Dr. Metablog

The "Chinese Bus"

As is our custom, we journeyed from New York to Washington (and back) on the so-called "Chinese bus." It's a bargain: round-trip between Chinatown here and Chinatown there for just $35. It's a non-standard, non-greyhoundish, no frills experience. It's also shoestring capitalism in the raw. When a potential passenger arrives at the East Broadway departure site, he/she will be accosted by young female representatives of several different companies, each touting her own organization. The ladies are aggressive but hard to decipher inasmuch as they shout in Chinese and possess only the most rudimentary English. A traveler must be careful to board the right bus at the right hour (the first time I used this service, I was almost shanghaied to Boston). The buses are not well marked and misrepresentation is rife. Leaving New York last time, we talked with a number of travelers who were frustrated and angry. Some had been told that the bus would set out for Washington at noon, some at 12:30, some at 12:45 -- whatever time would sell the ticket and get the luggage on board and the passenger into a seat. Because there's no terminal and the streets are so crowded, the bus had to run a loop around lower Manhattan. Each time it set out, there was optimism, but then fifteen minutes later it would return to square one to board more passengers. We circulated three or four times. At 1:30, which was in fact the scheduled departure time, we were on the road, but with quite a number of unhappy passengers in tow. 

A few years ago, almost all the passengers were Asian. Nowadays, the news is out and it's all complexions from ebony to ivory. Still, the dominant language and the dominant food odors are Chinese.

Sometimes the driver bypasses a scheduled stop. Sometimes it's necessary for one passenger to discipline a fellow passenger for surreptitious smoking. Amenities are minimal. The waiting rooms are small, dank, and squalid. On the bus, the john is unspeakably foul. BYOTP.

But it's inexpensive, it's fun, and it gets you there.   

A Walk With Ella

Today it was my assignment to pick up the five-year-old granddaughter at the local Montessori school. We walked home together.  It's a ten minute walk but it took us more than forty minutes.  Here's why.

There was a patch of frozen snow on the ground. Ella pretended to skate back and forth on it for a few minutes.  After a while she happened to push some lumps of ice onto the sidewalk and decided to see how far she could kick them. When the ice disintegrated, she went back for more clumps to practice her kick upon.  She repeated this four or five times. But finally, searching for more ice, she found a black and white feather (she collects feathers), which she closely inspected and gave to me to carry.  After that she looked at a number of leaves both on the ground and hanging upon the low branches; she gathered a few of last year's brittle brown oak leaves.  Next she came upon a small flock of English sparrows who were pecking at some seed; she chased them off but waited to see how long it would take them to return. She decided to add to her rock collection: she found a beautiful, potato-size rock that I was allowed to carry home.  "Could I open it with a knife?  I'd like to see inside it?"  Then it was time to dance on a brick retaining wall.  Finished with that activity, she found two hunks of packed snow and scraped them together.  "It's beautiful music," she said.  She stopped to practice her whistling, a newly acquired skill. Then came an experiment:  what happens when clumps of snow are rubbed on the trunk of a pear tree.  And so on.   

Ella's world:  so various, so beautiful, and so new! 

The Tarantass

Here the all but preternatural patience of metablogian aficionados is solicited as Dr Metablog quotes directly from an ancient (April, '07) posting on sex and the horsedrawn vehicle -- the R-rated entirety of which can be found here:

"Regular readers of this blague are well aware that I have repeatedly indulged my bemusement with the names of extinct or obsolescent horsedrawn conveyances.  My point is that modern readers, who know precisely what is signified  -- in design, in metal, rubber and plastic and other constituents, and especially in social value -- by such words as Jeep, Jaguar, Jetta, and jalopy, know zero zilch zip about "fly," "trap," "landau," "chaise," "phaeton," "cabriolet," "sulky," "surrey," "curricle," "gig," "hansom," "buggy," "four-wheeler," "spring-van," "berlin," "barouche," "britchka," "troika," "wurt," "tandem," "caleche," "tilbury," "dog-cart," "wagonette," "go-cart," "victoria," "brougham," "diligence," "clarence" and "post-chaise."  If we notice these words at all, we tend to savor them as archaic Victorian music rather than to identify and evaluate them as specific forms of transportation."

