsided, snow was piled so high on both sides of the sidewalks that, for a small boy, it was like walking though a canyon -- and great fun to clamber up the mountainous heaps.  I was a young witness to a sudden squall on Long Island Sound that sank, if I remember correctly, hundreds of pleasure boats.  Even more serious was the Connecticut River flood of 1972, which washed out the culverts on our road, tumbled downstream some hefty boulders, and isolated us for a couple of days.  Throughout the summer, there were memorable mud stains thirty feet in the air on the trees that grew in the river valley.  Once in the 1980s, driving across the country just after the Mississippi had overflowed its banks, we observed standing water many miles from where water had any business to be.  We were at Mt. St. Helen's a year after the mountain blew its top, but signs of the devastation -- bald patches, toppled trees -- were still writ large on the landscape.  Same with the Black Tiger fire;  we missed the fire but couldn't ignore the extensive blackening.  In Hawaii once, we walked along hardened lava flows for a couple of miles to find a standpoint to observe magma, fresh from the earth's interior, fall steaming into the ocean to create new land.  In Costa Rica, we visited a dormant volcano -- monumental even in its sleepiness.

Not many such events, but a sufficient number to produce respect for the natural processes.  No tsunamis or crackings of the ice shelf.  And nothing, thank goodness, comparable to the explosion of Tambura on the island of Sumbawa that caused the summer without sun and a crisis of subsistence in parts of Europe and North America. And certainly nothing whatsoever like the meteor that landed 70 million years ago in the Yucatan, after which the fossil record becomes a blank for a thousand years and every creature larger than a pussycat went extinct.  Yesterday's trembling was a good reminder that our mother earth is a lot more fragile than she appears to be on your average warm, pleasant, quakeless evening.   

Real Live Dialogue

First the exchange, exacty as it occured in real life, and then the gloss.

The cashier: "Breakfast of Champions?"

Me: "Well, I'm a vegetarian."

The cashier: "Yeah, I know, all organic."

So here's the story. We were driving across the western, uninhabited part of South Dakota, heading toward the glorious Black Hills and the Badlands. Somewhere out there, I stopped for gas. It was about 9:00 or 9:30 in the morning.

As a general rule, I don't drink coffee or other caffeinated liquids, but when I'm driving long distances, I keep a Coca-Cola by my side on the conservative principle that whatever damage the caffeine might do to my eccentric heart, it will be probably be a lot less dangerous than falling asleep, crashing the car, and mangling myself and my passengers. Moreover, I'm not a consumer of candy bars, but the day before, somewhere in Minnesota, A. had treated herself to a package of M &Ms.  I had wheedled a handful or so from her and I had decided to make good her loss.  So when we stopped to refill the gas tank in Somewhere, South Dakota, I purchased, at one of those roadside convenience stores, a 12 oz bottle of Coke and a small plastic bag of multicolored chocolate candies, and the friendly, tough, old lady who kept the register looked at me aslant and said, affectionately, questioningly but also with a touch of scorn, "Breakfast of Champions." I was feeling defensive and while I could have responded by explaining that I don't usually eat junky stuff, and that it wasn't even my breakfast, I didn't feel that I needed to apologize, so I went the other route and capitulated: "Well, I'm a vegetarian." Which made the lady smile a bit, as I had hoped, and made me feel as though we were on the same mock-serious wavelength.  It was a moment of deep communication, far superior to the commonplace vacant salesperson/customer/middle-of-nowhere encounter. Feeling a kindred spirit, the lady went along with the game and both assimilated and expanded on my gambit, saying, "Yeah, I know, all organic' --an expression that was in part friendly but which also carried a little bite, as if she detected that I was from some tofu/granola city (which, in fact, is true, even though I myself am an old-fashioned cheeseburger --as opposed to veggieburger -- kind of guy). Altogether, it was one of the more satisfying conversations I've had in the last while. A moment of deep and profound understanding, the kind of intimate communication that we all strive for all day, every day, even out there on a two-lane in one of the "flyover" states.

More on Religion and the Rockies

I'm trying to remember the name of the superstitious 1940s Dodger pitcher, who, when the inning ended, would flip his mitt into the first base coaching box, then walk over and reposition it so that the fingers pointed directly toward the mound.  (I'd better stop here and remind the young folks that in days of yore, players left their gloves out on the field when they came in for their turn at bat. I can't remember exactly when the Commissioner prohibited this harmless, colorful custom -- was it in the late 50s?)

Baseball players have always been notably superstitious. They don't step on foul lines or talk about no-hitters in progress.  They wear the same underwear or socks for the length of a winning streak.  Turk Wendell had to brush his teeth and chew licorice between innings.  Wade "Chicken Man" Boggs, a good enough hitter not to solicit divine intercession, had to eat a meal of chicken before every game.  Craig Biggio refused to wipe the dirt or the pine tar off his helmet for an entire season.  Baseball is where the Curse of the Bambino and the Curse of the Billy-Goat are items of faith. It's also where players wear gold crosses in their ears and ostentatious floppy crucifixes around their necks and point triumphantly to the sky when they bloop a single to center.

