Dr. Metablog

What is a Cutter?

Regular readers of this blague should be able to anticipate Dr. Metablog's best and favorite answer to the important question, "What is a cutter?"

Familiar with Dr. M's lifelong passion for baseball, the king of all sports, an informed reader might be tempted to say that a "cutter" is short for a "cut fastball" -- a variation, baseballophiles know, of the two-seamer -- perfected by the likes of Mariano Rivera. Or one might think to guess that a "cutter" is a skilled craftsman in the garment trades. Good answers both, but not the echt metablogian answer.

How about a utility knife or box cutter, prominent in the new world of terrorism?  Or a small fore-and-aft rigged sailing vessel, junior to the sloop?  Or one of those self-destructive teens who inflicts injury upon himself?  A shaper of gems?  An unlicensed, underworld surgeon?  A film editor? A queue-jumper? A quarry worker from Bloomington, Indiana?  A mohel? 

Good answers all. But Dr. M, in a moment of ultra-metablogism, is proud to announce that the properest answer can be found in William Dean Howells' 1882 novel, A Modern Instance: 

"On a Saturday evening in February, a cutter, gay with red-lined robes, dashed away and came musically clashing down the street under the naked elms. The young man slackened the pace of his horse, as if to still the bells.  The girl took the hand he offered her when he dismounted at the gate, and as she jumped from the cutter, 'Wont you come in?', she asked.  'I guess I can blanket my horse and stand him under the wood-shed,' answered the young man, going round to the animal's head, and leading him away."

The answer: a cutter is a nineteenth-century horse drawn vehicle.

Howells doesn't bother to mention whether it runs on wheels or on runners. He assumes that his readers will know.

Another Novel by John Hassler

Last month, I reported that I had read The Dean's List and that I was not sufficiently impressed to enroll myself in the John Hassler fan club.  But inasmuch as Hassler had been so celebrated upon his death, and I felt negligent, I thought it only fair to give him a second try. Now I've done so: I've read The Staggerford Flood (2002). It's a congenial satire that concerns itself with an aging group of small-town Minnesota Catholics. It's intermittently witty, but either too subtle or too fey for me. Hassler has been praised as a great regionalist, but in my view can't hold a candle to the upper New York state chronicles of Richard Russo and isn't even in the same league with the inventive and often very beautiful Baltimore novels of Anne Tyler. 

Embarrassment is Forever

One of my childhood friends confesses to me that his otherwise peaceful early years were marred by a perfectly unnecessary bit of fighting -- which he himself initiated.  "We were in the middle of a softball game in the P. S. 217 schoolyard and I struck out with two or three men on base. One of my teammates said something uncomplimentary to me and started to walk away.  Humiliated and frustrated, I charged after him and jumped on his back. I'm not sure what I intended to do (my fighting skills were even worse than my softball skills)."

This less-than-earthshaking softballmachia occurred somewhere between fifty-five and sixty years ago. It is impossible that anyone in the known universe remembers either the score, the sides, the game, the strikeout, or one boy's vault onto the back of another -- no one, that is, except the perpetrator himself, who goes on to confess that he is "embarrassed and ashamed even now."  I do not doubt for an instant that he's telling the exact truth, because even though glaciers have receded and oceans of water have passed under the bridge, embarrassment is forever.

Like my friend, and like many another poor suffering mortal, I too retain ancient memories that make me cringe.  A few of these acts, I'm sorry to say, are, like my friend's, instances of unjustified and petty violence. A larger category: the recollection of saying something stupid at a party or over dinner. Or a lame, feeble, failed witticism. An irony that was misunderstood and taken to be serious. A mispronounced word. The realization that my presence was unwelcome or that I had overstayed my welcome. The largest category of all: something that I did or said that was vain or pretentious or self-aggrandizing.

