Dr. Metablog

This Old House

We've left the old place for a slick new condo.

It was a good ol' house. A 1912 arts and crafts bungalow, probably built right out of the Sears, Roebuck catalog.  When we arrived, in 1973, she had been much abused:  some of her fir woodwork painted, some removed; the stained-glass window and the original prairie-style chandeliers long gone;  the handsome five-paneled living room window (prominent in the old photographs) replaced with an Eisenhower-era "picture window," the original fireplace mantle superseded by a monstrosity in native stone; the brass registers covered with layers upon layer of paint, all those beautiful, then-fashionable pre-World War I built-in cabinets carted to a dump; the classic oak floors covered with wall-to-wall carpets.  Over the years, little by little, we did what we could for the old lady: insulated her walls and ceilings, replaced the primitive electrical wiring, stripped and refinished the woodwork and the registers, fabricated a "new old" mantle and "new old" bookshelves and cabinets, modernized the heating system, removed the asbestos, and (Boulder is hotter than it was a hundred years ago) retrofitted it with air-conditioning. We updated the kitchen -- brought the kitchen into the modern world.  

We left the old dear in far better condition than we found her. Trust me on this. 

And let's not forget the backyard garden.  Where there was once an incoherent jumble of thorny plants, there are now peonies both herbaceous and tree (Including my favorite, the ever-larger Joseph Rocks), irises bearded and Siberian, a variety of multiplying day lilies, climbing roses, a thriving weigela, a Rose of Sharon, an abundance of clematis, and fences draped with thick healthy ivy. I'm sorry to report that I never did get around to replacing the sticky, aggressive bear-berries.

Are we sad to leave?  A little, but only a little. We did well by the old house, and the house did well by us. We leave with a good conscience. But the time has come to move along. It's only an object, after all; a machine for living. 

So here we are now, in this bright shiny new apartment. Floor-to-celing windows. Fancy new appliances. A "great room," a "master bedroom."  An elevator.  It took almost a full month to move, but in that month we progressed from the turn of the previous century to the turn of the next.

And it feels right. It's OK.    

On Aggasiz

Louis Agassiz was, Darwin aside, the nineteenth century's most acclaimed naturalist. He was the first to speculate about the ice ages and the first to suggest that mastodons and other giant quadrupeds had become extinct as a consequence of the deep freeze in Asia and America. Agassiz was much celebrated in his lifetime, and at his death, Harvard, where he taught, shut down for a day for his majestic funeral. James Russell Lowell contributed an eleven-page elegy to the Atlantic. "Seldom, if ever, has the death of a man of science been so deeply felt," reported The Nation.

These details are drawn from Barry Werth's Banquet at Delmonico's (2009), an oddly-titled but informative and accessible history of Darwinism in gilded-age America.

Here's a striking and crowded sentence about Aggasiz, also drawn from Werth's book. "The son of a strong-willed assistant pastor to the Protestant congregation of a lakeside village in French-speaking Switzerland who married well, he was his parents' fifth child but the first to survive infancy." 

Agassiz was a therefore a "replacement child" with a vengeance. He "replaced" four lost siblings (but whether male or female Werth does not say). Imagine his parents' pain; imagine how young Louis must have been cherished and protected but also, possibly, afflicted with the 'guilt of the survivor.' Or how he must have unconsciously competed with his deceased and therefore perfect brothers and sisters. And then try to imagine both his mother's suffering and also how his aspiring and apparently devout father might have responded to such an appalling succession of family tragedies. 

Agassiz was America's foremost opponent of evolution. He rejected natural selection because, he claimed, "Darwinism" led inevitably to "atheism" -- which hasn't turned out to be the case, although I personally can't imagine why it hasn't. Agassiz took his own idiosyncratic route and proselytized for the curious and retrograde doctrine of "polygenism" -- the idea that the various races of man were separately -- and hierarchically -- created. Agassiz imagined eight different kinds of humans, ranked according to their "cranial capacity" -- Caucasian, Arctic, Mongol, American Indian, Negro, Hottentot, Malay, and Australian (thereby running afoul of both "monogenists" like Darwin and bible-worshippers who acknowledged only one creation -- that of Adam and Eve). For Agassiz, each species was "a thought of God." An odd path for usually observant scientist. Agassiz was the favorite intellectual of slaveholders and their apologists. 

Agassiz was also a virulent and odious racist. Here's what he wrote to his mother when he stopped at a hotel in which he was served by black waiters. "It is impossible to repress the feeling that they are not of the same blood as us. Seeing their black faces with their fat lips and their grimacing teeth, the wool on their heads, their bent knees and elongated hands, their large curved fingernails, and above all the livid colors of their palms, I could not turn my eyes from their face in order to tell them to keep their distance, and when they advanced that hideous hand toward my plate to serve me, I wished that I could leave in order to eat my bread apart rather than dine with such service. What unhappiness for the white race to have tied its existence so closely with that of the Negroes. God protect us." And so on, and more, and worse. I can't remember reading a paragraph that more turned the stomach or that more cried out for psychological analysis.       

