Dr. Metablog

"His Meanest Garment."

I was all alone for a week or so.

I'm not what you would call a spiffy dresser, even on the best of days, and perhaps, solitary, I was even less attentive than usual to my presentation. It is possible that I had neglected to comb my hair and it is also possible that I hadn't shaved for a few days. I do know for sure that I was wearing my favorite, familiar blue sweatshirt, the one with the hood, which is perhaps fifteen years old and a trifle faded. It may even have had a stain or two on its sagging front -- perhaps jam or spaghetti sauce or something equally tasty. The veteran sweatshirt may also have been slightly frayed at the sleeves -- but it is, or was, in my opinion, a very wearable garment.

In any case, one morning last week I took a walk over to Breadworks, my favorite establishment for day-old muffins. I set down my notebook, which is, I admit, slightly chewed, on a vacant table, noting that the next table over was occupied, but at that moment only by a plate of eggs and a cup of coffee, the customer no doubt hunting up more food or making a quick trip to the bathroom. I dug into a stack of used newspapers, came up with yesterday's Camera and sat down to read.

And then my putative neighbor, the young woman who must have previously claimed the next table, returned. She took a long look at me. I smiled slightly, as one does in such situations.  She quickly gathered her plate and coffee and moved to a vacant table three over from me.

Oh my gosh! I know exactly what she was thinking. "Homeless." "Loathsome."

How awful it must be to be regularly and unapologetically shunned!

My daughters have been visiting this week. I hadn't even mentioned this incident, but they independently took one look at my well-worn-in stained garment and quite spontaneously trotted off to Army-Navy store just off the Pearl Street Mall and came home with a brand new Carhart sweatshirt, which after a few years of use will become a new favorite. The old blue friend-of-long-standing is in the rag bag.

I can now I enter any coffee shop in our fair city and proudly rejoin the respectable citizenry. Or should I say the fastidious citizenry?

The Silliest Word in the Entire English Language, Bar None

To decide upon the language's silliest word, many would steep themselves into the gallimaufry that features such sesquipedalian monstrosities as mollycoddle, liripoop, and kinnikinnick, but in my view such words are no more than flagrant tomfoolery. (In point of fact, almost every word seems silly, if you just say it over and over again, especially spoon, swivel, and sluice [just in the s's alone]). A more promising category in which to delve is among those words that ought, from their sound, mean something entirely other than they do, as for example turdiform, titmouse, cacoethes, antimacassar and crepuscular. Some words are silly because it is inherently ridiculous that their combination of consonants and vowels should mean anything at all: usufruct, zeugma, ginkgo and glebe fall into that unlovely grouping.

As a child, I thought that the silliest word in the English language was "pumpernickel," but now I can make more mature judgments. I therefore announce that the second most ridiculous word in English -- the penultimate -- is "indubitably."  "Indubitably" is composed of a series of staccato syllables that can only be spoken by a duchess, or a dandy wearing a tuxedo and a monocle  -- or perhaps even a lorgnette. I have never heard anyone utter the word "indubitably" with a straight face. It's a word that is intrinsically litotic. 

And now, after decades of pondering, I proclaim that the grand champion silliest word in the English, and of this there can be no shadow of doubt, no possible probable shadow of doubt, is: ointment.

The evidence?  Well, first of all, there's that wayward "oint." Except for "oil" and oil-related words (oiler, oily), there are very few English words that begin with "oi" --and for good reason. "Oi" lacks the dignity of more imposing vowels. It's an unstable gliding sound, hard to fix in the mouth, almost thriphthongic.  Moreover, "oint" comes perilously close to "oink" and therefore reeks of the piggery. To couple "oint" with "ment" is to augment the awkwardness. Most words that end in "ment" make obvious sense: battlement, pavement, amazement, advancement. If the "ment" in ointment is such a suffix, what, pray tell, is an "oint"?  And then there's that foolish near-congruence of the first and second components of the word --its perfect and quintessential spondeehood -- exaggerated by slant rhyme and the awkwardness of "nt"/"nt." Altogether, "ointment" is indubitably absurd.

