Dr. Metablog

A Further Note on Nineteenth-Century Horsedrawn Vehicles

Modern readers of the great classic novels of the previous era generally have no clue about the significance of horses and horse-drawn vehicles. As I wrote, right here on this blague a couple of months ago, "no, I'm not obsessed, it's just that I have this little bee in my bonnet about the fact that we gasoline-era moderns understand the exact social significance of jeep, Jaguar, Jetta, and jalopy, but we are, except for specialists, utterly clueless as to the valence of barouche, basket carriage, berlin, britchka, brougham, buckboard, buggy, cabriolet, caleche, cariole, carryall, chaise, chariot, clarence, coupe, croydon, curricle, cutter, daumont, dearborn, diligence, dog-cart, fiacre, fly, four-wheeler, gig, go-cart, governess cart, hansom, jaunty car, jersey-wagon, kibitka, landau, phaeton, post-chaise, rockaway, shandrydan, shay, spider-phaeton, spring-van, stanhope, sulky, surrey, T-cart, telyezhka, tilbury, tarantass, trap, troika, victoria, vis-a-vis, wagonette, and wurt."

What does it tell us when our hero arrives on the scene in a wurt?  Does it mean that he is rich and stylish, or vulgar and pretentious, or tasteless, or downtrodden.  We don't know, and so we read our own traditional literature with one hand tied behind our backs.

Well, I though that I had made my point, and I thought also that I had exhausted the list of nineteenth-century horse-drawn vehicles. But then I came upon this passage in Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence (a truly splendid novel published in 1920, though the action is set in the 1870s). 

They [Archer and Countess Olenska] walked back toward Beacon Street, and near the club Archer caught sight of the plush-lined "herdic" which had carried his note to the Parker House, and whose driver was reposing from this effort by bathing his brow at the corner hydrant. "I told you everything was predestined!  Here's a cab for us.  You see!"  They laughed, astonished at the miracle of picking up a public conveyance at that hour, and in that unlikely spot, in a city where cabstands were still a "foreign" novelty.

The novelty, the herdic, was "a kind of carriage invented by Peter Herdic of Williamsport, Pennsylvania, in 1881" (so Wharton is guilty of a tiny anachronism).  "A predecessor of the taxicab, the herdic was a small two-wheeled carriage that had side seats and an entrance at the back.  Their low entry made it easy for passengers to enter and exit the cars.  The first herdics carried up to eight passengers.  The earliest herdics were painted bright yellow."

Cheers to Peter Herdic, forgotten father of the Yellow Cab. 

Oh No! What's Happening to Me?

So, a couple of days ago, we were watching some basketball on the HDTV, and despite the fact that Carmelo was going to the rim virtually at will, I was kind of down and depressed. Trying to cheer me up, the companion of fifty-plus years says, "I'll tell you what. I'll get you anything you want -- absolutely anything at all."  Meaning, of course, anything edible, anything from the kitchen. We'll I'm not abstemious, I've always been a good eater, and I recognize that food has the power to confer good cheer, so I thought and thought, and finally I said, "I know what I'd like. How about a cup of decaf tea and two prunes." And then after a few seconds, I screamed, "Holy moley, what in the living heck has happened to me?"  Is it now the case that the outer limit of my once-voracious imagination is a cup of decaf tea and two prunes?  So embarrassing, so downright geezerish. What ever happened to ice cream sundaes with Fox's U-Bet and real whipped cream, to rich and gooey lasagna, to late-night salami sandwiches on deli rye (not that we would have any of those ingredients stocked in our bland healthful-but-tasteless-low-cholesterol refrigerator). It's all downhill, this septuagenarian eating. Ou sont les pepperoni pizzas dantan?  Where are the bacon cheeseburgers of yesteryear?

Sons of Ham, Sons of Japheth

In Caroline Hentz's The Planter's Northern Bride (1859), Eulalia, the daughter of a New England abolitionist, has married a slave owner and traveled with him to his home in Georgia.  Here's what she sees. Warning: be prepared to be shocked and revolted.

