Dr. Metablog

Nanny State! Nanny State!

According to Charles Dickens, who visited the United States in 1842, American men were constantly masticating tobacco.  He was thoroughly shocked by the "two odious practices of chewing and expectorating" -- a habit that he found to be both "offensive and sickening."

"In all the public places of America," wrote the novelist, "this filthy custom is recognized.  In the courts of law the judge has his spittoon, the crier his, the witness his, and the prisoner his."  They all spit "incessantly."  Worse still, In the hospitals the students of medicine are requested, by notices upon the wall, to eject there tobacco juice into the boxes provided for that purpose, and not to discolor the stairs."  A further horror:  "in public buildings visitors are implored ... to squirt the essence of their plugs... into the national spittoons, and not about the bases of the marble columns.  This custom is inseparably mixed up with every meal and morning call, and with all the transactions of social life.  The stranger will find it in its full bloom and glory, luxuriant in all its alarming recklessness."

It must have been horrible.  Dickens says that every floor, staircase, carpet was disfigured with traces of "tinctured saliva."  It's hard to imagine that our revered ancestors lived in such a foul, smelly, slippery environment or that your doc would have a spittoon at his feet while he discussed your symptoms.

Eventually, there was a movement to ban public spitting, but it took almost a century before the odious custom was conquered (except on the baseball field, where it flourishes today in all its ancient glory).  There were those who resisted change, of course.  To prohibit spitting was to regulate and ultimately to deny a human freedom.  If the catchword had been invented, the right-wingers of the day would have been shouting, the way they do now when it's not the spitting but the smoking of tobacco that's in question:  "Spitters' rights!  Spitters' rights!  Nanny state!  Nanny state!"   

When Sir Simonds d'Ewes visited Paris two centuries before Dickens toured America, he was shocked to find the steps of the Louvre littered with "a thousand ordures."  Defecating in public was the French custom and a human freedom.  Eventually, however, laws and customs changed.  But I'm absolutely positive that 1640s libertarians were out there on the barricades, screaming "Shitters' rights!  Shitters' rights!  Nanny state! Nanny state!"

Smoking, Smokers

My father smoked cigars and later a pipe;  my mother smoked Lucky Strikes -- lots of them.  When I was a boy, the air in our house was a blue-gray haze. I believe that my mother smoked throughout her four pregnancies. Why shouldn't she have?  The tobacco industry advertised that smoking was good for you.  There wasn't "a cough in a carload."  Doctors smoked Camels and were paid to testify that smoking was harmless all the while corporate leaders knew about but suppressed evidence of fetal damage, heart disease, and lung cancer.  Cigarettes were the perfect product:  "make it for a penny, sell it for a dollar, and it's addictive as hell."

I tried to smoke -- I stole my mother's cigarettes and lit up in the cellar.  It was horrible, nasty, and disgusting.  I couldn't do it.

Smoking was omnipresent in those days.  Foul odors and brimful ashtrays were the norm.  In my first year in college, I was assigned a roommate who smoked constantly.  I hated it, but there was no recourse.  Professors smoked while lecturing and students, naturally, followed suit, so classrooms were distractingly polluted.  Smokers had everything their way and dissenters were a prissy minority.  At dinner parties, guests would bring their cigarettes to the table.  Is there anything more odious than a tray of smelly ashes at the festive board?

In the 70s, I got up the courage to place a modest, hesitant sign on our front door:  "Please no tobacco."  But sometimes guests would smoke anyway, unwilling to believe  that a hospitable person would try to restrict a commonly accepted right.  I was regularly outraged by the insensitivity of my friends.

But little by little, customs and laws began to change.  It took lots of hard work by anti-smoking lobbyists and organizers.  Many lawsuits. Now it's hard to remember that until recently airplanes had smoking and non-smoking sections -- although in fact, the air stunk no matter where you sat.  As did restaurants, buses, arenas, theaters, offices.

