Dr. Metablog

More Real Live Conversation

Clerk at bookstore:  Can I help you find something?

Me:  My wife.  Have you seen her?

Clerk.  Possibly.  Probably.  How long since you saw her last?

Me.  Only a few minutes.  But she has a habit of being abducted by aliens.

Clerk:  Have you tried Metaphysics, upstairs?

At the Backyard Barbecue

"I grew up in Durban and in Cape Town. It was a privileged enclave. I had no idea what was going on except that when I competed in sports, there were kids who had no shoes. That was my first awareness. I went to government schools, but everyone was white. The teachers were not allowed to talk politics but we knew how they felt. When I was eighteen and finished high school, I could either go into the "police" or to jail.  f you were in the police or in the army, you were going to fight the guerrillas in Angola or you were going to put down the natives. My mother was British, so I had a British passport. I left the country. I was a triathlete. Sometimes we were sent to train in South Africa. I knew then that I could never come back. I lived in France for fourteen years. We lived in southern France, in Marseilles and in Avignon. There were many Arabs and they would jeer at my wife when she went running. We came to Boulder because of the running community. It's a great place for children. It may be a bubble, but it's a good bubble. I don't run anymore but I coach triathletes. It's what I know how to do.

Mandela was amazing. He was very forgiving. I don't know if it will always be forgiving. I completely understand the resentment."

Replacing Children In In America

I finally got around to watching In America, a film which won all sorts of awards in 2002 and which I ordered from Netflix after it appeared on someone's best films of the decade list. It's a fine movie, especially if you enjoy piping your eye from dawn to dusk. Always susceptible, I cried a full quart. Samantha Morton, familiar from her role as Hattie in Sweet and Lowdown, is endowed with the most expressive face in the history of cinema, and the director of In America, Jim Sheridan, is smart enough to take advantage of her features.  

The story is not unfamiliar -- immigrants in America, culture-clash and assimilation, poverty and a bit of triumph at the end.  he film skirts dangerously close to cliche and occasionally falls over the precipice -- I'm sorry but I've seen too many movies in which an emotionally-stunted hero waits until the final frame before he breaks into tears.  

In America is at heart a drama about replacing the dead child. Johnny and Sarah Sheridan lost a boy to a brain tumor and they've been off balance ever since.  They're not going to be whole until they make another baby. Sarah's pregnancy is precarious and the parturition difficult, and in a contrived piece of hoakum, the baby doesn't begin to thrive until the suffering soul of a dying friend is mystically infused into her.

No thought is given (nor should it be) to the poor baby, whose whole life will be colored by her entrance into the world as savior and redeemer and who will be freighted with expectations that she will never be able to fulfill.  

Brooklyn Watchamacallums

The 6' 8" Russian oligarch and billionaire Mikhail Dmitrievitch Prokhorov, chairman of the conglomerate Polylus Gold and president of the Onexim Group has acquired the New Jersey Nets. The Nets (or as they are sometimes known, the Swamp Dragons), are moving to Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn year after next, and Prokhorov wants to change the team's name to something more germane. It's a monumental challenge to find the correct moniker. After all, what Brooklynite would be content with Brooklyn Nets, especially when the New Jersey team carries with a storied history of failure, mismanagement, and dysfunction. Who can forget the sale, for a few paltry bucks, of Dr. J himself?

Should the Nets be renamed the Brooklyn Dodgers? Too presumptuous by half. In honor of Prokhorov, how about the Brooklyn Billionaires?  Not fan-friendly. Brooklyn Gold? Brooklyn Samovars? Brooklyn Borsht? 

My good friend Otis Jefferson Brown proposes Brooklyn Eagles. I think it's a brilliant idea. It has history, especially for those who remember the Brooklyn Eagle (once edited by Walt Whitman -- 5 '11", 200); it has patriotism, it has style, and it lends itself to headlines -- "Eagles Soar Once Again";  "Eagles Tear Apart Hawks." 

Unless someone comes up with a better name, I'm going with Brooklyn Eagles. 