"All around, far as the eye could reach, the rich rolling fields of cotton, bearing the downy wealth of the South, stretched out a boundless ocean of green, spotted with white, like the foam of the wave.  Soon returning in grand march from the fields, came the negroes, poising on their heads immense baskets, brimming with the light and flaky cotton. Little children looking very much like walking semicolons, toddled along, balancing their baskets also, with an air of self-importance and pride. Eulalia recollected all the horrible stories she had heard of negro insurrections, and thought what an awful thing it was to be at the mercy of so many slaves, on that lonely plantation. When she saw her husband going out among them, and they closed round, shutting him in as with a thick cloud, she asked herself if her were really safe. They gathered around him, eager to get within reach of his hand, the sound of his voice, the glance of his kind, protecting, yet commanding eye. More like a father welcomed by his children than a king greeted by his subjects, he stood, the centre of that sable ring. She had never seen him look so handsome, so noble, so good. As she looked at her husband, standing in their midst, the representative of the fair sons of Japheth, wearing on his brow the signet of a loftier, nobler destiny, every lineament and feature expressive of intellect and power, and then at each of that dark, lowly throng, she felt a conviction that freedom, in its proudest latitude, education with its most exalted privileges, could never make them equal to him. She never dreamed that slavery could present an aspect so tender and affectionate. Do the hundreds and thousands buried in the black coal-pits and wretched dens of Great Britain, who have never heard, in their living graves, of the God who created, the Saviour who redeemed them, pass their sunless lives in greater comfort or fuller enjoyment."

Hey, it's good to be a slave. Apparently. "Tender and affectionate????

I was aware that there were anti-Uncle Tom's Cabin novels, designed to showcase the glories of slavery, but I had never read one. The Planter's Northern Bride is supposedly one of the best of the genre. It has the power to make you despair for the intelligence of the entire human race. Some samples:

"Merry voices singing in the fields of labour or filling up the pauses of toil...."

"The joyful songs and exhilarating laughter of our slaves...."

"The negro has an intense appreciation of beauty and grace, and feels the influence of mental superiority."

"You will see the negro, not as he is at the North, an isolated, degraded being, without caste or respectability, a single black line running through a web of whiteness, but surrounded with the socialities of life, and though doomed to labour, yet free from the cares and anxieties that rest so heavily on us."

Here are the words that Caroline Hentz puts in the mouth of one of Eulalia's slaves. 

"I tell you what, Crissy, when de nigger have good massa and good miss, dey well off. When dey have bad massa and missis, dey bad off. Talk 'bout us being on a 'quality with white folks, no such ting. De Lord never made us look like dem. We mustn't be angry wid de Lord, for all dat: He knows best, I 'spise. Look a'me, black as de chimney back, -- dey, white as snow; what great, big, thick, ugly lips I got, -- dere's look jist like roses. Den dis black sheep head, what de Lord make dat for?  Dey got putey, soft, long hair, just like de silk ribbons. Now look at dat big long heel, will you?" added Judy, putting out her bare foot in the moonshine, giggling and shaking;  "who ever saw de white lady with sich a heel as dat?  I do wonder what the Lord made us nigger for? I spect de white dust gin out, and he had to take de black."

Slavery deformed society.  Arguments in support of slavery deformed the intellect. The attempt to find supernatural sanction for slavery perverted religion. Slavery incapacitated the slaveholding states. One hundred and fifty years after slavery, they have still not caught up and they are still pulling the country down.

Does Caroline Hentz believe the words that she puts on paper?  I believe she does. I believe that she makes these observations and arguments with total sincerity. I also believe that the kind of utterances to which she gives vent, though no longer respectable, no longer made in public, are not dead but continue to appear in VFW halls, in bowling alleys, in union halls, and in truck stops all over the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Help, I Need Somebody Not Just Anybody

I did so write a check to register the car, it turns out, but since we have changed our residence, the registration certificate and the little adhesive tab that you're supposed to fix to the license plate never arrived here, and of course I forgot all about the legality of the vehicle. Had no idea. The upshot is that while driving to the airport, I was stopped by a police guy who was lurking in the shadows to pounce on malefactors such as I. I was issued an expensive ticket. Very annoying. I'm generally a law-abiding citizen and I'm not used to being in trouble with the authorities.  

Not immediately able to figure out what went wrong, I hustled down to the Motor Vehicle Bureau out there on 33rd Street. I took a number, sat down and rehearsed what I would say to the clerk on duty. All I could think of was, "I need help."  

When my number was called, I walked up to the designated clerk, a woman of uncertain age. The sign on her desk said, in rather large letters, "Rhonda." And so I did it. I couldn't help myself. I said, "Help, help me Rhonda." And then, of course, I was immediately chagrined. "I'm sure you hear that all the time," I apologized, admitting to my appalling banality. "Not all the time," she said, "but often enough."  

It could have been even worse. I could have declaimed the entire poetic chorus to the Beach Boys' 1965 hit:

Help me Rhonda
Help, help me Rhonda
Help me Rhonda
Help, help me Rhonda
Help me Rhonda
Help, help me Rhonda
Help me Rhonda
Help, help me Rhonda
Help me Rhonda
Help, help me Rhonda
Help me Rhonda
Help, help me Rhonda
Help me Rhonda, yeah.