Nowadays, no one that I know would dream of smoking indoors; certainly not in someone's home.  Cigarette smoking has become a shameful addiction.  The change in attitude toward tobacco has been one of the few unequivocal social betterments of my lifetime  -- but too late for those dear friends and family members who died far too painfully and far too early.

And what about those knots of poor proud deluded newly-addicted teen-agers?  The increase in tobacco use world-wide?  And those fat pompous corporate execs, still lying through their shiny teeth, who deserve to be strung up by their thumbs?            

Lebanon, Puccini

I'm just back from Lebanon (that would be Lebanon, New Hampshire) where I heard a performance of Puccini's Madame Butterfly.  If you pay no mind to the ridiculous racist orientalist anti-American story, it's a pretty good opera.  The orchestra, though small, was excellent and the singers top-notch.  The music is a little on the overwrought side, and the garish emotional display makes Dostoevsky seem in comparison like drawing-room comedy.  It's a sad, dated story.  While Emma Bovary found the solution to her problem in arsenic, Anna Karenina in the locomotive and Edna Pontellier in the water, Cio-cio-san elects the knife -- more evidence, if more is needed, for women's paucity of choices in the grand old days.  But great melodies, no question.  The opera crowd was, as usual, a little on the geriatric side -- and as a consequence I felt quite youthful bounding up to the balcony.  At breakfast the next day, a friend admitted to being moved by Cio-cio-san's suffering.  "Did you cry," I asked.  His reply:  "I'm not saying."

Crime, Punishment, Oblivion

If someone had asked me, a month, ago, whether I'd read Crime and Punishment, I'd have sworn up, down, sideways, and seven ways from Sunday that I had done so.  And I would confidently have specified the date: during the early 1950s, when anyone who read anything at all knew that "existence preceded essence" and that the grandfather of existentialism was Fyodor Dostoevsky.  Who, in those days, would have confessed to ignorance about Raskolnikov, his heady jumbled philosophy, the murder, the remorse?  We were all striving to be Alienated Youth, and Raskolnikov was the king of alienation -- a hundred times more alienated than the runner-up, James Dean.

I've just finished reading Crime and Punishment, and I have a confession to make.  I didn't remember the plot, the characters, or the outcome.  Not the picture of louche, impoverished, oppressive St. Petersburg.  Nothing except the mellifluous name:  Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov. Come to think of it, I didn't remember the Rodion or the Romanovich either.  Just the Raskolnikov part.

Did I read the novel back there in the fifties?  If I did, is my memory now so flimsy and porous that I've lost everything?   Did I pretend to have read the novel?  Or was it so much spoken of that I absorbed it without effort.  Whatever the facts, I certainly managed to fool myself.

Crime and Punishment is an exceedingly vivid piece of writing.  I think that the trampling of Marmeladov and the suicide of Svidraigalov are such brilliantly written scenes that they could not possibly slip my mind. How could I lose track of the pathetic waif Sonya, her dreadful occuption, or her lunatic stepmother?  The grand generous gestures, the poverty, the overwrought emotions, the flaunting of propriety.

It's a thrilling, iconoclastic novel -- painful, and not fun for the morally squeamish.  It's absolutely unforgettable. 

Duke, Duke, Duke

Ain't it shocking that Gene Chandler's excellent song is now almost half a century old?  Seems like just yesterday.

This be the verse in its full splendor.   

Duke, Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl

Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl

As I walk through this world
Nothing can stop the Duke of Earl
And you, you are my girl
And no one can hurt you, oh no
Yes, I'm gonna love you
Come on let me hold you darlin'
'Cause I'm the Duke of Earl.

And when I hold you
You will be my Duchess, Duchess of Earl
We'll walk through my dukedom
And the paradise we will share.

Yes, oh, I
I'm gonna love you
Nothing can stop me now
'Cause I'm the Duke of Earl.

Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl

I'm gonna love you
Nothing can stop me now
'Cause I'm the Duke of Earl.