My Better Half, who knows that often, half-asleep, I will suddenly recall an embarrassing moment and will vent a profound sigh or pound my fist into the pillow, confronts the problem practically. She simply asks: "What year?" To which I respond, for example: "1954."  And then she says:  "Everyone who heard what you said has been dead for years. Go back to sleep."  It's a good protocol and is moderately effective. But the hallmark of authentic embarrassment is that even though the offending act was performed in public, it will be recollected in solitude years later to disorder our tranquility and to disturb our rest. Whether the witnesses have long since forgotten the event (if they noticed it in the first place) or even if they've been underground for decades doesn't seem to moderate self-flagellation.

In point of fact, embarrassment is the only natural phenomenon that has tempted me to believe, even slightly, in an afterlife. If anything is eternal, it's embarrassment.

It is sometimes said that Western society has evolved from a shame culture to a guilt culture. In earlier ages, social disapproval kept the lid on our transgressive impulses. Nowadays, the theory goes, we've been psychologically transformed and have learned to internalize shame as guilt, so that we regulate ourselves without our fellow tribesman crying tut-tut and shame, shame, shame. Perhaps there's a bit of truth to this formula, but it's simplistic. In my own fragile ego, guilt has not supplanted shame; both emotions are thriving rather nicely, thank you very much.

Embarrassment is neither guilt nor shame, but a third thing that combines the two emotions -- as for example in the case of Joey Valachi, mafia hit man and stool pigeon, who once told an investigating committee, and I quote verbatim,  "you can imagine my embarrassment when I killed the wrong guy." An awkward moment for Joey V., but whether its memory would be sufficient to disturb his pleasant dreams is not for me to guess. It is certainly embarrassing to all concerned that he would classify a murder as an embarrassment. Compare Macbeth in the same situation:  "O full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife."

I guess I should be happy that my sleep is troubled by social gaffes rather than by crimes. Mini-scorpions, so to speak. 

Family Matters

Yesterday, in a long-buried collection of file folders, I found some papers of my father's that were written during those last painful years when he was a widower. Some of the pages comprise a "commonplace" book, the theme of which is, 'why am I still alive when my wife is dead?'  In addition to the lamentations, there are two anomalous paragraphs of reminiscence  -- constituting the sum of my father's known autobiographical writings. For the benefit and edification of my own children and grandchildren and family, I now put these writings on the record.

My father writes:  "My maternal grandmother was a thin, almost gaunt  woman about 5 ft 5 inches tall. Although I am sure she loved all her children & grandchildren, I cannot remember her ever showing any overt sign of affection. We children always knew when grandma was to visit us. My mother would go into a frenzy of housecleaning. All the curtains would be washed and re-hung; the kitchen floors scrubbed and the silverware washed and polished. Her [i.e. my father's grandmother's] face was unwrinkled, the skin drawn tightly. Her most dominant feature was her eyes, piercing, direct, demanding. There would be Grandma, wearing a little hat, glancing around the room while she slowly took off her gloves. If she was satisfied with what she saw, she would give a little nod as if to say, 'well done.' We would all relax."

A historical footnote:  my grandparents came to this continent in about 1895 and the events that my father remembers are all turn-of-the-century and pre-WWI.

Until I uncovered this paragraph, I thought my grandparents came to North America on their own.  I did not know that they were accompanied by this formidable great-grandmother. Although she herself was long gone when I came on the stage, I certainly encountered those piercing black eyes in other faces, my father's in particular.  I wonder why my father (who was born in 1904) never wentioned his grandmother to me -- she certainly made an impression that lasted to the end of his life. Come to think of it, why the heck was my family so entirely tight-lipped about their ancestry?

But wait.  There's more.

"My grandparents (that would be the ferocious grandmother and her equally unknown-to-me husband), had 5 children, 4 daughters and one son. There were born to their children in a space of 10 years, 18 grandchildren.  Each one of these children were delivered at home. My grandmother attended every one of these births.  About 2 weeks before the expected date of birth, my grandmother would appear wearing her little hat and gloves & carrying a small satchel; she immediately took charge of the household. The expectant mother would be freed of all household obligations."