 

Still Another Directional Dyslexic Anxiety

One of the awkwardnesses that we dysgeographicoids, or directional dyslexics (or whatever you want to call us) have to come to grips with is -- being asked for directions. You might just be walking down a street, more or less aware of where you are, and a car pulls up next to you and a lady leans out of the window and asks, how do you get to, let's say, the football stadium. I don't know about you, but I immediately break into a sweat. Especially if it's a place that I've been to a hundred times and ought to know like the back of my hand. The best way to deal with the tension and anxiety generated by such questions is to pretend complete ignorance: "I'm sorry, I'd like to help you, but I'm a visitor here." Sure, it's an itsy-bitsy lie, but a useful one, because the lady in the automobile is going to get much better instructions from the next person she asks, who will probably be completely normal, direction-wise. 

I remember a particularly tragic instance of direction-giving-panic from my time in England. I used to walk, once a week, from Charing Cross Station to the British Museum. The streets were all a-tangle -- not a one of them parallel or perpendicular. I carried a detailed map but nevertheless, week after week, I managed to lose myself in the maze. I would have thought that I appeared to be totally bewildered, but nevertheless, I was several times accosted by tourists and asked the way to some monument or tube station. Of course I didn't have the least clue. 

Yesterday, walking to the library, a lady in an automobile asked me the directions to Whole Foods. I  tried not to panic but I could feel the clammy hand around my heart. "Which Whole Foods," I asked, stalling. "Nearest one." Well, I've been there a hundred times, so I made an effort. Plus I knew it was only two right turns. "A few blocks this way," I said, pointing, and then turn right until 30th Street. Big shopping center on the left."  So the car drove off and I spent the next ten minutes wondering whether I had given the right directions. Is it after or before 30th Street? Is there an easier way? Is the other Whole Foods closer than the one to which I sent her? What would a directionally-gifted person have said?   

But at least I hadn't sent her in the absolute wrong direction. I think.  

More on directional dyslexia here, here, here, here, and here.

Parade of Jargon

At the coffee shop, reading Crackanthorpe and drinking my horrid decaf tea, a phrase from the conversation of the important-looking business guys at the next table wafted my way. "We don't have to re-invent the wheel." Wow, I thought to myself, does anyone still perpetrate that old cliche -- and do so without a shred of irony or self-awareness?  I listened more closely to them and in less than five minutes plucked the following flowers of wilted rhetoric:

"From the get-go" -- "chicken-and-egg problem" -- "here's the pressure point" -- "low-hanging fruit" -- "where the rubber meets the road" -- "that's the genie coming out of the bottle" -- "it's fifty-fifty"  -- "here's my quick pitch."

All useful phrases, I suppose. Shorthand. But, nevertheless, kind of embarrassingly banal.

If these guys sensed my disapproval, why, they'd probably laugh all the way to the bank.  

My advice to them, and to others similarly situated: when you use cliches, try to think outside the box and turn it into a win-win situation. You don't have to knock the ball out of the park, language-wise, but you don't need to throw anyone under the bus either. It's all water under the bridge that we'll cross when we get there. Can we agree to disagree?  When you look at this problem from the 30,000 foot level, then, and only then, can you eat the elephant one bite at a time. So, let's give it 110%. And, you know, if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. Are we all on the same page? 

Crackanthorpe's Wreckage

The Crackanthorpe name is not as well known as it should be. The short stories in Wreckage (1893) are a good sharp antidote to the pieties and sentimentalities of Victorian fiction.

There must be hundreds of novels which feature a virtuous, long-suffering heroine, who, however mistreated, turns cheek after cheek until her patience is rewarded with a beau and an unexpected inheritance. Think Jane Eyre.

Here is Hubert Crackanthorpe's version of this archetype:

"A blind desire to silence [Aunt Lisbet], to stamp the life out of her, swept over Lilly. Seizing the parasol, which lay on the kitchen table, with all her strength she Aunt Lisbet across the side of her head.

And over the thought of that blow she lingered, recalling it again and again, repeating it in her mind with a strange, exquisite pleasure. For into it she had put the hatred of years.

Aunt Lisbet uttered a low, plaintive moan -- the curious moan of sudden pain -- and fell, dragging with her on to the floor a pile of plates.

The crash sent every nerve in Lilly's body tingling, but when, a moment later, Aunt Lisbet moved to get up, the blind, murderous desire returned. Another brutal blow of the parasol, and she knocked her back again."

Hubert Crackanthorpe drowned (perhaps accidentally, perhaps taking his own life) at age 26. His fiction is sometimes compared to that of de Maupassant, but I prefer to think of him as the Dostoevsky that England never produced. 