1)  "Duke of Earl" is classic, though late, doo-wop. It's lineally descended from songs in which a supporting male quartet sang meaningless syllables: doo wop, wop, wop. In this revisiting of the genre, nonsense doo doo doo de wop has been superseded by words that carry meaning of a sort: duke duke duke of earl. Return we now to the pages of history: in their turn, doo wop quartets were themselves secular offspring of gospel quartets, where a reverent foursome would sing do lord do lord, do lordy lord (a good example: the unnamed quartet supporting Georgia Peach in "Do Lord Send Me").

2)  It's a fascinating process: Gene Chandler's replacement of doo doo with duke duke is in fact a return to the roots, except that the previous and inherent religious content has undergone secularization. "Lord" has become "Duke," while the heaven of gospel has become the "dukedom" of doo-wop.

3.  It's easy to deride the naive aristocratic title "Duke of Earl"; but would the song preserve its meaning if it were "Duke of Buckingham?" "Earl" may sound silly, but because it's a generic title rather than a specific one it carries allegorical significance."Duke of Earl" is no one and therefore everyone. 

4.  It's entirely likely that the word "earl" was chosen because of it echoes "lord": liquids "r" and 'l" and unemphatic vowel. 

5.  The first line of the lyric --"As I walk through this world"-- introduces a secularized religious motif (an inheritance from the song's gospel forbears). Some will recall the opening sentence of the most famous of all religious allegories, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (1672): "As I walked through the wilderness of this world."  Gene Chandler, walking through this world, is reborn just as Christian was reborn in the classic allegory. Not religiously, but in a worldly way. He is not saved;  he is duked.

6.  What is the significance of aggressive "nothing can stop me now?" What obstacles stopped the Duke of Earl in the past, before his duking?  The triumphalist language is highly developed but the obstacles remain vague and unarticulated. Audiences find their own meaning in the lacuna, but indignities historically suffered by the black underclass lurk only slightly below the surface of the lyric.

7.  The transformation from a previous but unknown and unarticulated existence to an aristocratic, unstoppable Duke of Earl takes place offstage, nor is any explanation offered for the metamorphosis. It's entirely magical.

8.  Because it's magic, it's pure fantasy. Pastoral fantasy in fact, which, curiously, is simultaneously primitive ("paradise") and sophisticated ("dukedom").

9. But it's a shared paradise: the duke along with his duchess. The retreat to domesticity is almost Victorian: "ah love, let us be true/ To one another...."  This particular Duke does not know that "Two paradises were in one/ To live in paradise alone."

10.  The Duke retreats to domesticity and ayet he seems to stake out ("nothing can stop me now") new territory to conquer, in which regard the spacious lyric seems to embody contradictory or even incoherent vectors of thought. However, the enthusiasm of the singing obliterates the ambiguity of the lyric; in sum, the song is remarkably optimistic -- which is just one reason for its continued popularity. 

The Sculpin. Slimy or Mottled?

Knowing little of the finny tribe, I borrowed the Bradford Public Library's copy of Langdon's introductory Fishes of Vermont (2006). It's an excellent, informative, helpful guide. With Langdon's help, I can now declare that it's undeniably the brown bullhead, a species of catfish, that has been multiplying in our pond, The bullhead, a villainous omnivore, is one of the causes of the steep decline of our population of frogs. The butt-ugly, scaleless, bebarbelled brute gobbles frogs' eggs.    

Readers of this blague will not be astonished to learn that Dr. M .has fallen deeply in love with fish names. Take the brown bullhead, for example. It's also known by such evocative and lunatic denominations as the horned pout, the mudcat, and the minister. Minister?  To whom, and under what circumstances, would a brown bullhead minister?

My favorite Vermont fish, nomenclature-wise, is the slimy sculpin, also performing under such titles as the blob, the chucklehead, the rock cusk, the stargazer, and the cockatouch. The slimy sculpin should not be confused with its near cousin, the mottled sculpin -- which can also be addressed as the slowfish or gudgeon. 