From this evidence it would appear that in addition to his three siblings (Max, Sol, and Molly), my father had fourteen cousins on his mother's side of the family.  Why didn't I know about them?  Why did I never meet a single one? Or even hear their names?  Or the names of their progeny, if there were any?

Also in my father's hand, scribbled in a corner of the paper, is a calculation:  Mom - 4, Manya - 6, Nadya - 3, Mary - 2, Maris (or Saris, or Norris) -3.  And then the sum:  18.

So, children and children's children and collateral descendants, you now understand a piece of the family history.

And readers:  if there's anyone out there in internetland who had a strong, perhaps dictatorial great or great-great or great-great-great grandmother who came to assist at births armed with a satchel, a little hat and memorable black eyes (first name unknown but surnamed Hessel), and who knows that his or her ancestry includes a woman whose maiden name was Mary Hessel or Manya Hessel or Nadya Hessel, or if there's someone who's descended from Noris or Moris or Saris Hessel, hey, cuz, take a moment and add a comment to this entry and I'll get right back to you.   

CCNY Basketball Ups and Downs, 1950-51

My friend Otis Jefferson Brown reminds me of the crushing sports-and-morals tragedy of our joint childhoods. It all took place in 1950/51, when I was a creeping like snail to sixth grade in P. S. 217 and Otis, a child of Bay Ridge, was trudging his shining morning face to P.S. 102. Our guys, our local heroes, the CCNY basketball team, won both of the major basketball tournaments, the NIT as well as the NCAA. The city -- New York City, especially Brooklyn  -- was electric with excitement. Headlines, victory parades, and demonstrations in all the neighborhoods. 

The twin wins -- it never had happened before and will never happen again -- were great events in the public sphere but of even greater moment in our 9th Street home.  Back in the 1920s, my father had attended CCNY for a year, but like so many of the sons of impoverished immigrants, had to drop out to help put potatoes and black radishes on the family table. While at City, he had played on the freshman basketball team. Would he have made the varsity? Who can tell? He was a strong man, a fine natural athlete, very graceful in his movements even into his 70s, and very serious about basketball.

His coach had been Nat Holman (one of the earliest stars of professional basketball), and Nat was still the City College coach twenty-five years later. So whenever CCNY played, everything in our family came to a halt, and we all gathered around the wooden Philco to listen as my father's team went down to the wire against Bradley or Kentucky or Toledo. My father, generally a restrained man, was as partisan and as jubilant as I ever knew him to be. Not only were the victories a fulfillment of his own hopes, but they were all achieved by a bunch of local players -- Jews and "Negroes" from the Bronx and Brooklyn who, in those days, would not have been welcome at most of the big basketball powers. Ed Roman and Ed Warner and Irvin Dambrot and Normie Mager and Floyd Lane were household names as familiar and as admired as those of Koufax and Campanella. 

It was the very next year that it all blew up in our faces. The CCNY players, or many of them, confessed to taking bribes from the gamblers and bookies and to shaving points and managing the spread. There were indictments, "perp walks," headlines, indignant editorials. O the shame!

My father was devastated. Although in size he was just a scrappy guard, in person he was a tower of rectitude, and it was beyond his ken that our guys, even poor guys who desperately needed cash, would compromise their integrity and their futures for a few bucks.

My father turned the disgrace into a morality play. Every day, for years it seems in retrospect, I listened to still another passionate sermon about keeping to the straight and narrow. (Not that there was anyone in the world who would pay me to miss a shot; I could miss shots on my own. But I knew what he meant.)   