Etymology offers no solace. The silly thing came to us through Old French "oignement" from late Latin "unguimentum" and from classical Latin "unguentum."  "Ointment" may ultimately derive from an ancient root for butter. Just as might be suspected, that first ludicrous "t" is an accident, having been smuggled in, by analogy, from "anoint."  

When Jean Lundegaard bites Gaear Grimsrud on the hand, he grunts, famously, "Unguent, I need unguent." One hesitates to suggest an improvements to classic dialogue, but, tell the truth, wouldn't the scene have been even funnier and more memorable if Gaear had muttered, "Ointment, I need ointment?"  Especially if the tip of his tongue had landed plosively on both of the lingual-palatal stops?

The Entirety of My Career as a Nude Model

A friend of mine was teaching a course in life drawing and was having trouble finding models. He asked me if I'd be willing to donate an hour. Hey, it was the drug-crazed 1960s (or perhaps early 70s) and I had long since put modesty behind. So I agreed.

It was odd to be naked  among a roomful of the clothed. I was more sensitive to drafts than I would have guessed. It was difficult to remain motionless, especially with all the houseflies a-lighting on the sensitive areas. It was peculiar and a little flattering to have so many pairs of eyes fixed upon me. However, my clearest memory is the student, a young woman, who at the end of the hour, asked the teacher, "Next week, could you try to find someone with a more interesting body?"

December 20.  I now realize that, bodywise, I have become more interesting over the last forty years -- if interesting means lumpy, wrinkled, and asymmetrical. 

The Golden Age of Sex Ed

I've been reading the novels of Edith Wharton. It's been one heck of a thrilling experience. The Age of Innocence is a world-class masterpiece, as subtle a novel as any that I've read in years, and The Buccaneers, which Wharton left uncompleted at her death, is almost as good (fortunately, she left behind a plot summary so we know how it was to conclude. Edith, couldn't you have hung on for just a few more weeks?!) In addition, I was dazzled by The Reef and The Children. Also a couple of volumes of short stories. I'm now reading the very intriguing Glimpses of the Moon. And all the while, I'm wondering how I could have passed over all this great stuff in my first seventy years and still considered myself a serious reader. Wharton wrote forty books and I think that until this month I had only read The House of Mirth, which, it turns out, is her most notorious but not her finest work. But I'll give H of M another chance -- when I come to with new perspective.  

Edith Wharton and her great contemporary Henry James are often bracketed  -- both of them upper-class New Yorkers and writers of "psychological" fiction. I suppose there's some justice to the comparison, but I prefer to think of Wharton's works as a culmination and also a critique of the great Victorian novelistic tradition. One (of many reasons) is that nineteenth-century fictions often revolve around the keeping of secrets. In the archetype, Mr. A loves Miss B, and Miss B loves Mr. A, but some sort of social constraint forbids them to acknowledge or to speak their love until 450 pages have elapsed. Wharton repeatedly brings these conventions out into the open in order to rip them to shreds. She scrutinizes and satirizes the imprisoning systems of manners (as well as conventions of fiction) that the earlier era left unchallenged.  She punctures taboos.     

The secret that underlay all of those punishing proprieties was, in one form or another, sex: sexual needs, sexual passions, sexual gratification. The godawful messiness of it all. 

When the twenty-three year old Edith Wharton was about to be married, she was ignorant and terrified of sex (and this despite the fact that she was then known, and I don't [and couldn't] make this up, as "Pussy" Jones ["Jones" as in 'keeping up with the Joneses', "Pussy" an affectionate diminutive certainly not employed in its modern street-corner signification]). Like many another young lady, she turned to her mother (in her case, Lucretia Rhinelander Jones, the 'best-dressed woman in New York') for advice.  The outcome was catastrophic. So here it comes, sex ed in Victorian America, recollected in anything but tranquility: 

A few days before my marriage, I was seized with such a dread of the whole dark mystery, that I summoned up courage to appeal to my mother, & begged her, with a heart beating to suffocation, to tell me "what being married was like."  Her handsome face at once took on the look of icy disapproval which I most dreaded. "I never heard such a ridiculous question!" she said impatiently; & I felt at once how vulgar she thought me.

