Dr. Metablog

Can You Believe It?

And now a brief quiz for Metablogian readers who are familiar with nineteenth-century fiction. I will describe the situation and quote a short excerpt, and you will be required to identify the novelist. Ready?  Let's go. Here's the story: a clergyman considers whether to commit a murder.  Although he takes no concrete action, he's overcome with guilt about what might have been. Here's a sample of his extensive, tortured musings.

        He struggled to drive from his mind and from his eyes the phantom of the terrible deed but that he did not succeed was made evident to himself by the hot clammy drops of sweat which came out upon his brow, by his wakefulness through the livelong night, by the care with which his ears watched for the sound of the young man's coming as though it were necessary that he should be assured that the murder had in truth not been done.  Before that hour had come he found himself to be shaking even in his bed; to be drawing the clothes around him to dispel the icy cold, though the sweat did still stand upon his brow;  to be hiding his eyes under the bedclothes in order that he might not see something which seemed to be visible to him through the utmost darkness of the chamber. Why then, could he not sleep?  Why should he be hot and shiver with cold by turns? Why should horrid phantoms perplex him in the dark?

And the correct answer is?  Obviously, it's Russian anguish, the novelist is Fyodor Doestoevsky and the passage is from Crime and Punishment. 

Except that it's not. Surprise. It's Anthony Trollope, master of manners, anthropologist of English civilization. The character who is described is not Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, but Thomas Greenwood, D. D.; the novel is Marion Fay and the year is 1882. (Crime and Punishment appeared in Russian in 1866, in English in 1914).  

In Dostoevsky's novel, Raskolnikov does the deed right at the outset. There's no murder at all in Marion Fay. As is common in Trollope's last novels, there's a flirtation with boundary-breaking (bigamy in Dr. Wortle's School, premarital sex in An Eye for an Eye, interclass marriage in this particular novel), but there's also a withdrawal or hesitation. 

Marion Fay would have been quite something if Trollope hadn't lost his nerve and had let Greenwood pull the trigger.

It would have been an even stronger piece of fiction if Lord Hampstead had actually married the low-born tubercular Quaker lass and if Hampstead's sister Frances had married the Post Office clerk George Roden before, not after, it was discovered that he was an Italian Duke by birth. But Trollope drew back from the dilemmas he created, alas and alack, and as a result there is no  English parallel to Dostoevsky's radicalism. More's the pity.  

Nightmare Made Worse by Critique

Last night -- another horrible dream. I was riding in the passenger car of an old-fashioned railroad and there was this big puffy guy, a smaller version of Oliver Hardy, who was brandishing a pistol. He was about to take hostages and shoot us folks. I grabbed his gun arm and wrestled him to the floor, but he was mighty strong. I called out to the other passengers, "Help me!"  Eventually, a couple of people came to my aid and started to twist his arm. Then I yelled out, "Hit him!" and a couple of people started to bang his head with books. Heavy books. Then I shouted "Kick him!" and a crowd gathered and started in with their feet. After a while, I realized that the gangster/terrorist/kidnapper was dead, but I continued to punch to and kick him. I woke up with my heart beating 180 or so.

It took a while to regain my equanimity, but it wasn't long before I returned to sleep. I dreamed that I was reporting the dream to my daughter and son-in-law and that they were totally uninterested and bored by my story. Which I took to be a critique of my ability with narrative.

So if I tell any more dreams, I'll abbreviate (as I did above, where I left out all sorts of interesting details) for fear of alienating my audience.

My New Career - III

This blague's enthusiastic readers are well aware that each year for the last two, Dr. M. has made himself available for the NBA draft, but that not a single team has selected him, even the lowly, strife-ridden Knicks. It's incomprehensible, but true. Why are these GMs so unadventurous?  

As a consequence of being overlooked, I'm developing an entirely new marketing strategy this year. I'm no longer going to sit at home waiting for the telephone to ring. Heck, no!  I'm going to advertise my skills by competing in the dunking contest.  

I've developed three imaginative new dunks, any one of which could carry the day and get me the attention I require.   

