Dr. Metablog

On Noise

Even as my hearing deteriorates, I become more and more disturbed by excessive noise.  For example: coffee shops, which in any sensible world, would be oases of tranquility, have become positively uninhabitable. When I visit such a place, I do so either to talk with a friend or to read silently.  I do not go to be assaulted by what the tattooed, benose-ringed young staff fancies to be "music" -- grating sounds amplified to 11 on the Nigel Tufnel scale.  And then last week I went to a baseball game at one of the new stadiums where they have embraced to the ultimate the philosophy of  the "total entertainment package," which means bright blinking lights, almost constant "music," and exhortations on the giant scoreboard to "Get Loud."  But baseball, more than any other sport, requires thought and concentration.  It's a subtle game, not enhanced by distractions. And yet it seemed that very few of the spectators around me were actually paying attention to the events on the field.  The noise forbade it.  When our side's left fielder played a routine fly ball into a single -- an act which would have provoked indignation and jeers at the low-tech Ebbets Field of my youth -- the crowd remained preternaturally silent, reserving its roars for the inter-inning "kiss-cam" and similar travesties.

Do we truly enjoy or are we simply inured to the noise that has become so constant at the old ball game, in the restaurant, or even on the leafy suburban street, where the egregious leaf-blower has become an oppressive commonplace. (Why do we not ban a mega-decibel machine that is less efficient than the time-honored and virtually silent broom)?

The noise of machines and the noise of amplified sound is a relatively new phenomenon.  Until 1650 or so, no such sounds oppressed our ears. There was the occasional thunderstorm, and there were church bells, and there was the clatter of horse and coach on cobblestone streets  -- but there was nothing comparable to the sea of noise in which we daily swim. Our ancestors lived for a million years in a world that we would judge to be virtually silent.  There were no factories, no trucks, no airplanes overhead, no electric guitars and, inasmuch as 95% of the people were village-dwelling agricultural workers, not even large crowds.  The noise that we routinely endure is unprecedented and unnatural.  And unhealthy as well. 

     

Some Mid-Career Baseball Deaths

Ray Chapman, the most notorious of  the dead-in-mid-career, was batting .300 when he was hit on the head by a spitball thrown by Carl Mays in August of 1920. "Big Ed" Delahanty, a Hall-of-Famer, fell drunk off the International Bridge at Niagara Falls in 1903.  Cory Lidle, Thurman Munson, Nestor Chavez, Ken Hubbs and the great Roberto Clemente died in plane crashes.  Many players, including Nick Adenhart, a pitcher of great promise until April 9, 2009, have died in car crashes.  Danny Frisella died in a dune buggy accident.  Steve Olin and Tim Crews ran their motorboat into a pier in 1993.  Steve Bechler was a 2003 victim of Ephedra. Tiny Bonham and Jake Daubert died of appendicitis, Harry Agganis of a blood clot, Darryl Kile was found dead in his hotel room, having succumbed to an unsuspected heart defect. Urban Shocker died of pneumonia, Danny Thompson of leukemia.  Dernell Stinson, Gus Polidor, Dave Shotkowski and Lyman Bostock were murdered.  Just last year, Geremi Gonzalez was struck by lightning. Jim Umbricht died of cancer at age 34. His ashes were spread over the field he loved.  Unfortunately, he played at domed stadium with artificial grass, so after a few days, he was vacuumed up and spends eternity in a Texas landfill.    

Plastic Flowers

Our property adjoins the old West Bradford cemetery. The two- or three-acre plot of ground is the most visible remnant of the dairy, sheep and apple community of  West Bradford, which was hacked out of the steep slopes above the Connecticut river in the first part of the nineteenth century, peaked before the Civil War, and then went into decline more than a century and a half ago. West Bradford lost its post office address in the 1920s and its schoolhouse (if word-of-mouth can be trusted) before W W II. We still have a few sheep and horses and some beef cattle but also an ever-increasing number of commuters who head down I-91 for their employment in Lebanon or Hanover. 

The history of West Bradford can be read in the cemetery's gravestones. There must two hundred of them. The oldest are made of local slate and are only a foot or eighteen inches in height; these date from the 1820s. One or two of them feature lugubrious, stunted iconic weeping willows which rain and wind have rendered barely visible. The markers that date from the end of the nineteenth century are larger, made of marble that was quarried thirty miles to the west of us, and reflect the area's growing prosperity. They're laconic  -- just name and dates -- and entirely bereft of adornment or decoration. They celebrate the Baldwins and Cunninghams and Lows and Tebbetses who cleared these hilly fields with horses and oxen and who left behind all those massive and beautiful stone walls that snake and twist their way through lands that are once again deeply forested. There are women buried here who have been denied even the brief immortality that a grave marker affords: a man's name and dates and the notation "his wife" or sometimes even "his wives."

Quarter-size headstones, numerous and unincised, attest to unbaptized infants.

There's a new part of the cemetery, still in use, which to my eyes is less sturdy and more frivolous -- an emblem of a culture in decline. Just because it's possible to laser a prancing reindeer onto a granite headstone doesn't mean that it's a good idea to do so. How all those long-bearded and puritanical Emersons and Pipers would have railed against such trifling?

