Dr. Metablog

What We Should Have Read in the Fifties: Two Years Before the Mast

It's been a long time since I enjoyed a book as much as Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast, which describes events of 1834-36 and was first published in 1840. It's a great piece of writing. I've heard about it since I was a child, but just got around to reading it this week. It's a book that alters my understanding of the early nineteenth century. 

Why did I like it so much.  Let me count the ways.

1.  It's a sensitive work. Dana's a Boston patrician but instead of going to sea as a junior officer, which he could easily have done, he enlists as a common seaman. He describes life on board the ship from the seaman's point of view. I don't know another book that's so honest, so real, and so uncomplaining. Dana later put what he learned to work, becoming an advocate for sailors' rights. His is not a modern sensibility, but on the whole there's far less of the deplorable racist and sexist assumptions that disfigure the earlier literature and make us cringe for our ancestors.

2. I've always loved sea stories. Wasn't I transfixed, as a child, by the Bounty and Hornblower stories?  But Dana is leagues ahead. Two Years  is non-fiction that is more compelling reading than most fiction. I couldn't put it down. Besides, I had just read Moby-Dick, a thoroughly romanticized version of life on sea. Melville is poetic; Dana is gritty and detailed. I'm sorry, but I'm almost always happier in the world of the enlightenment than the world of nineteenth-century romanticism.  Something in the mitochondria, perhaps. 

3.  A large hunk of the book takes place in California, when it was still part of Mexico and there was a shack or two where there's now Santa Barbara or San Diego or Monterey.  It's an invaluable record of California before the gold rush, both picturesque and enlightening 

4.  It has great characters:  ship captains both competent and cruel, sailors brave and cowardly, as well as the occasional onboard eccentric.  A good account of naval camaraderie.

5.  Language. Some of us enjoy specialized vocabulary of any sort.  This book is a treasure trove of words unfamiliar to a landlubber like me.  "It was clew up and haul down, reef and furl, until we had got her down to close-reefed topsails, double-reefed trysail, and reefed forepenser."  "I threw the downhaul over the windlass, and jumped between the knight-heads out upon the bowsprit.  The crew stood abaft the windlass and hauled the jib down, while we got out upon the weather-side of the jib-boom... the great jib boom flying out to leeward and slatting." "The cook made us a mess of scouse." "Dessert was duff." Sometimes Dana lays it on a bit thick, but it's worth it.  What is a martingale anyway?   Well, "it comprises the parts of the standing rigging which strengthen the bowsprit and jib boom against the force of the head stays"  Clears that up.  Who's up for a great big helping of scouse?

Actual Dialogue Captured in the Wild

Telephone conversation with an eighty-two year old cousin. 

"Evreryone down here, all they ever talk about is their pains, their doctors, their diets, their diseases.  Now I have something to talk about.  For years I went to this doctor, maybe forty years, he's almost as old as I am  Every time I go into see him, with a sore knee or pains in the chest or whatever, he'd look at it, and he'd say, 'what can you expect at your age?  You're lucky to be alive.'  I'd go in with a sore throat.  He'd say, 'Can you swallow. So what it hurts. You're too old to worry.'  If I had a headache, he'd say, 'whatever happens, happens.  You're old, enjoy the day.'  Finally he retired.  He took a job as a dance instructor on a cruise ship. I'm not kidding. He leads exercises or something.  So I went to a younger doctor.  He listens to me breathe, pokes around a bit, puts me in the hospital, and now I have three stents." 

Another Crack at Moby Dick

I read this great so-called classic of American literature once in the '50s and twice in the '60s and I just didn't get it.  I've now re-read it and, after forty-something years of seasoning and experience, I'm still a dissenter. Moby Dick is like opera or ballet -- it's so highly stylized that either you buy into it or you don't, and I don't. To me, Melville is a quite ordinary GrubStreet quill-driver whose every sentence screams at the very top of its lungs, "Look at me, I'm Shakespearean."  I resent Melville's attempt to draft using WS as puller.

Ultimately, there's a deep  incompatibility of sensibility between me and HM.  I'm not a big Romantic guy. Baring the soul isn't enough to keep me happy, certainly not  for the length of so elongated and dense a novel. Perhaps for a brief lyric. 

I like stories.  Moby Dick must have the thinnest plot in the history of 800-page novels. Man hunts whale, man finds whale, and (last ten pages) whale wins. 

Charles Reade's formula for the long nineteenth-century novel was "Make them laugh, make them cry, make them wait."  Melville neglects the first two of these maxims.  There's nothing either amusing or pathetic about Moby Dick but I'm here to tell you that Melville totally mastered the "make them wait" part.  Totally.

Life Lessons from F. P Schubert

Our local chamber players, the Takacs, performed the Schubert Quintet (D.956). It's a glorious work -- one of the finest in the entire chamber repertoire -- and was brilliantly performed.  It's a turbulent, nervous, tense piece of music. With the last notes, the entire audience rose simultaneously to cheer.  There were fist-pumpings, whistles, "bravos," "yesses," and other spontaneous shouts of pleasure from the octogenarian listeners.  It was a rock and roll moment at Grusin Hall. 