ADH2*2 in My Life

I can't drink wine, beer, or spirits. Alcohol of any kind, no matter how sophisticated or elegant, makes me ill. In this respect, I'm similar to my father and to one of my sons. People who know me only slightly  imagine that I am unsociable or ascetic. Or that I'm a recovering alcoholic. In fact, I suffer from an inherited disability.   

Now at long last the culprit gene has been fingered. It's ADH2*2, "a rare variation of ADH2, which produces a more active form of alcohol dehydrogenase, the enzyme that catalyzes the first step in alcohol metabolism."

Alcohol dehydrogenase? There are more than a sixpack of them: "alcohol dehydrogenases are a group of seven dehydrogenase enzymes that facilitate the interconversion between alcohols and aldehydes or ketones with the reduction of NAD+ to NADH...." More succinctly, "they break down alcohols." I don't know whether ADH2*2 digests alcohol too fast, or too slow, or just idiosyncratically, but the effect on me is stomach-ache, headache, and general queasiness. Wine, "the merry cheerer of the heart," sours my digestion.  

The eccentric allele occurs in 20 to 30 percent of Jewish populations "suggesting that ADH2*2 is one of the factors explaining the low rates of alcoholism in this group." Recent investigations have demonstrated "significant relationships between ADH2*2 and alcohol use ... in all Jewish groups studied." "Those with the variant gene have been seen to drink less frequently, consume less alcohol overall or have more unpleasant reactions to alcohol."

This analysis makes perfect sense to me, but Science is apparently unsatisfied: "the exact reason why ADH2*2 tends to discourage heavier drinking isn't known." Well, Science, let me see if I lend a hand here. If you get sick rather than high from a few sips, you stop drinking -- unless you're a complete and total Schmuck."

Perhaps because I'm a teetotaler (though a reluctant one), I have little tolerance for drunken excess. I'm not amused by loss of inhibition, by sloppy speech, or by too-loud staggering enthusiasm. I've honored my father's warning -- "never get into an argument with a drunk" -- to the letter. In actual fact, I try very hard not to engage the alcoholically-addled in any discussion, whether serious or flippant. 

I regret that I can't participate in wine-tastings -- the stuff looks and smells so good. But even there, I'm skeptical of the poetic language that oenophiles employ -- hints of rubber and raspberries and old leather and that sort of hyperbole. I tend to sniff deeply, and then proclaim, "tumescent but not rigid."

It's not hard to be witty when you're sober and your Falernian audience has been quaffing the pinot grigio.

 

Damn Yankees

The Yankees 2009 payroll was $201,449,189, exceeding the next largest (the Mets) by more than $50,000,000.  The median major league payroll was about $80,000,000 and the lowest $36,834,000.  With 103 wins in regular season, each victory cost the Yankees $1,955,810.  The other teams that made it to the playoffs incurred considerably smaller but greatly varying costs per win:  Boston Red Sox, $1,285,300;  Philadelphia Phillies, $1,215,097; Los Angeles Angels $1,172,325; Los Angeles Dodgers, $1,056,995; St. Louis Cardinals, $852,803; Colorado Rockies $817,402;  Minnesota Twins, $816,165.  Should we be surprised that the Yankees could beat the Phils?  Given the numbers, it would have been shocking if they couldn't.

Cheers to the Cardinals, Rockies, and Twins. 

Cost per victory is a measure of management efficiency.  By far the most effective 2009 team, dollar for dollar, was the frugal Florida Marlins, who won 87 games at a cost of just $423,379 per win.  On the other end of the scale, the woeful New York Mets, with just 70 successes, were the only team to pay more per win than the Yankees.  It cost the Mets $2,133,910 each time that they walked off the field in triumph.  

As long as the Yankees are allowed to pay salaries one-third larger than their nearest competitors and two and a half times more than the median, it must be expected that they will win regularly  -- which is why I'm for rigorous, enforced parity.  Let's level that playing field.

And with all that money, how to account for the fact that the Yankees sported such an entirely run-of-the-mill outfield.  Melky Cabrera?  Nick Swisher?  Gosh, there must be better players than those to entice to the brand new ballpark.

Which brings us to the next spending spree. free-agent outfielders wanted.  Must be able to hit the short porch. Bring joy to the eyes of George S.  

STAAS

The woman with whom I've shared the last fifty-plus years has developed an alarming new symptom.  She disappears in markets.

We'll be together, innocently pushing the basket in the vegetable section, for example, and I'll wander off to fetch some cream cheese and a half-gallon of milk.  When I return, she's gone.  Nowhere to be found.  I walk up and down the neighboring aisles.  Nothing.  She's completely dematerialized.  I walk up and down, back and forth, vainly searching. 