A few years ago, one of our local Thurstons erected a pink granite stone with a plastic cross epoxyed to its surface. The cross, it was said, was to be a perpetual lantern -- lit until the end of time by some sort of device that gathered energy during the day and discharged it at night. "Oh no," I thought the first few times that I came home late at night and was greeted by a ruby and unwinking polysterene crucifix, "how ugly, how tacky, how out-of-keeping." Fortunately, the perpetual light only lasted a year or so before extinguishing itself for good. 

I rather enjoy having a cemetery is nearby. "Quiet neighbors," as they say here. Our house lies halfway between the cemetery and the pond. It's satisfying to be flanked by crucial symbols of life and death. My only quarrel is that occasionally a visitor to the cemetery, perhaps a decayed descendant of one of the pioneers, will pitch an old vase or some sun-faded plastic flowers onto our land. I don't so much mind picking up a few pieces of trash as I object to my property being used as someone's rubbish heap. It's disrespectful. But any person who would think to commemorate his mother with polycarbonate or acrylic geraniums will generally not be the most mannerly or ecologically sensitive of souls. 

One day, many years ago, I was sitting on the cemetery's split-rail fence with D., a local farmer. We were chatting about the weather and such. He suddenly swung around and pointed to one of the headstones: "That's the boy that died of eating the crayons."

To honor both the visitors and the inhabitants of the West Bradford cemetery, I've composed a country-and-western quatrain. 

Remember me in marble and in granite;

     Remember me with rose and lilies brave;

Remember me in sunshine and in shadow

    But don't put plastic flowers on my grave.

Updike -- Part IV

The Updike-athon continues  Since my last report, I've read Museums and Women, Bech is Back, In the Beauty of the Lilies, Rabbit Run, Rabbit Redux, Rabbit is Rich, and Rabbit at Rest. 

The good news:  Updike is fluent, a masterful stylist, a remarkable story-teller, a distinguished craftsman.  He's original, entertaining, bold, inventive.  The section of Beauty of the Lilies that describe Alma DeMott's childhood in Basingstoke, Delaware is as good as anything I've read in years -- a truly classic piece of writing  

The bad news:  Updike's characters have no heart  They're almost uniformly small-minded, bigoted, hateful, unloving and, in fact, incapable of love.  The novels are distressing and depressing.  And inconsistent.  The Rabbit quartet is reputed to be Updike's masterpiece, but the long section about Skeeter in Redux is a ludicrous mess, a total bomb, a failure that disfigures the entire series  

A reader who knew America only through the Rabbit series would be convinced that Americans in the second half of the twentieth century were selfish, money-grubbing, racist, entirely without culture, sex-obsessed, alcoholic, uneducated, insecure, obnoxious, undisciplined and knowledgeable only of TV trivia.  I suppose that there are such people -- but there are also substantial citizens, artists and artisans, and good, functioning families.  I must say that four large novels in the company of Updike's folk can wear a reader down.  I think it's time to re-read Trollope's Palliser novels, where there is villainy but also redemption.  I crave an antidote.

Another P.S. 217 Picture

Is it my imagination, or did we mature later in those days than kids do now?  These handsome juveniles are thirteen and fourteen years old.  To my eyes, the girls look barely half-grown, the boys variable but distinctly unfledged.

Claire R., who sent me the picture (thanks so much, Claire!!), looks womanly, but the others --not far out of childhood.  The boys in the second row look as though adolescence has not yet begun to rear its unhandsome head. 

Want to know the names of these unpromising lads and lasses?  Search here.  

I

Notes on the "Tarpaulin"

We're packing up, getting ready to go -- even though there hasn't been the slightest hint of frost. When I loaded the metal sculptures into the bed of the truck, I realized that it would be a good idea to cover them with a tarpaulin. So down I drove to Main Street and to the recently enlarged Aubuchon. "Where do you keep your tarpaulins?" I asked the young clerk. "What is a tarpaulin?  I've never heard of it?"  "Never heard of a tarpaulin," I replied, taken aback, "you use them to cover boats or cargo or the backs of trucks." "Oh," he said, brightening, "a tarp," and he took me right there where the shelves were loaded with blue "polytarps" -- canvas being virtually extinct, at least in our part of the landlocked world. 

The young feller didn't know the world "tarpaulin" and looked at me as if I were some sort of pretentious snob. But "tarpaulin" goes right back to my childhood -- it might be the first three-syllable word I ever learned. Not that I was nautical, not in any sense a "tar." But when it rained at Ebbets Field, the ground crew would roll out the infield tarpaulin and then we'd all sit and listen while Red Barber and Connie Desmond chatted for an hour or so until either play resumed or the game was postponed. "Tarpaulin" is not a hard or obscure word -- certainly not to baseball fans who can remember when fields didn't have roofs. But the big linguistic question is -- will the word tarpaulin survive in all its glory or will it be truncated into a pathetic apocopic monosyllablic shadow of itself?  Or will it be confused with the TARP, which is a horse of another acronymic color. Troubled (or more accurately, Toxic) Asset Relief Program. 