I cannot help wondering whether there might not be a connection between Agassiz's status as a replacement child and his embrace of polygenism. Is it possible that he unconsciously thought that he was a special and superior person because he, of all his siblings, was chosen for survival?  And that in the same way, white people were chosen and superior among all the "races" of humankind. His deeply-held resistance to the evidence that persuaded almost all of his fellow naturalists is inexplicable -- unless he clung to the doctrine of special creation for reasons that were fundamentally irrational. Put it this way: Agassiz's unusual situation required him to believe that he, and people with whom he could identify, were marked for distinction -- and that all others were inferior. One of five among the siblings, one of eight among the races. How else could he free himself of the guilt that he lived and thrived while his apparently less deserving siblings had perished?

Broad-brush cheap pop psychologizing, to be sure -- but let's reserve judgment until we find some time to get ourselves to the library and learn a little about this brilliant, disgusting man. 

Another Merchant Mystery

In The Merchant of Venice, as it appears in one up-to-date modern edition, Portia's husband-to-be Bassanio is attended by a pair of friends named Solanio and Salerio. Yet In another equally authoritative edition of the play, the friends are named Solanio and Salerino -- and moreover, in this edition, a third and apparently separate character named Salerio enters half-way through the play. What's going on? Why the inconsistency?

First some onomastic context. Shakespeare could be quite casual about the naming of his characters. In The Second Part of King Henry the Fourth, there are two distinct figures, one named Bardolph and the other, for no good reason, Lord Bardolph. Two separate and very different Jacques complicate As You Like It, while in The Taming of the Shrew, easy-to-confuse Gremio and Grumio have needlessly perplexed generations of readers. Even in The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare twice used the name Balthazar -- initially for a servant of Portia and then a second time, gratuitously, as the pseudonym that Portia adopts when she poses as a Paduan lawyer. But nowhere is Shakespeare quite so arbitrary as he is with the names of the two (or is it three?) Sallies.

Solanio, Salarino, and Salerio all inhabited Merchant when it first appeared in the 1600 quarto edition known to scholars as Q1, but whether Shakespeare meant there to be two characters or three is a matter of mystery. It's possible, in fact, that the playwright changed his mind in the course of writing. And what would be evidence for Shakespeare's indecision? Scholars have now determined that the first Merchant quarto was set in type by compositors who worked from a manuscript in Shakespeare's own handwriting -- an "autograph" -- that preserved evidence of the writer, quill in hand, in the very thick of invention. Shakespeare himself, it appears, vacillated about the names by which to denote the Sallies and also about how many of them there were to be. His waffling was reproduced by the compositors who dutifully set what they had in front of them -- first thoughts, re-thinkings, revisions, errors, and all. No wonder that modern editors have been baffled.

Here's a brief outline of a complicated textual tangle. In the stage direction with which the play begins, Shakespeare introduces two of the characters in question. "Enter... Salaryno, and Salanio."  In terms of personality, the pair seem to be conceived as twins or doubles. Both are excessively talkative -- long on enthusiasm and short on common sense. It appears that Shakespeare not only cast the two characters from the same psychological mold, but that he also decided to underline their similarity by giving them near-identical names -- and it is from this initial decision that the confusions springs. The trouble begins right there in the play's first scene. If Shakespeare had retained his original names and followed his customary procedure, he would have assigned Salaryno and Salanio the abbreviated speech headings "Sala." and "Sala." -- clearly a recipe for disaster. So before he had entered fifty lines into the scene, the playwright traded in one vowel for another and transformed Salanio into "Sola." It's a curiosity that in the first scene of The Merchant of Venice (as it appears in Q1), Salanio enters but Solanio exits. Oddly enough, the pattern repeats itself when Solanio re-appears in the subsequent scene in which the Sallies and Lorenzo plan Jessica's elopement. Solanio is once again Salanio in the initial stage direction and Solanio or "Sola." in the speech headings. Was Shakespeare irresolute or simply forgetful?  