After a twenty minutes, or half-an-hour, she's back, but teleported to an an entirely different part of the store.  She doesn't even know that she has vanished.  Sometimes she pretends that it's I who has disappeared.  

I can understand that she could lose herself in the acre-and-a-half King Soopers, or in the McGuckin prairie, or on the vast Costconian steppe.  But in Bradford's minuscule P & C?  Or in Bradford's Main Street, comprised as it is of far fewer square feet than any mid-size contemporary Walgreen's?  No, there's more here than meets the eye.  This is no natural process.  Something supernatural is going on.

It took some serious reflection before I came to the realization that it's a clear case of abduction by aliens.  There is no other credible explanation.

I've given a name to the disorder.  I call it Spousal Transient Alien Abduction Syndrome, or STAAS.

I've made some inquiries, and it seems that STAAS is not a condition found only in my family.  In fact, it's quite common.  More than four-fifths of the people that I questioned had experienced recent instances of STAAS.  Curiously, it's much more frequently discovered in long-marrieds than among the recently-hitched.  And less common among women than men.  In fact, men tend to disappear for longer periods of time than women.

Moreover, just as might be expected, not a single one of the disappeared remembers that he (or she) had ever fallen into the ungentle hands of aliens -- which is certain proof that the abduction took place, inasmuch as it is well known that these extraterrestrial beings possess the ability to scrub human brains and obliterate memory.

I don't know what can be done to arrest the spread of this alarming syndrome. Perhaps a Federal task force.

Updike's Gamble

John Updike's novels are loaded to the ever-loving gills with invocations of the most evanescent and ephemeral manifestations of "popular culture."  I can't think of another writer who is so relentlessly fascinated by the most trivial of things.  If his novels are to be read in a hundred years, they will not be fully understood unless encrusted with extensive and elaborate footnotes.

"Roy has been carefully shaping can his Total mush into a kind of a pyramid with the back of a spoon."  Who will understand the meaning of this sentence.  "Total mush?"  I imagine a footnote:  "'Total' was the brand name of a fibrous dry packaged breakfast food which, when liquids such as milk were added, could be formed into a paste."  

Here's another example.  Rabbit is musing.  "Biblical names.  Rachel, Esther.  Not always.  Barbra, Bette."  And here's the putative footnote. "In this passage, Harry muses about the names of Jewish women.  "Barbra" (sic) refers to Barbra Streisand, a popular Jewish-American singer and actress of the period.  Professor Harvey Wrongbody's assertion that "Bette" refers to Bette Davis is clearly uninformed, as Miss Davis was not Jewish. "Bette" as Professor Wrongbody should have known, references Bette Midler, a performer famous in her day for impersonating Janis Joplin (see Index) in The Rose." 

In the first few pages of Rabbit at Rest --  which is perhaps the most consistently fine of Updike's novels, there are dozens or scores of allusions that will test a future annotator's learning.  It's highly unlikely that with the passing of generations anyone but specialists in late twentieth-century Americana will be able either to identify or grasp the significance of  "this guy Bundy who murdered dozens of women in dozens of states."  (Bundy?  Is that King Kong Bundy?  McGeorge Bundy?  Al Bundy?)  Or have the least idea what is meant by a "Cabbage Patch doll with its bunchy beige face" or the possible thematic significance of "Cara Lott Gets Hot" or "Winn Dixie" or "Ekerd Drugs" or the National Enquirer or "Planter's Peanut Bar" or "Melanie Griffith" or "Deion Sander's recent arrest."  It's only twenty years since Rabbit at Rest was published, and I was there, paying reasonable attention, but frankly, I'm already becoming a bit vague about some of  the details.

If I were a novelist of Updike's talent, I would think twice about loading up on trivia that cannot help but  barricade the novels from future readers.  But perhaps Updike doesn't care.  Perhaps he's only interested in the moment and in readers of his own generation.  To me, it seems as though he doesn't give a royal fig for the future. 

Shakespeare, a writer not for his age alone but for all time, occasionally included references to fleeting phenomena.  I rather like it that he did so.  I'd be intrigued to learn, once and for all, who was that "red-nosed innkeeper at Daventry" to whom Falstaff refers.   But neither Shakespeare nor any other writer with whom I'm familiar so saturated his work with multitudinous and forgettable popcultch trivia.

But perhaps Updike has made the right choice.  Perhaps the density of reference makes the novels so credible, so real, that scholars will be happy to annotate and readers will revel and glory in the footnotes.

It's a gamble.  My guess is that it's a losing one, but time will tell.