Many of the common Vermont fishes have lost their colorful historic names. The bowfin was once called the John A. Gindle, the stonecat was the doogler, the lake trout was the togue or longue, the burbot was variously ling or lawyer (lawyer? minister?  why not accountant? or dentist?), the quillback was the buffalo, and the gar was the needlenose. On the other hand, the blandly-named pond perch of olden days is trending in the reverse direction: it's now called the pumpkinseed -- a name which seems curiously vegetarian for a denizen of the deep.   

If I had known that there was a fish called the cisco (known on jolly days as the tollibee and on prosaic days as the sand herring), I would long ago have promoted Galen Cisco to my all-time-great Baseball-Fish Team, adding him to such piscine luminaries as Catfish Hunter, Dizzy Trout, Chico Salmon, Sid Bream, Bobby Sturgeon, Art "Red" Herring, and Shad Roe. And Mudcat Grant.

No Sculpins in MLB that I can recall, but In a more poetic universe, "Slimy" Sculpin would have been a spitball pitcher, or perhaps even a team owner.

On Praise

Praise for what is not praiseworthy is mere flattery. All the more so, if fair words gain advantage. Praise even of the dead is suspect if it flatters survivors. Persons in authority must be wary of false praise: be mindful that for every man who praises you, ninety-nine hold their peace or mutter imprecations aside.  A friend of long standing said to me, "You are the hardest person to praise of anyone I've ever known," by which words he meant to tax me, but which I took as compliment. I offer praise generously when it is merited, but not for ordinary deeds. Of a churlish man, it was justly said at his funeral, that he was a good speller; of a sloven, that his fingernails had never been so clean. Praise need not be effusive and is most sincere if simply couched. I was once most happy to be praised, when a discreet man, looking over a landscape of which I am vain, said to a friend who marveled, "He works on it."  Of all virtues, I am most apt to praise diligence, the want of which I deplore in myself. Children are most easy to praise as they know not irony.

A Non-Mystical Experience

It was the evening of a cloudy day and I had my face in among the clumps of blooming day lilies, which I was trying to protect from the constant encroachment of witch grass. It's a minor art -- to lie on the ground and reach arm's length into the forest of leaves, careful not to knock the fragile buds off the scapes, and identify and remove the underground stems of the witch grass by feel alone. I had pulled out a heap of noxious weeds and was lost, absolutely lost, in the project, when suddenly, from behind my back the about-to-set sun emerged and illuminated the scene   For no more than thirty seconds the day lily spectrum was on full display: apricot, pink, a range of yellows, each slightly different from its neighbor, a near white, along with a few fully saturated, shimmering crimsons, plus some bi-colors with their cute contrasting throats. For a glorious moment, everything leaped at me. It was truly theatrical to be surrounded by such brilliant colors and shapes and fragrances -- a rare and memorable instance of transcendent aesthetic bliss. 

The next day, on he telephone, I tried to convey my rapture to The Daughter. She was concerned. One of her friends had had a similar moment. Her friend was walking in the Colorado mountains and came upon a magnificent field of wild flowers. The experience was powerful and life-changing, and she's now, after years of study, an Episcopal priest. "You're not going to tell me that it was a religious experience, are you?" I could hear the worry in her voice. My response: "I would have thought you'd have known me better than that."

Some people conflate beauty with spirituality and religion. I'm not one of those people. Beauty is transcendent, yes, but it's also material and explicable. 