Well, I bought the "tarp"  -- not at Aubuchon, which didn't have the right size -- but down at the Farm-Way. So now we're one step closer to shoving off for DC and then back home. I'm overwhelmed with pre-nostalgia.

My First Racist

There was this nasty kid in our class at P. S. 217, back there in the Flatbush '50s. I'm not going to name names, but if anyone is cares to look, you can tell him by his superior, know-it-all smirk in the picture of our eighth grade graduating class. For convenience, I'll call this guy K. K was not particularly smart, or athletic, or talented, or attractive, or congenial, so he was quite a way down the social pole, a resident of the land of the nebbishes. But to give him his due, he was intense, dogged, hard-working, and perpetually argumentative. He was not afraid to offend. He took positions that no one else in the schoolyard supported. I remember him haranguing me on the subject of social security. It was a bad thing, he asserted, because his father could make more money by investing on his own rather than contributing to the pot. "But, but, but...," I remember stuttering, "it's insurance, and not everyone is a good investor." This exchange must have taken place during the Truman years. In the P. S. 217 schoolyard, where everyone was the child or grandchild of immigrants, FDR was our guy and social security was a revolutionary improvement in the quality of life. Wasn't it the case that my widowed grandmother received $32 a month from social security -- not sufficient to live on, surely, but a great help, enough to pay her rent? To argue against social security -- where in the world did K get such weird, off-the-track ideas?  Plus, equally astonishing, K was an enthusiastic Yankees fan. What an unholy, contrarian jerk!

Then K disappeared for a month or a year -- some period of time, I can't remember exactly how long. He had relatives in a southern city -- Baltimore, I believe -- and he lived with them for an extended while. When he returned, he starting spouting the most grotesque racist claptrap. It's engraved on my memory:  "they have a lot of uppity blacks down there, they won't even get off the sidewalk for you." Whoa, daddy. First of all, no one said "blacks" in those days -- they were "Negroes." And second -- "uppity?" I had never heard the term before and was shocked out of my skull. And "get off the sidewalk" --WTF???  These were words and sentiments far beyond my experience or conception, beyond anything I had ever heard uttered in our part of the universe. I was offended and flabbergasted. Remember, dear readers, that the only person more sacred to P. S. 217 schoolyarders than FDR was Jackie Robinson. It was from K that I first heard the grotesque sentence, "Would you want one to marry your sister?"

I tell you, I gave K a lot of room after those conversations. Truth to tell, there was no need for our paths to cross -- we weren't in the same classes and K didn't play softball or basketball -- as I said, he was pretty much of a klutz.  

Recently I looked up K on the internet. He's a retired professor of economics and is a "fellow" at a right-wing think tank. He's made a career out of opposing third-world development and supporting "free market solutions" to all our ills. That dogged dullness has produced a number of books. I've even found a picture of him -- where he was once flabby and pimpled, he's now bald and sleek, with a malevolent cast to his eye. 

There's always been a connection in my mind between conservatism and racism. The link is narcissism. "I've got mine, let "them" take care of themselves." For the Ks of the world, it's not "how do we take care of less fortunate and of our old people?"  It's, "how do 'we' deal with 'them.'"  And "they" are usually, almost always, darker-skinned than "we."  I'm sure that K would deny that his "free-market" views have anything to do with racism. But I know better -- I was there at the beginning, before K became quite so sleek.  

New Bird in Town

A creature previously unknown to me has appeared in the pond. After a few moments with the binoculars and a glance at Peterson's classic Field Guide to the Birds along with some intense internet research, I could make a positive identification. It's a double-crested cormorant, usually found at the seacoast but sometimes in rivers and lakes, which has been "recently extending its range" and which has just now arrived on Hackett Hill Road. Although it's exciting to encounter a new bird, especially a large graceful swimmer and diver, the cormorant arrives tarnished by a bad reputation. Cormorants form very large colonies and over-indulge their voracious appetites -- they gobble fish, frogs, salamanders, clean out the lakes. Is it after our trout? They've become a pest on Lake Champlain, where the authorities are "taking measures" to reduce the population. I don't mind one cormorant, but I certainly don't want to host a horde of them.

When the first wild turkey arrived, about fifteen years ago, everyone would stop and stare. Now turkeys are as common as pigeons, but as far as I can tell, do no damage (unless they get into the garden, which they haven't, so far). They eat insects, not frogs. Plus they're good eating. I've never heard of anyone salivating over roast cormorant.

I'd trade the cormorant, and the turkeys for that matter, for some of the birds that have disappeared over the last forty years. We used to have a symphony at dawn and dusk -- now there's hardly a peep, except for the robins and the bluejays. I'd give a lot to hear a white-throated sparrow at daybreak. It's been years since I've seen a bluebird, a wren, an indigo bunting, an oriole, a purple martin, a red-wing blackbird, a sandpiper, a tanager, a vireo. Or seen the swifts overhead. Even our once-abundant swallows have become rare. Where are they? 

[November 9, 2020: the cormorant never returned. Nor did any of his friends or relatives.]