My point is that we read Victorian novels with one hand tied behind our backs, so to speak, when we don't know whether a dog-cart or a clarence or a wurt delineates rich or poor, stylish or provincial, pretentious or aggressive or modest. 

Perpetually naive, I thought that I had pretty much exhausted the list of nineteenth-century horsedrawn conveyances.  However, by a curious coincidence, I just yesterday happened upon two more such vehicles.  The first is a "basket-carriage," an example of which I observed with my very own eyes at the New York Historical Society at Central Park West and 77th Street.  A basket-carriage is a coach constructed of wicker.  The carriage on exhibit looked mighty comfortable for summer travel but would be frigid and leaky when winter winds are raging.   A second new conveyance materialized in Nikolai Gogol's story, The Carriage.  It's the very versatile "tarantass" -- a horsedrawn coach fitted with removable wheels so that it could be converted into a sled come winter.  Are there still more to be discovered?  I wouldn't be surprised if there are. Stay tuned.      

Roth/Allen's Breasts

Michael Hollingsworth writes: 

"Dear Dr. M.:  you're directly on target when you claim that Woody Allen and Philip Roth are the same person, but you've unaccountably omitted to mention the most pressing evidence.The year: 1972. Philip Roth published The Breast, a fantasy about a writer transformed into one. Woody Allen released Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, in which a giant female breast wreaks havoc upon the countryside.  Obviously, both "Roth" and "Allen" had recently read Gogol's The Nose and Kafka's Metamorphosis. Just as obviously, "both" of "them" were struggling with some seriously unresolved maternal issues. How fascinating that both of their boundless cups of creativity "runneth over" so to speak, in such similar ways. A coincidence? Hardly. 

By the way, both "Roth's" and "Allen's" contributions are embarrassingly false and flat."

Dr. M. responds:  "You know, Professor Hollingsworth, I think I support your breast remarks. I'd been aware of both of these upwellings of mammariness but I never put two and two together. If Roth/Allen aren't doppelgangers, they're certainly developing along twin tracks.

And let me add my own reservations:  the short stories by Gogol and Kafka are untouchable contributions to world literature.  Both writers create astonishing fantasies; they also manage to skewer the particularities of, in the one case, czarist Russia and in the other, early twentieth-century Prague. Frankly, neither Roth's nor Allen's breasts are anywhere nearly as full or pointed."    

Twenty Thousand Something-or-Others

Today, or tomorrow at the latest, the blague Dr. Metablog will have been visited for the twenty-thousandth time.  A milestone -- twenty thousand readers.

Well, perhaps not exactly readers.  It would be more accurate to say twenty-thousand page viewers.  Twenty-thousand page views is considerably fewer than twenty-thousand readers.  Actually, many of those page-viewers aren't readers at all and only viewers by accident;  they don't stop long enough to read or to view; page glancers, perhaps.  They just touch down to find out whether whatever they've googled is what they want and then, disappointed, off they go in a microsecond.  For example, Dr. M. once wrote an entry in which he made fun of the overuse, in book titles, of the word "naked." Consequently, the blague Dr. Metablog googles to the surface when someone types in "naked weightlifting" or "naked skiiing" -- a search that is attempted oodles more often than in his innocence Dr. Metablog might ever have imagined.  Internet pilgrims hoping to find salacious portraits of naked hairy weightlifters are mighty crushed and are off like a shot -- but they still leave their electronic trace.  Another example:  Dr. M once wrote a tribute to Vladimir Nabokov's excellent novel, Lolita.  Did Dr M. know that the word "lolita" is a term of art in the world of sexual exploitation?  Pity the internet hairypalms and chicken-chokers, who, searching for secret pleasure, encounter (gasp) literary criticism.   

We here at Dr. M. could increase "traffic" simply by using such code words or by listing body parts of a groinal or perigroinal nature, but we're too proud to do so just to increase readership  --or viewership -- or glancemanship.

Nevertheless, all of us here at Dr. Metablog are overjoyed to reach the twenty-thousand mark, whatever that number signifies.  So best regards to our readers from regular staff members Vivian de St. Vrain, Otto Onions, and Amber Feldhammer, as well as  occasional contributors Alan Saxe-Poppette, Michael Hollingsworth, Professor Marion Morrison Ph. D., Spike Schapiro, and Otis Jefferson Brown.

Onward to thirty thousand! 