But in my extremity of need I persisted.  "I'm afraid, Mamma---  I want to know what will happen to me!"

The coldness of her expression deepened to disgust. She was silent for a dreadful moment, then she said with an effort: "You've seen enough pictures and statues in your life. Haven't you noticed that men are -- made differently from women?"

"Yes," I faltered blankly.

"Well, then  ---?"

I was silent, from sheer inability to follow, & she brought out sharply: "Then for heaven's sake don't ask me any more silly questions. You can't be as stupid as you pretend."

The dreadful moment was over, & the only result was that I had been convicted of stupidity for not knowing what I had been expressly forbidden to ask about, or even to think of."

Poor dear Edith, our hearts go out to you and to all the maidens of the last era. Her "heart beating to suffocation," her pathetic ignorant (not stupid, but ignorant) inquiry, and the imperious mother hiding her embarrassment behind an affectation of anger. O my!  Along with the ridiculous idea that furtive (I'm sure) glances at "pictures and statues" could convey any bird-and-bee information of value. Edith's derelict mom punted when she should have pulled her goalie. She missed the "teachable moment." But then again, how do we know what mamma Lucretia knew about sex. Perhaps she had nothing to offer. Perhaps she was one of those Victorian ladies who was taught to lie back and think of England (or, in her case, to think of Washington Square).

Pussy Jones's marriage to Teddy Wharton was a miserable failure. Some of Edith's friends suspected that it was what used to be called a "mariage blanc" -- a marriage without sex. After twenty-eight years and, I'm glad to report, a couple of fervent affairs, Edith divorced Teddy, by that time alcoholic, manic-depressive, and institutionalized. Among her manuscripts Edith left an unfinished pornographic fragment, Beatrice Palmato (which I have not yet read but which is supposed to involve, double-eek!!!, father-daughter incest).

Edith Wharton's passage from unnaturally prolonged innocence to sexual sophistication or perhaps even to sexual derangement summarizes, in little, a big hunk of American social history. In the course of her lifetime, she had to cope with revolutionary changes, and those changes provide the background for some extraordinary and sometimes painful works of fiction.

So I will read on. 

[Biographical details are from Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton (New York: Knopf, 2007). 

The Chosen Zebra

Ordinarily, I'm skeptical when supernatural images magically appear on everyday objects. To me, such manifestations are perfectly explicable run-of-the-mill instances of pareidolia.  [Pareidolia:  the tendency, inherent in the human brain, to discover patterns (e.g. faces) in random markings.]  No matter how intently I peer and squint, I simply cannot find the blessed virgin and her child in the Ritz cracker. Nor in the stump of that felled yew in Donegal nor in the water stain on the Samoan wall nor on the broken storm window in Jesup, Georgia and certainly not in the miraculous bird dropping on the rear view mirror of a pickup in Bryant, Texas. Not even in the revered and legendary 1978 Mexican tortilla. I am also willing to confess that although I haven't seen it with my own eyes, I remain unpersuaded by the internationally-celebrated image of Jesus in the partially-eaten toasted cheese sandwich that is reported to have sold on Ebay for $28,000 and is now framed and publicly exhibited in the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino of Hollywood, Florida, where it amuses the agnostics and wows the credulous.

In my conception, if the Ancient of Days had wanted to impress an image of his very own filius unigenitus or of JC's tender and mild mom on breadstick or bagel, cornbread or challah, he would have the made the representation clear and distinct -- certainly not subject to dispute or interpretation or doubt or skepticism. That's the way the Big Guy in the sky should operate when he's at the top of his omnipotent game.

Which brings me to the illustration above, where, when you point and click, you will encounter in sharp detail a  complete and perfect menorah incontrovertibly etched, this Hanukkah season, on the port side of a zebra. No ifs, ands, buts, or pareidolia.