No question but that the profusion of day lily colors is glorious. For a hundred years now, careful hybridizers have worked on the homely fulvous lily, a roadside weed sometimes inelegantly called the "outhouse lily", and have transformed it into the bearer of the rainbow colors in which it now sparkles.  Thank you, clever day lily breeders, for your generations of imaginative work. Thanks also to the parcel post driver who every year brings me three or four more new varieties from Oakes in Tennessee. And while I'm at it, I would also like to thank the people who designed and built that brown truck and its rubber tires and constructed the roads and refined the gasoline -- no border of day lilies without their help. Nor without the designers and manufacturers of my spade and my favorite dibble and my all-purpose dandelion puller. I could add other equally essential people -- go right back to the first practitioners of smelting -- but I think I've made my point.  The day lilies do not declare the glory of god; they declare the glory of human civilization and human enterprise. 

I  grow a single wild fulvous lily on the grounds, just as a reminder.

It's drab. 

"The verse is not/ So long as we can say 'This be the verse'"

The most widely-known as well as the most notorious poem of the second half of the twentieth century is Philip Larkin's "This Be the Verse." For those of you who don't know the poem by heart, here it is in its brief and startling entirety.

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

  They may not mean to, but they do.

They fill you with the faults they had

  And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in the turn

  By fools in old style hats and coats,

Who half the time were soppy-stern,

  And half at one another's throats.

Man adds on misery to man.

  It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,

  And don't have any kids yourself.

Pessimistic? Jaded? Angry?  Yes, I think it's fair to call it so. And let's also add, unsubtle with a vengeance.

Larkin is hyperbolically illogical. It can't be that every generation is more deranged than the one that preceded it. When were the good times? A few generations ago?  In the medieval period?  In antiquity?  In Larkin's view, it's been all downhill, all the time. No doubt those early primates were already fucking up their kids when they came down from the trees and started to walk upright on the savannah. "There's only one piece of roasted rhinoceros left. You take it. I don't mind being hungry."

Despite its dyspepsia and illogicality, "This Be the Verse" is a curiously lovable poem. Whenever I've heard it read or recited, audiences react not with horror but with amusement. The poem's misanthropy is so absolute and its language so blunt that it can't help but provoke tittering.

The laughter arises because the poem doesn't earn its pessimism. It's too fluent and too easy. Unlike, say, King Lear, where the sublunary world is rank with incest, betrayal, and murder.  After three thousand lines and five full horrific acts, Shakespeare acquires the standing to conclude that life is miserable and that "humanity must perforce/ Prey on itself, like monsters of the deep."

The events in Oedipus lend credibility to the difficult apercu that it's best not to be born at all, next best to die very young.

While Shakespeare and Sophocles are philosophically serious, Larkin is merely flip. There's a monumental disproportion between his gloom and the light-verse vessel in which his gloom is contained. And as a consequence, the off-kilter comedy. It's a whiny poem. "Poor poor pitiful me. I had a difficult mommy." 

If "This Be the Verse" is in fact the most popular poem of the last fifty years, it supersedes Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." What a remarkable devolution! While Frost endures, Larkin abhors.

I doubt whether Larkin had "Stopping by Woods" in mind, but he certainly glosses Robert Louis Stevenson's "Requiem" -- the poem from which he drew his title. Stevenson's performance is charming, gentle, self-effacing, and modest. 

Under the wide and starry sky,

Dig the grave and let me lie.

Glad did I live and gladly die.

And laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:

Here he lies where he longed to be.

Home is the sailor, home from the sea,

And the hunter home from the hill.

Stevenson praises the adventurous life lived well and brought to completion. Death may end it all but it also closes the circle. No completion, no circles in Larkin, where natural processes are crudely truncated: "don't have any kids yourself."

"This Be the Verse" is a hilarious and wonderful piece of joking, but it's victimology is unsettling. It's tempting to claim that it satirizes its own pessimism, but, sorry, it doesn't. Larkin loves his own gloom.

Here's another Victorian variation on the thema Larkiniana.

Is life a thorn?

Then count it not a whit.

Man is well done with it.

As soon as he's born,

He should all means assay

To put the plague away.

Pessimistic, yes.  But Colonel Fairfax, even-handed, also entertains the possibility that life might be a boon (which, as we all know, is true for at least part of the time).