I cheered too, but not so much for the Takacs as for Schubert.  It's so often the case that the interpreters are rewarded while the creator is neglected.  Here's Schubert, dead of poverty and syphilis and mercury poisoning at age 31, never having made a nickel out of his many compositions.  In desperate straits, with only two months to live, Schubert sent his new quintet to the Leipzig publisher H. A. Probst. Probst rejected it, asking instead for something "easily understandable."  The world "does not yet sufficiently and generally understand the peculiar, often ingenious, but perhaps now and then somewhat curious precedures of your mind's creations."  The quintet was first performed in 1850, twenty-two years after Schubert breathed his last.

Is there a moral?  Yes, I think there is.  If you're in the composing or painting or novel-writing business, do it your own way -- not the easy way.  If you lose, you lose.  So what?  If you win, you win big.

Oscar Wilde's Siblings

According to Richard Ellman, whose 680-page extremely- detailed Oscar Wilde (1988) I've now read and enjoyed, Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde came out of more colorful family situation than is generally known.  Oscar's father, the famous eye surgeon Sir William Wilde, brought three children to his marriage with Jane Elgee -- apparently by three different mothers, none of whom he bothered to marry.  The first child, a boy named Henry Wilson, was supported by his father and eventually became a partner in his medical practice.  The girls, Emily and Mary, born two years apart, were adopted by Sir William's older brother "as his wards" and were also acknowledged to be part of Oscar's family.  Emily and Mary were not so fortunate as their older half-brother. "In the course of showing off their ball dresses before a party, one went too close to an open fire, caught her crinoline in the flames, and was terribly burned.  So was her sister, who tried frantically to rescue her.  Their gravestone records that they both died on the same day, 10 November, 1871. Sir Williams's grief was intense, and his groans could be heard outside the house."  The girls were twenty-four and twenty-two years old.  Oscar, born in 1854. was just seventeen at their deaths.  Although he wrote voluminously about his own life, Oscar nowhere records this horrific event. But was he affected? Certainly the knowledge that his father lived a second, darker life seems to have made a contribution to the plot of Dorian Gray -- a novel in which Dorian is in love with a woman of questionable birth.  Matters of legitimacy are raised in two of Wilde's best known plays.  Nevertheless, it seems extraordinary that the tragic deaths of two half-sisters should have left no mark either on Wilde's public or private personality. It might be argued that Wilde's lifelong aim was self-destruction and that his sister's deaths served as a template for his own tragedy -- but such an argument would be weak in evidentiary support.  The sisters and the fire is a terrible tale that may signifiy nothing beyond its own horror.    

Sursum Corda; Brain Surgery

Last night I awoke from troubled sleep with a mysterious and inexplicable Latin phrase drumming on my agitated brain. As best I can remember the dream, I had taken a razor to an essay I was writing and had cut out the two words--and I mean "cut out" as in scissored, not merely deleted--"sursum corda."  And then there I was with a slip of paper on which the two words were inscribed -- andnow comes the nightmare part--I couldn't translate the damn phrase. I went so far (still in the dream!) as to hypothesize a past participle "*sursus" of the verb "surgere" (to rise)--although, as everyone knows, the proper form would be "surrectus"--but I still couldn't parse the phrase (*"sursum" or "risen", would be a singular, "corda," "hearts," a plural). I forced myself out of sleep, distressed that I couldn't make sense out of what my dreamatorium was screaming was an important phrase. So there I was in the middle of the night, checking the Latin dictionary to discover that "sursum corda" is a versicle in the Roman mass generally translated "lift up your hearts," but, inasmuch as "sursum," I can now attest, is not a participle but an adverb, might more properly come into English as something like "upward your hearts." OK, now I understand the phrase, but why in the living bejeesus was I a) dreaming in Latin, b) dreaming a part of a mass, and c) slicing the phrase out of some papers of my own composition? 

Enough of that. Back to bed, back to sleep and then, holy moly, another weird dream. No more Latin, at least, but now I'm being held responsible for the low rate of pollination of apple trees. Whose apple trees?  I can't say.  And what is the remedy. Brain surgery -- and on my brain. The surgeon announces to me (somehow we're in a very official looking operating room) that "we're going to remove the smallest bone in the human body, which is in the hinge to the top of your head."He takes his scalpel, cuts through my hinge, and flips opens my skull. Inside the dome (somehow I can observe the interior) right where my brain should be, is a heap of glowing stuff that looks like orange Jell-o.

OK, that's enough. Time to wake up once again. 

Unanswered questions. a) why am I responsible for the fruiting of apples?  Blame the lazy bees, for goodness sake. b) Who says the smallest bone in the body is this imaginary hinge?  The smallest bone is in the inner ear--the stirpes, I think. c)  what's with the Jell-o? Just because I couldn't translate "sursum corda," must it therefore follow that my brain is gelatinous?  Some of your most intelligent Wall Street investors and bank presidents couldn't translate sursum corda, and they must be the most accomplished people we have, at least to judge by their annual bonuses.

On the whole, I think that both of these dreams put me in somewhat of a bad light. Nevertheless, I'm impressed that my unconscious is so gosh-darned creative. Let's face it - it's a ton more imaginative than my daytime self, which doesn't much concern itself with either the Latin mass or the pollination rates of mali domesticae.  