Why a zebra, a creature not mentioned in the Holy Book?  Well, once again, the L-rd moves in mysterious ways. If He chooses a zebra, who are We to question his mighty decision?

Moreover, there's absolutely no question but that His menorah on a zebra beats His Jesus on a toasted cheese sandwich all to heck.

Just sayin'. 

Unless perhaps the Lord of Hosts uses photoshop?

Dinner Conversation

A:  Do you remember Walter Peter, used to teach history at the university?

B.  Yes, he had quite the reputation.

A.  Lazy as sin, among other things. I was his grader in the late 60s. He never looked at a paper or at an exam. When a girl would complain about a grade, I'd tell them to go see Professor Peter. Some of them would, some of them wouldn't dare. There was this one young nubile maiden, very beautiful. She had a D on the mid-term and didn't show up for the final, so of course I gave her an F. She was one of those who were willing to see Professor Peter in his office. I never heard back from her but eventually I took a look at the grade sheet. He had changed her grade from F to B.  I asked him, how come?

B.  Did you get any kind of explanation?

A.  He said, I talked to her, and I felt sure she would have gotten an A on the final, if she had taken it, so I changed her grade. He said it with a straight face.

B.  I wonder if he thought you believed him.

A.  I don't think he even cared.       

B.  Let me tell you my favorite plagiarism story. I was handed a paper which began, "Moreover...."  Student just took a couple of paragraphs out of the middle of a chapter. Didn't even bother to change the first word.

A.  There's also the story of the student who handed in a paper with the bill from the ghost writer still in it.

B.  Here's one I heard from Don Baker.  He was teaching in  Mississippi, early in his career. Freshman English. He receives identical papers from two students in the same class. He gives an A to one and an F to the other. This would be in the 1950s sometime. The F student comes into his office.  He says, "Uh, uh, Mr. Baker.  I have a friend in the class. I sometimes study with him. He, uh, uh, handed in a paper, kind of, uh, you know, similar to mine."  Baker says, "and." The kid says, well, he got a much better grade than I did."  Baker says, or at least he swears he says, "Oh, but I like him. And I don't like you."

English Teachers Are Such Jerks

English teachers are such colossal jerks, at least whenever they appear in movies. A case in point is Smart People (2008), which is the second-best academic movie ever made in Pittsburgh (Wonder Boys is superior). Smart People offers us a Carnegie-Mellon Professor of English, played by a shambling Dennis Quaid, who is a depressed, angry, uncommunicative, and miserable being, and who insults and patronizes both his students and his family. He's the perfect embodiment of traditional and persistent American anti-intellectual stereotypes. Book-learning has turned him into a mere grammarian, a pedant, who must learn about "real life" from his rolling-stone, improvident, frequently-stoned but streetsmart brother. Smart People is constructed around stereotypes that were exhausted when Shakespeare created Holofernes and Sir Hugh Evans more than four hundred years ago. 

I've known a lot of English teachers -- some good, some bad -- but I've yet to encounter the shallow stereotype.

English teachers make their way into a disproportionately large number of movies. There are two reasons for this phenomenon. The first is that the writer of the film wants to illustrate some thematic point, so he brings his characters into a classroom where a pompous old fart or fartess can provide some cheap laughs while explicating a poem or novel that is tangentially related to a point the film is trying to make. The second reason is pure revenge. In films in which English teachers figure, there's often --almost always, in fact -- a young man whose writing is unappreciated by the narrow-minded professor. In Smart People, he's the son of our own nasty hero, and his sparkling poem is published in the New Yorker while his indifferent father is still waiting to hear whether his critical-theory manuscript has been rejected yet once again. This character -- the brilliant but unappreciated young poet or playwright or novelist -- stands in for the writer or director of the film, who is saying, in filmspeak, "look at me now, you colossal jerk. I'm making movies and you're still back in high school or at State U., grading freshman term papers. So there!!! That'll teach you to give me a C+."

By the way -- Smart People is an intelligent, well-written film. I heartily recommend it.