I've now read Charles Rosen's Scandals of '51, how the gamblers almost killed college basketball [New York, 1971]). It's a shoddy, melodramatic, disheartening book, but it does help to put things in perspective. Rosen makes it clear that there was more than a little American nativist glee about taking CCNY and its upstart culture down a peg. It was sad to read that players from many other colleges were also indicted (I hadn't remembered), but discouraging to learn that their defenders were happy to extol heartland values and to scapegoat the corruption onto big city immigrant depravity. It was also sad to be reminded that the only basketball player who served hard time was Sherman White, the biggest, the best, and the blackest of all the athletes. Nor was it pleasant to discover that although there were apparently point-shavers at St. Johns, a Catholic college, DA Frank Hogan brought no indictments because the evidence against the Red Men was "inadvertently" destroyed.

The events were a blight on my basketball-loving childhood. And still a great sadness after all these years. But I must say that we, as a family, engineered a strong comeback. It was only a few years after the scandals that one of those 13" black and white TVs with the rabbit ears made its first appearance in our home. And along with the Zenith came the NBA. I think that my father was on perpetual alert for signs of malfeasance, but our faith in the game and in humanity was restored by a new set of New York heroes: Harry Gallatin, Connie Simmons, Carl Braun, Dick McGuire, Bud Palmer, Vince Boryla, Sweetwater Clifton, Max Zaslofsky.   

What We Read in the Fifties: The Ox-bow Incident

Walter van Tilburg Clark's 1940 western, The Ox-bow Incident, was required reading in English classes at Erasmus Hall High School during the Eisenhower years.  I assume that I studied and possibly even answered some assigned questions about the novel, but judging by the minute shards of information that my porous head has retained, I’d be hard put to swear yea or nay.

The Ox-bow Incident is still in print and apparently still part of many curricula, which is a surprise, considering its racist caricaturing and taboo language. For those who can overlook its offenses, it raises some peculiarly American questions about violence and personal responsibility. It's not a beautifully-crafted novel: it takes a long time to get going, leaves gaps in the continuity, and although just a couple of hundred pages long, is peopled by more characters than I could easily track. The principal defect is that the narrator, a young cowpoke named Art Croft, is never forced to choose between the good guys and the bad.

Despite these defects, The Ox-bow Incident proved to be well worth the re-reading, largely because of the story, which is inventive and which takes a number of surprising, unexpected turns. It's an anti-western, I now realize, in which readers wait in vain for a white-hatted hero to ride to the rescue and to wing the black-hat and bring the gang of bad guys to justice. Instead, thugs and bullies drag the weaklings down to their own level. Although I had already read my share of Zane Greys, I’m sure that I did not understand that Clark was toying with the conventions of the western genre. Nowadays, The Ox-bow Incident seems less kin to Riders of the Purple Sage than it is to Lonesome Dove.

Clark wrote when Hitler was menacing the world and he clearly aimed his shafts at temporizers and appeasers. I suspect that at Erasmus, my teachers understood The Ox-bow Incident in the context of the anti-communism that was the religion of the 1950s. I would not be at all surprised if the novel is now taught as anti-Jihadist, but it needn't be, because it's not so much anti-this or anti-that as it is about decency and the need to stand firm for law and justice. "Because most men are more afraid of being thought cowards than anything else," says the author, and because "real" men, so-called, believe that it's manly to take the law into their own hands, the cowboys and shopkeepers and drifters who cohere into a necktie party are defenseless against masculinist demagoguery.

While Clark never uses the word "honor," he implies that the cowardly-fearful would think it dishonorable to back off from their commitment to violence.

I think it was Spinoza who said that "honor" was a "slavish dependence on the opinion of others." His definition could serve as a an epigraph to this novel. Honor, as well as law, justice both domestic and international, masculinity, and violence, are all matters of contemporary debate, and as a consequence, The Ox-bow Incident hangs in there quite nicely.

I've now seen the 1943 William Wellman-Henry Fonda-Dana Andrews-Anthony Quinn film of The Ox-bow Incident. It's faithful, much too faithful to the book. I found it plodding and prosaic, inoffensive, but far too moralistic. It was just the merest tad more optimistic than the bleak novel. The political semi-allegory was barely there.      