And now Salanio/Solanio's companion, Salarino, also begins to mutate. When Jessica steals from Shylock's house, she is accompanied by a character who bears the name Salerino -- that is, Salarino/Salaryno rechristened with a medial "e."  We're now a third of the way through the play, and readers have already encountered two characters, one of whom is named Salanio/Solanio and the other Salarino/Salarynol/Salerino. At this point things become truly messy. Jessica elopes with Lorenzo and they and their co-conspirators flee Venice for Belmont. Gratiano, first to arrive at the country retreat, greets Lorenzo and his bride Jessica and an accompanying friend. "But who comes here?" he inquires. "Lorenzo and his infidel?/ What, and my old Venetian friend Salerio?"  Who, we may ask, is this Salerio?  Readers who have been paying attention know that Gratiano doesn't have an "old Venetian friend" Salerio. Instead, he has two old Venetian friends -- Solanio and Salarino. Is Salerio a new character? Or, given the whimsicality of Q1's spellings, is he simply a orthographical variant of one of the Sallies with whom readers are already acquainted? 

The action then returns immediately to Venice where a new scene begins with the following stage direction: "Enter the Iew (i.e. Shylock) and Salerio."  But Salerio, if he's anything more than a spelling error, can't be in both Venice and Belmont at the same time (in fact, he's just been commisssioned to carry a message from country to city). An editor vents her frustration: "Q1's Salerio cannot be right, as he is on the way back to Venice." Apparently Shakespeare himself was totally befuddled about whom he had named what and where he had sent whom. Certainly, the printers themselves were baffled. The three earliest editions of The Merchant of Venice each assign a different name to the Sally who remained in Venice in the company of Shylock. In Q1, as we've just noted, it's Salerio; in the lightly-edited second quarto (dated 1600, but actually a forgery printed in 1619), he is Salarino, and in the 1623 Folio, it's Solanio.

If Q1 did, as is supposed, follow Shakespeare's manuscript, then the playwright himself made the muddle, but who can say for certain that the confusion couldn't have been the fault of one of the various scribes, book holders, compositors, or editors through whose hands the manuscript might have passed.  In any case, the snarl wasn't untangled in Shakespeare's time, and it hasn't been sorted out since. Some editors give two characters, some three;  some name the characters Solanio and Salarino, and some add a Salerio to the mix.  

Why didn't Shakespeare simply create one all-purpose Sally? Because the duplication makes dramatic sense. When one of the Sallies attacks Shylock venemously, his bigotry might be dismissed as personal idiosyncrasy, but when two of them gang up, they speak not as individuals but as a chorus that expresses the nasty side of Venetian society.  

But why didn't Shakespeare himself fix the problem? Did he leave it to his actors to work it out on the stage, or was he a big-picture guy indifferent to such details? Perhaps he did sort it all out in a scribal or subsequent version of the play to which Elizabethan printers never gained access?

In any case, Shakespeare learned a lesson from his adventure with Salerio, Solanio and Salarino. When he next came to invent characters who were doubles or twins, he took the precaution to give them names that were impossible to confound: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.   

A Merchant Mystery

In the middle of The Merchant of Venice, right out of the blue, without warning, the audience is suddenly told that Launcelot the clown has gotten a "Negro" pregnant. Who is this 'Negro'? Why haven't we heard of her before?  Why does Shakespeare introduce her into his play?  And why, having invented her, does he precipitously drop her? A loose end, to be sure.

The pregnancy seems to be unplanned, both by the characters and the author. It occurs at the point in the play when Shylock's runaway daughter Jessica, newly married and newly converted to Christianity, engages her bridegroom Lorenzo and their clown/servant Launcelot in a bit of superficial banter. Launcelot puts forward the barren jest that Lorenzo is "no good member of the commonwealth," for "in converting Jews to Christianity, [he] raises the price of pork." Lorenzo veers from the context to reply sharply. "I shall answer that better to the commonwealth that you can the getting up of the Negro's belly. The Moor is with child by you, Launcelot."  Up until this very moment, there had been no mention of a "Moor" or "Negro" (north Africans and sub-Saharan Africans were not always distinguished in the Elizabethan imagination). It's a sensational, unanticipated accusation and one that Launcelot does not deny. Instead, he attempts to deflect Lorenzo's indignation with clownish wordplay. The subject is abandoned as precipitously as it was raised and the pregnant Moor vanishes from the play.  Neither Launcelot nor any other character has alluded to a "Negro" before, nor had there even been the slightest hint that Launcelot has been wooing a lady  A perplexed editor simply shrugs his shoulders: "This passage has not been explained."

But where there is no explanation, there is room for conjecture.