The first is a variation of "making change." I drive to the basket, leap into the air with a basketball in my left hand. With the right hand,  I leave a quarter on the top of the backboard and take down the dime that's been previously placed there.With the left hand, I gracefully drop the ball through the net. 

My second dunk. I have a ball in each hand and put another one under my shirt. I spring, dunk both basketballs authoritatively and successively, then grab the third one and throw it high into the air. I land right under the backboard, and then, without pause, immediately spring into the air again and power that third one through just as it comes down into the cylinder.   

I've perfected these two moves, which, I can say without bragging, are far more interesting than anything I saw in the contest last year. To be absolutely honest, so far I've only done them with six-foot rim and with those mini-basketballs that they sometime distribute free during the second half timeouts. Not to worry -- I'm working on it every day and in a couple of weeks I'll be ready for the standard rim and full-sized basketball. There's still plenty of time before All-Star Weekend.

My third dunk is even more extraordinary. I start at the far basket and do a series of back handsprings and back flips across the floor. Then, as I approach the target basket, I pick up a basketball between my ankles, and with one final back flip -- in which my feet are actually above the level of the rim -- I slam that sucker home. It's going to be something spectacular to watch, I guarantee, just a soon as I work out a few kinks in the execution.

Carrots, etc.

I've experimented a bit in with flowers but in my choice of vegetables I've been quite conservative. My garden has always relied upon the standards: black-seeded Simpson lettuce, Detroit red beets, Danvers carrots, Waltham 29 broccoli. But now I've decided to take a walk on the wild side  In today's mail came my brand-new heirloom and rare seed catalog. (Is there anything that more brightens a cold December morn than the colorful garden catalog that arrives in the mailbox at winter solstice?)  Consider the lowly carrot, for example. Here are some of the possible choices for next year's adventure garden: the 12" long red-orange St. Valery, dating from the 19th century; Lunar Whites -- "white carrots were grown during the Middle Ages but now rare";  Cosmic Purple -- a dark variety, loaded with lycopene; Parisienne -- "small round carrots popular in France"; Chantenay Red Core -- "a large stump-rooted carrot with a deep red-orange center" dating from 1929; the "mild and sweet" Shin Kuroda, a Japanese variety. And twenty other equally entrancing varieties. How to choose?  I have room for twenty feet of carrots. Just enough for one variety, or possibly, if I push it, two. 

What about tomatoes, the king of all summer vegetables, but an uncontrollable plant that turns itself into a jungle come August. Nine pages of varieties -- greens, yellows, pinks, reds, purples in various sizes from cherry to plum to 2-pounders; some of them mottled, others striped, round, cylindrical, and every one of  them claiming to offer old-fashioned sweet/acid tomato taste. How many can I possibly plant?  However few, I know I'll be imploring my friends take some, please, with you when you leave. Old Vermont saying:  "always keep your car locked in August, otherwise someone will open your door and throw in a bunch of zucchinis." Or tomatoes.Which brings me to the nine pages of exciting squash, including the Hopi Cushaw and the Pink Banana and the... well, you can see my dilemma.

"I Dream of Georgie with a Whole Lot of Shoes."

Just before pulling the blankets over me, I watched (via You Tube) the Iraqi journalist wing not one but both his shoes at the Duck Most Lame. Not much of an arm, I thought, but a symbolic act of courage nevertheless. A few hours later, waking from troubled sleep, I realized that my dreamatorium had been working overtime. I had imagined a White House press conference where at a signal all the correspondents, led by Helen Thomas herself, unzip, untie, unvelcro and hurl whatever was on their feet at the Great Incompetent. He weaves and bobs, takes one on the shoulder.  Everyone is on board but Fox, whose "correspondents" lace up even tighter. Next  thing you know, regular citizens start packaging pairs of old shoes and mailing them to "W, The White House, 1600 Pennsylvania." Huge mounds of shoes fill a nearby warehouse; the secret service refuses to estimate the total but reporters guess fifty cubic yards. Someone creates a Facebook application "One Million Strong to Hurl Shoes at George W."  Everyone visiting El Lamo is now asked to remove shoes before meeting with him; but then, what do you know, people start throwing their smelly socks. I dreamed of political buttons: "I'm Shoeless for George." And songs: "I Threw A Shoe at You Know Who."  A website springs into existence: send ten dollars from anywhere in the world and we'll leave a pair of old shoes at the front gate of the White House. It's a democratic movement: all shoes are equal. Sneakers, loafers, Blahniks, boots, moccasins, babouches, buskins, pattens, galoshes, scarpines, clogs, air georges. A protest movement with real soul.   