More P. S. 217 1952 Graduates

Searching the out-of-the-way corners of this ol' house that we are leaving behind after thirty-five years, I discovered a mutilated copy of The Log, an eight-page mimeographed pamphlet produced by students of P.S. 217 in June of 1952.  The entries seem to have been written not by the students but by the teachers and  were designed to inculcate a moral. For example: "Class 8-1 has made many things in cooking, shop, sewing and arts and crafts. The girls under the supervision of Miss Willig have baked many good cookies and cakes while the boys, under the supervision of Mr. Kaminsky have made expertly constructed pieces of furniture. In grammar we have learned to diagram long sentences and are beginning to excel at it. On Graduation Day, when the girls wear their beautiful organdy dresses which they themselves made, they will be very grateful for the instructions they received from Mrs. Ennis." The bottom line: "you may have run wildly amok, you horrid little creatures, and created ruckus after ruckus, but some day you'll appreciate us, we hope hope hope."

Also In The Log,  and far more interesting and useful than the forced feeding of pre-nostalgia, is a list of the 1952 graduates of our fabled elementary school.

A month or so ago, I posted on this blague a formal picture of the assembled graduates, and, with the help of a committee of distinguished volunteer mnemosynists, was able to identify about half of the members of the class. With the discovery The Log, I am now able to to list the remaining students who graduated from P. S. 217 that last Truman June.  Here's hoping that my enthusiastic comrades will now be able to assign faces to the following seventy-seven most musical names: Carol Berse, Diane Goldberg, Norma Harris, Rosalind Symons, Sheila Slovis, Dorothy Steinfeld, Sara Steinman, Harriet Young, Robert Derwin, Harold Schienkoff, Myron Sklar, Maryann Abrahams, Sheila Carp, Ria DeCastri, Anita Friedman, Ricki Gottlieb, Marcia Katz, Sheila Katz, Sandra Kopelton, Rochelle Miller, Diane Spatz, Janet Solomon, Eleanor Troy, Appolonia Yacovelli, Carole Zietlin, Thomas Bellavita, Donald Carbone, Joseph Cassano, Robert Cohen, John McKay, Arne Neilson, Toby Anker, Renee Dickson, Sylvia Gordon, Francine Herskowitz, Marguerite McGinty, Florence Rosenthal, Yvette Rosenthal, Doris Sippel, Hope Steuer, Michael Gerber, Alan Lipis, Stuart Stillman, Stanley Weinberg, Michael Welch, Carol Coniglio, Carol Gerber, Marline Gold, Leah Goodman, Evelyn and Norma Greenberg, Laurie and Roberta Katcher, Selma Schnier, Edith Snyder, Robert Goldstein, Leslie Shernoff, Barbara Bider, Ann Cacioppa, Sheryl Jerome, Patricia McCabe, Marilyn Snow, Barbara Williams, Ruth Wintheil.

Identifications as well as news of our friends and companions are solicited.  Who are these people?  What paths in life, glorious life, did they tread?  Did they embark on careers of baking, or furniture making, or sewing long dresses?  Did they ever truly excel at diagramming long sentences? Your contributions are most welcome. 

New News

My friend Bob, with whom I've shared many a pleasant lunch, went outside to fill the bird-feeders and never returned. Was it heart attack, aneurysm, or stroke?  Bob had taken early retirement a few months ago to spend more time with his ladylove, from whom he had been forced to live apart by circumstances. His sudden collapse was untimely, but not more so than the death of Edward Peter, who had a bad reaction to a flu shot, or Rubin, who drowned while fishing, or JB, whose testicular cancer went to his lungs, or Phyl, whose stealth ovarian cancer finished her after nine dreadful months, or my brother Gene, dead thirty seconds from the onset of whatever it was that leveled him. It's all happening much too frequently and and much too fast. Nowadays, I read the obituaries first and I keep my one respectable suit, my funeral suit, cleaned and pressed. I do not like this trend among folks of my own years.    