Chewing licorice and making the sign of the cross are equally effective procedures, as far as I can tell.  The only difference is that one is a private superstition while the other has the sanction of religion.  It's individual delusion versus mass delusion.

At this writing, the biblethumpatudinous Colorado Rockies, baseball's most Christian-y organization -- the only team with a chaplain on its payroll -- have won twenty-one of twenty-two games and will (after an eight-day timeout) head for their first-ever Series.  It's astounding and wonderful, and I'm rooting for the home town boys.  But my enthusiasm is tempered because fanatics are already calling it "a miracle," or "destiny," or claiming that "it's meant to be."  Baseball's a gritty, subtle game, and the Rocks are winning because they're playing excellent defense, getting timely hits, making great pitches at the crucial moments, and committing very few mental errors -- not because of their prayer circle or their morning bible study or because the Great Signifier in the Sky has decided that this year, the Rockies are kosher and the Diamondbacks are treyf.   

But, say the superstitious, it's unlikely that any team could take twenty-one of twenty-two.  Of course it's unlikely.  But if statistics tells us anything, they tell us that even unlikely events will occur some of the time.

Here's what's genuinely unlikely:  that the Rockies' shortstop, Troy Tulowitski, who (if there's any justice under the heavens) will be soon named rookie of the year, has a "Christian" name that is an acronym for The Rookie Of Year. What, pray tell, are the odds?  And also, that the Rockies' have a catcher, Yorvit Torrealba, whose name is an anagram for "real toy vibrator."  Such an extraordinary unlikelihood has never happened before and it's never going to happen again, and it's entirely more remarkable than any winning streak, however extended.  Yorvit Torrealba is one of those gosh-darned superstitious sky-pointers.  It would suit my Manichean view of the world if Yorvit would also point downward, toward Sheol or Gehenna or whatever is supposed to be down there, every time he futilely chases a high fast ball, which he does far too frequently.   

I would also like to point out that the Rockies have a reliever named LaTroy Hawkins, whose name would also anagrammatize into "real toy vibrator" if he would simply rechristen himself LaTroy Riverboat.  Coincidence?  Or destiny. 

Go Rockies! 

Robert Bage's Hermsprong (1796)

Back in the early '60s, when I was just beginning to learn about literature, I enrolled in a course on the eighteenth-century English novel. I diligently worked my way through an ambitious syllabus. There were more than twenty novels, some of them monumental in size, like Clarissa and Tristram Shandy;  and others blessedly brief, like Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield and Mackenzie's Man of Feeling. Diligent lad that I was, I read every single word, every syllable. In addition to the required reading, there was also an extensive register of recommended works. On this intimidating list was Robert Bage's Hermsprong, which, forty-five years after the fact, I've at last read. Better very very late than never at all.

It's a good book -- not a masterpiece, but very fine, very enjoyable. The plot is  unoriginal. An heiress falls for a fortune-hunter, elopes to the continent, but is rescued just before the threatened deflowering; a domineering wicked old guy forces his unwilling daughter into marriage with an idiot aristocrat; a man of mysterious origin turns out to be the estate's true heir -- that sort of thing. But other elements are less cliched. Charles Hermsprong, raised among Indians on the banks of the "Powtomack," is a plain-spoken 'merican radical; Maria Fluart is as witty and defiant and independent as Benedick's Beatrice -- sometimes it seems as though her lines could have been composed by Oscar Wilde himself. Maria is by far the most vibrant character in the novel. If Bage were as advanced a thinker as he sometimes pretends to be, he would have let his hero marry her.It's disappointing that Hermsprong falls for a conventional dutiful young simperer, while Maria, too strong for any man in the novel, is left on the putative shelf.

Here's a passage that jumps out at the reader. It's from a description of two of the novel's minor characters:

"But the tender interest they had in each other was torn asunder by pride and prejudice, and this pride and prejudice, she feared...."

Whoa, daddy!  Jane Austen's novel was originally named "First Impressions" and only borrowed its familiar title from Bage late in the game. It is obvious that right there on Jane's bookshelf, next to Sir Charles Grandison and Tom Jones and the novels of Frances Burney, was a copy of Hermsprong, which Ms. Austen (unlike your dilatory '60s student) was smart enough to read in a timely manner. 

Jane Austen Nude

Today's posting is contributed by the art historian, Alan Saxe-Popette. 

Jane Austen's quiet private life has been thoroughly explored for events of emotional import. It is therefore a wonder that there has been such inattention to the portrait, identified some forty years ago,in which the novelist, nude, reclines on a green baize fainting couch. One would have supposed that writers of fiction and especially film directors would have seized on the opportunities that the portrait presents, especially since the only other surviving representation of Jane Austen is her sister Cassandra's amateurish, unflattering, and essentially asexual sketch. The Austen nude has faded inexplicably from view. Older readers of this blague will surely remember the mid-1960s flurry of journalistic interest, some of it nasty and anti-feminist -- a cover story in Time ("Did Jane Disrobe") as well as the scandalmongering reportage of Huntley and Brinkley.  But just like the revelations concerning Wordsworth's French mistress and like the notoriety that greeted Edith Wharton's pornographic short story Beatrice Palmato, the brouhaha over the Austen nude quickly evaporated.