Mrs. Peixada by "Sidney Luska" (1886)

I've just read, and much enjoyed, a novel called Mrs. Peixada, by one Sidney Luska. The novel was published in 1886 by Cassell & Company, Limited, at 739 Broadway, in New York City. I had it recalled it from the library's archives, where, from all the evidence, it hadn't been touched for a hundred or so years. Why did I read this book? Because a) I'm reading stuff from the last two decades of the nineteenth century, and b) because the novel is listed in the bibliography of the wonderful anthology Victorian Love Stories (1996) edited and illuminated by Kate Flint -- an anthology which persuaded me that although I think of myself as moderately well read in Victorian fiction, there are untold riches out there of which I am embarrassed to be unaware. 

Mrs. Peixada isn't exactly a shower of gold, but it's a revelation. The author "Sidney Luska" turns out to be a pseudonym for Henry Harland, who is better known for his second career as an editor of the Yellow Book. I guess that Mrs. Peixada falls into the broad category, novel of sensation, but it's also a mystery story laced with occasional touches of social comedy and progressive social thought. 

The plot could be next year's blockbuster movie. Arthur Ripley woos and falls in love with the mysterious young widow, Ruth Lehmyl, who has recently moved into an apartment in his Beekman Place neighborhood. We're treated to the details their sophisticated and modern courtship  -- music, museums, poetry. At the same time, Ripley, a lawyer, has been engaged to track down a murderess named Mrs. Peixada, who fled New York after being acquitted on grounds of insanity of murdering her husband. Ripley tracks her from Vienna to Rome and to London, but then loses her trail. He marries Mrs. Lehmyl --  only to discover that she and Mrs. Peixada are one and the same person. 

Although there are holes in the plot through which a daumont or shandrydan could be driven with room to spare, the novel is engaging and intriguing. But then I'm an easy mark.

Perhaps our screen writers aught to do some looking at the lower tier of Victorian novels  -- especially if (as it seems) they're interested in making lower-tier movies.  

But for me -- it's time to learn more about Henry Harland. 

Ditch the Didge!!

The downtown mall is home to a motley assemblage of street buskers. Some are excellent and welcome performers: the occasional string quartet, the accomplished visiting bluegrass band, a witty gaggle of a cappella singers. Others are less excellent but still tolerable; the contortionist, the magician with the rings that divide and rejoin, the sword-swallower, the zip-code man, the fire-eater, the too-young violin student supervised by his mommy, the juggler whose act hasn't changed since the days when he was known as a joculator. And then a step lower still: that inaudible French girl who struggles with her ukelele. Less welcome are the drummers: bang, bang, bang with no discernible rhythm, just noise great enough to set off sympathetic vibrations in your own personal pancreas. But the worst of the worst is the didgeridoo-master. After decades of practice, all that the didge player can produce is an ugly drone. One note. It goes on and on, relentlessly, and it's dull, grating and loud. If you haven't heard it, imagine a big old bagpipe, playing one note at the bottom of its range, for ever, and ever, and ever. Worse still are didgeridoo assemblies: didgetets or didgeridoo chamber orchestras. 

The didgeridoo comes to us from northern Australia, where it was invented more that 1500 years ago. Perhaps it hasn't evolved because it's thought to be sacred. While the rest of the world developed wind instruments that played a variety of colorful notes, the non-innovative didge people embraced an unchanging and exceedingly boring drone. They are patient people. One by one, native Australians said no to the bassoon, the clarinet, the horn, the sax, the flute, the piccolo, the trumpet, the tuba, the oboe bright and cheerful, and decided that a branch of a eucalyptus tree, naturally hollowed by termites, was all that they needed in the way of wind-instruments. In another fit of imagination, they invented the bull-roarer, an instrument that hasn't yet taken a bow on the mall, but trust me, it won't be long.  

Let's face it;  the didgeridoo is an instrument that hasn't produced a pleasant sound in many thousands of years. It has no plans to do so. Didgeridooists are barking up the wrong tree -- it's never going to be music. It's always going to be noise.

Which brings me to my point, which is that would-be mall performers should not be permitted to busk until they have passed a performance test and have been granted a license. The Board of Acceptability would consist of some of the more traditionalist faculty of both the Music School and the Department of Theater and Drama. The chairman would be an open-minded but engaged citizen, such as Me.  Approval must be unanimous. We (the Board) would strictly enforce standards of artistic excellence. Life would improve.