The fleeting and mysterious black woman reminds us that The Merchant of Venice explores questions of exogamy. Jewish Jessica elopes with Christian Lorenzo, while the heiress Portia, a native Venetian, is pursued unsuccessfully by Morocco, a "tawny Moor." When Morocco fails the test that might have won him Portia for his bride, Portia expresses pleasure in words that were acceptable then but are unpleasant now: "Let all of his complexion (i.e. race) choose me so." So it would seem that one possible explanation for Launcelot's insemination of the Moor is that Shakespeare started a hare that he didn't bother to pursue; he was sufficiently intrigued by interracial sexual doings to provide Launcelot with a non-white lover, supplementing comedy with farce -- but he lacked either the inclination or the space to develop the relationship more fully. (The fertile subject of love between the races was one that Shakespeare had previously engaged in Titus Andronicus -- in which Aaron the Moor fathers a child upon Tamora, the queen of the Goths -- and would become the tragic motif of Othello. 

There's a second possible explanation for the presence of the pregnant Moor.  It's known that as originally perormed, the part of the clown Launcelot was played by the much celebrated comedian Will Kemp, whose part Shakespeare might have wanted to sweeten.  Who now can imagine with what facial expressions or gestures Kemp, in 1596, responded to Lorenzo's charge.  The visual comedy of the past is unrecoverable.  Even though Launcelot's quibble on the homonym Moor/more ("It is much that the Moor should be more than reason...") lies absolutely limp on the modern page, we can guess that it would have been made much of (who knows how?) by the great comedian for whom it was composed.

So that while Launcelot's getting the Moor pregnant must remain ultimately mysterious, its odd and curious introduction at this juncture of the play very possibly offered its original audience a moment of humor which later readers and playgoers will never understand or appreciate.

Unsatisfying answers I know. But we must accept the fact that the past is not always explicable.

The Big Seven-Oh

In the course of the Great Downsizing, a long-buried letter emerged from the "archives."  It's from my long-gone father, and was written in December of 1974 on the occasion of his seventieth birthday.  A most fortuitous discovery -- inasmuch as I am now exactly the age that Pop was on the day that he wrote to me.  In his letter, Pop reports that he is taken aback by the person whom he has become.  Who is this guy with the gray hair and the "little paunch" who "takes a day or two to recover from any physical activity" and who "finds events repeating themselves." 

"In my mind," he says, "there is another me, a real me," who looks upon this present self as a "stranger and an interloper."

It appears as though my father's self-image was lagging behind the reality of things

I hadn't remembered reading the letter -- it sat in a box for thirty-five years -- but I'm not surprised by its content.  My father was a strong, athletic, handsome man who didn't easily accept the inevitable changes that come with septuagenarianism.  I vividly remembering him saying, at eighty, "I hate my body." 

I'm with him, but only a part of the way. Of course I'm dismayed by the decline. The gray hair, the thickened figure, yes.  The deterioration of memory, certainly.  But I don't share Pop's sense that my real or better self is somewhere in the past. True that I can't jump as high -- yet, paradoxically, I feel more like myself, more comfortable being me now than ever before.  I'm also more cheerful, on the whole -- although not at nighttime, when i sleep just as badly as ever my father did). When I look in the mirror, I don't see a face ravaged by age -- I see a face that now looks like it was always destined to look and finally got there.  I have become more like myself, so to speak, every year. But how long until the me-ness starts to plummet? It must happen eventually. Time will tell.

My father used to say, "You're entitled to your biblical three score and ten.  But after seventy, you're in extra innings."  o which I would respond, "In some sports, extra innings is known as sudden death." 

But hey, let's not forget that the extra innings are frequently the most exciting part of the game.   

Aunt Harriet's Story

"I was born in 1920 in Bayonne. I had four older sisters. When I was eleven, my mother died and my father disappeared. I was taken in by my sister Jennie and her husband Jack. She was eighteen, he was nineteen. They raised me. I graduated from Bayonne High School in 1938. For years I worked for an insurance company in New York City. I started at $5 a week. I lived with Jack and Jennie in Bergenfield. I took the bus and then a train and then a subway. One of my girlfriends was seeing a guy, I can't remember his name, but he had a friend named Dave. I married Dave in 1942. He was sent overseas, I didn't see him for three years. In Oman, he was coming off a ship, they were shooting at them, he was wounded right here, if it had been an inch this way I wouldn't have any children. Dave's father had a business, Broadway Arcade on Broadway and 53rd Street. Dave took over the business. He was a good mechanic. We had Madame Esmerelda the fortune teller. Pinball, skiball. In the basement were pool tables, we sublet the space. It was a good business. We were famous for our nuts. We had two boys, Steve and Mark.  Steve ran the Arcade after we moved to Florida, Mark is a food chemist. The Arcade is closed now -- the landlord kept raising the rent. If we had bought the building I'd be rolling in it. Dave died at 68 in 1987. I play mah-jong once a week. I go bowling once a week. My team is in first place. I take my sister Sophie with me but she can't see well enough to bowl. She's ninety-six. So I've been married, it's sixty-seven years.  Hard to believe."