More on Sam Cooke

Sam Cooke's "A Change is Gonna Come" condenses centuries of tangled racial strife into a brief lyric. The song begins in rural, impoverished, perhaps southern, America: "I was born by the river, in a little tent."  Then, with a glance at the old man river who just keeps rolling, it alludes to African-Americans as on-the-lam outsiders: "Just like the river, I've been running ever since."  The third stanza, now shifted to an urban location, refers specifically to the insult of segregation (shortly before writing the song, Cooke had been barred from a Shreveport hotel): "I go to the movies and I go downtown;/ Somebody keep telling me, don't hang around." The second stanza is surprisingly confessional for a man who had started his career in gospel and had sung lead for the Soul Stirrers;  it's about loss of faith. "I don't know what's up there, beyond the sky." Nevertheless, despite all the reasons for losing heart, including the lack of support from brothers of different political factions, Sam retains an uncompromisIng optimism: he will "carry on, yes I will." The song is a miniature allegory of a triumph over separation and persecution. It celebrates endurance, perseverance, fortitude in the face of long odds.No wonder that Barack Obama adapted Cooke's affirmative "Yes I will" into "Yes we can."

Sam Cooke himself didn't get to the promised land; he was shot, under "mysterious circumstances" in December of 1964. "A Change is Gonna Come" was released posthumously.

It's Been a Long Time Coming

I'm enchanted that our new president chose to cite -- or "sample" as they say in the world of pop music -- one of my favorite, and one of the most important of the songs of the 1960s. Here's the borrowed sentiment, delivered in Chicago on November 4, just after Obama cleared the electoral hurdle: "It's been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America." The big O's citation is to the refrain of Sam Cooke's great anthem, "A Change is Gonna Come": "It's been a long time coming/ But I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will." 

Those who know their Sam Cooke will appreciate Obama's sentence. To the Cooke-innocent, the "change" is a new administration and new policies. To the Cooke-knowledgeable, the "change" to which Obama refers is a tectonic shift in American racial politics.   

So I'm reproducing Sam Cooke's lyric right here.  If you're one of my coevals, you probably know the song by heart. If you don't know it, you should. If you're curious, you can see and hear Sam and Otis Redding and a host of others sing the song on You Tube. Here's the lyric.  It's one great, inspiring song. 

"I was born by the river in a little tent

And just like the river I've been running ever since.

It's been a long time coming.

But I know a change is gonna come.

It's been too hard living, and I'm afraid to die.

I don't know what's up there, beyond the sky.

(refrain)

I go to the movie and I go downtown

Somebody keep telling me, don't hang around.

(refrain)

I go to my brother, I say help me please,

But he winds up knocking me down on my bended knees.

(refrain)

There's been times that I thought I couldn't last long,

But now I think I'm able to carry on.

It's been a long time coming,

But I know a change is gonna come, o yes it will."

Talk about the ability to say a lot in a little.  O yeah!

BASKETBALL ANNOUNCER EXHIBITS PROFOUND IGNORANCE OF BIBLE

I watched the Nuggets beat the living whatchamacallit out of the Toronto Raptors. Actually, I didn't watch the entire game -- it was a gruesome mismatch. I can endure only so much garbage time at a single sitting. The high point, for me, was a comment by one of our home team announcers (I'll not reveal his name). Toronto has a reserve point guard named Willie Solomon, who acquired the nickname "King Solomon" when he played for Maccabi Tel Aviv in 2005. "Must be a reference to the movie," suggested our announcer. 

I'm guessing that he means King Solomon's Mines.

Well, no one ever suggested that we consult TV announcers for knowledge of scripture.