Why I Fear Dentists

Novacaine was discovered sometime around the turn of the last century, but it hadn't reached the backward interior of Brooklyn during my childhood. As a result, I endured hours of drilling and filling without anaesthetics. It was horrible.

The local dentist was named Dr. Caress. It would have been more appropriate if he had been called Dr. Butcher. 

There were no high-speed drills. Dr. Caress used a mechanical drill -- a motor attached to a system of small pulleys, if I remember correctly, at the business end of which was some sort of bur. It was slow and awkward and It took forever to drill out a cavity. There was lots of starting and stopping and moaning and readjusting and rinsing and spitting. I can still remember the pain. It was not a "discomfort" kind of pain. It was a torture kind of pain. 

All this in the office of Dr. Caress.  I can't even imagine what it was like across Ocean Parkway where the local dentist was named Dr. Yankowitz. 

More on Dr. Metablog's mouth right here.

Boustrophedon, Rongorongo, and the Phaistos Disc

In a previous post, I expressed fascination that writing could go in any possible direction. I began with Swift, who satirized both "women" and the English when he described the fanciful Lilliputian script: "their manner of Writing is very peculiar, being neither from the Left to the Right, like the Europeans; nor from the Right to the Left, like the Arabians; nor from up to down, like the Chinese; nor from down to up, like the Cascagians; but aslant from one Corner of the Paper to the other, like Ladies in England."

To Swift's curious catalog (the Cascagians are of course his own invention), I added boustrophedon, a system that Swift did not know but one that would surely have delighted him.

In boustrophedon (a lovely Greekish word that signifies "turn like an ox plowing"), alternate lines move in opposite directions. Lines one, three, five and seven and so on proceed from left to right; lines two, four, six, and eight from right to left. Ancient languages such as Safaitic were written in boustrophedon; some Etruscan inscriptions, still undeciphered, seem to follow the same pattern.

Boustrophedon is not unreasonable, but it's certainly awkward for those of us who have made a fetish of left to right. Here's how Shakespeare transforms boustrophedonically. The passage takes a bit of effort to read but it's certainly intelligible.    

It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul,—

!srats etsahc uoy, uoy ot ti eman ton em teL

It is the cause. Yet I'll not shed her blood;

,wons naht sreh fo niks retihw taht racs roN

And smooth as monumental alabaster.

.nem erom yarteb ll'ehs esle, eid tsum ehs teY. 

Right, left, up, down, aslant, and back and forth might seem to have exhausted the possible formats. But such is not the case. Rongorongo, the language of Easter Island, is written in still another style, that of "reverse boustrophedon." In Lost Languages (2002), Andrew Robinson describes how this most peculiar system works. 

"To read a Rongorongo tablet, one started at the bottom left-hand corner and read along line 1 to the right-hand corner. Then one turned the tablet through 180 degrees and began reading line 2 from left to right again,  At the end of line 2, one repeated the 180-degree turn so that the tablet was in the same orientation as at the beginning, and read line 3 from left to right and so on....  Every even-number line is written back-to-front and upside-down in relation to an ordinary English text." 

I don't believe that even Jonathan Swift could have invented a manner of composition so counter-intuitive, so odd.  But then, those Easter Islanders (or, more properly, Rapanui) danced to a drummer who is uniquely their own. I don't believe that there's a second reverse boustrophedonesque culture anywhere on the planet. 

Is that all? Are there no other possibilities? Yes indeed, there's also the phaistos disc, which (according to Andrew Robinson once again), "was discovered in 1908 by Luigi Pernier in the ruins of a palace at Phaistos in southern Crete. The archeological context suggests that the date of the disc is 1850-1600 BC. The disc is 6.5 inches in diameter and .75 inches thick and is made of fine clay. On both sides is an inscription which consists of characters impressed on the wet clay with a punch or stamp before it was fired. They are arranged in a spiral around the center of each side." 

The writing begins at the outermost circle and works its roundabout way towards the center, which means either that the scribe knew exactly how many letters (or ideographs, or syllables) he intended to use, or that he started at the center and wrote backwards until he reached the circumference of the disc. Neither method is particularly convenient or flexible, so it's not surprising that spiral writing never caught on. It certainly wouldn't do for people like me who revise heavily.

The phaistos disc cannot be translated.