What the Heck is an Elfskin?

In one modern edition of Shakespeare's The First Part of King Henry the Fourth, Falstaff, in a fit of exuberant swearing, describes Hal as an "eel-skin."  But in another edition, the word is "elfskin."  What's going on?  Only one of these curious words can be "correct."  

Paunchy Falstaff attacks Prince Hal with a string of half-comic, half-offensive epithets:  "you starveling, you elfskin (or eel-skin), you dried neat's tongue, you bulls-pizzle, you stockfish...."  A "starveling" is a person emaciated by hunger, "stockfish" is desiccated cod, and a "bull's pizzle," which an Elizabethan might dry to use as a whip, is self-explanatory.  But "elfskin" or "eelskin?"  "Elfskin" is the original reading, although in actual fact the earliest quarto prints not "elfskin" but "elsskin" where the first "s" is the old-fashioned "long s."  "Elsskin" was as incomprehensible then as now and someone who participated in the making of the 1623 Folio changed the word to "elfskin" on the grounds, it is easy to imagine, that the first of the two long s's properly signified an "f."  If "elfskin" is a word, then it's a Shakespearean coinage -- the word being otherwise unknown and the skin of elves not a subject of speculation even in an era that took such imaginary beings more seriously than does ours. Is it possible that, considering the context, "elfskin" could carry the meaning "as thin as fairy skin" -- even though elves were generally described as small and stunted rather than diaphonous? 

The alternative, "eel-skin" is the inspiration of Sir Thomas Hanmer, whose edition of Shakespeare's works appeared in 1744.  "Eel-skin" jibes with "stockfish" and "neat's tongue" as an example of Falstaff's fixation on edibles, although it was the eel itself rather than its skin that was the delicacy.  As Hanmer well knew, Shakespeare had used the word "eel-skin" in a not dissimilar context in King John, when Philip the Bastard described his feeble half-brother's skinny arms as "two eel-skins stuffed."

"Elfskin" is therefore the earlier reading, closer by 150 years to William S. himself, but "eel-skin," though it dates only to the mid-eighteenth century, is much more colorful and apposite. It's therefore entirely possible that Hanmer restored Shakespeare's original intention.  Possible, but not proven.    

A Pitiful Reminiscence of Academia

In an earlier life, Dr. M. served as chair of a large academic department at a state university out here in the American west.  On the whole, the teachers that Dr. M. nominally supervised did their work very well.  They were responsible, self-motivated, liked their teaching and reading and writing, and fortunately, did not expect to be lavishly rewarded either in salary or appreciation or assistance.  But there were a few employees who were difficult.  There always are.  Ten per cent of the people take 90% of your time, no matter what the enterprise.

We had very little secretarial staff -- not even enough people to take and relay telephone messages, So (this was before the advent of sophisticated electronic communication), innovative chair that I was, I took some scarce departmental funds and purchased inexpensive, tape-driven answering machines and attached one to each professorial telephone.  The theory was simple:  most of the faculty weren't in their office many hours a week (nor were they paid to be), but the new technology would allow them to come to work, listen to yesterday's telephone calls, and return messages rapidly and efficiently.  Ninety-five per cent of the faculty was happy with the new system.  But a few of them rebelled.  One particularly recalictrant member of the faculty -- let us call him RR -- categorically refused to touch his new machine.  His reasoning:  pushing the button and playing back the tape was not a "professorial responsibilty";  it was mere secretarial work, and in his view  the new system asked that a professor lower himself to the level of staff.  It would be "unprofessional" for him to listen to recorded telephone call, asserted RR..

I should mention that RR was the least distinguished member of our faculty.  He was a poor teacher and his contributions to scholarship lay somewhere between non-existent and negligible, depending on the decade.  You might think that his sense of nobility derived from a ducal or regal grandfather, but not so --he came from a working-class Kansas background, if I remember correctly.

"Professional" is a word about which I have ambivalent feelings. In its best incarnation, when it denotes adherence to an internalized set of responsible and shared values, it's a damn good word and an uplifting concept. But there are many occasions when "professional" is used to camouflage willfulness, laziness, and privilege, and then it is a word of which I am ashamed.  I take the case of RR to be an example of "professional" used in order to justify indolence.  For the rest of my faculty, it was "professional" to make ourselves available to the students whom they state paid us to educate and assist; not for RR.

I think that RR had a peculiar, retrogressive understanding of university life.  He didn't like students or scholarship, but he did enjoy ceremony.  He was the parliamentarian at meetings of the university's governing board.  And every year, at commencement, he was the person who led the procession, bearing the university's mace (or whatever the heck that strange object was).  Not a born teacher, he was a born presider at rituals.  A large, ponderous fellow, he was a terrific mace-bearer -- and a truly crappy colleague. 

I never did find a way to make him use his answering machine.  If I owned the company, I would have fired him in a flash.  But the university likes to separate responsibility from authority, so all I could do was cajole and beseech and shame -- a procedure that proved in his case to be totally without effect.  You can't shame the shameless.