The portrait itself, a full-length study in chalk and colored pencils, resides in the Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and his Circle, which is housed in Room 319 of the New York Public Library, and  may be viewed upon request. Perhaps it is unfortunate that the first account of the Austen nude appeared in the pages of the Keats-Shelley Journal, a publication sponsored by the Pforzheimer.  More scholarly attention might have been paid if the identification of the portrait had been announced in a journal of larger circulation, such as Nineteenth-Century Fiction or Romantic Studies.

The late R. W. Chapman, who knew more about Jane Austen than any scholar of his generation, resisted the idea that the portrait was genuine. His attack on its authenticity, published as an appendix to the revised edition of the Complete Works of Jane Austen, is scathing, but is rather a reflection of Chapman's Victorian prejudices than of the facts. Chapman was a traditionalist who believed that young females, even brilliant female novelists, should be, above all, decorous. His Jane Austen was a bulwark of conservative and hierarchical values and he would certainly not have recognized the modern revisionist conception that situates the novelist in an uneasy alliance with transgression and subversion. In private, moreover, Chapman was notoriously prudish. He is reported to have confessed to his great friend Kathleen Tillotson (herself a well-known scholar of English fiction) that "I just don't want to go to my grave thinking that I've looked upon dear Miss Austen's pubic hair."

In the 1960s, there was considerable resistance to the authenticity of the portrait, perhaps because, compared to Cassandra's prim drawing, the new rendering revealed a young woman in full beauty and bloom. Jane retains the familiar apple cheeks and the dark hair, but her eyes are knowing and forthright rather than subdued, and her long, glossy and loose black locks, secured only by a single cherry-colored ribbon, appear as they were described by Jane Austen's grand-niece, who recalled her aunt having "large dark eyes and a brilliant complexion, and long long black hair down to her knees." Opinions will of course vary, but many will find that in this portrait, Jane looks somewhat Italian or Gypsy or perhaps even Levantine. Her expression is eager, her waist slim, her legs short but shapely, and her breasts, despite their surprisingly large aureoles, magnificent.   

Misgivings about the portrait's authenticity survived even until the 1970s. But then it was established that the chamber in which Austen posed was the drawing room at Steventon that she shared with Cassandra. There's a useful description in Constance Hill's Jane Austen, Her Homes and Friends (1902). Hill, it is well known, had access to the Lefroy family papers. The Lefroys were important connections of the Austens. It was James Lefroy who wooed Jane and then inexplicably broke off his relationship with her and retired to Ireland. Jane's brother James Austen's daughter married a Lefroy; Jane's grand-niece Anna Lefroy, the child of this union, left a remembrance of her great-aunt's sitting room. "I remember," wrote Anna, "the common looking carpet with its chocolate ground that covered the floor, and some portions of furniture. A pointed press, with shelves above for books, that stood with its back on the wall next the Bedroom, & opposite the fireplace; my Aunt Jane's Pianoforte -- & above all, on a table between the windows, above which hung a looking glass, 2 tonbridge-ware work boxes of oval shape, fitted up with ivory barrels containing reels for silk, yard measures, etc." In the portrait, these two same oval Tunbridge work-boxes appear just to the left and behind Jane Austen's head; the keyboard of "Aunt Jane's Pianoforte" is in part visible to the right; the oval cheval-glass is exactly as Anna described it. Moreover, the ingenious young art historian Oksana Sartry, who, using powerful magnifiers, was able to identify the books in the press, discovered not only Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison and Robert Bage's Hermsprong, both novels known to have been much studied by Austen, but also a folio with the words "Volume the Second" inscribed on its spine. "Volume the Second" was the name that the novelist gave her manuscript collection of early works (which included the unfinished novel, The Watsons). With this confirmatory evidence, skepticism was at last dispelled. Austen's remark to her sister Cassandra (reporting on a day spent with James Lefroy), "imagine to yourself everything most profligate and shocking" took on new meaning.  And what did Jane mean when she wrote to her sister, "here I am once more in this Scene of Dissipation & vice, and I begin already to find my Morals corrupted."

What was the exact occasion for the portrait and why was it found among the Lefroy papers? There are two views. The first is that Jane sent it to James Lefroy as part of the courtship process: "here's what you get if you marry me." This explanation is certainly possible, but the greater likelihood is that it was a "revenge" portrait: "here's what you have scorned."

That the drawing has sexual content is undeniable, but it is absurd to think, as some have suggested, that Jane Austen would allow herself to be depicted in a post-orgasmic state. It is true that Jane's skin is rosy and flushed and that her plump nipples are erect, but the placement of her hand just above the tendrils of abundant black hair is traditional and would not seem to indicate that she had pleasured herself. Those who argue that Jane had recently masturbated seem, frankly, to have surrendered to prurience. I myself, after the very closest scrutiny, can discover no evidence whatsoever of what one writer has called "a clitoral cleft in arousal." Jane Austen was bold, but she would never, ever, have exceeded the bounds of modesty.