The Art That Hides Art

Today we paid a call on the New Museum of Contemporary Art.  It's an uncompromising, vibrant building, all the more grand for being plunked down in the rusty old Bowery.  The space is wonderful.  But the stuff on exhibition is, in my less than humble opinion, ludicrous.  A mattress covered with buttons.  A cage made of chain link fencing.  Fluorescent light bulbs  arranged in a series of "Y" shapes.  Aluminum foil hanging from sticks. Broken glass on a bench.  Cardboard boxes, some open, some closed.  Plastic pipe threaded through a deck chair.

Three substantial floors littered with such artlessness.  What a dreadful, terrible squandering of space and opportunity.

The unifying principle:  a conspicuous antagonism to craftsmanship.  Every single piece of work left with rough edges and bad joins and unpainted surfaces, as though not to complete the task is fundamental to the aesthetic.  If there is an aesthetic other than fakery. 

I don't get it.  I don't want to get it.  To me, it looked like the detritus of a civilization in utter, hopeless implosive decline.  A decadence beyond ordinary decadence.  In-your-face ugliness.

What is attractive or interesting or even repulsive about old clothes tied into a tight bundle with an orange electrical extension cord?   It's still a bundle of old clothes.  It's not art because it's in a museum, and if it's supposed to be a critique of art, it's not not even remotely clever.  It's stupid.

There were lots of museum-goers who milled unexpressively around the various objects.  Were we all pretending that we were looking at Vermeers?

One of the sculptures, so-called, consisted of a pile of chairs, randomly arranged.  A four-year-old boy looked at the "sculpture" and announced, in a very loud and clear voice, "It's a pile of chairs.  Very funny."  And he laughed.  It was a great clothesless emperor moment.     

More on Roth/Allen Doppelgangerism

Michael Hollingsworth, associate professor of American Literature at Texas A & M University, writes this:  "Dr Metablog:  you claim that Woody Allen and Philip Roth are doppelgangers. I've got to tell you something you might not want to hear: you're way behind the curve on this one. It's been well known in literary circles for many years that Roth and Allen are two different presentations of the same person. But there's lively disagreement about who's who. One group, the Rothites, think that Woody is an invention of Philip. The Allenites, on the other hand, are convinced that the Roth who very occasionally appears in public is an actor hired by Woody and that Woody has written all the so-called Roth novels. And then there's a more radical group (gaga conspiracy-theorists in my view) who claim that both Roth and Allen are the invention of some as-yet-unidentified third person, a prominent New York intellectual. This last theory is just nuts" 

Wow, this is exciting news. And here I thought that I had discovered something original when I identified Roth and Allen as one and the same. Isn't it always the case; you think you have an original idea but it turns out that someone has anticipated your insight?  Stay tuned, loyal readers, as I bring myself up to date on Roth/Allen doppelgangeritudinousness.

For a while there I was beginning to think that I was some sort of crank; now I see that I'm part of the mainstream. How reassuring. And moreover, readers, I think that I've already chosen my side in this battle. I'm inclined to be an Allenite. 

Sticker Shock

We're in Manhattan (New York, not Kansas) where I'm suffering from two kinds of sticker shock:  regular and newyorkish.  Regular:  at DIA, I treated myself to a cylinder of Life Savers:  $1.35.  Life Savers, as everyone knows, were invented by Hart Crane's father and are still manufactured to the formula that has made them a gourmet delight for a hundred years:  "sugar, corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup, artificial flavors (Red 40, Yellow 5, Blue 1)."  But Life Savers cost, in my childhood, exactly a nickel.  Now it's $1.35 for a small package!!  Beyond belief!!  But if regular sticker shock is bad, what about high-voltage newyorkish shock?  In my own lifetime, it was possible to ride the NYC subway for 5 cents.  Now it's two count 'em two bucks, making the lifesaverish increase seem like peanuts.  And what about this morning's breakfast?  An omelet and a cup of coffee:  $17.23 plus tip.  And the earmuffs at a boutique for brazillionaires on Madison Avenue:  $650.  After an efficient deliberation, we decided against purchasing the designer earmuffs. At a nearby shop, knockoffs just as effective were available at $32.00, which, in context, seemed like a bargain. Only $16 per ear.  But shouldn't a pair of earmuffs retail for $1.59?