A Truly Romantic Poem

The poem that might entrance you when you're young might not be the poem for your older years. In my "mature" phase, poems that I earlier ignored take on new significance. I'm now quite taken with Tennyson's "Ulysses,'" a dramatic monologue that meant nothing to me until a few years ago. "Ulysses" celebrates perseverance, a late-onset virtue. 

Another poem that I've latterly come to love is Robert Burns' jaunty "John Anderson my jo, John." To me, in my present incarnation, it's the most romantic poem in the English language (or, to be precise, the Scottish language).  While most love poems celebrate desire and longing, "John Anderson," takes as its subject continuity and longevity. As opposed to more conventional works that come to climax with a wedding, "John Anderson" situates itself near the end of life and glances happily backward over a life well lived. Its frankness about bodily changes is comforting (especially to readers who may no longer glow with first youth). John Anderson may be bald and gray and tottering, but he's still loved and loving.

The cheerful woman who speaks the poem has lived "hand in hand" with John A. for a lifetime. 

John Anderson, my jo, John                            dear

When we were first acquent,                           acquainted

Your locks were like the raven,

Your bonnie brow was brent;                           smooth

But now your brow is beld, John,                      bald

Your locks are like the snow;

But blessings on your frosty paw;                     head

John Anderson, my jo.

John Anderson, my jo, John,

We clamb the hill tegither.

And many a cantie day, John,                          happy

We've had wi' ane anither.

Now we maun totter down, John                      must

But hand in hand we'll go,

And sleep thegither at the foot,

John Anderson, my jo.

The Springless Kibitka

No, despite appearances, I'm not obsessed with nineteenth-century horsedrawn vehicles, although I do love those classic novels in which our hero dashes to the rescue in one kind of coach or another.

It's just that I have this little bee in my bonnet about the fact that we gasoline-era moderns understand the exact social significance of jeep, Jaguar, Jetta, and jalopy, but we are, except for specialists, utterly clueless as to the valence of barouche, basket carriage, berlin, britchka, brougham, buckboard, buggy, cabriolet, caleche, cariole, carryall, chaise, chariot, clarence, coupe, croydon, curricle, cutter, dearborn, diligence, dog-cart, fiacre, fly, four-wheeler, gig, go-cart, governess cart, hansom, jaunty car, jersey-wagon, landau, phaeton, post-chaise, rockaway, shandrydan, shay, spider-phaeton, spring-van, stanhope, sulky, surrey, tandem, telyezhka, tilbury, tarantass, trap, troika, victoria, vis-a-vis, wagonette, or wurt. Which of these words tells us that the driver is rich or stylish, and which of them implies that he is vulgar and tasteless?  Or downtrodden?  We don't know, and so we read our traditional literature with a handicap.   

It is good fortune that when in Don Juan (a comic epic well worth the revisiting), Byron trots out a kibitka (a vehicle new to me), he tells us all we need to know: "And there in a kibitka he rolled on,/  (A cursed sort of carriage without springs,/ Which on rough roads leaves scarcely a whole bone...."  [IX, 234-6]). Byron testifies that the kibitka is down there in the horsedrawn slums. An online dictionary is less poetic but more detailed than Lord B: "a kibitka is a rude kind of Russian vehicle, on wheels or on runners, sometimes covered with cloth or leather, and often used as a movable habitation."

Definitely not the kind of vehicle out of which Sir Plantagenet should step when he opens Parliament or accompanies Lady Glencora to the ball.

May 10.  My friend W. S. wants to know if history provides an instance in which a "a cabal of kibbutzniks kibitzed in a kibitka?"  A good question to which I am at present unable to provide an answer. May 19.  Professor Marion Morrison wants to know why I prefer Russian vehicles to "les voitures hippomobiles." Whoa, Professor M. Time to get off your high horse!